I remember it all too well: It was 1952. I was a novice then, and preparation for full membership in the community was intense. Study, prayer, and almost total withdrawal from the society marked that year as special, as different.

We didn’t take college classes. Instead, we studied only the sixth century Rule of Benedict, which formed the framework in which we would live out the rest of our lives. We not only prayed seven times a day but we studied the Latin in which the prayers were written in order to make those prayer periods understandable. Most of all, we concentrated on the Rule itself and, particularly, its cornerstone chapter, “Of Humility.”

And that reading alone could well have been enough to make any thought of taking another step in the process impossible. First, the Rule itself had been written fifteen centuries before the novitiate. Second, the book needed a good editor. Its language for the most part was musty and terse. And at least to a teenager in 1952, in a postwar era that had new and liberating written all over it, the ideas were chilling. One, in particular, drew my attention—and troubled me deeply: We were to “keep the fear of God always before our eyes and never forget it.” Life was to be about “the fear of God”? Oh, great.

Years later, of course, they told us that “the fear of God” was an archaic term, which meant “a mixed feeling of dread and reverence,” but no one stressed the “reverence” of it in those days. “The fear of God” was the current translation, the defining essence of the relationship, and it stuck.

But I was young and new to monastic life, and the very language of this first step of humility was itself enough to be discouraging. What did it mean to “keep the fear of God always before our eyes”? I found the words stifling. Threatening, if truth were told. This God, it seemed, forever hovered over us just waiting for us to slip up. Then all heaven would pounce and, as the old Church manuals made so clear, close the gates of life to us forever. How could we possibly reverence a God like that, a God waiting in the dark, a specter in the night?

We were, I figured, entrapped by the presence of God, not liberated by it at all: This God sees “the thoughts of my heart” the chapter on humility put it. A discouraging thought in itself. We were condemned in that case just for thinking about something, before we even got a chance to try it. And yet, over the years, another light began to dawn: If that was true, then something else was surely just as true. This God who knew everything had to know, too, how hard I was trying to live decently, to love people, to grow beyond the gaps in my soul. And that, at least, was a calming thought.

But, there was something else that still bothered me: How was it even possible to claim to have nothing but God on my mind? I simply could not imagine how to be perfectly immersed in God. Perfectly attuned to God. Perfectly satisfied with a life more intent on perfection than on life itself. I was looking for a spiritual life that was more grounded, more real, less ethereal. I wanted to move on, to find more of the sacred in life rather than cut if off in the name of Life. Something in me insisted that I needed to become fully human before I could even think of being perfectly holy. Why? Because striving to come to fullness is the nature of the human condition, and without that how can anyone be truly holy?

—Excerpts from Radical Spirit: 12 Ways to Live a Free and Authentic Life by Joan Chittister (Convergent)