I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that life as a Catholic woman does not unfold in a vacuum, laboratory, or ivory tower. Being a woman rarely looks like the depictions of the Blessed Mother in Renaissance paintings, or seldom feels the same as the emotions of Bernini’s “St. Teresa in Ecstasy”.

Being a woman rarely looks like the depictions of the Blessed Mother in Renaissance paintings

Instead, being a woman, Catholic or not, is often dirtier, more often lived without clean lines and easy questions. At times, it is uncertainty and confusion, and in the darkest times, despair. It can look like a slumped over, exhausted body. It might sound like tears and sighs, and the question, “Why?”. My experience as a Catholic woman has taught me this, that over the course of my life, salvation worked out in the day to day is not always beautiful, ideal, or clean. More often, this journey with myself, my neighbors, and God leaves me with bruises, cuts, and scars.

As a survivor of sexual assault, I have learned what it means to continue walking in and through my trauma, to struggle to reconcile my experience of my own reality with the ideals and expectations of my Catholic faith. The event of my sexual assault left me with intense anxiety, trouble fully trusting others, tendency towards isolation, and many other psychological wounds. Like many other women who have experienced trauma, I was profoundly changed after the assault, and I have been struggling to repair the ruptured meaning of who I thought I was since the day it occurred. Though pain, loneliness, and anger have sometimes estranged me from the knowledge of my own identity as God’s beloved daughter, I have kept walking, even when my trauma made it difficult for me to see the path. However, the light illuminating the darkness has been my own strength, first gifted to me by God, and increased over time through my own volition, grace, and the healing of others.This strength that played a role in shaping and sharpening by nature of my trauma is resilience. Because of it, I have been able to make the intentional choice to keep trying, living, and breathing. Through resilience, I have grown into to my new identity of “survivor”.

I believe that I have always had the capacity for strength and survival, even before my trauma; however, the virtue of resilience is a part of myself that I have the ability to nurture, cultivate, and form most intentionally after the assault. Like strength, resilience involves the possession of power and agency, but also includes the ability to endure even in immense pain and challenge. Resilience connotes not just an ability to survive a single instance of suffering, but the capacity to endure of repeated discomfort or pain in different forms. Cultivating this sense of power and agency that can withstand both daily anxiety and life-altering events has involved the intentional effort of all the parts of myself: the spiritual, intellectual, psychological, and physical.

The virtue of resilience is a part of myself that I have the ability to nurture, cultivate, and form most intentionally after the assault.

The formation of my resilience has taken quite a bit of time, and has involved a variety of things like therapy, trusting relationships with mentor figures, supportive friends, challenging myself in healthy ways, immersing myself in my studies, strengthening my physical body, writing from my authentic voice, knowing when to rest, honest prayer, and striving for holiness in the context of my individual life. For me, cultivating resilience has looked like starting therapy, even though I didn’t want to, but also freedom to remain angry at God for months. It has felt like increasing the weight of my deadlift in the gym, but also allowing myself time to grieve. It sounds like the ability to have compassion for myself, restoration in trust in others, and a breakthrough in a new, more honest and authentic relationship with God.

If the effects of trauma have wreaked havoc in all areas of my life, producing cracks and fragmentations, resilience has not only filled in the rifts in my spiritual, physical, and mental life, but has also moved me to be a unified and integrated soul. Resilience nurtured over time has not only given me strength to live out my life even as a survivor of sexual assault, but also continue to live through the new transitions of my young adult life, broken relationships, failure, disappointment, disillusionment, and confusion. In trauma, depression, and anxiety, cultivating resilience has allowed me and so many other Catholic women to continue on in what Dorothy Day called “the business of living”:

“...What saves us from despair is a phrase we read in The Life of Jesus of Daniel-Rops, ‘getting on with the business of living.’ What did the women do after the Crucifixion? The men were in the upper room mourning and praying, and the women, by their very nature, ‘had to go on with the business of living.’ They prepared the spices, purchased the linen clothes for the burial, kept the Sabbath, and hastened to the tomb on Sunday morning. Their very work gave them insights as to time, and doubtless there was a hint of the peace and joy of the Resurrection to temper their grief...Because no matter what catastrophe has occurred or hangs overhead, she has to go on with the business of living.”- Dorothy Day, “The Business of Living, ” in Selected Writings (p. 103 American Catholic Gender Identities)

This “business of living” - our daily life, the routines we know so well, the familiar and mundane, and also the disruptions and interruptions in our plans, the unexpected joys and sorrows, the extraordinary hidden in the ordinary - is where our salvation is worked out. The ability to go on with our lives, to have hope that our life can continue despite a major life altering event, depends on our willingness and capability to cultivate resilience. Resilience not only allows us to continue walking on the path of daily life, but also has the potentiality to transform and redeem the catastrophes of our lives into things that move us towards greater life and love through our openness to this virtue’s formation. In the many hours of therapy that I have participated in, I always remember this wisdom, “Recovery and healing are not always linear, but are always forward moving”; resilience is what allows for the movement to take place, the trust to keep living to resurface, and the hope that God is still there to return.

The ability to go on with our lives, to have hope that our life can continue despite a major life altering event, depends on our willingness and capability to cultivate resilience.

Out of my experience, I have found that as a Catholic woman and survivor of sexual assault, I have a capacity for inner strength that allows me to endure great suffering and the uncertainty of daily life. Although resilience is only one facet of my identity, it is one of the parts of myself that I am most proud of, as it is something that was not obtained easily. Resilience is a part of my identity that has arisen from my particular experiences in life, been cultivated to allow me to be drawn further and further on the path of holiness, and fostered the restoration of right relationship between myself, God, and others. This virtue resonates with me, as it isn’t an ascribed, generic, impossible ideal that I have to squeeze my identity into; rather, resilience is natural-fitting garment that I myself have partaken in weaving, dyeing, and wearing.

The Experience of Women

There is an immense importance in noticing and naming virtues like resilience that arise from my experience as a woman- firstly, for their inherent value, and secondly, for their necessary use in the conversation surrounding what it means to be a Catholic woman, especially at this precise moment in our culture. In my work as a PhD student studying catechesis, I have had the opportunity to study the content and methods that comprise the Church’s ministry of handing on the faith to all Catholics throughout the life cycle. Experience - the events, emotions, thoughts, and worldview of a particular person in their unique lived reality -is a possible means of coming to know the faith. In addition to divine revelation, experience is also itself a form of revelation- a way in which all human beings can come to know deep truths about themselves, the Church, and the Trinitarian God. In this way, resilience is a virtue that comes forth from my experience, and has revealed deep truths to me about myself as God’s beloved child and about God in his steadfast love. The process of naming this virtue out of the revelation of my experience and cultivating it has led me more deeply to the sources of healing that the Church has to offer, namely, the Eucharist. Arising from my lived reality as a sexual assault survivor and Catholic woman, resilience has been a way in which God has revealed his presence to me in the midst of my pain and suffering.

While the ideals of Catholic womanhood that come to us through ascribed, traditional narratives might be worth considering in the conversation of what it means to be a Catholic woman, I believe that the virtues that arise from individual experience are equally important. As Catholics, we are called universally to holiness, but the way in which this is carried out in our lives differs according to who we are individually. The particular, unique parts of us are the way by which we personally and saliently come to know, love, and serve God and others. Our experiences are loci of salvation, meaning that in our small daily lives, the grandeur of salvation history unfolds through our individual participation.

Our experience, and the experience of so many others in throughout the Church’s tradition, plays a role in the entire Church’s life.

Our experience, and the experience of so many others in throughout the Church’s tradition, plays a role in the entire Church’s life. This is recognizable in the communion of saints- from Dorothy Day’s “long loneliness” to St. Therese’s experience of God’s love as a tender Father, recorded in The Story of a Soul, to the Blessed Mother’s being “greatly troubled” during the Annunciation - the Church grows and matures in her understanding and ministry to women because of the naming of their experiences. In my individual life as a survivor, I know that, like my sister saints, I too have a responsibility to the Tradition to name my experience; resilience may not be a word common to the Catholic Tradition’s understanding of what it means to live as Catholic woman, but through my individual life and story, someday, it could be. In this way, resilience has formed not only my identity, but informs the identity and experience of women in the entire Church. This process -the fearless, unapologetic being of myself and ourselves as women- witnesses to the incredible feminine power to give life, not just biologically, but emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically. By being ourselves, having the courage to name the most traumatic events in our lives, and continuing to walk bravely as women of faith, we breathe new life into the Church for women everywhere and in every generation.

From Dorothy Day’s “long loneliness” to St. Therese’s experience of God’s love as a tender Father, recorded in The Story of a Soul, to the Blessed Mother’s being “greatly troubled” during the Annunciation - the Church grows and matures in her understanding and ministry to women because of the naming of their experiences.

I have come to believe that resilience is not only part of my story of healing and survival, but is also essential to my working out of my own salvation in my own individual call to holiness. While my trauma was not of God and never something itself to which I was called, my process of recovery is a part of my vocation, a component of the self-gift that I can give to other women and the world. My resilience is something I am proud to have partaken in cultivating myself, out of my individual, life-altering experience; more importantly, resilience helps me articulate what it means to be myself, a Catholic woman in a particular context, with a particular reality. In naming my experience and the virtue that has arisen from it, I hope to add my story to the canon of possibilities of what feminine striving for holiness might look like, and challenge other women to do the same.