Dedicated to God (7 page)

Virginia (a pseudonym Sister Joan Marie selected for herself to represent life before she was assigned a religious name), was led to her new quarters, a cell that measured eleven feet, eight inches by six feet, nine inches. Seeing little more than a bed with a straw-stuffed mattress, she says, “That woke me up a little bit.” She changed into the outfit for first-year postulants and then wound her way back through the corridors from the novitiate wing of the monastery to the parlor, where she met her parents and siblings to say goodbye. For the first time, the metal grille separated Virginia from her family and from the rest of the world. Debuting her uniform further startled the dream. “Here I thought I was all grown up, leaving my home and family,” she says. “And when I came in with these cuffs and a big bonnet, I wonder, ‘Am I a baby again?’ ” she laughs. Her mother told her she looked like the Dutch girl from a popular advertising campaign.

Before she entered the monastery, Virginia pictured life as a cloistered nun. She thought of Saint Colette, a hermit. “Of course, I was young and idealistic,” she says. “I thought it would just be me and God. Nobody else. I didn’t know about community. I had a lot to learn. You’re that age, you’re pretty idealistic, and even my parents—I don’t think they knew exactly what I was getting into. We trusted the Church. We were so enthused by the Church, being converts.”

Raised in an environment of upheaval that started with her father’s job loss, followed by episodes of migrant family life and then periodic separations from her parents, Virginia believed her mother and father hoped she would choose her own religious preference. She took cues from her spiritual surrogate and standin mother figure—her maternal grandmother; Virginia claimed the Protestant faith but, after a successful campaign by her older sister, was baptized into the Catholic Church. Two years later, she joined the Poor Clare Colettine Order. Monastic life—her new life—seemed like a riddle. And she lacked the code to decipher it. “I just never knew what was going to happen next,” she says.

Sister Joan Marie did not grasp the meaning of every custom or comprehend the significance of all the events she witnessed or participated in. She shares an anecdote about the predicament of observing monastic silence while adapting to her new culture: Every day, the nuns lined up in the refectory to confess their faults and weaknesses of that day before their community. Sister Joan Marie remembers standing with the other nuns, waiting her turn to step into the center of the room; the Mother Abbess and Vicaress sat at the head table at one end of the room, and the other nuns lined the two tables that ran the lengths of the room, their backs to the walls. Each nun stood before the Mother Abbess and recounted to her community her imperfections—confessing, for instance, if she accidentally broke a dish.

After the public admission, each nun prostrated herself on the floor facing the head table. Because they lived in such close quarters, Sister Joan Marie says, no disclosure was truly a revelation. “They knew anyway,” she says. “It wasn’t anything new.” If a nun confessed that she forgot to perform a duty, she was given a broken clothespin to wear—presumably a symbol of the omission and a visual cue to remember the next time. If a nun was concerned she might have forgotten to mention a sin of omission or commission, she wore a “forget hat.” Sister Joan Marie remembers one nun in her eighties always took the forget hat. Habitually, the elder nun recited her list of faults, adding, “Something else I forgot.” A few minutes later, when she bent forward to eat her soup, the hat inevitably fell into the soup. “She forgot she had the hat on!” Sister Joan Marie says. “It was so funny!”

Following the communal ritual, one of the nuns walked to a chart and flipped the numbers. Sister Joan Marie assumed the nun was tallying for the scorecard the collective faults and weaknesses confessed that day. “Later on,” Sister Joan Marie says, “this other postulant came to me and said, ‘What does
that number mean?’ I said, ‘I really don’t know.’ I said, ‘There’s some things you just don’t ask about.’ Well, she was smart enough she asked the superior, which I was afraid to do because everything was so mysterious to me.” The postulant relayed to Virginia what she had learned; the number denoted the temperature outdoors so the nuns knew how to layer up for their manual labor in the gardens. “I was amazed it was so simple a thing!” Sister Joan Marie says. “I thought for sure it had to do with those faults or something mysterious!”

Virginia’s new home, with its foreign routines and formal construct, baffled her. “It was so different than anything you had imagined,” Sister Joan Marie says. “I guess that was good. In a way, if you see all that’s coming, you can’t adjust very well. I would have liked to have some relaxation. There was none. Like when you go home, you can relax. But there was no going home. There was no time when you could just be yourself. You were kind of on edge every minute. There’s advantages to being young. I couldn’t have done it later. I would have been too set in my ways by that time.” Virginia arrived at the monastery directly from high school. She was accustomed to a structure bracketed by bells, and so she had no trouble responding when the monastery’s bells prompted her to move on to the next activity—prayers, or work, or recreation. “You know the schedule is pretty tight,” she says. “But in the evening, I would have liked to relax. You know, when you came home from school, you could be yourself, you know. You didn’t have to be on edge. Well, there was no relaxing because you had work you were supposed to do. You had something you were always supposed to do—except when you went to bed; you were so tired, you dropped. What got me was there was no free time where you could just be yourself because I felt they were all looking at me, watching every move.”

As the youngest member of the novitiate, Virginia led the group’s processions into and out of the chapel. Another postulant directed Virginia to pick up all the “dust fuzzies” she saw on the ground, for love of God and mortification. This spiritual act, she was told, would prompt other young women to join the monastery. Whenever the postulant pointed out a dust ball for Virginia to stop and pick up, the line was forced to halt behind her in a pileup of postulants. “I just wasn’t ready for all those little things, details,” Sister Joan Marie says. “She was trying to help, but it just discouraged me because I couldn’t understand why you had to pick them up.” Virginia learned the postulants saved the “dust fuzzies” for Feast Days, when they counted them up, and she prayed that each ball of dust represented one woman with a
religious vocation who would be called forth and hear her calling to enter a religious community. “I know it seems crazy,” Sister Joan Marie says. “It seemed crazy to me, too.” Still assimilating her conversion from Protestant to Catholic, Sister Joan Marie was moved by the teachings of Saint Therese of Lisieux, a contemplative nun nicknamed “the Little Flower of Jesus.” The canonized Carmelite summarized the vocation of the monastic life not as a series of heroic acts of virtue, but as a process of honoring God in little acts that demonstrated great and steady devotion. “She always did something for souls,” Sister Joan Marie said. “That’s all we’ve got to offer—little tiny things. We don’t have big martyrdoms.”

Still, the senior postulant’s unsolicited guidance frustrated Virginia, who eventually took the matter to her Novice Mistress. The Novice Mistress agreed the other novitiate was too “zealous,” and she permitted Virginia to overlook the dust fuzzies when she was leading a procession. Virginia could, however, continue the practice of collecting wayward dust for prayers at other times, the Novice Mistress said, when she found her itinerary freer. “I could talk to her,” Sister Joan Marie says of her Novice Mistress. “I was close to her because she was like my mother. Especially at that age, I needed somebody.”

Sister Joan Marie says she was “ready to be formed” when she arrived, but she was also worn down by notations of her missteps. “They saw all your faults and all your defects,” she says. “That’s what they wanted to point out. They say the novitiate is the ‘seed time’ in life. They want to point it out so that you get a little better before you get with the professed nuns. Of course, the professed weren’t all saints, either, but it seemed to us they were because we didn’t recreate with them much.”

Incongruous as this life seemed to Virginia, an outsider to the Catholic faith and a rookie at the monastery, she feared that she would be found lacking and would be asked to leave the premises. “I was just so afraid. They didn’t realize how scared I was,” Sister Joan Marie says. She witnessed, in Clothing Ceremonies, postulants become novices, receiving the habit and a religious name, only to be asked to leave months or years later. One novice refused to talk during the community’s one-hour social recreation each day. The girl was moody, Sister Joan Marie says. “Well, that wouldn’t work in a community. She got sent home. When she got sent home, I thought, ‘Oh, I’m next!’ As a novice, you’re supposed to get a little better—at some things, anyway. I didn’t either, but they kept me somehow. I guess they knew; they knew I didn’t want to go back to what I came from.”

Sister Maria Deo Gratias says,

Our love for God spills out, and it spills out on our sisters in community. When you have love, you can’t keep it to yourself. We take care of each other’s needs, but when we’re taking care of each other’s needs, we’re taking care of the needs of Christ in that person. There’s that perception of that other sister as the body of Christ and that whole mystical body idea. In community, we show our love for God by how we love our sisters. We form a happy family, in the sense that the family is a group of adult women responding to God together. And people are different. They have different personalities. But that’s kind of like a given. You know you’re not going to find a perfect human on earth.

Even in a cloistered monastery, where like-minded women convene, for life, after internalizing their common beliefs, and aiming together toward holiness and perfection, there are conflicts. “You know, each person is so different, unique, and then sometimes we clash on each other; and sometimes we agree,” Sister Joan Marie says. “Most of the time we agree.”

“I think men religious have different struggles than what women religious would have,” says Sister Mary Gemma. “A woman by nature likes to arrange things and have her kitchen the way she wants, but in community you have to learn to let go of that. I think that’s one of the hardest things—you aren’t the woman of the home. There are twenty other women. That’s something you struggle with. It’s more of a struggle when you first come. You have to let go of the way you want things to be, otherwise you’re just not going to get along.” Although Sister Mary Gemma has never heard “a bad word” uttered in the monastery, she adds, “I would say probably what I found most surprising was that once in a while there would be a couple of sisters that would get into it with each other. Then later, I found that there’s so much forgiveness here. Later, that’s what struck me more than anything.”

The inherent tensions that can fester within an enclosed community have been mythologized in oral tradition. The stories are like fables, or parables, with morals. Sister Mary Gemma shares a story passed along from the early days of the Corpus Christi Monastery’s founding through the generations of novices and nuns: Two young nuns were assigned to work in the garden together, but they could never agree on anything, namely how they should conduct their work. One day, one of the nuns introduced a novel attempt at
diplomacy, to quash the inevitable quarreling. She walked out to the garden and greeted the other nun. She had either filled her pockets with marbles in the monastery, or she picked up stones off the ground. She proceeded to place one marble or stone after another into her mouth, as Sister Mary Gemma says, “so that she would keep her mouth shut, because she had a hard time controlling her temper. In charity, she thought she had better put something in her mouth to remind her to be quiet when she didn’t agree with something. She recognized that it was wrong of her to get so upset about things, and since she couldn’t control herself that way, she did it another way.”

This “real old story that goes way back,” Sister Mary Gemma says, has been told and retold. Its themes strike at the core of the nuns’ values: Discipline. Obedience. Silence. Love. Selflessness. Peacemaking. It illustrates the virtue of caring for someone else over the desire to express one’s own opinions, or get one’s own way. “Those are the kind of thing we share at recreation,” Sister Mary Gemma says. “The sisters that have been here longer like to tell the stories that bring out the foibles of one another. It’s a joyful acknowledgment. We’re acknowledging that we’re all struggling. You can look back and laugh, even though something was so hard at the time; and yet you can look back and laugh.”

Sister Mary Gemma sees humor and truth in this now remote but still poignant teaching moment. “The thing is,” she says, “we didn’t choose each other. God chose. God chose who we were going to live with the rest of our lives and that’s where we say, especially if women can get along together, can struggle together and get along, that shows the grace of God is there. It’s God’s grace that makes a marriage work. It’s God’s grace that helps us in community to be faithful and get along. Like marriage, you have to work at it.”

“But our response to other people’s personality is because of the love of God,” says the Vicaress, Sister Maria Deo Gratias. “It’s a little different than the divided life of a married another person. For us, we’re all looking at God together. That would be a way of picturing it. All of us stand together looking in the same direction, focusing our life in the same direction and it’s like a circle. We’re all standing in a circle and the center is Christ and the more we come closer to Christ, the closer we are to each other.

“We are different people and we do think differently. But there is that unity—that core unity—that holds us together and it’s a beautiful experience
to live in community. The give and take that we learned as a kid, we apply that here.” Having lived in another religious order before entering the Corpus Christi Monastery, Sister Maria Deo Gratias says this community exhibits a “beautiful grace,” embracing the “essentials that we all treasure so much”—the same values and a “centeredness on living the life.” “You understand that you’re bound to have people make different choices, but our community is very united in our basic values—very, very much so, more than other communities, and I’ve experienced many of them. And that’s a plus for us.”