Dedicated to God (13 page)

Back home in Austria the summer after her freshman year, Monica told her mom she was thinking of transferring to another college. Monica was turned off by a polarizing, judgmental message: “You’re not good enough and we want to convert you.” She says, “They were out to convert everybody,” Monica included. She decided to try one more semester at the Franciscan
university before making a final decision about transferring. Her sophomore year, Monica had a much different, much better experience. Now, in retrospect, she ascribes the pushiness and zealousness as acts of “misdirected charity.”

During her sophomore year, she and two friends worked together in the college’s conference office, helping organize a massive event, Pentecost in Pittsburgh. When their work was complete, the three sat in their dormitory, exhausted. They needed a break. One of them said she knew just the place where they could rest—a cloistered monastery in Ohio. She picked up the phone right then and called to arrange a visit. The Mother Abbess said she could not offer a place for young women to stay if they simply wanted a vacation, but the monastery welcomed visits by those interested in the cloistered monastic life. In that case they could stay across the street from the monastery with an active order of nuns, and they were permitted to attend the cloistered nuns’ chapel service and Divine Office.

“We were all three sitting on the bed,” Sister Mary Nicolette says, “and I remember my friend covered the phone and she said, ‘Mother wants to know if we’re interested.’ We all said, ‘Oh, yes, we’re interested! We’re interested!’ ” Sister Mary Nicolette laughs. “So this is how I got my vocation—through a lie. I was interested in knowing how Buddhist monks lived, too!”

Sister Mary Nicolette says her two friends “played their part a lot better than I played my part” because they asked for private interviews with Mother Superior. Monica did not. “Uh-uh!” she says.

Sister Mary Nicolette does not question her friends’ sincerity in asking for those private talks. “They were very, very, very spiritual so I’m sure they spoke to Mother about spiritual things, their spiritual lives and whatnot,” she says, adding that the two were not interested in becoming cloistered monastic nuns.

In the monastery’s chapel, the Blessed Sacrament was exposed perpetually. Sister Mary Nicolette spent hours praying before the Blessed Sacrament, the host that, once consecrated, Catholics believe becomes the very presence of Jesus. She says, “I remember I was praying there and I felt a strong sense in my heart, not an audible voice, but a voice speaking to my heart, kind of, saying, ‘This is where I want you. You don’t know where, you don’t know how, and you don’t know when, but this is where I want you.’ And I was shocked. This is not what I was expecting. At all! Not right now. I was expecting to relax from my busy, stressed work and
instead God hit me over the head and told me this was really what He wanted for me.”

Monica talked with an extern nun, who maintains a unique role in an enclosure, as the one responsible for communicating with the public and with the world on behalf of the cloistered nuns. The nun explained the mission of the Poor Clare Order: Cloistered contemplatives dedicate their entire lives “for the salvation of souls to the complete love of God without any distraction, or without a divided heart.” The extern sister told Monica that, in the enclosure, there are no distractions, and so their hearts are not divided because they are separate from the world, devoted to God alone. For Monica, this description—this life—seemed like an answer she did not know she was seeking. “It’s all about this deep relationship with God, for your own salvation but also for others,” she says. “And I just thought, that’s always what I felt deep in my heart. I wanted to live for others. Everything she is saying is what I feel God created me for. I imagine it’s what someone would feel when they meet someone they love and want to marry: God created me for this person and this person for me. We were made for each other. It was the same thing for this; everything she was saying, I thought this is the whole reason God created me.”

Introspective and reflective Monica took stock of all that the cloister denied—traveling, marriage, motherhood, talking to and visiting her parents and siblings. Hugging her loved ones at will. “It just seemed so radical to me and so drastic,” she says, “and I didn’t know if I could do that. In my mind at the time, I’m just working through it and I’m just saying, ‘I’m really attached to my family.’ I’m giving all these reasons to God why this isn’t a good idea. I’m like, ‘Lord, you know, you
know
me. You know I can’t do this!’ ”

Monica’s proficiency with languages offered little solace; rather, it was a lens into yet another obstacle. The words “cloister” and “claustrophobia” both derive from the same Latin root, meaning “to close” or “to lock.” “That’s where the word ‘cloister’ comes from—being shut in,” Sister Mary Nicolette says. “That was very ironic. I get claustrophobic in an elevator. So I’m like, ‘Lord, the cloister? I’m going to get claustrophobic!’ That’s the word that comes to my mind. You know being shut in and not being able to travel. I just thought, ‘How am I going to be able to do this, Lord? You’re asking me to do something that’s just completely contrary to my nature.’ ”

Monica never learned if her two friends asked for applications to join the Ohio monastery, or if the Mother Abbess offered the applications during
their private meetings. “All I know is that when we walked out of there, they had application papers and I didn’t,” Sister Mary Nicolette says. “I didn’t dare ask for the application papers.”

Over the next couple of weeks, Monica wrestled with an unsettling prospect: She might have stumbled, unwittingly, upon her vocation—to be a cloistered monastic nun. “To my human, limited view, this was something that just seemed so contrary to what I was expecting of life,” she says. “And it was beautiful; I wasn’t against that, but it just seemed so much bigger than what I could do.” She told God, “You know, I thought you knew me. Why are you asking this of me? You know me better than I know myself.”

Gradually, Monica engaged her own desires and her will in a mental exercise, a question of faith. She became convinced that if God truly called her to this vocation, He would also grant her the ability to embody it. Sister Mary Nicolette says she took a “stab in the dark.” She asked one of the two friends for her application papers to the monastery, since neither of the other young women planned to apply, and Monica submitted her own application to join the Poor Clare monastery in Ohio.

She was rejected, though, for health reasons. In childhood, Monica was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease after antibodies, which had been called forth to fight a virus as they should have, turned and fought her own body, devastating the healthy muscle cells. The monastic community’s physician thought that someone with her disease could not live the physically demanding Poor Clare life of fasting and manual labor and interrupting sleep at midnight for the Divine Office. “I was on medication, but I was stable. I was crushed,” Sister Mary Nicolette says.

“I thought, ‘This is what God created me for. This is my life,’ and I had come to a peaceful acceptance of saying, ‘If God wants me to do this, He’s going to help me.’ And then it was, ‘No,’ and it was just like everything, my whole world, came down. I just thought, ‘Oh my goodness.’ ”

She says she cried for two days after hearing news of her rejection. Monica worked to interpret the twist; maybe she was mistaken in thinking she was called to the cloistered contemplative life, or maybe the monastery in Ohio was not the right community.

Again, Monica enrolled in college courses at her Franciscan university. She remained open to the possibility that she might be called to become a nun. Sampling religious orders and communities became her weekend pursuit. “There was a group of us at school—seven at first, and twelve by
the end of the year—who were interested in a religious life,” she says. “We’d go convent-hopping, or make ‘nun runs’ on weekends and we’d visit these convents.”

Monica was impressed when she visited a convent in Kentucky. She was taking everything into consideration. “I loved their habit,” she says. “I just thought their habit was so beautiful. It’s all black and they had a head covering that doesn’t go across the forehead; I think it goes a little bit higher and it covers the ears. But it’s all black and they have an insignia of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The austerity of it attracted me for some reason.”

She thought the Poor Clare habit was beautiful, too. “It kind of captured my whole idea of a sister who is consecrated and set apart,” she says. “It’s a sign, a very tangible sign to me of that. And I loved it.”

Monica kept thinking, “The Poor Clares is the place. Poor Clares—it just kept coming back to me.” On her birthday, a Sunday, a piece of mail was delivered to Monica’s dorm room. She thinks it could have been dropped in the wrong mailbox the day before, then left at her door when the error was detected. The return address on the envelope listed a Poor Clare Colettine Order in Rockford, Illinois. “The fact that it was my birthday and it contained the address of this monastery I don’t think is a coincidence,” she says. “I think God works through little things like that, just little touches in our life here and there you can see all along the journey. It was just the special touch I needed that day from the Lord. So it was a beautiful birthday present that year.” The form letter served a simple function—calling Monica’s attention to another Poor Clare monastery—yet Monica felt, because of the unique timing and situation of the letter’s arrival, she might be fated to go there.

Monica wrote a letter to the Mother Abbess. She wrote about her visit to the Poor Clare monastery in Ohio, that she had asked to join that community but was turned down because her health was not deemed adequate. Monica thought it prudent to be honest from the outset about any potential obstacle. She informed the Mother Abbess she wanted to live as a Poor Clare. She assumed that this candor about her medical condition and the other monastery’s rejection would sabotage her acceptance into the Rockford community.

On Christmas break while home in Austria, Monica received a response. The Mother Abbess explained in her letter that the process of joining a religious community should start with a visit; she invited Monica to spend a few days at the Corpus Christi Monastery. Monica replied that she would
love to visit when it could be arranged. She did not mention at the time that on a student’s budget she could not afford the $110 round-trip flight from Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio to Chicago, or the $98 bus fare. After the holidays, Monica returned to college. About ten days before spring break, while she was working in the conference office, a friend walked in and announced to everyone within earshot, “Does anyone want to go to Chicago?” Monica shouted, “I’ll go!” She figured a group was taking a road trip and she could split the cost of gas and tolls. Monica learned the student had found an airline deal called “Friends Fly Free”—two tickets for the price of one. The two split the cost of one ticket, each paying $60 for the round-trip fare. “You wouldn’t find that normally so I said, ‘this is a godsend,’ because I could pay for that,” Monica says.

She flew to Chicago. A relative picked her up at the airport and dropped her off at the monastery so she could stay for three days during Holy Week, leading up to Easter. “I spoke to Mother Abbess and a few of the sisters and I was so afraid,” she says. “I was just scared to death. I was terrified. I think I just sat in the chair and listened most of the time to what they had to say to me. I didn’t say much myself. I was just so terrified. You would never know it, but I’m a shy person!”

Before Monica left the monastery, the Mother Abbess told her she could return to join the community if she wanted. The ease of this acceptance stunned and frightened Monica. “I didn’t expect that,” she says. “I was like, ‘Whoa.’ ” She told the Mother Abbess she still had a year of college left before she graduated. “I guess I was scared of being hurt again, of it not working out and putting all your hopes in something, and then it’s just crushed,” Sister Mary Nicolette says. “And I think it was just a defense mechanism; I didn’t want to commit myself.”

Back at college, Sister Mary Nicolette solicited advice from a priest whom she had sought out earlier to help her discern her vocation. She conveyed her confusion. “This is the life I want,” Sister Mary Nicolette remembers telling him, “but when I was there, I felt nothing. It was just, like, blank.” She told the priest that maybe God was treating her differently in this situation than during her visit to the monastery in Ohio. “Maybe this time,” she told the priest, “he’s not going to whisper in my ear, ‘This is where I want you.’ Maybe he’s going to say, ‘This time, you make the choice.’ ”

The priest pointed to a park bench and instructed Monica to sit there until she heard a directive from God. Sister Mary Nicolette says, “It was a
lovely day to sit on a park bench!” She explains, “The priest wanted me to come to a conclusion for myself, you know, because he knew he couldn’t tell me what to do. He couldn’t tell me, ‘You go and try.’ He thought, ‘You have to figure this out on your own.’ He was very wise. And I remember just feeling in my heart, ‘Now, the first place the door was closed to me. Here, the door is opening to me. So the choice is up to me. What am I going to do? Am I going to give it a try and if it doesn’t work out, well, at least I tried? Or am I going to spend the rest of my life wondering if that’s where God wanted me?’ ”

Monica was up from the park bench, decision made, within an hour. She tracked down the priest—with his long white beard, he looked to Monica like a jovial Santa Claus—and she told him she planned to join the monastery. He gave Monica a “bear hug” and congratulated her.

That summer, when her junior year came to a close, Monica flew home to Austria for two final months with her family before joining the Poor Clare Colettine Order. “A lot of people probably think we spend the last month thinking, ‘This is the last time I’m going to eat ice cream, walk in the mountains, hug my parents,’ ” Sister Mary Nicolette says. “And most of that is true. Most of that is true. It is the last time you do a lot of things.