Dedicated to God (8 page)

Sister Maria Benedicta first joined an active religious order, living with that community for five years before entering the Corpus Christi Monastery. “God has a special place for everybody,” she says. “It’s not just—religious life, go join wherever you want. He has a special place and a special purpose. And every community has what is called a charism—it’s like their spirit—and you’re created to be in that community. You have that spirit. God has given that to you. It’s your home. It’s where you will fit, where you will become holy. It’s where my spirituality matches that of the community so we can strive together to holiness. Not that we’re all the same because we’re not. But we have the common spirituality and charism to strive together toward God.”

Sister Maria Deo Gratias explains:

The higher you come into the spiritual life, the more you’re able to accept differences because the spiritual life expands you. Whereas if you have a very narrow way of thinking, it all has to fit in that narrow little package, and if it doesn’t, then you break out in some way—impatience, or you submerge yourself, or whatever. But the deeper you come into union with God, you come to accept people the way they are. There doesn’t have to be any breakage. You can have union in diversity.

And we know—we certainly know—that our sister is striving to do the best she can. She falls short just like I fall short so therefore we don’t take that amiss or against her; it’s just we have a greater compassion to say, “I know what you mean, Sister. You fell today. I fell yesterday.” And it’s just that type of it’s no big deal about it, but we do strive together and that’s why at times, we hold ourselves accountable to say—every evening before collation, we say—“I’m sorry.” We say that as a group because we know that we are human. We annoy. And we may not even know the annoyances we give another person. And it may be that on a particular day I didn’t annoy someone, but I say sorry for anytime that I have. And you always are crystal clear with God.

For Sister Joan Marie, monastic life jarred her sense of self. Beyond the enclosure and the grille, in the chaotic world she inhabited until the age of seventeen, she was regarded as upright, a model student, daughter, and sister. “I think the novitiate was awful hard—being young, partly, being in a new culture entirely,” Sister Joan Marie says. “Everybody’s praising me out there. Before Vatican II, it was like coming to a completely different milieu. Well, when I got here, it seemed like everybody was on me for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. So it was hard to adjust. In fact I don’t know if I ever did. I got sick, mostly. Instead of adjusting, I got sick, the one way to adjust. I didn’t do it on purpose, but God works it out.”

She had endured much in her youth, upended by her family’s many moves, jostled by her father’s mental instability and the needs of her mother and siblings; she worked to protect her family from self-destructing. Before her parents married, her maternal grandparents predicted doom for the couple. She learned from her parents that they met when her father eyed her mother, a sorority girl in college, at a social. “I’ll take that Kansas girl,” he said. They married in a civil union; Sister Joan Marie’s maternal grandparents were mortified by their quick pairing. Another daughter had married her high school sweetheart, and they “didn’t think this could turn out.”

Virginia’s early years were sweet enough. She remembers visiting her father’s office building in Detroit and looking down on the city below. “He would show me these little cars, and I thought they were toy cars. I soon learned it was because we were high up. I was just a baby,” she says. She smiles at the memory and her juvenile mind’s attempts to consolidate her perceptions and interpret her world. As a youngster, she and her older brother played the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Virginia always wanted to be the Lone Ranger and say, “Hi-yo, Silver!” Her brother relegated her to the role of Tonto. She aspired to become a “cowboy.” The family vacationed at their beach house in Canada, and her father took her into the water to teach her how to “ride the waves.” To Virginia, the phrase was married to the world of horseback riding; she tried to mount a wave, as if it were a horse. Her father laughed. Her family was “well off,” Sister Joan Marie says, and each year she was proud to add one new doll to her collection, a gift from her parents.

If her grandparents’ undisguised displeasure at her parents’ union was not an omen, an ill-conceived object lesson at Christmas foreshadowed impending turmoil. A toddler at the time, Virginia watched her mother set the holiday cookies on the kitchen table, out of the child’s reach. Virginia realized, though, that if she yanked on the tablecloth, she could get at the cookies. At first, her parents laughed at her cleverness, but they tried to stop it soon enough. “Well, Mother didn’t like that because all the dishes came down,” she says. “But I kept doing that because I got the cookie.” Weeks shy of Christmas, her parents informed Virginia that she would not receive any presents if she kept pulling the cookies and dishes off the table; she would get switches, for spankings, instead. Her mischievous efforts continued to be rewarded, with cookies obtained. So Virginia persisted. And she wreaked havoc on her mother’s dishware. On Christmas morning, Virginia watched her father hand presents to her older sister and her older brother. Then he reached behind the tree for a package, swaddled in newspaper, for Virginia. Inside the wrapping were switches. “Mother said she would never do that again to any kid because I was crying all day,” Sister Joan Marie says. “Mostly, I was crying because Santa knew my sins. Santa knew how bad I was. I didn’t mind the family knowing what was going on because they know me. But a stranger—Santa of all people—knew.” Her mother tried to console her daughter with a gift of clothesline and clothespins so that the little girl could be like her mother. “It didn’t help at all,” she says. “I just cried.”

When her father lost his job, Virginia experienced her family’s downward spiral as an economic crisis. Her father began to unravel. When he filed for bankruptcy, signs emerged of his fragile grip on reality, his declining mental and emotional state. One day, the family packed their car and abandoned their home and most of their belongings. Her mother sold a few items to neighbors before the move, thinking she would replace what she sold after they resettled; she could not know then that they would never establish a stable family life again. “In those days that was a great disgrace,” she says of her father’s bankruptcy. Since Sister Joan Marie’s older sister helped their father pack the car, Sister Joan Marie remembers they found room for all of her sister’s collections. The car packed full, Sister Joan Marie was told to select from her possessions only what she could hold on her lap. She took one doll from her collection.

In time, Sister Joan Marie gleaned the backstory of her father’s sad life: He was one of twelve children, and his mother died in childbirth when he was
eight years old. His older sisters took care of the infant. Meanwhile, he and the other middle children were neglected. “Nobody loves you but your mother at that age,” Sister Joan Marie says. Her paternal grandfather was portrayed in these stories as holding his children to impossible standards; he had overcome the dark years of the Depression in spite of the extra mouths and because of the many hands, his offspring toiling on his potato farm. “He worked them to death,” Sister Joan Marie says of her paternal grandfather. Her father bonded with one of his brothers, who got a job on the railroad feeding coal to motor the train. In another tragic blow, her father’s favorite brother was killed in a train accident. Still an adolescent, he ran away during World War II, lying about his age so that he could enlist in the military. A country boy with an aversion to rules, he clashed with authority. He made whiskey out of potato peelings and was about to face the expected repercussions from the military for his misbehavior when another brother who was “good to him” testified that he had lied about his age to get into the army. He was discharged.

Like his siblings, Sister Joan Marie’s father did not want to work as a farmer, a result of their hard labor in their father’s fields. “My father especially wanted to be a big businessman, and that was his ideal,” Sister Joan Marie says. “He had worked himself up to this.” After the financial collapse, Virginia bounced between the family’s temporary shelters, including a campground one summer in Indiana, and her maternal grandmother’s home in Kansas. At times, it seemed she was a character in a fairytale, inhabiting a campground complete with a backyard forest to explore, and a Hansel and Gretel–like cottage whose tenant kept pet raccoons and raised a blue jay named “Perculator.” The owner trained the bird with milk and bread to land on her finger. “To us it was like a miracle,” Sister Joan Marie says. Other times, Virginia was reunited with a patriarch who was succeeding either at business or at drink.

Her mother taught her children the Golden Rule. “As long as we were with her, it was okay,” Sister Joan Marie says. Her father often left to search for work; his reappearance disrupted the calm and was “emotionally upsetting,” Sister Joan Marie says. “And Mother always said, ‘Forgive him. Forgive him.’ ” Once, her parents left their three children for a few days with a caretaker, maybe a neighbor, Sister Joan Marie says. Her parents did not explain in terms that registered to their youngest child where they were going, or why. “I think they said they’d give us each a quarter if we were good,” she says. She doesn’t remember receiving a quarter. “I don’t think we were good.”

Her father, never satisfied as an employee, “wanted to be on his own,” Sister Joan Marie says. “He didn’t want to be under anybody. He was kind of a tyrant.” Virginia was terrified of her father. Her mother, it seemed, could talk to him, even during his rants. She warned her husband she was going to record his outbursts and play them back when he was sober and spent. “She should have,” Sister Joan Marie says. “He liked to talk. When he got upset, he liked to talk. Just crazy. Wasn’t reasonable. Unreasonable. But she could control him, pretty much. I think she was able to. But I was affected more than she. Because he would take it all out on her, it kind of got me.”

Sister Joan Marie believes her father was a complicated figure. “Sometimes he would be so good,” she says. “He would always stop on the highway if he saw anyone in trouble; he would stop to help. I guess he must have been real hungry when he was little because he always thought he should feed everybody. He wouldn’t give you an ice cream cone unless he gave the whole group a cone. One time it was raining and we were soaked and we had to stay in the tent—we had a big tent that we went around with—and he got us all suckers. I think he came with suckers and it broke the day a little bit. He was real good with children. He always liked children. He had a lot of good points. But the sickness got him. When you’re discouraged and it goes into depression, then you seem to take it out on the ones you love the most. It’s terrible. But that’s what happens. Suffering from Dad, I think we naturally turned more toward God because there was nothing else to turn to. Mother always said, ‘Don’t tell anybody, don’t tell anybody,’ because at that time you didn’t have these groups—support groups. There was nobody we could talk to.”

Sister Joan Marie remembers that her mother loved reading the melancholy Old Testament books of Job (the story of the holiest man alive, who experienced an epic plight, with his loved ones killed and his fortune erased, in a series of temptations to curse God) and Ruth (a widow who refused to follow her mother-in-law to her homeland, found love with a rich relative of her in-laws, and famously said, “Entreat me not to leave you, or to turn back from following you; for wherever you go, I will go; and wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God, my God”).

With no one to talk to, no one to help carry her burdens, Sister Joan Marie turned to her dog, Suzy. She told her pet her worries.

It was in her maternal grandmother’s care and in the United Brethren denomination, and their small, poor church with its conspicuous crack in the wall, where Sister Joan Marie felt safe and her faith took root. Sister Joan
Marie says her parents did not want to be “prejudiced,” and so they left the matter of religion to their children’s efforts. “I think they were hoping that we would choose some religion. My mother said she just thought it would take. She had been brought up in it. In college, I guess she just got that idea, that you should choose your own religion, you should bring your children up to choose. She was religious but she didn’t know that she had to train; she didn’t realize that you have to get some training.”

Virginia was often anxious for her mother. Once, her mom disappeared in the middle of the night. Virginia screamed at her father, demanding to know what he had done to her. He laughed. The following day, Virginia was relieved that her mother had given birth, which explained why her mother had sent Virginia and her brother outdoors and out from underfoot in the previous months. Virginia’s fear for her family grew, and this was justified: Her father, without any means and one more mouth to feed, experienced a psychological break. He told his family he was going to kill himself. He raged at them. One day, he held his newborn out a second-story window and threatened to drop the boy. He ended up carrying the child outside and walking the boy around the block barefoot. Virginia’s mother sent her to follow them. “He went into different cars to try to take them away, but he couldn’t get them to start,” she says. “He didn’t have the key, I guess. But then he came back. Thank God he came back.”

Sister Joan Marie thinks now that her father was motivated to upset her mother. One day he held a knife to his wife’s throat. He told his children he was going to kill their mother. The police were phoned, and Virginia’s father was taken to a mental hospital. Asked if she would allow the institution to perform a surgery—perhaps a lobotomy—“so that he became like a vegetable,” as Sister Joan Marie remembers it, “Mother would not allow that. She would not allow that. We all thought she should. She said, ‘It changes their personality, and they’re no longer human because they’ve got no passions. They’ve got no passions.’ ”