For an Ex-Nun, a ‘Radical’ Approach to Sex and Spirituality

Dorothy Donnelly, ex-nun and associate member of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Orange, laughs when asked about her credentials to speak on the subject of sex, more particularly “Sexual Spirituality,” as she did recently as leadoff speaker in a series of weekly lectures at the Orange campus of Loyola Marymount University.

The San Francisco native gives the glib answer first--”Every doctor who treats cancer doesn’t have it”--and then proceeds to the serious one. “Normal human beings experience their sexuality and they have to make mature decisions about what to do about it,” said Donnelly, 65, author of “Radical Love: An Approach to Sexual Spirituality” (Winston Press, Minneapolis, Minn.).

For her part, after many years as a nun, it “was not honest to declare a vow of celibacy. It didn’t fit into my life anymore,” she said, so she decided to “accept the holiness of the body, which means its wholeness,” and leave the order.

Welcome at Order

But the self-described “theological circuit rider,” holder of two doctorates and a former president of the National Coalition of American Nuns, was welcomed back to the order’s Motherhouse in Orange as an honored scholar and old friend, as well as the first speaker in Marymount’s “Christ Centering Days.”

Of course, some alterations were in order, given the topic. Since the Wednesday-morning gatherings--designed primarily for lay people--integrate meditation and the celebration of Mass with the speakers, the sessions are usually held in the chapel. This time Donnelly, a frequent university lecturer, suggested that a classroom would be more appropriate, and the sisters agreed.

Standing at a wooden podium, flanked by a colored map outlining the travels of St. Paul and a blackboard filled with notes, Donnelly launched into two lively hours of wide-ranging remarks focusing on her thesis that “sexuality is a gift, not an affliction” and her plea to “accept in a more healthy way that we are embodied.”

Steeped in Languages

In the process of setting the historical scene, she managed to quote Plato, Carl Jung, William James, Theresa of Avila, Oedipal theory, Augustine of Hippo, Carlos Castaneda, G.I. Gurdjieff--and Virgil, in the original. After one linguistic digression, she explained: “I spent half my life in languages.” Early church doctrine was served up in Latin, but the message was mostly contemporary, with the activist academic urging the 14 people sitting in a rough semicircle to “go off and do what you want when I get boring.”

Donnelly reminded them that St. Paul referred to the body as the temple of the spirit and urged them not to “deny your body. We’re God’s condos!” she exclaimed. The essence of sexual spirituality, she said, is “using sexuality as part of your personality,” and the key question to ask in a relationship is, “Am I using someone, or am I expressing my love?”

The group seemed, by turns, engrossed, mesmerized and entertained by the handsome woman in the Indian tunic.

“She seems like a wonderful lady,” said Pattin Dornan of Irvine, “a wonderful role model for us women.” Dornan, a hospice worker at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, said the current series was the second she had attended at Marymount, which she called “a great place to learn.”

Al Lopez, a Whittier retiree, was attending a Marymount series for the first time, although he said he is taking an Old Testament course at the Marywood Center, also in Orange. Lopez started taking the courses because “I didn’t like doing nothing, so I decided to come and see what they’re offering.”

There are more than a dozen conferences, workshops and series like the Christ Centering Days offered at the Orange campus, as well as another dozen or more daylong and weekend retreats and programs at the order’s new Center for Spiritual Development, which has sleeping accommodations for 50. Donnelly is scheduled to return to the center over the Thanksgiving weekend for a retreat with Morton T. Kelsey, an Episcopal priest and author, who is also a scheduled speaker in the Christ Centering Days series.

‘Roots Are Here’

Although Donnelly has left the order, she is clearly comfortable on her return visits. “I owe them everything,” she said of the sisters. “My roots are here.” Joining the order after high school, St. Joseph’s enabled her to attend college, and later she taught at Rosary High School in San Diego. After secondary teaching came a master’s degree and, later, her first Ph.D., in Latin and Greek, at Catholic University in Washington, and a Fulbright fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. But a few years later, after teaching again at a Downey high school, at Marymount and at Cal State Fullerton, her father and sister died, and she asked for a sabbatical, this time to study theology in the Bay Area.

“I needed the solitude,” she said. “I needed to be alone. Somehow I never came back.” In the post-Vatican II period of the late 1960s and early 1970s she came to a decision: “I have to live in an ecumenical world.”

While in this atmosphere, Donnelly absorbed and embraced feminism and pacifism. She says now that “authentic prayer is social action,” and her criterion for judging a theology is, “Does it throw light on your human experience?”

Studied Eastern Religions

Teaching, traveling and studying Eastern religions drew her to the question of how, theologically, the Catholic Church came to “divide the sexual and spiritual condition.” Some of this questioning led in 1982 to an essay entitled “The Sexual Mystic,” which appeared as a chapter in the book “The Feminist Mystic” (Crossroads, New York). Eventually, Donnelly’s response came in the form of her book-length treatment, “Radical Love.”

“The essence of being human is learning how to love,” she said. “Prayer is a relationship, a love affair. . . . Change your image of God to God as lover. God is in the act of constant seduction--we are in the act of constant resistance.”