An aesthetic that no longer apologizes

On December 13, 2025, the feast day of Saint Lucy, there was a great deal of light in the Monastery of Santa Clara in Medina de Pomar. There, the solemn profession of vows of a nun was being celebrated.

I entered the church with a very contemporary prejudice: that I was about to witness something curious but unnecessary. Long, solemn, laden with symbols we no longer handle with ease. And yet, a few minutes were enough to understand that this was not an archaeological vestige of the past, but a direct, uncomfortable, and surprisingly relevant cultural challenge.

The Baroque altarpiece dominated the space with a force that today seems almost provocative. Gold everywhere. Columns, reliefs, images layered to the point of excess. To my great agnostic friend: a “glittery” decoration, an outdated aesthetic, even kitsch. But the Baroque is not decorative: it is affirmative. It arises when Europe begins to doubt itself and responds not with subtlety, but with abundance. Faced with the Protestant iconoclastic emptiness, horror vacui. Faced with suspicion, plenitude. Faced with fragmentation, totality. It does not explain: it imposes itself.

In the center, Saint Clare, motionless, austere amidst the excess. Above, Saint Michael the Archangel, defeating the devil. No moral or aesthetic ambiguity. Good and evil exist, the struggle is real, and it deserves to be represented without reservation. In a culture that has turned minimalism into a form of moral neutrality, this aesthetic is almost offensive. Precisely for that reason, it continues to speak.

A ceremony that debunks stereotypes

In that context, Sister Maria Esclava de Jesús, 29 years old, was going to pronounce her solemn vows as a cloistered Poor Clare nun.

The church was packed. Hundreds of people, buses arriving from Baracaldo, some twenty priests, Archbishop Mario Iceta of Burgos, and just as many nuns from the community. Nothing marginal or clandestine about it. The scene immediately dispelled another common prejudice: that the contemplative life is a marginal phenomenon, belonging to eccentric minorities. This was a socially visible, shared, even festive event.

Nine years to be able to say yes

One of the most common arguments against this type of decision is that it stems from immaturity, from forced or hasty choices. But Sister Maria’s biography, as told me by her mother, dismantles this notion with the unflinching reality of the facts: nine years of process. A year and a half as a postulant, four as a novitiate, three with temporary vows. Nine years before she could say “forever.”

In a culture that barely tolerates lasting commitments, this slowness is almost subversive.

Prostration: the gesture that unsettles modernity

The most disconcerting moment for the lay brother came when Sister Maria prostrated herself on the ground, completely stretched out on the floor. An ancient gesture that makes people uncomfortable today. From the outside, it might be interpreted as the annihilation of the individual. But perhaps it says just the opposite.

As Romano Guardini pointed out, only those who belong to themselves can truly give themselves. Modern freedom tends to be identified with the absence of ties; here, another definition was proposed: freedom as the capacity to commit oneself without reservation.

And what is this for?

Sister Maria, Slave of Jesus, was definitively entering a cloistered community of nuns. And it is here that the final question usually arises, posed with greater or lesser irony: what is the point of this?

We live immersed in a logic of constant utility. Everything must justify its existence through its performance, its impact, its productivity. Anything that doesn’t produce visible results seems suspicious. From this mindset, the contemplative life is incomprehensible, if not irritating.

And yet, perhaps that’s precisely why it’s relevant.

Someone once told me that cloistered nuns and monks “are good for nothing.” My response was simple: I am grateful that there are still people who think of others and pray for us without expecting anything in return. In a world organized almost exclusively around exchange, selfless giving is profoundly rewarding, even if it makes others uncomfortable.

The old medieval division of society into estates—  prayers, warriors, and laborers  —may seem outdated today, though it still survives in some form in India. But perhaps in an age when it seemed we were all already  *homo economicus *, and yet we discover that warriors are dangerously resurging, we still need those who pray.

As Charles Taylor has pointed out, societies that lose their sources of meaning eventually become exhausted or destroyed, even when they appear to be functioning technically. Not everything that sustains a culture is visible or quantifiable.

Closure is not escape

The Poor Clares of Medina de Pomar do not live apart from reality. They work, bake pastries—the famous horseshoe-shaped ones—run a small guesthouse, and open their church to visitors. But their logic is not one of efficiency, but of permanence.

Byung-Chul Han would say that they represent a silent resistance against the society of performance, exhaustion, and constant self-exploitation.

A normality that baffles the skeptic

Sister Maria Esclava de Jesús’s family was there, serene. Believing parents, five children, several of them destined for religious life. No dramatic conflict, no generational divide, just the father’s joke that at this rate they might have to adopt their grandchildren… Sometimes faith doesn’t produce conflict, but rather continuity. And that normality is almost more disconcerting than rebellion.

The wedding party

After the solemnity came the celebration. Contemporary songs with lyrics inspired by Sister Maria and her vocation, laughter, hugs. Nothing somber. Nothing stuffy. Nothing untouchable. Many joyful Dominican nuns on a kind of evangelizing return journey. A cloistered life, unfamiliar to me, that surprised me because it doesn’t flee from the world, but rather observes it without anxiety.