Welcome back, dear friend...
It's good to be with you again... I've been thinking of silence---how it can be chosen, or imposed. Last time, we remembered Mother Ann Lee and the way her silence became sacred, a language all its own.
But today, the silence feels heavier.
It presses at the edges of candlelight, settles in the corners of bookshelves, waits outside the cloister gate.
There is a woman I want you to meet.
She was not silent by nature. She loved words---devoured them, shaped them, spilled them onto every scrap of parchment she could find.
And yet, the world around her decided that some voices were not meant to be heard.
Come with me.
Let's step into her library, just for a moment.
The room is small, but it holds entire worlds.
Books line the walls, their leather spines worn smooth by candle smoke and careful hands. There is no sound but the scratching of a quill and the soft creak of wood beneath the weight of thought.
She writes quickly, hunched over a cluttered desk, long after the other nuns have gone to sleep. Her candle is burning low---too low---and she knows she'll be scolded for wasting wax again. But still she writes.
The ink is dark and quick. Her words arrive faster than she can trap them.
A sonnet for the moon.
A letter she will never send.
A line of theology she dares not speak aloud.
Every sentence is a thread, pulling her further from obedience, deeper into herself.
Outside the convent walls, the streets of Mexico City stir with colonial power---priests and viceroys and merchants, their boots grinding dust into the stone. None of them would guess that behind these thick adobe walls, a woman is writing what none of them would dare to say.
She pauses.
Listens.
Not for God, but for footsteps. For the sound of her superiors waking.
She tucks the parchment under a volume of Aristotle, extinguishes the candle with her fingers, and disappears into the dark.
The silence returns.
But it is no longer empty. It is full of unsaid things.
I remember her before she wore the veil.
A girl with too many questions and not enough pages.
Juana Inés de Asbaje was born in 1648, in a small town just outside Mexico City---then the heart of New Spain. Her mother was unmarried. Her father disappeared. The colonial world into which she arrived had already decided what she could become. A wife. A servant. A silence.
But Juana didn't accept that.
By the age of three, she was following her sister to school and begging the teacher to let her stay. By eight, she'd written her first dramatic poem. By adolescence, she was studying Latin, philosophy, and theology---subjects women were not supposed to touch.
She devoured books the way others devoured prayer.
At court, her brilliance became impossible to ignore. She was summoned to the viceroy's palace and dazzled the assembled scholars with her intellect. She could answer questions in Latin and compose verse on command. The viceroy's wife, impressed beyond words, became her patron.
But even the palace had its ceilings.
When the pressure to marry grew unbearable, Sor Juana fled---not to escape the world, but to find a quieter place to engage it.
She entered the convent of San Jerónimo in Mexico City, where she would spend the rest of her life.
There, behind the safety of cloistered walls, she built a kind of intellectual sanctuary. Her cell became a salon, a study, a sanctuary of mind and spirit. She amassed one of the largest private libraries in the Americas. She wrote poems, plays, scientific treatises, theological debates. She corresponded with scholars and noblewomen across continents.
But her mind was not free.
As her influence grew, so did the suspicion. Church officials began to circle. A woman, writing theology? Arguing with bishops? Making art that stirred the wrong hearts?
In 1691, after a particularly bold letter critiquing a sermon by a well-respected theologian, the pressure came crashing down.
She was forced to recant. To give up her books. To sign a confession.
She never wrote again.
And four years later, as plague swept through the convent, she died while nursing her sisters.
The silence, it seems, finally caught her.
But the words she left behind still breathe. Still trouble. Still burn.
At first glance, she looked like a contradiction.
A nun who loved music, theater, and scientific thought.
A cloistered woman who debated public theology.
A humble servant who refused to stay silent.
But to Sor Juana, there was no contradiction at all.
She saw no rift between mind and spirit, no danger in asking questions of a God who created questions themselves. Her thirst for knowledge wasn't pride---it was praise. Study was prayer. Learning was love. To her, the life of the mind was a sacred act of devotion.
This belief put her in quiet rebellion against her world.
New Spain, like much of the Catholic world at the time, still held to a rigid hierarchy of spiritual authority---male, clerical, ordained. Women were permitted to serve, to suffer, to surrender---but not to speak. Not to teach. And certainly not to write theology.
But Sor Juana did all of that.
Not in open revolt, but with elegant insistence. Her poetry dripped with double meanings---sacred and profane, playful and defiant. Her plays challenged gender roles with wit and reverence. Her essays revealed a woman unafraid to think deeply about God, justice, and the limits of obedience.
In one of her most famous texts, Respuesta a Sor Filotea, she defended a woman's right to study---not as rebellion, but as her spiritual duty. She cited the Bible, the Church Fathers, the saints themselves. She made her case with such grace that even her critics couldn't look away.
But the spiritual idea burning underneath all of it was this:
That the soul has no gender.
That wisdom is not the property of priests.
That the divine voice can---and does---speak through anyone bold enough to listen.
At the time, this was dangerous. It challenged not just church authority, but the entire structure of society. If a woman could be a theologian, what else might she be?
And so the silence fell.
But the silence wasn't proof that she was wrong.
It was proof that she had been heard.
What Sor Juana offered to the world wasn't a doctrine.
It was a question.
A beautifully sharpened, inconvenient, radiant question.
What if holiness includes intellect?
What if contemplation looks like a woman, writing?
In her own time, she was silenced, but not erased. Her words found their way into secret libraries and quiet hearts. Centuries later, her voice is louder than ever. Not because it triumphed---but because it endured.
What she gave history was the spiritual imagination to see knowledge as a form of worship.
Not knowledge that conquers, but knowledge that seeks.
Not the kind that claims truth, but the kind that moves toward it---through poetry, music, study, debate, and silence.
Her life became a mirror held up to institutions that confused humility with suppression. She revealed how submission, when demanded, becomes a kind of violence---and how obedience, when coerced, ceases to be sacred.
Sor Juana's story helped pave the way for a different vision of spiritual life.
One where truth isn't passed down from the pulpit, but also discovered at the desk, the page, the stage.
Where women are not only vessels of virtue but bearers of insight.
Where scholarship is not a threat to God, but a tribute to God's complexity.
You can see her legacy in the quiet persistence of women who kept reading when they were told not to. In the questions whispered in pews. In the prayers that begin, not with praise, but with doubt.
Her contribution was not to theology, but to the conditions in which theology can live.
Freedom.
Thought.
Dignity.
She asked the question, and let it echo.
There's something I've noticed---again and again, across the centuries.
The soul is rarely silenced by thunder.
It's usually silenced by suggestion.
A glance.
A rule.
A smile that says, "That's not for you."
For Sor Juana, it was the subtle pressure of a world that insisted knowledge belonged to others. That holiness was quiet. That a good woman, a faithful woman, did not question. Did not write. Did not think too much.
And yet, she did.
She studied not because she wanted to disobey---but because she believed God had given her a mind, and to let it grow was an act of praise.
That truth is still true.
It's easy to think her story is history. That we've moved past those old walls and gates. But every day, I watch as women---young and old---are told to shrink their questions, soften their thoughts, tuck their brilliance into quieter corners.
And not just women.
Anyone whose voice doesn't echo the expected tone.
Anyone whose insight doesn't serve the dominant shape of power.
Anyone who believes the spiritual life is wide enough to include both silence and song, obedience and inquiry.
Their voices are still being managed.
Still being praised for restraint.
Still being punished for daring to speak in full.
And yet, they continue.
That's what Sor Juana gave us---not just the example of courage, but the memory of how it feels to keep your truth alive under pressure.
She reminds us that intellect and spirit are not rivals.
That devotion can wear the robes of scholarship.
That prayer may sound, at times, like poetry---or argument.
And perhaps most of all, she shows us this:
What is sacred in you does not need permission.
It has always been yours.
It has always been real.
Even when the world refused to hear it.
I keep thinking about the desk.
Not the one in the viceroy's palace, surrounded by scholars and chandeliers.
The other one---the small, worn desk in her cell at San Jerónimo. The one with candle wax on the corners and ink stains beneath her sleeves. The one where she stayed up long past prayer time, scribbling verses she knew might never be read.
There's something sacred about that kind of persistence.
It makes me wonder---what have you kept tucked away?
What truth do you carry that doesn't quite fit the shape of what's expected?
What question have you quieted, not because it was wrong, but because it made someone else uncomfortable?
There's a voice in you that's still writing, even if the candle's nearly gone.
You don't need to shout.
You don't even need to speak yet.
But perhaps, tonight, you could find a page.
Let a few words appear.
Let the part of you that has always known begin again.
In another place---colder, quieter, thick with pine and snowfall---I remember a man standing alone in two worlds.
He spoke the language of the Ojibwe and the prayers of the Book of Common Prayer.
He walked not between nations, but between spirits.
He was the first Native American Episcopal priest.
His name was Enmegahbowh.
And though his name has been nearly forgotten, the peace he carried still waits in the spaces where silence once lived.
Until then...
Remember: your thoughts are not separate from your soul.
Your questions are not departures.
They are arrivals.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.