Regular readers of The Lamp may recall that back in March I wrote about the anonymous Twitter account Nuns Holding Things. As its name suggests, the account features pictures of consecrated women holding a variety of different objects related to their common life and charism: breviaries, animals, whiteboard pens, carpentry tools, and, in the case of my own community, toadstools and goats. Since writing that article my relationship with Nuns Holding Things, as well as my attitude towards the portrayal of consecrated religious life on social media more generally, has undergone several developments.

First, I have now featured on Nuns Holding Things myself not once, but twice. (Once I was holding an ice cream at a zoo—a long story, but suffice to say it was the Easter Octave; the other time I was brandishing our convent’s nifty apple-picking device in the direction of a tree.) Second—and this is a result of thought, rather than simply a reaction to my cumulative ten minutes of fame—I have wholly come around to the idea that this kind of online visual portrayal of consecrated religious life is a straightforwardly good thing. And third, working through my feelings towards Nuns Holding Things on the digital page resulted in an interview with the account’s anonymous creator.

It was a relatively brief interview, conducted by email in different zones. The creator, whom I’ll refer to simply as N.H.T., was very happy to tell me about the history of the project, its motivations, and some of its visible fruits. I have preserved N.H.T.’s anonymity; all I will say is that my suspicion that the account is Sister Simona Brambilla’s weekend hobby turned out to be, for better or worse, misguided.

The story begins with Benedictines and cheese. Five years ago, N.H.T. came across an image on Twitter of a Dominican nun holding a puppy and noticed it was proving popular. The creator set up the account soon after, with the aim to share a picture each day of a sister holding “something cute, ordinary, or unexpected.” The first picture N.H.T. posted was of Mother Noella Marcellino of the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut holding a wheel of cheese.

It is worth pausing here to reflect on this choice of début image, for there is in fact quite a bit going on beneath the surface of this picture of Mother Noella (who, in addition to transiently holding cheese, also permanently holds a doctorate in the microbiology of cheese-ripening from the University of Connecticut). Several years ago she gave an interview about her cheesemaking apostolate and its application to the spiritual life. “Enzymes are catalysts that enable reaction,” she said. “An enzyme itself does not change. But it is a mediator that brings together two things. By analogy you need mediators like enzymes in a community of people, people who do not act out of self-interest. I learned about this principle of community life in part through my experience as a microbiologist.”

When I first saw N.H.T.’s photo of Mother Noella and decided to look her up, I wasn’t expecting to discover a woman who had combined a life of monastic enclosure with academic research or find myself being edified by her analogies between cheese production and the common life. But there are many similarly remarkable stories behind other images on Nuns Holding Things. That’s the thing about nuns, you see: They’re full of surprises. And revealing their surprisingly multifaceted lives to a wider audience is something Nuns Holding Things is very good at.

Perhaps this is why N.H.T.’s favorite photos are of sisters doing things we don’t expect to see. These range from the mildly absurd—a sister “holding a sloth at a zoo and making a very surprised face at the camera”—to ordinary photos of “nuns and sisters hanging laundry up to dry, or ironing.” Other favorites include photos that are “beautiful in composition and color,” the ones that “show sisters praying, moments from Christmas and Easter, or time outdoors.”

For somebody who has been living the consecrated religious life for nearly a decade, this combination of ordinary, extraordinary, and beautiful pictures seems to me a very fitting visual summary of a life which is itself ordinary, extraordinary, and, in the precise theological sense, beautiful. It is also, in our current age, a very useful one. As we religious strive to find our place in the contemporary world, staying faithful both to the essence of our tradition and also to our ongoing call to reform and renewal, two temptations confront us: either to downplay the radicalness of religious consecration until it loses its clarity and distinctiveness, or else emphasize our separation from everyday life and natural goods to a destructive and inhuman extent. Generational cultures and theological priors often influence which one of these extremes we find ourselves drifting towards. But in any case, neither one is authentic or spiritually sound.

Many of the pictures on Nuns Holding Things are caught in that happy space between the extraordinary, the ordinary, and the beautiful. This same place where pictures of the religious life are at their most appealing is also the place where the actual living of the religious life is at its healthiest. It is sometimes difficult to describe or explain this reality in words, and it takes a young woman several years of formation before this balance can be achieved in her own practice. But perhaps it is something that can be glimpsed in small, subtle, and intuitive ways by a well-chosen image.

And this is in essence the small online apostolate of Nuns Holding Things: “In my mind, if someone can see a picture that surprises her, helps her see something in common [with a sister], or shows her beauty, that is good for Catholicism and good for religious life,” the creator told me.

There’s nothing for me to disagree with here. Regularly posting photos of nuns online might not change the world. But it strikes me that to be surprised by something, one has to have put some thought into what it is or what one expects it to be, and to find something beautiful, one has to experience some attraction to or desire for it. These small movements of the intellect of the will, these acts of knowing and desiring, are in fact the building blocks of vocational discernment. Through them Catholics come to develop a clear, accurate understanding what a life radically given to God looks like: ordinary, because it is an authentically human life; extraordinary, because it is a life set apart and only possible by a particular grace of God; beautiful, because its truthfulness and goodness possess an attractive power.

And who knows—perhaps looking at the images on Nuns Holding Things will encourage some women to look within, and discover that what they are holding is a desire to live this life themselves.