Prayer as an actant: Freedom and sociality in the subject formation of a Catholic nun in Kerala,South India

Abstract

Going beyond current sociological and anthropological understandings, the article harnesses Latour’s idea of actant to grasp prayer as a comparatively independent entity, analytically cleavable from the nun’s act of praying. Based on an ethnographic study of two indigenous congregations of Catholic nuns in Kerala, India, the article argues that conceptualising prayer as actant takes it out of pure interior spirituality and re-imagines it as a form of the sociality of a nun, which includes her relationships with herself, with God, and with those inside and outside the convent, particularly those who solicit her prayers. Perceiving prayer as an actant brings the non-human, divine but real and active presence of God into sociological conversation, enabling us to examine its crucial place in the discipline and formation of the nun as a subject within her everyday life in the congregation. Moreover, analysing its diverse modes locates prayer within the networks and relationships of the congregational community, thereby engaging Foucault’s subjectivation with Latour’s actant.

Introduction

Can we understand a Catholic nun as inhabiting the disciplines of a religious institution and exercising her ‘freedom’ in doing so? What is the significance of prayer in this process? The article observes that the everyday life and subject formation of a nun within a congregation cannot be understood without the analysis of prayer, as prayer is central to the monastic form of life. Thus, the article is an attempt to make a novel intervention in the social science research on prayer by examining prayer in the context of monastic orders, which serve as a little-studied location to provide new perspectives for its analysis and by considering how prayer is critically constitutive of the formation of the nun as a religious subject within her congregation. In doing so, the article seeks to connect the act of praying by a nun, which is central to her subject formation, to prayer itself, considered here as analytically independent. Drawing on Bruno Latour (2005), prayer is conceived as a form of sociality through which a nun’s relationships with herself, with God, and with those within and without the convent are worked out. Thus, a nun’s subject formation is constituted within a web of relationships, which prayer as an actant brings about between humans and divine entities.

The article is based on multi-sited, ethnographic fieldwork carried out by the first author as part of doctoral research, which focused on the calling, vocation, and subject formation of Catholic nuns. The research extended over 16 months between 2017 and 2019 and was conducted in two indigenous congregations affiliated to the Syro-Malabar church of Kerala in South India, namely, the Congregation of the Mother of Carmel (CMC) and Congregation B. ¹ These congregations were selected as they are the two biggest indigenous congregations of Kerala and access to them was granted to the researcher. CMC, further, is one of the convents that bifurcated from the first indigenous congregation established in Kerala under the Third Order of Carmelites Discalced (TOCD) in 1866. The article is based on in-depth interviews and conversations with a total of 91 nuns. Moreover, participant observation was conducted in three convents affiliated to CMC and Congregation B. A brief attempt to explore the international context was also made by the researcher through short visits to two convents in Preston city, UK, established by and affiliated to the indigenous congregations studied here.

Out of the 91 nuns studied, 41 were from CMC and 27 were from Congregation B, 12 were former nuns from both these congregations as well as other indigenous congregations, and 11 were cloistered nuns (from a cloistered convent affiliated with the CMC). 47 nuns (37 from CMC and 10 among the former nuns) were met with multiple times in their convents, homes, workplaces, and at other meetings. Each of the cloistered nuns and the nuns from Congregation B were interviewed once. ² All the interviews were semi-structured, and the researcher moved from one question to the next depending on the topics being discussed and the narratives provided by the nuns. 4 out of 41 CMC nuns and 4 out of 27 congregation B nuns were from two convents in Preston city, UK, where the researcher also conducted one-time semi-structured interviews. These interviews with nuns of varying vocations, family backgrounds, professions, and age groups (including the former nuns) enabled the thematic interpretation of their work, motivations, prayer life and daily routines, and analysis of their subjective, personal experiences of these. In addition, the first author engaged in participant observation and had shorter interactions both with the nuns interviewed and many other nuns over a 2-year period. The researcher stayed in two convents in Kerala – one in Kottayam, and the other in Ernakulam district – for 14 days and 10 days, respectively, and also spent a week in the CMC convent in the United Kingdom. Participant observation involved following the everyday routines of the convents and accompanying various nuns in their work throughout the day, including going with them to the church, chapel, kitchen, garden, and, in one instance, the orphanage run by Congregation B. Furthermore, the researcher participated in the morning to evening daily routines of St. Mary’s prayer home and a hospice in Ernakulam district, for about a month each, without staying within those institutions. Altogether, the researcher spent more than a year in the field, and also remained in active contact with the nuns through phone calls, WhatsApp, and text messages.

Engaging with the ‘sociology of prayer’

Sociological literature has understood ‘prayer’ through themes such as the content of prayer, social and cultural meanings of prayer, various traditions of prayer, types of prayer, what people pray for, the significance of pilgrimages in prayer life, and so on (see, for instance, Giordan and Woodhead, 2015). Still, prayer remains a relatively under-researched subject in sociology and anthropology. Perhaps its apparent interiority renders it obscure to exploration.

Prayer’s many manifestations have been recorded by Marcel Mauss, according to whom it is by turns adoring and coercive, humble and threatening, dry and full of imagery, immutable and variable, mechanical and mental (…) here it is a brusque demand, there an order, elsewhere a contract, an act of faith, a confession, an act of praise, a supplication, a hosanna. (2003: 21)

Prayer is often understood as a conversation with God, yet contingent and discursive, undergoing constant transformations with the changing times. Linda Woodhead points out that prayer transforms subjects where ‘individuals (alone or together) adjust or suspend their subjectivity’. She further observes that contemporary practices of prayer have changed. Prayer is now largely subject-oriented and individualistic and gives way to more informal modes. It is becoming a ‘personally meaningful experience with a close relation to an individual’s own life concerns, hopes and fears’ and is ‘less likely to be valued as a bodily routine, discipline, form of ascetic self-denial or even a matter of intellectual assent’ (Woodhead, 2015: 223). For Giordan (2011:79), the deepest dynamics of prayer are not just psychological but also have to do with relationships of power and institutions. In other words, prayer can be studied as a relation of power and legitimisation. However, these conclusions are inadequate to understand prayer in the context of the religious orders, as therein it is crucially bound up with the disciplines of monastic life. What might be retained from Woodhead’s suggestions, though, is the transformative character of prayer. Prayer serves a complex set of functions inside the convents where the nuns engage in a life structured by religious vows and regulations, which are elaborated on below. Nevertheless, it transforms the religious subject.

Moreover, recent scholarship on prayer emerges from diverse geographical locations. The effect of prayer on the transformation of the individual is of interest within psychology (see Sion and Francis, 2009), sociology, and anthropology. Psychological studies have looked into how prayer practices and routines have contributed to overall well-being or increased mental health (Ijaz et al., 2017) and have recognised that an individual’s cognitive and social positionality play a role in understanding prayer practices (Sharp, 2012). Scholars such as Tanya M Luhrmann use insights from both psychology and anthropology to locate the centrality of imagination in prayer and in training one to hear the voice of God, in nurturing a relationship with God, leading to the good health and trauma healing of the believer (Luhrmann, 2013). At the same time, other scholars have explored prayer in relation to questions of piety and self-formation from within the discursive practices of Islam (Hirschkind, 2006; Mahmood, 2005). The scholarly understanding of prayer, subjectivity, and religious self-formation using the concepts of Michel Foucault and Talal Asad has also emerged (see for instance Simon, 2009; Topal, 2017).

Coming to the particular context of monastic institutions, although European religious orders are facing a crisis of vocations, a fascination towards this mode of living in silence, away from all worldly exposure, is gaining popularity among lay individuals. However, the sociology of religion has not paid serious attention towards monastic life and its engagement with the larger society. The internal workings of monastic institutions, the ‘motivations of the actors, dynamics of reorganisation, or tensions with society’ remain largely unstudied (Jonveaux et al., 2014: xv; see also, Jonveaux and Palmisano, 2017).

We argue that monastic institutions are quintessentially liminal (Turner, 1969). The nuns studied here understand that they are on a journey, a pilgrimage towards God, and their life in this world is an in-between phase where they constantly work towards renewing their own self for a perfect union with God in the afterlife. The religious life of a nun is hence understood as a liminal phase, where she is in suspension from everything earthly and in anticipation of heaven. Monastic traditions, therefore, offer a valuable opportunity for the study of prayer as a complex terrain on which a nun’s inner faith meets and intertwines with the structural disciplines and ritualistic patterns of a religious institution. Prayer is part of the disciplines of time, space, bodily decorum, and posture through which a nun is trained to be modest and pious in everyday work and practice.

Moreover, it is also a practice that guides a nun to engage with her own inner spiritual self as well as with others with whom she interacts daily. Non-liturgical and non-ritualistic prayer includes meditation and silent introspection in cloistered and semi-cloistered convents. Hence, crucial to the argument of this article is the idea that a nun’s prayer connects her to the mundane world outside as much as to her interior self, and this relationship has God as a real presence at its centre. While the nun is suspended in liminality and seeks to transform herself in anticipation with her union with God, her prayers are also a form of sociality within the monastic setting, thereby bringing into fruitful conversation Foucault’s subjectivation with Latour’s actant. This article then is an attempt to locate the significance of prayer in providing a critical insight into the lives of religious women who engage in a process of constant self-reformation within monastic institutions of Kerala.

Actant, freedom, and the subjectivation of a Catholic nun

The nuns studied here often talked about the individual transformation they must undergo in the process of congregational life, which they understood as crucial to grow closer to God. This transformation of the self is achieved through the work of the everyday. ³ A nun’s singular belief and the institutional disciplines are both important in achieving this transformation. One can observe Foucault’s concepts of subjectivation and ‘the techniques of the self’ at work here. According to Foucault (1997: 291–292), the processes of subjectivation are ‘those models an individual finds in the culture’ that she is immersed in and which influence, persuade, convince or impose specific values on her in the process of her self-formation. Inherent to the processes of subjectivation are ‘technologies of the self’, practices that

permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on – their own bodies, their own souls, their own thoughts and their own conduct – and in this manner so as to – transform themselves, modify themselves to attain a certain state of perfection, happiness, purity and supernatural power. (1997: 177)

For Foucault, subjectivation should be understood as a process through which ‘a subject relates to himself freely’. The individual reflects and defines his relationship to the norms and ‘recognises himself as obligated to practice’ them (Foucault, 1997: XXI). As he stresses it, within the modes of subjectivation, ‘ethos is a practice of thought’ (Foucault, 1997: XXXII). Through various ‘technologies of the self’, subjects determine, maintain, and transform their identity ‘through relations of self-mastery and self-knowledge’ (Foucault, 1997: 87, 242–243). Both staying faithful to one’s truth and the practice of thought and the ability to reflect on oneself (‘reflective consciousness’) are central to the ‘technologies of self’ (Foucault, 1997; see also Laidlaw, 2014: 102). One objectively reflects on one’s own actions, taking a step back from oneself, as an observer of oneself, with freedom of thought. ⁴

As argued here, prayer is an important tool in unravelling the complexities, contradictions, and negotiations of a nun’s everyday life, and the question of her everyday transformation as achieved through acts and practices of piety, both institutionally prescribed and individually nurtured. Following Saba Mahmood (2005) and Laidlaw (2002, 2014), it is stressed here that the practices of piety of the nuns are not mere expressions of conformity or subjugation to the prescriptions of a patriarchal, institutionalised church. The singular nature of a nun’s call and her individual belief are critical to this process. Thus, listening to the call and inhabiting a life of prayer and vocation may be understood as her ‘freedom’. ⁵ As argued earlier, drawing on Foucault, a nun’s subject formation is understood here as both singular and institutional. Laidlaw (2002: 315) further asserts that ethics – both morality as the following of ‘socially sanctioned’ moral codes and the ethical command to forge ‘oneself into a certain kind of person’ – must take seriously the ‘possibilities of human freedom’. With reference to Foucault’s ‘techniques of the self’, he (Laidlaw, 2002: 323) argues that while the subject may fashion a self through practices ‘proposed, suggested, imposed upon’ her by society, culture, or social group (Foucault, 2000: 291), the act of constitution itself is an exercise of freedom. Thus, for both Foucault and Laidlaw, freedom is not something external to or exclusive of power but is itself ‘an aspect of the configuration of power relations’ (Laidlaw, 2014: 98).

To provide an instance from the field, one of the formation mistresses ⁶ asserted that achieving at least some form of ‘internal freedom’ is a precursor to taking the decision to enter the religious life. Sr. Kusumam, ⁷ a formation mistress for novices in CMC, explained that inner freedom is considered mandatory for a novice to be able to decide whether to take vows following her training in the novitiate house. The four-year formation of a novice is a period during which she is expected to reflect on and rethink her decision to join the convent. According to the formators in the study, the novice’s decision should come from her free will. She must arrive at it through her one-on-one conversations with God. This individual conviction can only be achieved through continuous self-reflection and prayer. Further, prayer goes beyond the formulaic or ritualised prayer of the community in the convent chapel and communal spaces. In this article, a nun’s self-reflection and self-examination of her everyday actions are considered central to her self-transformation and are a part of her everyday routine. According to the nuns, the initial spirit of their call and formation should continue throughout their lives inside the convent. Each day is a process of self-renewal and transformation. The community life of the convents, the religious discipline, and everyday routines, though repetitive and laborious, help them in achieving the self-transformation they seek to attain.

Apart from the ‘free’ subject herself and her congregational culture, it is argued here that the transformation of the subjectivity of a nun is not possible without the work of ‘prayer’. Prayer as an actant animates the idea that monastic life crucially interweaves relationships not only among those within the liminal world of the congregation but also with the ordinary social world outside. The work of prayer performed by a nun is part of the process of her subject formation and also connects her with those who solicit her prayers. This relationship has the central and real presence of God as recipient of the nun’s prayers and the one who answers them.

By conceptualising prayer as an actant, we are able to move beyond perceiving prayer as a thing or as an act (however defined) performed by someone (Mauss, 2003) or in terms of its psychological dynamics (Ijaz et al., 2017). Prayer’s capacity for transformation (Woodhead, 2015) and its potential as ‘technologies of self’ (Simon, 2009; Topal, 2017) acquires a more definite foundation in that prayer is now perceived as relatively autonomous, an actant conceptually separable from the act of praying by the nun as a human actor. It also stresses the importance of moving beyond a Foucauldian (see, for instance, Topal, 2017) and Asadian (for instance, Simon, 2009) framework in capturing the complex aspects of a nun’s subject formation within the cultures of Catholic modernity and makes a crucial connect between Foucault’s (and Asad’s) notion of subject formation and Latour’s idea of the actant. Bringing in Latourian concepts to this discussion also highlights the importance of understanding the categories of the social and religious as intertwined rather than as contrasting binaries, and therefore the transactional networks of a nun’s everyday life is more complex than merely religious. Prayer is the mediator of a nun’s relationship with both the divine and the social world and hence should be understood beyond the meanings of a communal discipline or even a solitary religious practice.

Furthermore, one sees prayer not merely as a perspective of power and institutions or in relation to these (Giordan and Swatos, 2011) but also as constituting one node in a transactional relationship (the one where often the individual praying, the individual prayed for and God are involved) as will be elaborated shortly. While he has not focused on prayer, Chambon (2020) has recently made a similar argument drawing on Latour’s actor–network theory to conceptualise how Chinese Christians identify and construct a set of networks through their interactions with each other and a variety of non-human material objects such as buildings, pews, offerings, and blood in particular. Here, the understanding of prayer as an actant stems from an approach that declines to see it only as a dimension of the interior world of spirituality that cannot somehow be comprehended by a sociological or anthropological lens. In other words, it acknowledges the actuality of the presence of God in the lives of the nuns and perceives prayer itself as a form of sociality through which nuns interact not only with a very real but unseen divine presence but also with themselves, their sisters in the community and with others outside of the convent, who request intercessory prayers.

For instance, for Sr. Nirmala, ⁸ prayer is central to a nun’s self-transformation within her congregational life and in nurturing an active relationship with God. Sr. Nirmala’s relationship with God has grown stronger over the years in her convent through her everyday prayers. She explains how she grows a ‘little heaven’ within her, the nurturing of which started from the day she entered religious life. Sr. Nirmala, a nun in her late 50s, is very prayerful and invested in her vocation as a teacher. She prays daily for hours and believes these prayers are crucial in fulfilling her duties as a teacher. She understands prayer as a way through which she ensures God’s direct involvement in her professional and everyday life. Sr. Nirmala’s ‘little heaven’ initially had only three people – Jesus, Mother Mary, and herself. She used to close her eyes during her prayers and imagine herself seated between Jesus and Mother Mary. Over the years, the heaven grew to accommodate her favourite saints and singing angels. A quiet heaven gradually developed into an active and lively place where all the saints, angels, Mother Mary, and St. Joseph gathered around the trinity, praising the Almighty with utmost happiness.

Sr. Nirmala’s heaven keeps expanding as she advances towards God in the heavenly pilgrimage of religious life, and she lives in this heaven even as the heaven grows within her. Here, one can see that she is actively engaging in her own self-transformation through prayer, by cultivating for herself a continuous inner prayerful practice and communication through her imagination. Prayer, for her, is a process that takes place over a period of time, months, or years and leads to her transformation as a religious subject. Prayer here is also closely intertwined with the ideas of self-reflection and direct conversations with God.

As said earlier, the nuns studied here understand themselves as pilgrims, on a journey through this life to unite with God at the time of their death. Having cut themselves off from the mundane social world by being called by God to the religious life, they seek continuously to understand God’s divine will for them and to participate actively in all the missions of their congregation. It is only through prayer that they can come to understand and realise the love and the will of God. As the formators in the study pointed out, the congregation can support or assist an individual in realising her call to a certain extent; the rest has to be discerned by the individual herself through her relationship with God. This relationship has to be developed and nurtured over the years, particularly through prayer. A nun’s prayer thus carries deep individual conviction even when it is an institutional practice. In short, in this article, prayer is an entry point through which concepts such as self-formation, subjectivity, and freedom can be further analysed. The argument rests on the proposition that prayer is an actant in congregational life. For Latour, ‘anything that modifies a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor – or if it has no figuration yet, an actant’ (Latour, 2005: 71). ⁹ In this sense, there can be a diverse set of factors in multiple figurations that motivate a subject to act in a given way. It is averred here that understanding prayer as an actant illuminates how a nun’s subjectivity is moulded and transformed within her congregation.

Prayer in the everyday: structure, discipline, and routine

In the convents of Kerala where this research was conducted, prayer dictates one’s posture and routine and structures both time and space. Prayer times organise the activities of the day, from morning to night. Prayer disciplines the mind and the body and decides when a nun wakes up and when her day comes to a close, when she should return to her convent at the end of her working day, and when a visitor should leave, or when a meal should start or conclude. Prayer disciplines and structures a nun’s day by managing ‘time’ within the space of the convent. Fieldwork showed how prayer both constitutes and modifies the religious subject within the traditions of monastic life. Prayer is an act in itself in the context of monastic life and a preparation for everything to be accomplished within a nun’s vocation. Prayer is a routine, a ritual that binds a nun to her community, a practiced reflection that provides her with new perspectives, a mechanism through which she meditates on the mistakes of her day, and a conversation with God through which she improves herself in order to fulfil his mission. The brief description below of daily convent routine as observed during fieldwork provides an idea of how prayer structures time and space inside the convent:

The nuns wake up by 4.30 am, freshen up, slip into their habits, sip a cup of black coffee at the kitchen counter and reach the convent chapel at 5.30 am for the morning prayer, Sapra. By 6.00 am, after reciting the morning prayer (…) the nuns retreat to their daily introspective meditation till 6.30 am. (…) holy mass is at 6.30 am and by 7.30 am, there will be a prayer for the perpetual adoration of the Holy Communion, after which the bell for breakfast is rung. ¹⁰ At 12.20 pm, the bell for chapel prayer is rung, (…) to recite the litany of church intercessors and observe the mid-day introspective meditation after which lunch is served from 12.30 to 2.00 pm, Evening tea is served at 4.30 pm, and by 5.30 pm, the nuns go to their rooms to bathe and freshen up before evening prayers. At 6.30 pm, they reach the chapel for the recitation of the rosary, novenas and Ramsha, the evening prayer. The hour following Ramsha is the time for individual prayer and meditation. By 8.30 pm, dinner is served, followed by an hour for recreation and after this, they recite Leliya, the night prayer in the chapel, and then return to their rooms, to introspect and meditate on the day and sleep, to start afresh the next morning. ¹¹

Thus, the day’s routine as seen in the field is threaded through by prayer, which connects each hour with the next and ensures that the nuns, while in this world and engaged in its activities, are also simultaneously participating in and conversing with the divine. The punctual response to various bells rung during the day is also a fulfilment of a nun’s vow of obedience. The inability to keep up with the pace of the day other than in situations where a nun is physically ill is considered a disruption or an aberration in religious life that needs to be corrected immediately. Nuns facing such issues have access to various techniques to deal with them, for instance, by talking to a senior nun, taking a 2-day break to pray in the chapel, or requesting a meeting with their spiritual counsellor. In other words, discipline is not limited to the daily routines but extends to the body and soul as well as to one’s work.

The diverse meanings and modes of prayer

Within the Kerala convents studied here, congregational prayer is not the only form of prayer. Prayer is a search into oneself through which one discerns the will of God. It may take other forms such as writing the name of Jesus multiple times in a notebook as an everyday practice, reciting a small verse of prayer while performing chores, or maintaining a diary of one’s thoughts, writing in it each day before going to bed. At the same time, it is argued here that prayer emerges as a form of sociality and relationality through which the nuns are connected with people outside the enclosure, by praying for them and working for them. Prayer mediates between the nuns and those they pray for, thereby modifying these subjects participating in the religious life. Prayer, as Mauss (2003: 21–22) understood it, ‘does not exist in one single form’ in the everyday lives of these nuns. It exists as practice, routine, conversation, the work accomplished, the pain embodied, and various other aspects of their lives.

As mentioned above, contemporary convents (after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s) are semi-cloistered, unlike the earlier completely cloistered convents, with a few exceptions. The changes reflect in the different aspects of vocational life. Prayer continues to be central to contemporary monastic life for nuns belonging to regular, semi-cloistered, and fully cloistered convents. Nuns in regular or semi-contemplative orders lead a religious life and are, simultaneously, actively engaged in work as teachers, nurses, social workers, and care workers in institutions of their respective congregations or of the diocesan church. There are also nuns belonging to semi-cloistered congregations, who do not have any active work life outside the convents, mainly due to health reasons. These include the elderly and retired nuns, younger nuns suffering from some illness, or bedridden nuns. The nuns who belong to cloistered orders live their entire lives within the enclosure of the cloister and as such have a very different vocation from semi-cloistered nuns.

The workings of prayer vary in the case of each of these nuns. A nun who is a teacher or a medical worker carries the spirit of her prayer life to her workplace. Whether it is the first Friday mass or retreats in the school or the morning mass or evening rosary in the mission hospital, these nuns actively organise and participate in these activities. In a school run by CMC, ¹² prayer and prayer-related activities have a lot of prominence. In one instance, an elderly nun asked students to silently pray for three wishes whenever a teacher was late for class. Even in hospitals and other charity institutions managed by nuns, prayer is central to routine. On the other hand, the elderly and ailing nuns and the nuns belonging to cloistered convents share different meanings and practices of prayer. In the absence of jobs outside the convent, one can see how prayer itself often becomes work for them.

Ailing nuns often associated their bodily pain with the effectiveness of their prayers. Sr. Ros ¹³ underwent a lobectomy at a very young age and, with her right lung removed, she did not have much hope of entering a convent. Yet her desire to join a convent was deep, and ‘God’s will was strong’, so the convent authorities decided to admit her, despite her health problems. According to her, the convent realised the depth of her call from a 12-page letter she wrote to the mother superior, in which she explained possible ways in which she could contribute to the convent. She recalled writing that ‘prayer from a painful body is the most powerful prayer’. For Sr. Ros, ‘bodily pain is a blessing’, she can ‘devote the pain to Jesus and ask for his intervention in the lives of those who need his help’. After more than two decades in Congregation B, prayer is still her major duty. She undertakes the ‘duty’ of accomplishing prayer requests. She goes through the diary kept near the phone in the visiting room, in which one of the sisters jots down the prayer requests received by telephone or from visitors to the convent. Then, she prays for these everyday prayer requests entrusted to the convent, sitting in a corner at the back of the chapel with her rosary of multicoloured beads, while the other nuns are away working. Here, prayer becomes work; Sr. Ros’ work is praying, and indeed, her bodily pain is sent up to God as a powerful prayer of intercession, entreating his help for the needs of others.

Furthermore, when a nun is faced with a spiritual crisis, prayer guides her in sorting it out or taking a decision. For instance, for Sr. Rebecca, ¹⁴ who is a former nun, her decisions to both join a convent and leave the convent were acts of religious discernment. She sorted out her confusions with regard to religious life through more than a year of prayer and considered her decision to leave her congregation as an act of re-discernment.

Moreover, observation and interactions in the field showed that prayer is the major activity that connects the community; it is what they do together when they are in communal spaces. Other than the dining room (where meal times are marked by prayer before and after), the garden, and the recreational hall (where nuns spend only an hour of the day after dinner), the only common spaces are the chapel and the prayer hall. In other words, praying together forms the basis of community life and thereby also the vow of poverty. ¹⁵ In continuation of the understanding of the life of a nun as a pilgrimage, her attachment to a community means her separation from mundane earthly life and dissociation from any forms of possession and ownership of property. The following section examines the work of prayer by nuns in a prayer home and strengthens the argument about thinking of prayer sociologically as an actant. It shows how prayer may be understood as a labour, and explicates further how prayer plays a crucial role in defining the social relationships of a nun, both with God and the laity (and also with herself and her fellow community members).

Locating prayer within the transactional networks of monastic life

In this context, the nun as a religious subject should be understood as existing within a set of relations, such as her relation with God, her fellow community members, the everyday routines, religious vows, and disciplinary regulations. Moreover, she also connects to the world outside her congregation through different modes of prayer. For instance, the laity coming to her with their prayer requests or the individuals she meets at her work place who ask her to pray for them are all expecting her to intercede for them with God. In all these instances, the relationship of a nun with God is a significant aspect in understanding her relationship with herself and the outside world. Prayer, in this sense, is an actant, helping a nun in her everyday routines, in taking decisions, in negotiating through the confusions in her religious life, and in interacting with the world outside the congregation. Moreover, almost all the nuns studied spoke of how prayer enables them to realise what God wants from them and helps them to take crucial decisions in their vocation. Indeed, prayer reorganises the relationships of those interconnected through it.

St. Mary’s prayer home in Ernakulam district of Kerala helps us understand how prayer connects a nun to the world within and outside the monastery while also connecting her to the world of the divine. ¹⁶ This is a small prayer home, with seven sisters from various congregations. The mother superior, Sr. Janette, belongs to CMC. The prayer home conducts special prayers – both ritualistic and meditative – from morning to evening.

During research at the prayer home, it was observed that the prayer was mostly intercessory as the nuns prayed for the needs of others. People from the locality came and attended the prayers – some of them throughout the day and some others for half an hour or so, according to their convenience. Many of the people who visited the prayer home donated money to conduct a whole day’s prayers for their special needs and problems. The nuns chose a day for these requests and the family or individuals participated in these prayers on the day dedicated to their requests if they were free. People who have requested prayers typically maintained a fond relationship with the nuns, and some of them even returned with gifts if their prayers were answered. For instance, the family of Chacko, a retired teacher, came with cake one evening as his daughter got admission to a prestigious college and he believes that the prayers of these nuns were helpful.

Congregation B has a prayer home in the United Kingdom. ¹⁷ It is located just outside Preston city, and is part of the Lancaster English diocese. This Indian congregation was invited to establish a prayer home in the United Kingdom, to receive the prayer requests of believers of the English Catholic church. They stay in an old presbytery, now converted into a convent. The chapel of the presbytery functions as the prayer room. Congregation B has the ‘adoration of the Holy Communion’ as its charism. ¹⁸ Hence the Holy Communion is placed on the altar for adoration from 9 a.m. in the morning till 5 p.m. in the evening. This is also the routine time of the prayer home during which outsiders come and say silent prayers. In a corner, on the right-hand side of the altar, near the offerings box and a statue of Mother Mary, is a wooden box into which prayer requests may be deposited. The believers (mostly from the older generation, according to the nuns) come with small pieces of folded paper on which their prayer requests are written and silently deposit these in the box. Of the four nuns staying in the convent, at least one nun is present in the chapel throughout the day. Prayer is the main duty of the nuns. Throughout the day, the nuns pray for the believers and their prayer requests.

The bishop of Lancaster invited Congregation B, as the English parish is facing a dearth of religious labour. ‘The English society is walking away from Christian spirit and belief. The believers are actually a minority here and they don’t have a spiritual space to go, silently sit and pray, if it is not a Sunday’, Sr. Teslin explained. ¹⁹ The Catholic church authorities are worried about losing believers and that is one of the main reasons behind inviting these nuns from Kerala. The nuns are also planning various strategies to attract young English students to the spirit of prayer. While they pray throughout the day for the requests of believers, they also conduct evening adoration and rosary recitals regularly. The sisters are entrusted with the mission of attracting more and more youth into the faith and the Christian spirit. In Sr. Teslin’s words, ‘We are here to work for bringing back faith to English society’.

In both these prayer homes, ‘praying’ is the major work of the nuns. Day-long prayers are undertaken with dedication and responsibility. With regard to the convent in Lancaster, the nuns can also be seen as undertaking the responsibility of instilling the spirit of Catholic belief in a society with entirely different cultural norms and values to their own. These prayer homes allow us to think further of prayer as a form of relationality and sociality, of the nuns engaging in social contact or contract. The nun is a part of society through her prayer. At the same time, these prayer homes permit or rather demand that we incorporate in this relationship a third node – that of the divine being to whom prayer is addressed and who, in fact, resides in prayer. Prayer does not exist without this third entity, God. As can be observed from these instances mentioned above, understanding prayer as an actant opens up the possibility of bringing in a non-human and divine entity into sociological and anthropological discussions. Even when a nun is not praying for others but for herself, God is present and her prayers are always addressed to God and there is God in her prayers, in terms of his will and what he wants for her and those she is praying for.

In other words, understanding prayer as an actant allows us to think of ‘action’ as including both human and non-human aspects. The nun who is repeating the prayer requests of the believers or expressing her own needs or confusion is addressing God and if her prayers are answered, in her understanding, these are answered by God. In this sense, God is active in these transactions. The concept of actant helps us to place this relationship, which includes God, in sociological conversations by allowing us to bring out the reality for the nuns of the interaction between human and non-human entities (see also Chambon, 2020). In Latour’s (2005) sense, prayer acts as a mediator between the nun and God, or the nun, the social world outside the convent, and God. While humans pray or interact with God in a more or less predictable manner, whether or in what way God will manifest himself in the prayer or answer it is unpredictable, in the religious sense ‘mysterious’ or mystical. When prayer returns to this world as ‘God’s answer’ to one’s prayers, it has become in fact a mediator rather than only an intermediary in Latour’s (2005) language. If the prayer requests raised by a nun are answered or returned (in the mysterious and unpredictable ways of God), the non-human entity is actually exerting a certain agency in the entire transaction. The concept of actant is useful here in bringing out this particular aspect. In other words, one can say that divine or non-human entities and words and prayers can be causally significant and, in our context, prayer links together the three worlds of the monastery, the outside social world, and God.

To reiterate, following Turner (1969: 125–130), the monastic universe may be perceived as suspended between this world and the other world. Here, our understanding of the Syrian Catholic nuns of Kerala studied is that they occupy such a world of liminality. They believe not only that they will go to heaven once they die but that they live in the sight and in the presence of God (Daiva saannidhya avabodham) in the here and the now. While this may be true to an extent for all Catholics, for the nuns, their severance from the world in the monastic order is an attempt to recreate and live in accordance with the divine order and by the laws of spirituality in this world, pending their total submersion in it after death. At the same time, they continue to live within the world and to work in it, and with society. Prayer is a crucial mode through which nuns link the world of the divine with this world of the social. Other ways of linking are through their work, such as in hospitals, schools, and the like. Therefore, thinking of prayer as an actant allows us to consider the nun phenomenologically from her own perspective of being so suspended between the mundane life of the social world and the true life with the divine beyond it.

Prayer then is transformative because it carries the words, the pleas, the faith of the nun to the world beyond and returns to the social world as an answer, a resolution, or just a calm acceptance of what is. The nun (particularly, if cloistered) is not turned fully to the social. She only takes the requests that come from it and becomes the receptacle through which they reach the divine. She does not return to the world to tell of what miracles her prayers may have wrought; the people in the social world do that when they come back to the prayer house with their gifts and their gratitude. In this way, prayer is more than an exchange between God and the nun, more than a plea that is somehow addressed and answered, and more than a change wrought internally within the nun ‘herself’. Prayer is partly a social act of gift exchange and reciprocity between the nun and those who request her prayers for their often but not always ‘worldly’ needs. Prayer is over and above an actant interconnecting human subjects and divine entities and returning as an ‘effect’ or a transformation simultaneously of self, of societal other/s, and of the circumstances which led to the appeal for prayer in the first place.

Both meditative and disciplinary prayer routines shape the world of the everyday and give it form; they provide it meaning and organise it. Thus, the act of praying is both disciplinary and subjective. As Latour (2005: 55) argues,

Once the difference between actants and agency is understood, various sentences such as moved by your own interest, taken over by social imitation, victims of social structure, carried over by routine, called by God, overcome by destiny, made by your own will, held up my norms, an explained by capitalism becomes fully comparable. They are simply different ways to make actors do things, the diversity of which is fully deployed, without having to sort in advance the true agencies from the false ones and without having to assume that they are all translatable in the repetitive idiom of the social.

Thus, in accordance with Latour’s understanding, from organising the routine to disciplining the subject into the culture and missions of the religious order, prayer, through its varied manifestations and by being ‘productive’, fulfils its role as an actant in this context. Latour does not suggest that non-human actants like this completely determine the course of action. But he clearly argues that they play a role. The nun can definitely refuse to engage in the activities of her congregation but if she stops participating, she ceases to be a religious subject as she is not partaking of the community life. Moreover, prayer is work and, as such it has effects and consequences both for those engaged in praying and for those on whom prayer acts. At the same time, this does not diminish the freedom of the nun. The nun takes on this life and this discipline freely and in full awareness.

As an actant, prayer should be understood as transactional in that it may emerge from the desires of those outside the monastery in the social or mundane world, be moulded and mediated through the thoughts, words, and acts of the nun who prays for the wishes of others and be directed towards the other world of God and the divine. It returns from there as a wish granted or fulfilled and those whose desires are so achieved bring to the nuns material gifts of other kinds including foodstuff and the like. Thus, prayer interconnects these three worlds of the social, the liminal (monastery), and the divine as forms of materiality, sociality and even causality. The prayers that a nun recites for others are also part of her larger eternal goal of living for God and ‘earning souls for God’. When her prayers for others are answered, she is participating in revealing the greatness of God to the laity. God makes the prayer effective, perhaps even unpredictable in its outcomes; prayers make a difference in the outcomes for human beings. From this perspective, and in contrast to the critique of the concept set up by Laidlaw (2014: 183), we argue that the idea of actant remains valuable to our analysis of the nun as a religious subject, enfolded within his overall understanding of freedom, which he builds on Foucault’s thought.

Conclusion

As the article has shown, monastic traditions form a significant field for the anthropological and sociological understanding of prayer, since prayer is central to this mode of life. Further, when understood as an actant, prayer helps us make sense of the nuances of a nun’s everyday life and understand her self-formation and transformation. Prayer illustrates the disciplinary modes of everyday existence as well as the individual’s embedded but solitary journey towards God within her institution. Although the discipline of congregational cultures can be understood as an aspect of power, as argued here, following Foucault (1997), power is not merely coercive but is productive and can only be exerted over free subjects. Hence, the production and constitution of a subject within these institutions occurs through the practices and relations of power.

What is quite evident here is the ways in which prayer becomes an actant in congregational life. It is not a mere thing, or object, something acted on, but because God is in the prayer it is one which acts as well on the nun and through her on others also, mediating her relationships with them. It is not merely a set of words, spoken and perhaps also highly rigid or prescribed. Those words contain the divine will of God and are perceived as active, they change and alter the world of the nuns. Prayer roots a nun within her community, helps her meet the demands of her work and spirituality, guides her in her transformation, and leads her into taking crucial decisions. In this sense, our analysis has animated a Foucauldian perspective on prayer as discipline and self-formation with the idea of the actant from Latour. Using prayer as an entry point to understand and evaluate the everyday life of a nun enabled us to map out the processes through which a nun achieves her self-transformation within monastic life. Understanding prayer as an actant also helped us to bring out the transactional nature of a nun’s relationship with herself, God, and others, thereby allowing us to explore the complex aspects of her vocation and subjectivation.

In conclusion, therefore, the article attempted to locate the centrality of prayer in a Catholic nun’s religious life. Moving away from the existing literature on prayer, it explored the possibilities of understanding prayer as a Latourian actant, which further allowed the unravelling of the complex everyday practices and processes through which a nun constitutes herself as a religious subject within her congregational culture. Moreover, understanding prayer as an actant enabled us to place the nun within a network of socialities and relationalities that encompass the divine, the mundane and the liminal monastic world.