Every so often, someone asks me what the most challenging part of the consecrated religious life is. Sometimes she poses her question in terms of the three evangelical counsels. Is the greatest challenge evangelical poverty: sharing all things in common and calling nothing my own? Or is it evangelical chastity: renouncing marriage for the sake of the Kingdom? Or is it evangelical obedience: adapting my will to the requirements of a Rule and a superior?

The honest answer, or at least my honest answer, is that what makes convent life difficult is not, in fact, one single evangelical counsel in particular. Rather, it is something which exists partway between poverty and obedience: the ongoing process of distinguishing what I actually need in life from what I simply want.

How does convent life do this? Simply by requiring me to ask for things. The apparently simple act of requesting something from another person, in my case the prioress, requires me to bring into the cold light of day a little of my inner world, a little of my perspective on the people and the things around me, and then to see how it all holds up to reality. It’s incredible how quickly my grand narratives of urgent necessity—whether it be for new books, a new habit, a bit of technology that none of the other sisters have—suddenly seem rather flimsy and contrived when brought into conversation with someone whom I love and trust, and who loves and trusts me in turn.

Of course, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting things. Desire is an integral part of a flourishing Christian life. But Christian life, especially when lived in common, is an ongoing process of having God gently reshape those desires, coiled tightly inwards by the effects of original sin, until they once more point us towards love of Him and love of neighbor. This process is neither quick nor easy. But if we ever become impatient or disheartened, we can simply avoid it altogether by recategorizing each of our wants as something else entirely: a need, the kind of thing that nobody in their right mind, surely, would be so cruel and callous as to interfere with or to question. Most of the time, we do not do this interior bait-and-switch consciously. And so we need the help of someone or something external to us—a superior, a Rule, a community—to bring it to light.

“Call nothing your own,” exhorts the Rule of Saint Augustine, “but hold all things in common.” This principle of common ownership underpins the practice of evangelical poverty in communities, such as my own Dominican community, who live by this Rule. What matters in Augustine’s view of common ownership, more than the goods we have, is the people from whom we have received them. Sharing material goods in the way a religious community does requires us to live in trusting, honest relationships with others. And this attitude of trusting non-possessiveness developed through evangelical poverty quickly spills over into our practice of evangelical obedience, working its transformative power on our needs and wants on a yet deeper level within us. For instance, perhaps I think I need to tell another sister something very important during the Grand Silence because, in fact, I simply want to avoid solitude and inner quiet. Perhaps I think I need to make a terribly important point in a conversation with my superior because actually I just want to have the last word at any cost.

This might seem like nothing more than a glimpse into a way of life whose relevance to the rest of the Church is limited at best. But it seems to me that, in our present age, consecrated religious are not the only ones slowly realizing that their apparent needs are, in fact, simply desires in need of reform. We might consider the S.S.P.X.’s need to consecrate bishops without a papal mandate, or the need of German bishops to respond to a pastoral situation with a misleading formula of blessing, or even of the need of American politicians to be left in peace to formulate foreign policy without any moralizing from Rome.

I can’t judge, of course. The only reason I’m in any position to recognize my own apparent needs as unreformed wants is because of ten years in convent life. I have felt the slow, gradual, ever-embodied experience of having my perception of God, of the Church, and of my own self healed and re-adjusted through a life lived in common, face-to-face and hand-in-hand with other creatures made in God’s image.

Christian obedience is not meant to be an abstraction or a disembodied theory. But in our current age, most of us will see a picture of the pope ten times a day while never having to kneel and kiss his ring. How many of our contemporary difficulties with obedience would be sorted out if only we could only recall, in whatever form of life that God has given us, that we are to call nothing our own? Everything, from our shoes and our books, right up to our minds and our wills, is in the service of an ultimate good which we did not create, do not possess, and yet is the path to our deepest happiness.