FOR LOVE OF THE BROKEN BODY

In this memoir, a young woman’s journey to join a Franciscan community includes spiritual introspection and physical healing from a catastrophic fall.

Julia Walsh felt a spiritual call from a very young age as one of four children raised Catholic while living on a farm in Iowa. While attending Iowa’s Loras College, a Catholic liberal arts school, she tried to reconcile her attraction to men with her desire to become a nun. During this time, she connected with the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in La Crosse, Wisconsin. She continued to struggle with her competing desires during a year spent in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, living simply in an intentional community with five other women in Sacramento, serving the poor and praying together. At 24, she moved into the sisterhood’s house in La Crosse as part of a trial period. Meditation and reflection during a silent retreat solidified her desire to become a Franciscan sister, and she became a novice. During a brief visit to her childhood farm, an accidental fall off a 20-foot cliff broke many bones in her face, requiring extensive reconstructive surgery: “No matter how I heal, I’m pretty sure that from now on, I will always feel broken.” She continued her canonical year and joyfully joined the FSPA as her spiritual home. Throughout this remembrance, Walsh effectively shares details of her spiritual journey and her grueling physical rehabilitation. Along the way, she ably dispels some “nun-ish stereotypes,” often informed by Hollywood depictions in the films The Sound of Music and Sister Act: “None of these realities, I am learning, are actually true.” The memoir also effectively shows how a spirited young woman, sporting a tattoo that symbolizes how life among the sisters changed her, found fulfillment in choosing a life in a religious community: “The roots, the depth, the way that this form of religious life means I’m now in a beautiful web of connection, tradition. I’m tangled, I’m caught. I’m stuck. And I’m actually glad.”

A modern Catholic nun insightfully details coming to a life of wholehearted service, prayer, and community.