Friends and family have learned over the years that when they ask me what my religious community did to rest and recharge over the summer, they’re likely to find the answer a little strange. This summer, however, has taken the biscuit. Absolutely no one who asked me what this actual nun did on her Nun Girl Summer was expecting me to say that one of the most enjoyable and spiritually refreshing activities of the past couple of months was the process of revising our Book of Constitutions.

Readers of The Lamp might be understandably concerned at this point that my argument for a jolly time being had by all in the redrafting of the convent rulebook is going to end up, quite frankly, facile and unconvincing. So to begin, it’s worth pointing out that the Book of Constitutions of a religious community is not, in fact, “the convent rulebook.” Religious communities do not draw up constitutions simply because they believe that the sisters would, left to their own devices, spend their days holed up in their cells scrolling Instagram, stealing each other’s food out of the fridge, and yelling at each other. Nor are the constitutions the thing you consult only in an emergency, when the prioress has gone off the rails or the secretary has forgotten what she’s meant to be doing at the General Chapter. Here I can hand over to a Dominican nun of Lourdes, writing on the subject of the nuns’ Book of Constitutions: many of the constitutions “do not prescribe anything, and yet they are among the most important,” says Sister Marie-Ancilla O.P., because they “present fundamental values which should effect the unity of the community and give it its Dominican character.”

What we find in a community’s constitutions, then, are not just its procedural norms. We also find the history, patrimony, identity, and mission of the community set out in black and white—to prescribe, yes, but also to inspire, inform, challenge, and exhort.

Once we realize this, we begin to recognize the spiritual and theological treasure glittering beneath the surface of all these numbered paragraphs. We begin to understand that the high-minded ideals of the spiritual life that we have been learning about in our formal theological study—grace and nature, obedience and charity, royal freedom in Christ, docility to the Holy Spirit—are not airy concepts beyond our reach or understanding, but instead realities embedded in our practical everyday experience of community life.

We realize, too, that there can’t be a hard-and-fast distinction between what we call the spiritual and the juridic in the consecrated religious life. Consider my own Dominican family. Some of the constitutions which have the most to teach us about our spiritual identity and about our founder’s vision of the religious life are actually in the section on governance: the place where we find the nitty-gritty of election procedures, chapter meetings, and the responsibilities of superiors and other officeholders. Why? Because these kinds of meetings and procedures are places where we are visibly, obviously acting as a community of believers, united in heart and soul; where we live out in clear and vocal (sometimes very vocal) ways our calling, as responsible and rational creatures, to discern the will of God and co-operate with it. Our Holy Father Dominic is not an Augustine or a John Henry Newman, a saint who has bequeathed the Church a hefty corpus of theological texts to pore over; but what he has bequeathed us is a structure of governance. It is by taking our rightful place within that structure, seeking to deepen our love of God and of neighbor as free persons under grace, that we grow in our calling as his sons and daughters.

I shouldn’t idealize too much, of course. When it comes down to it, the process of revising the Book of Constitutions did involve a lot of meetings (in a room with large windows, giving a tantalizing view of the sunny convent garden), a lot of talking, and an awful lot of minute-taking by yours truly, the secretary (who has a reputation within the convent for being able to produce coherent text promptly, a reputation on which her editors at The Lamp might have some contrary opinions). The meetings were guided by the advice of a helpful and knowledgeable canon lawyer, who had to deal patiently and charitably with a barrage of questions about the precise meaning of various canonical terms. It was work, certainly. But it was work that gave opportunity for gratitude, for joy, and for fellowship; and, above all, for deep reflection on the loving kindness of the Lord, Who has given each one of us the great gift of a vocation to this community, to this way of life, and to this mission of preaching the Gospel as daughters of Saint Dominic.

There is much confusion in today’s Church about what it means to live obedience. It is a confusion felt in relationships within families, between the faithful and their pastors, and between priests and their ordinaries. Perhaps one of the visible witnesses which the consecrated religious life can offer the Church is the witness of a life in which the joy of faith and the demands of obedience are woven clearly, attractively together. Perhaps, then, the example of my convent summer—full of meetings and administration, yes, yet also full of gratitude and joy—can remind the Church of all that is necessary for a truly spiritual practice of that frightening sounding thing, obedience: freedom, responsibility, gratitude and trust, all resting upon the foundation of God’s love.