The guests at the party after my Final Profession came from many different backgrounds: married people, single people, secular priests. But they all had remarkably similar things to say about the experience of watching it. First they would say, “That was like nothing I’ve ever seen before!” Then they would say, “It was like a wedding, wasn’t it?” I relayed this to a friend who is also a Dominican, knowing he would be as amused as I was. In response, he told me that his brother (not a religious) had explained his own profession to their friends using the same line of reasoning in reverse. “Imagine a wedding,” his brother had said. “Okay? Well, it’s nothing like that.”

It is like; it is not like. This might seem nothing more than pleasingly absurd verbal gymnastics, but in fact it is an excellent way of understanding consecrated religious—and, in particular, of understanding why we use terms like “bride of Christ” and “spiritual mother” to describe women who, in the everyday meaning of such terms, are clearly neither. Ever since those conversations at my profession party, the apparent paradox of religious profession being like and not like a wedding—and, by extension, religious consecration itself being like and not like marriage—has helped me and my married friends talk more constructively about our respective states of life, edging closer to comparison, withdrawing from it, and finding increasing clarity in the to-and-fro.

I say “apparent” paradox because (as readers within the Venn diagram of theologians, Thomists, and pedants may have already noticed) there is a precise term for this kind of relationship of similarity and dissimilarity, and it is not paradox, but analogy. The Catechism describes analogy, without using the word, in its section on how human beings are able to talk about God; it tells us, quoting St. Thomas Aquinas and Lateran IV, that “we must recall that ‘between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude’ and that ‘concerning God, we cannot grasp what he is, but only what he is not, and how other beings stand in relation to him.’”

Analogy, in the context of theology, is first intended to help us talk about God. But this search for similarity and dissimilarity, this stating of what is and what is not by putting concepts in relation with one another, can also help us talk about the secondary states of life. In his Theology of the Body, for instance, Pope St. John Paul II describes Ephesians 5:22–33 (the passage on marriage and the “great mystery” of Christ and the Church) as an analogy which connects the spousal relationship of the married couple to the spousal relationship between Christ and His Mystical Body. He then returns to this use of analogy in his encyclical letter on the dignity of woman, Mulieris dignitatem, expanding it to apply to motherhood as well as marriage, and including consecrated religious as well as married people in the connection.

But here it is important to be clear what exactly we are putting into this analogy, and why we are using it—for analogies, much like cars, are only useful if we fill them correctly and drive them the right way up the road. When the Pope talks of spiritual marriage and human marriage, spiritual motherhood and human motherhood, he does not compare them directly to each other. Instead he compares both to the Church, Christ’s bride and our mother. The spousal motherhood of the married woman and of the consecrated religious are like and not like each other because both are, first of all, like and not like the spousal motherhood of the Church. She is, to use the technical term, the primary analogate: the uppermost point of a triangle to which the two like-and-not-likes are connected to form one shape.

More practically-minded readers might at this point wonder if I was wrong when I said that there is more to this analogy business than absurd verbal gymnastics. After all, what does it matter what I choose as my “primary analogate” when thinking about my state of life? It matters first because the gift of the consecrated life deserves to be lived to its fullest, and that fullness is something that God, in His kindness, has given us the capacity to truly understand. But there is a second and more sobering reason. Having a robust, rightly-ordered understanding of our identities as brides of Christ and spiritual mothers will protect religious women when it begins to hit home, in personal and immediate ways, that our consecration will not involve the same joys as those of our married friends.

If we have developed the habit of looking side-to-side to make sense of our state of life, rather than upwards—to the brides and mothers around us, rather than to the pre-eminent Bride and Mother, the Church—then this state of affairs might seem to us bafflingly cruel, rather than simply the expected way of things. If we have chosen to live as though our spiritual maternity and our spousal relationship with Christ are simply a (very) unusual way to fulfill our natural desires for offspring and companionship, then coming to terms with the sacrifice they entail will be far more painful than it needs to be. We have blocked our path to a more profound appreciation that to be a bride of Christ is to be called to the unceasing lovesong of the Church’s public prayer, and that to be a spiritual mother is to sustain and nurture not on the natural level but within the life of sacramental grace.

It can be enlightening to look to the examples of brides and mothers around us, marveling at what is like and not like our own life; it certainly makes for good conversation at the party after a Final Profession. But it is only when we look upwards to the Church, who gives all states of life their meaning, that we can truly see what that life is meant to be.