Recreation and the use of little signs are, in my experience, two of the most obvious differences between male and female religious communities. The little signs I was warned about. Ten years ago, just before I entered the convent, a Dominican friar whom I asked for a bit of advice on adjusting to convent life said to me, very solemnly, “Be prepared for signs everywhere. Nuns and sisters do that; men don’t.”

At first I was nonplussed but, reader, he was entirely correct. On entering a female religious house, the faithless generation discovers myriad neatly written, occasionally laminated signs warning the sisters that this or that is always to be turned off after use, always left on after use, not touched, put away, used first, used last, left for the sister with celiac disease, or simply—careful!—very hot. Male religious, meanwhile, are (as far as I can tell) largely left to fend for themselves amid piles of unlabeled cables and anonymous boxes of leftovers.

Recreation, however, was a male–female distinction I discovered wholly on my own. Over the years, I began to notice that whenever I spoke to a friar about our conventual recreation—the games, the crafts (knitting is popular at the moment), its rather nunlike frequency—I would see him carefully re-arranging his facial expression into something mild and agreeable, so as to hide his absolute bafflement at what I was describing. The difference was confirmed to me by a friar who, spending a night in our convent, overheard the sisters playing a particularly intense board game together during recreation that evening. “It took me a while to work out what was happening,” he told me the next morning, “because when the friars all gather together there’s not usually so much . . . well . . . whooping and yelling.”

I call recreation and little signs two of the most obvious differences. In themselves, of course, they are not particularly important. But they are a light-hearted entry into a conversation in which more profound, significant distinctions between male and female religious life can be observed and understood. After all, anyone who sticks around consecrated religious long enough notices differences. These are more than just the abundance (or deficit) of laminated instructions and divergent opinions on board games. This life has something of interest to teach us about what it means to have been created in the image and likeness of one God, yet embodied in two sexes.

The differences between male and female religious communities are particularly intriguing—and, I think, particularly edifying—when we compare communities within the same spiritual family, such as my own Dominican family. These are communities bound to the same Rule of life, exercising the same institutional charism, formed in the same history and spirituality and ordering their common life by the same structure of internal governance—and yet, nevertheless, not reduced to a bland interchangeability by this shared structure.

When a Rule and a charism are embodied in a living community, the divinely given contours of that feminine or masculine embodiment become clear, made manifest exactly where they are meant to be: in human relationships marked by charity and mutual help. A Dominican friar is not a sister without a veil; a Dominican sister is not a friar who chants in a higher pitch. The commitment to living by a Rule calls us to find dignity, not danger, within our sexual differences, and to acknowledge sexual diversity without giving in to the temptation to invent a corresponding sexual hierarchy.

All of this might suggest that my experience of religious life will have made me sympathetic to our current discourse on femininity and masculinity. It absolutely hasn’t. For me, our current obsession with arriving at an ever-more-structured definition of the differences between men and women, our drive to define even more tightly masculine and feminine virtues, vices, roles, and responsibilities, simply doesn’t map on to the reality of life in a single-sex system like a convent. What is a woman’s job? What is a man’s job? I have no idea, because in the convent there are simply jobs, and unless I or one of the women I live with find it within themselves to (for instance) take out the trash, put up a shelf, have a necessary confrontation or make a tough decision regardless of the emotional tension it might cause, then these things are simply not going to get done. We have neither the time nor the inclination to wonder if this might actually be a job for a man when it is, quite simply, a job for this present moment in this particular religious house. It becomes a feminine act by virtue of being carried out by a human being embodied female. It is, if you like, a human act played in a feminine key.

The view of sexual difference which sees masculinity and femininity as two interlocking puzzle-pieces, each containing half of the full picture of human nature—the view which the philosopher Sister Prudence Allen calls “fractional complementarity”—does not stand up to scrutiny. You can discover this by reading the work of Edith Stein and Abigail Favale, certainly. But you could also—if so inclined—discover it simply by hanging out at your local convent for a while.

Perhaps, then, religious life can make a small contribution to our modern discourse around gender and sex. (Though not, of course, entirely make sense of it: I fear only prayer and fasting can cast this one out.) Against fractional complementarity the Church proposes, in particular through the magisterial preaching of Saint John Paul II, a mutual complementarity. This is a complementarity in which embodied difference empowers human beings, each possessing the plenitude of human dignity, to exist in harmonious relation. Religious life can serve as an analogy for this mutual complementarity.

Religious are formed by one Rule, just as all human beings are formed according to one image and likeness. And while there is not a “feminine” and a “masculine” fraction of the Rule, the way that a particular community embodies it will have particular tones and emphases, because it is in our relationships that our differences find their purpose and their power. Certain parts of the Rule stand out differently when embodied in a particular male or female community. But the whole of the Rule is always there. Beneath our attitudes towards board games and little signs, the consecrated religious life—played in both its masculine and its feminine keys—can show us something not only of God’s goodness, but also of the goodness of the men and women He has created both with difference and with dignity.