Dedicated to God (35 page)

Sister Maria Benedicta thinks the technological upgrades, intended to save time, instead are “filling, filling, filling the time, filling the silence with
noise, filling all these things with the things that really distract from what’s really important.” She shares an anecdote depicting the unnecessary technologies: A friend, after buying a cell phone, told Sister Maria Benedicta, “I thought a lot more people would call me!” Sister Maria Benedicta laughs. “You really don’t need it! You know what I mean? It’s really not a need; it’s superfluous and it’s not leading to God.

“The world sees freedom as, ‘I can do what I want, when I want, how I want.’ That’s not freedom,” she says. “True freedom is to give yourself to God, to be taken in by His love and His truth. I think it was Saint Augustine who said, ‘Love, and do what you will.’ He doesn’t mean do what you want. It means if you truly love God, everything you do is for God and you’re not going to do what He doesn’t want you to do. The world sees freedom as doing whatever you want, but how many of those things are not what God wants, and they’re not what God wants because they’re not for our good? If you’re in line with that, it’s just a free existence. It’s authentic. It kind of is a lightheartedness, an authenticity, like we don’t have to worry about so many things, either about the world or about what’s going on, or what others think of us, or how others see us.”

The technological regression and the slower pace of the monastery agree with Sister Maria Benedicta. She associates “technology” now with the monastery’s John Deere tractor, a convenience the nuns only operate to mow the yard, enabling the nuns’ pursuit of union with God. “If we’re able to get the mowing done more quickly, then we can go in and pray,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. Rather than motoring the tractor to transport mulch for the gardens, the nuns instead push the mulch in wheelbarrows and heft it with pitchforks. “I mean, no one would think to do that, you know,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “You have a tractor sitting in the garage, and we’re out there with wheelbarrows and shovels. People would think we’re crazy, but the manual labor is such a good balance for our life. A lot of our day we’re sitting and praying. We need exercise and work and to get our mind off things.”

As the distance grows between Sister Maria Benedicta and the culture that she once identified with, the values of her adopted home have created—or perhaps revealed—fissures between Sister Maria Benedicta and her loved ones. A sports fanatic from cradle to college, Sister Maria Benedicta has lost interest in college and professional athletics, once hallmarks of her quality of life. Loved ones, meanwhile, scarcely recognize her for who she once was.
During visits, they ask, “You don’t care that
this
team beat
this
team? Or that
they’re
going to the Super Bowl?” “But it’s like, oh!” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “There’s so much more, you know what I mean? There is a huge difference in what you realize is important.” She shares these impressions from the enclosure side of the parlor, where she sits with her Novice Mistress. Their sparse environment—and lack of televisions—reinforces a disregard for her former hobbies, she says. “You think about it and you’re like, ‘Oh, they’re still doing that?’ ”

“What a quaint tradition!” I tease. Both laugh.

“I know!” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “They’re still doing that? The world still goes on without me? Are you sure? If I’m not watching it, they’re still going to put it on TV? They still have TV? I’m kidding. You realize that’s still going on, but you’re immersed in a higher reality, not because of anything we’ve done. It’s not because of anything we’ve done. It’s purely the grace of God. But the reality is, you realize what is important.”

Sister Maria Benedicta recognizes her calling is contrary to the way that the rest of the world lives, and it is at times contrary to the beliefs of fellow Catholics. Just before Sister Maria Benedicta transferred from the active order of nuns to the Corpus Christi Monastery, a woman at her parents’ church asked Sister Maria Benedicta about the cloister. “Girls still do that these days?” Sister Maria Benedicta says she responded, “Yes, they do! This one does.”

Sister Mary Nicolette can appreciate the woman’s disbelief. When she visited a cloistered monastery for the first time with two college friends, intent on a relaxing weekend holiday, Sister Mary Nicolette was awestruck; she did not realize anyone still lived like that, but she was thrilled to find a place that epitomized the life she wanted. Still, she had mixed emotions. “Is this reality?” Sister Mary Nicolette asked herself. “I must be crazy. Nobody does this anymore.” “All of that floods through your head, even if God’s calling you,” she says. Quiet time in prayer moved her through the discernment process into acceptance.

Sister Maria Benedicta reflects on the differences between life outside and inside the monastery. “There is a retreat when you go away and you just focus on God. That’s our whole life. We’re not always on retreat. We have work to do, but in a sense we are separated so that we can focus our whole
lives on God. If I had a job or was in the world, I wouldn’t be able to think of these things. But here, it’s all focused on God, and we do it all for Him. We’re made body and soul, and we’re called to sanctify both. So even the physical things we do—eating, sweeping the floor, everything—we bring that mystical dimension into it. God. We do it all for God. I’m not going out like the missionaries and converting the world, but I put my faith in God that everything I do, I do because it’s His will. I have a set schedule, so I’m constantly doing the will of God at every moment, if I’m doing what I’m supposed to do. And He will use that obedience for something that I don’t even know and that we can sanctify, even the normal bodily things. ‘Lord, I’m going to eat this meal so that I have strength so that I can serve you. I’m going to sleep so that I can be awake and pray to you.’ You can do even that for God. It’s really amazing to think that even in the normal things, that you can experience God in every aspect.”

When Sister Maria Benedicta played the hand she believed she had been dealt, and dropped out of college to become a religious sister, she says, “Everything you’ve ever believed in, you’re giving up; or everything you’ve dreamed of, it’s not important anymore.

“It is a sacrifice,” she says. “The Church says it’s such a gift—these lives that God has given grace—that these people are for God alone. It’s so precious to the Church, because the prayers and the sacrifices are what keep the Church going; it’s prayer. And we’ve chosen this and we know that these are going to be the sacrifices.”

Sister Maria Benedicta says families should not wonder what they have done wrong when daughters heed the religious vocation, rather than marrying and starting their own families. She thinks families should ask, “What did we do right?” The answer, she submits, is that “we showed them God, that somehow in the family it was fostered that God is important.” “It is very hard for them,” she says. “When we first enter, we receive the grace of the vocation, we are in love with God, we’re wrapped in Him. We have our new life, all these wonderful things that happen to us, all these experiences behind these walls. They just see the empty table, the empty chair at the dinner table, or Christmas without us. It’s harder for them to see how missing a family Christmas brings you happiness, but there’s more to it than that. We find our love. They find God through their love of husband and wife and family. We find our love directly to Him in the religious life. There’s just that difference. And it is hard. They haven’t experienced it to know it is real. It’s real.”

Sister Maria Benedicta prays daily for her parents. “I owe them my life,” she says. “They gave me my life and they gave me, taught me God—taught me who God is. I owe them so much; and I repay them with my prayers. I think that through prayer we’re a lot closer, because we’re on that spiritual relationship.”

As her relationship with her family settles on a spiritual plane, she notes that God relates to her differently. “Before, God was showing me these signs and what I needed,” she says. “I hope now our relationship is deeper. When He called me to the Poor Clares it was more prayer and the silence of the heart. There was that growth, where He didn’t have to show me ‘nun’ in the Bible, or all these little signs. You hope there’s growth when you look back. But look how God takes you where you are. He knew what I needed when I needed it. I needed that little cross at Wal-Mart that day. Now, He might just let me receive His consolation in prayer and let that be enough. I know that that is true. I may have sufferings now, but I know He’s faithful and this is for my good. Maybe it’s for my purification or maybe it’s so I will offer it with Him on the cross for some other souls, but I know there’s a reason for it.”

Once, a friend told Sister Maria Benedicta that she has it so good; her spouse is always perfect. Sister Maria Benedicta agreed: “I said, ‘You’re right. He can never let me down. He’s all good, all loving, all powerful. He will always do what’s best for me.’ I said, ‘You’re absolutely right. But if there’s ever a problem with our relationship, it’s me. I can’t blame it on anybody else. It’s my fault.’ ”

Monastic life demands constant assessment and an awareness that there will always be room for improvement. Sister Maria Benedicta says, “Perseverance in the religious life isn’t just, ‘I will stay here until I die.’ It is, ‘I will strive to live perfect charity and to become holy.’ That’s what perseverance is; it’s not just staying here and ‘I made final vows, smooth sailing until I die.’ Or a comfortable life. No. It is striving to perfection and to live charity and to give of yourself. That’s hard. To dedicate your life to that, it’s serious. It’s a life commitment. I know that to not let it die—your love for God—does take work. You can’t just come and live a luxurious life and grow in the love of God. It takes work, like any human relationship. If you get married, you wouldn’t say on your marriage day, ‘We’re done.’ Relationships are work. But to believe that God is really alive, He’s living, He’s alive and present here—it’s not an abstract idea. He’s personal and He’s living and in the sacraments, and especially in the Eucharist, I receive Him into my body.
Those are the ways that we, with God, foster that relationship and grow. We have to continually work at prayer. We have to fight distractions. We have to fight our imagination wandering. Like any relationship, it takes work. It is a commitment. I will do this for the rest of my life.”

Days before making temporary vows, Sister Maria Benedicta sits with Sister Mary Nicolette at the metal grille and attempts to express during an interview with me the significance of her impending ceremony. After a few years of observing monastic silence, albeit with more opportunities for dialogue because she has been in training in the novitiate, she verbalizes her thoughts tentatively. “God wants little me,” she says. “And it’s not like any … it’s just really … I don’t even know what to say about it. It’s incredible, really.”

Her Novice Mistress shares her own reflections from the same experience seventeen years prior. “I just remember the overwhelming feeling was the condescension of God—the condescension of God, that He would take a broken and fallen human creature to be His spouse,” Sister Mary Nicolette says. “And like, ‘Who am I?’ The fact that He would do something like that was just very overwhelming and moving and overpowering.”

Sister Maria Benedicta chimes in then: “When you first come, you have to get over your normal, big things. But then God shows you all the little things, and you see how much you’re corrupted. You see how poor and weak you really are because the mentality in the world is, ‘I can do it,’ but when you’re face to face with God and you see what you really are, you say, ‘Does God really want this?’ Humbling. But my goodness, He shows you what you are.”

“He still loves you,” Sister Mary Nicolette says.

“Yeah, you think, ‘Is He crazy or what?’ I don’t know. It’s hard to even describe. You see how much work there is to be done. Every bride wants to give her love something, but then you see, ‘Here I am, Lord. Sorry! This is all I can give. It’s everything, but boy is it little, you know what I mean? But anyway, I’m excited, but it’s very humbling.”

A few weeks later, on April 19, 2009, her family reunites for Sister Maria Benedicta’s ceremony of profession, to watch her make temporary vows. Relatives fly in from Kansas. Members of her second family, the Marian Sisters, drive from Nebraska to Rockford. After a somber ceremony, Sister Maria Benedicta’s loved ones gather on the other side of the grille, talking, laughing, crying.

Sister Maria Benedicta’s purpose in life is clear: “I just have to live like Saint Clare. That’s my way to God—just to live like this. He creates you for
a purpose and He’ll direct you there.” She prays and she makes sacrifices and she asks God to deliver graces to those in need. In her hidden life in the enclosure, Sister Maria Benedicta is a silent witness to the world.

As one of the few people to whom God has broken through, Sister Maria Benedicta explains simply, “His love was so compelling I couldn’t resist.” “I think a lot of people have the notion this life is dying out or that girls don’t do this anymore. It’s very sad that people don’t realize God is calling young women to the religious life, to join these religious communities.” The culture beyond the monastery’s premises is so loud, with radios and television and cell phones—“all these things I don’t know about anymore,” she says. “They can’t hear God calling them anymore. God whispers in the heart; if there’s no silence, they don’t hear Him speak.”

When passersby see the monastery or learn about the cloistered nuns, Sister Mary Nicolette hopes people pause to wonder, “Why would someone do this in our day and age?” Sister Maria Benedicta, who almost majored in Spanish so that she could become a missionary “because I wanted to go out and help people,” believes she would have reached a limited number of people that way. “But here, I can reach the whole world through prayer and offering everything to God and Him using it as He wants,” she says. “I don’t say now, ‘Only use this penance for my mom, or for my sister,’ but I let Him use it as He wants and He can reach the whole world that way because He knows who needs it the most. He’s not going to abandon my mother and my sister. He’s going to give them graces, too, because it’s united with Jesus’ infinite merits.