A nun’s memoir of brokenness and recovery

For Love of the Broken Body: A Spiritual Memoir

By Julia Walsh 
Monkfish Publishing, 2024

Sister Julia Walsh’s memoir opens with her feeling intense pain and tasting blood. She describes falling from a cliff near her childhood home and sustaining life-threatening injuries. In this broken state, she cries out: God, help me. 

At the time of this fall, Walsh was 25-years-old and fresh into her training period as a Franciscan Sister. For over a decade, she sensed God telling her these words: Be a nun. She had also been struggling to reconcile this calling with her romantic longings. For the Love of the Broken Body is her story of physical recovery and spiritual discovery. The narrative moves back and forth between memories of her youth and her adulthood as she pursues the path of nunhood, experiencing everything from deep peace to painful tension. Much of the book reads like a candid journal of her deepest questions about God’s will for her life, and for the world at large. She includes personal ruminations on her relationships with male friends and even includes some details such as snippets of emails and other messages. Her relationship with her friend Mike features prominently throughout her many years of searching for certainty about her spiritual vocation and life path. 

Walsh’s confusion is palpable. How can she feel her call to serve God as a nun so clearly – a call that includes choosing celibacy – and at times be so overcome with a desire to find romantic companionship? Rather than downplay the heaviness of these layered questions, she offers them up to the reader with honesty. Her memoir is a fascinating and refreshing look into the inner life of someone who could, to others, seem so certain about their life – but it’s not a simple surrender. Walsh admits, for example, that even when she heard God saying Be a nun as a teen, she wrestled with those words: “Is it me saying this? Or God? I suppose only God would direct me away from dating, physical affection, romance. On the other hand, maybe God was involved and there are good reasons why those prom dates never turned into anything, and why long phone calls with high school crushes never became something real.” 

Walsh’s serious accident upends her plans and leaves her to grapple with new questions about living a faithful and meaningfully life in response to her deep love for Christ. The fall injured her nose, jaw and hand; a nurse later tells her she has fractured “more (bones) than anyone could count.” She has to undergo several medical procedures and her daily life is completely altered. For a long time, her wired jaw makes even eating and talking a gruelling task. At first, she can hardly bear to look at her bruised, scarred, and shattered face, and her physical state changes her way of being in the world. 

Even with the care and help from her family members, fellow sisters, and other community members, Walsh experiences the turmoil of isolation and insecurity as she adjusts to her new reality. Eventually, however, her journey living in an injured physical body gives her fresh insight into how Christ works through his own broken but beautiful “Body” of imperfect people. “Since my fall, I’ve learned that everyone has brokenness story to tell. Each of us has vulnerabilities, weakness, pain; our imperfect bodies and minds carry the memories. And our hearts carry the longing for wholeness,” she writes. 

Walsh’s road to physical recovery becomes a key step in her road to recovering certainty about her identity as a nun. Rather than reject weakness, she embraces it as a way to emphasize her need for God and her suitability for nunhood. Six years after the accident, she goes on to make her final vows, confident in the Lord’s transformative power. 

Even readers outside the particular experience of nunhood will find much to relate to in this raw account of a nun recovering her calling and living the many questions of following a saviour who is no stranger to suffering. Some of Walsh’s final words in For the Love of a Broken Body read like a benediction for anyone traversing stories of brokenness while looking to resurrection hope: “As freedom was opened through Christ’s body, weak and broken on the holy cross, I hope that the mystery of communal bonds permit each of us to become a bit more whole. As we lean in and hold one another, we become bread for one another, giving our wounds and receiving tenderly what is blessed, broken and shared.”