Dedicated to God (12 page)

Mom was a good psychologist, even though she didn’t use that term. She was just very basic in dealing with life. You made the best of it. And she was a good example of that. Both parents were good examples of that. They had good psychology without even knowing what it was. It was just common sense. I think that’s what I would say with both parents: They both had good common sense, how to live. If you got upset at what somebody did and you said, “They made me do it because they did this,” my parents said, “No. You chose to get upset by what they did. You could have chosen not to. It might take a little virtue.” But of course they never used those religious terms. They
weren’t that type, but they were just very upright and honest, and so they made you responsible for who you were.

They would never say right out, “Do not drink and do not smoke.” But they realized we were getting older so one of them once said, “We’ve got to deal with you. If you don’t smoke until you’re eighteen, you get a hundred dollars. And if you don’t drink until you’re eighteen, you get another hundred dollars.” That was a motivation for us. And it was a motivation for them. They didn’t want us to get into those habits while we were children, so instead of saying, “Be sure you don’t take drugs, be sure you don’t do that,” they did it this way. You were kind of looking forward to the hundred dollars as a kid. Now, when I was eighteen, I was in the convent four years already. So what did that mean to me? My brothers and sisters—that was something for them. But for myself, I made the choice after my experience at the altar; I didn’t have the desire to do any of those things, so it wasn’t fair. I told Mom it wasn’t fair for me because there was no temptation to do it. So, therefore, I said, “You keep your $200. I don’t want to take your money.”

One time, I was on home visit. There was a school close to us and the kids were walking past our house to go to school. And I thought, boy, those kids are small. And Mom said, “Well, they’re in sixth grade.” And then it dawned on me that I had made my life decision when I was their age. Other than that, you were just growing up so you didn’t think of yourself as so young. You just thought of yourself as yourself! But that’s one experience I had where I realized, my gosh those kids are babies and I made my life decision when I was their age!

I’ve always had the desire to be a cloistered contemplative but because I was only fourteen years old when I entered, twelve when I made the decision, I had to obey my parents and they wouldn’t hear of it. And I figured God wouldn’t call it if it wasn’t granted by my parents. I knew I had to respond because He was calling me to respond now, so I thought maybe He’s calling me to a prayerful active community; I entered that and I loved it. I can’t say I left that because of anything I didn’t love while I was in that community. I was very happy there serving the people in different ways, first as a gym teacher and later as pastoral associate in the hospital. But then God in His way said, “No, I want you to go further.” Also, the superiors at that convent would say, “Have you thought of the cloistered life?” They could see it in me that I was probably called to the cloister. They could discern that I have the gifts to be a cloistered contemplative nun. And they said, “It won’t
be long; you’re going to be a cloister.” One superior told me that and I said, “If that be, that would be very fine, but I myself I don’t know at this point whether He wants me to be a contemplative in action, or truly a contemplative.” Did He want it, or did I want it?

My mom wanted to steer me away from a cloistered community. The other community, I think that that was all right with her. You could be a teaching sister; that was all right. She was a re-weaver, and so she had customers come to the door to fix garments, whatever they had holes in. One day, a priest came and he wanted his suit coat fixed. And so Mom said, I’ll ask him. In fact she came out and said, “God would never want anyone to enter one of the cloistered kinds of orders,” and then the priest said, “Oh, yes, He would.” And that helped my mom because she could talk to him and he talked to her about the value of the cloistered life. I just think how humble my mom was to share that with me. Because I wasn’t home, I didn’t know that that experience had happened. She shared it with me. I think that had helped her. I was here already when she shared that with me.

I think I can do more for people in the cloister than I could ever do out there, even though I did a lot out there, so to speak. Touching people’s souls, you do that through your prayers. We don’t see the results of that in the hidden life, but we have the faith to know that is what is happening. Here, it’s kind of like the powerhouse of prayer going out into the community and touching people’s lives in a way that we’re not aware of, but that we know it happens. And so to be a part of that, to give yourself totally to God, I think is a real privilege. To be together and have a life provided by the Church—that frees us to do this. There is a real freedom because of our customs; we don’t have to follow the protocol that you would have if in the world. We have our own monastic culture here. And we live side-by-side, respecting each sister’s union with our Lord. In that living together day in and day out, knowing that we do keep silence and in that silence, she’s communing with God, I’m communing with God and somehow developing our own relationships with God. But more than that, that’s our apostolate—to pray for others, and God gives graces to others that they would not have had otherwise. That doesn’t put it on us. It’s not us, it’s Him.

That’s the purity of the life of being one with Him. It’s a union, the contemplative prayer and whatever you’re doing outside of chapel; it’s
not two separate things. It just flows into each other and it’s just the life of union.

Now, our life is a perpetual Lent really, and I love it. I love Lent. It’s more simple. So in a sense, it’s probably my feast day because I love it. The simpler, the better. I just happen to be that type of person that I like that.

I’m only an instrument, as each of us sisters are. But we have the responsibility to be good instruments in our apostolate of prayer. We don’t work it through with people like I did when I was a pastoral associate, but I work it through in a different way. I say, “I pray for you, and I asked God to give you the special graces and the nudges you need to think things out.” That’s what I think my role is now. I think it’s a very important role that I can’t take for granted.

Even those who don’t call us and don’t contact us in any way—that don’t believe in us—we can touch their hearts.

2
The Claustrophobic Nun

In the monastery, everything is directed for the search for the face of God. Everything is reduced to the essential because the only thing that matters is what leads to Him. Monastic recollection is attention to the presence of God. So when you think of how the media, mass media in the different forms, can distract and be like a noise that can interfere with communion with God, we try to reduce that; most, we reduce to zero. We don’t listen to the radio or watch television, but it’s not because we’re against progress, or we’re against information, it’s just because of the effect that that can have on an environment that is silent, and what it can do to a recollected mind. It would come in and would just totally disrupt.

Sister Mary Nicolette of the Father of Mercies

To Sister Mary Nicolette, it is a familiar refrain, a now-old family joke: It is for the best that the Corpus Christi Monastery sits on South Main Street and that no mountain can be seen on the flat midwestern landscape; otherwise, the travel-hungry Sister Mary Nicolette might be tempted to run for the hills.

Sister Mary Nicolette laughs when she retells this jest of her relatives, which is funny because it is true. She was a child from Texas who grew up in Europe. The Alps were her backyard. When her family lived in Italy, and she was still known as Monica, she met Pope John Paul II twice. Once, he patted her on the cheek. When her father took a job in Lichtenstein, she learned German. In Austria, she hiked the mountain trails. There, she says, nature spoke to her of God. Her family moved and she thrived in each new culture. Because Sister Mary Nicolette managed to pick up languages like other teenagers pick up boyfriends, she considered studying etymology in college. And then she discovered the perfect outlet for her love of traveling and her talent for languages—a career as a flight attendant. “I had thought
of being an airline stewardess because I love travel and wanted to see the world,” she says, “and I thought that would be a great way to do it. I knew that wouldn’t be a permanent thing, but that was a dream. And I thought, well, maybe I could even be a pilot.” At twenty, when she became a postulant of the Poor Clare Colettine Order, Monica was fluent in English, Italian, German, and French.

Although she is allotted up to four family visits each year, her siblings are scattered across the globe; she usually sees only some of her family members once a year. She has a large family: three sisters and two brothers. In their transitory upbringing together as expatriates, the siblings bonded through humor. Once, when her younger brother arrived at the monastery for a family visit with his wife and children, Sister Mary Nicolette reminded her young niece that she is the big sister to the girl’s dad. The child did not buy it; her father is six feet tall. Sister Mary Nicolette looks petite, by comparison, especially when seated, talking to her family from the enclosure side of the parlor—a metal grille between Sister Mary Nicolette and her relatives. Sister Mary Nicolette climbed on her chair; her ankle-length habit hid her advantage from her niece’s side of the grille. Her niece was fooled and awed.

Sister Mary Nicolette’s brother travels for work. He has told his sister that he thinks of her during these trips; when he stood on a mountaintop in Peru, he was startled by the amazing view and the fact that his sister would never have the chance to hike up that mountain or take in that scene. Sister Mary Nicolette remembers him saying that he feels sorry for her because she is missing out. All joking between the siblings stopped then. Sister Mary Nicolette says she told her brother, “That’s really sweet to be thinking of me. But you know, I don’t think, ‘I’m here and I’m never going to be able to go out again.’ You don’t think of it as something restricting. It’s something that’s freeing. I’m freed of the worries and of all the exterior things.”

Sister Mary Nicolette realizes that the cloistered monastic way of life is difficult to understand, to translate to her own family. She received the calling to this life, she says, and so has been granted a supernatural grace to value and accept the vocation.

Sister Mary Nicolette’s journey to this place began, she says, with a lie. Her parents raised their six children Catholic. Sister Mary Nicolette believed she could become whatever she wanted; any path she chose in life, her parents told her, she should do with her whole heart. Her parents encouraged their children to consider any vocation, including the priesthood or sisterhood.
In childhood, Monica encountered religious figures regularly; nuns taught her at Catholic school, and when the family lived in Rome, the birthplace of the Catholic Church, sisters dressed in the full habit were a common sight in public.

From an early age, Monica wanted a family of her own. She planned to get married and have eight children. “It was a beautiful ideal for me to be a mother and a wife and have a lot of children,” she says. Above all, she wanted to give her life for others. She says, “I wanted to do something that would really make a difference and help. I always wanted to help.” This aspiration fit with her conception of marriage and motherhood.

Monica became what she jokingly refers to as the “black sheep” of the family when, instead of following the path of her two older sisters who had followed in their parents’ footsteps and attended the University of Dallas, she enrolled at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio. Her parents’ and sisters’ alma mater is also a Catholic institution, but Monica heard of its reputation as a party school and she thought the Franciscan university would be the better place to meet someone who shared her beliefs, someone with whom she could spend the rest of her life. “Something in my heart told me this decision was going to be important for the rest of my life—if I was going to meet the man I was going to marry, or if I would discover the vocation God had for me,” she says.

During her first year of college, Monica was put off by the religious fanaticism she encountered in the other students. Her father, a Fulbright fellow, had moved his family overseas to teach at universities; during Monica’s teenage years at a restored monastery they referred to as the Sistine Chapel of Central Europe, her peers were older philosophy students. At the Franciscan university, Monica befriended but debated a student who believed that every Christian should evangelize the world aggressively, preaching the gospel with the intent to convert people. Monica agreed, to an extent. “His approach was, everyone has got to do this and if you don’t do it, you’re going to be lost. My approach was, I can save souls and help further the kingdom of God by prayer,” Sister Mary Nicolette says.