Life Outside the Box: An Interview with Sara Boehk
Gardening, Monastic Tendencies, and Doing the Next Thing
Welcome to the third installment of Life Outside the Box, where we celebrate living as whole people and not just a one-dimensional job title.
The overwhelmingly positive response to my essay, Leaning (In and) Out, (Not) Having it All, suggested to me that there are a lot of women (and men) who are keen to set aside the societal pressure to hustle hard and put all their energies and decades of life exclusively into one single career box.
This series offers interviews with those who have chosen a life outside the box, in a variety of ways. It’s my hope that in getting to peek into the lives of others, we’ll all be inspired to step outside the pressure chambers we may feel stuck in - even if our lives are very different in practice from those shared here.
Encouragement, permission, examples - I hope whatever it is you need to step outside the box, you’ll find it here.
It’s a privilege to welcome Sara Boehk here today. I met Sara more than a decade ago, when she offered to help me - a total stranger on the other side of the Atlantic - get settled into Roman grad student life. She not only found me an apartment and mailed me an Italian cell phone, but she completed the Herculean task of getting all the right stamps on all the right papers. (If you’ve never dealt with Italian paperwork, just imagine the DMV on multiple steroids, open only for 2 random hours every day, run by mythical creatures taken to riddles and whims. Needless to say, it takes grit!)
Sara has a lot of wisdom to share about how to do the difficult things that a life outside the box requires. Enjoy!
(1) What does your life outside the box currently look like? Tell us about a day/ week in your life.
In the last six months, circumstances have overthrown my routines and schedules, but the basics, which currently get shuffled about, remain. My days are a blend of academic work, prayer, odd jobs, gardening, and everyday tasks.
A few details add color. I’ve lived in Rome, Italy, for nearly two decades. I share a wall with an eleventh-century church, situated on a property in the care of one of Rome’s old noble families and home to diverse realities, e.g., a residence for seniors and a hostel.
When I moved into this living space, I agreed to assist in managing the sacristy (scheduling celebrants for masses, ironing linens, occasionally organizing funerals, etc.) and to cultivate a garden. Running alongside the church was a marvelous quantity of dirt overrun by weeds. Gardening, which wasn’t something I’d done much of previously, has turned out to be an excellent complement to intellectual work.
There’s another detail that’s essential to what my life currently looks like: I’ve chosen to remain unmarried “for the sake of the kingdom.”1 I’ve encountered members of a plethora of ecclesial entities in Rome, and inevitably they ask me, “What are you?” (In other words, to which community do you belong?) In my early years here, I’d often reply, “I’m a laywoman with monastic tendencies.” Now, I’m more likely to say that I’m a beguine, or something like it.
(2) How did you get there? What intentional choices did you make?
How did I get here? By doing the next thing. I didn’t arrive at this insight on my own, but to give credit where it’s due, I have to provide a bit of background.
In my mid-20s, a priest who was a spiritual father to me envisioned founding a religious community, and I was ready to do whatever such an endeavor might entail. He connected me with another young woman and encouraged us both to study theology. She had already begun making plans to study at a pontifical university2 in Rome, and I decided to join her, thinking I’d be back in the States after a year or two. We relocated to Italy, and within a short time, the priest’s trajectory changed. My principal motivation for theological studies vanished.
On a deeper level, though, there’d been other interior movements, underlying the immediate cause of my Roman sojourn — and not bound to it — which persisted. I felt pulled towards celibacy, towards sacrificing my natural desires in order to be devoted to Christ. So, I made the choice to remain in Rome. What followed was a span of time I might cryptically call my “French years” (involving four or five French communities founded in the twentieth century, at least two French mystics, and a couple trips to France), which, along with a number of theological upsets and the obliteration of some cherished notions (I’m looking at you, Cadaver Synod), had brought me to a state of vocational anxiety.
Enter “the next thing.”
The woman I mentioned earlier — the one who pitched the study-theology-in-Italian idea to me — she’d also made the decision to stay in Rome, and we eventually became friends. About five years into our studies, we were introduced to a woman who’d been one of the first women to receive a doctorate from a pontifical university. Her life was intriguing; she defied definition. We wanted to know how she’d gotten there, and she replied simply: “By doing the next thing.” It’s hard to describe the profound relief that unpretentious phrase gifted me. Freed from the particular anxieties of my French years, I confidently kept watch for the next thing(s).
Around the same time — a little earlier, actually — a professor of medieval church history wanted to know “what we were,” and the friend with whom I’d been studying (and who’d shared in some of those French experiences) gave our standard answer: “laywomen with monastic tendencies.” With excitement he exclaimed, “You’re beguines!” It took me a while to embrace that idea, not least because I had no idea who beguines were.3 (That kindly professor later created a course for the two of us called Mulieres in Ecclesia, which looked at the beguinal movement south of the Alps.)
Doing the next thing moved me from my French years into my “Roman years” (involving the Diocese of Rome’s major seminary, Ordo Virginum, cloistered Augustinians, and German Benedictines) and then on to my “Jesuit years” (involving Jesuits, Roman nobles, and professional church ladies). It was a 30-day silent retreat4 in the latter period that brought me round to the beguines and to recognizing that their history might contain traces of a way forward for my own story.
(3) When you were a child/ younger, what vision did you have for your life? Did you always want to live outside the box, or did it come later? Was it a surprise to you?
The earliest thing I remember is that, as a child, I wanted to be an astronaut, because my father liked astronomy and aviation. Space exploration would have been out of this world, if not outside the box. As I grew older, I moved on to other ideas: historical interpreter, archivist, teacher. I think, throughout my childhood and adolescence, I took it for granted that I’d marry and have children. I even wrote letters to my future husband.
In my early 20s, I was diagnosed with stage 3B Hodgkin lymphoma and received chemo and radiation therapy. I’d been so relieved to finally have a name for my illness, and my oncologist and nurses had been so positive, that I didn’t really consider death until I was nearing the end of treatment. It struck me that if I’d been born earlier — say, the early twentieth century — I’d likely be dead. That was a catalyst. From that moment onward, I wanted to do something different, something radical, though I wasn’t sure what.
(4) What dispositions/ attitudes/ skills do you feel like held you back from stepping outside the box sooner, if you wish you had?
I don’t think the process, or the journey, could have happened any faster for me.
(5) What dispositions/ attitudes/ skills helped you cultivate the life you have now?
I’d say resilience, patience, and perseverance.
(6) What are you intentionally choosing to say “yes” and (maybe more importantly!) “no” to in this season of your life?
I’ve been saying “no” to Substack at breakfast. Opening the app warps time. I look up and I’ve been at the table for an hour, sipping my tea in far too leisurely a manner. Social media and the news are also off limits at breakfast — or the whole morning, if I can manage it.
(7) Where can people find you online?
If you’d like to write to me, contact Kerri, who will share my email address with you. [Editor’s note: you can just reply to this email and I’ll put you in touch.]
I think it’s safe to say that Sara’s life is far outside the boxes that most of us are surrounded by! I loved that she found freedom in the simple notion of doing the next thing: no grand plan needed. Have you ever encountered an idea like that, which has changed your whole trajectory? What have the difficulties of life inspired you to do? Share your thoughts in the comments!
And if you’re discerning your own move outside the box, Cultivating Clarity might be just the thing for you. Join us in a paid subscription for a weekly mix of essays on discernment, (prayer) journaling prompts, practical exercises to help in decision-making, and quarterly “office hours” for Q&A on all things discernment and decisions.
Matthew 19:12; 1 Corinthians 7:32–35
A university is pontifical if it has been established and approved by the Holy See. These universities offer degrees in philosophy, theology, and canon law, as well as in other fields. [Editor’s note: in layman’s terms, these are officially Catholic institutions that were originally established to train priests who could then train others who would become priests.]
If you’re unfamiliar with the beguines, as I was, this brief introduction might interest you.