Catherine de Hueck Doherty, the founder of Madonna House, once gave a wonderfully insightful interview. “Inside me,” she said, “there are three people. There’s someone I call the ‘Baroness’. The ‘Baroness’ is the one who’s spiritual, efficient, and given over to prayer and asceticism. She’s the religious person inside me. She’s the one who founded a religious community, who writes spiritual books, challenges others, and has dedicated her life to God and the poor. The ‘Baroness’ reads the gospels and is impatient with the things of this world. For her, life here and now must be sacrificed for the next world.
But, inside me too, there’s another person I call ‘Catherine’. ‘Catherine’ is, first of all and always, the woman who likes fine things, luxuries, comfort, pleasure. She enjoys idleness, long baths, fine clothes, putting on make-up, good food, and used to (while married) enjoy a healthy sex life. ‘Catherine’ enjoys this life and doesn’t like self-sacrifice. She’s not particularly religious and generally hates the ‘Baroness’. ‘Catherine’ and the ‘Baroness’ don’t get along.
However, there’s still another person inside of me, who’s neither ‘Catherine’ or the ‘Baroness’. Inside me too there’s a little girl lying on a hillside in Finland, watching the clouds and daydreaming. This little girl doesn’t particularly like either ‘Catherine’ or the ‘Baroness’.
… and, as I get older, I feel more like the ‘Baroness’, long more for ‘Catherine’, but think maybe the real person inside me is the little girl daydreaming on a hillside.”
Saints struggle and so does everyone else. It’s not a simple thing to be a human being and it’s even more complex if you’re striving to give yourself over beyond what comes naturally, morally and spiritually. Like Catherine de Hueck Doherty, all of us have multiple persons inside us.
Inside each of us there’s someone who has faith, who wants to live the Beatitudes, and who wants to be attuned to truths and realities of the gospels. Inside each of us, there’s a martyr who wants to die for others, a ‘Mother Teresa’ who wants to radically serve the poor, and a moral artist who wants to carry his or her solitude at a high level. But inside each of us there’s also someone who wants to taste life and all its pleasures here and now. Inside each of us there’s a hedonist, a sensualist, a libertine, a materialist, an agnostic, and an egoist. Beyond that, inside each of us there is also a little girl or little boy, innocent, daydreaming, watching the clouds on some hillside, not particularly enamoured of either the saint and the sinner inside us.
Our complexity is not our enemy but our friend. All those pathological opposites inside us are precisely what make up our keyboard. It’s precisely because we’re both sinner and saint, hedonist and martyr, adult and child, that we have the enough keys to play the various musical scores that life hands us. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Living with our own Complexities” November 2004]
