Dedicated to God (9 page)

Virginia’s mother tried to console her children, saying their father probably would not have acted on his threat to kill her. “Mother said he probably wouldn’t have done it, just like he wouldn’t have killed himself because he just would threaten. I couldn’t understand why she would say that when she was pinned against the wall.

“Her love was too great, I guess. Some said she should have thought of the children. Well, she did think of us. I used to say, ‘Divorce him. Divorce
him.’ She said he would just come after us because that’s all he had. He didn’t have a mother. His only love was for his family, really. But somehow it went haywire.”

Her maternal grandmother’s faith was a haven, cushioning Virginia through childhood. When her older sister enrolled in flight school, she converted to Catholicism after long talks with a priest-pilot. Virginia’s sister began evangelizing her, which Virginia construed as an assault on her carefully guarded sphere. Virginia cried when her older sister professed she also believed in Darwinism, not the creationism that Virginia’s grandparents instilled in her. In retrospect, Sister Joan Marie describes the thirteen-year-old version of herself as having “Protestant prejudice”; she was wary of genuflecting, which looked like the worship of Mary. Invited to attend her sister’s Catholic church for Mass with her mother and two brothers, they laughed at the family convert who they said appeared to be swatting at flies as she made the Sign of the Cross. Embarrassed by their inappropriate responses, Virginia’s sister said they were not welcome to worship with her anymore.

Aside from the theological disparities, Virginia liked her grandmother’s church, a cornerstone of her upbringing. Her sister argued that she should not choose a religion based on feelings, but rather with logic. In the end, she gave up on Virginia and stopped arguing. She advised her little sister to find a priest who had the patience to explain theological matters to her. Virginia did seek out a priest at a local church, who explained genuflecting by association: “Now, you love your own mother,” Sister Joan Marie recalls him telling her. The priest said that genuflecting was a sign of respect, that every other religion was founded by men, but Catholicism was founded by Christ. He suggested that Virginia pray, on her knees, for the gift of faith. Virginia walked out of the church, stopped on the sidewalk, a few feet from traffic, and she knelt on the pavement and prayed. She immediately wanted to be baptized into the Catholic faith. Her own religious fervor as a convert—the early risings for Mass and recitations of the rosary—attracted followers in her mother, her brothers, and even her father.

At the age of fifteen, Virginia was baptized. Moved by the poverty and simplicity of Saint Francis and his followers, the high schooler studied Latin at a junior college, took a job her sister lined up working for a two-person chemical company (helping test water on farms to be sure it was safe to drink), and read aloud at nights to her mother about Brother Juniper in
The Little Flowers of St. Francis
. They delighted in the stories of Brother Juniper,
who was “always doing odd things,” Sister Joan Marie says. As Saint Francis described him: “Would to God, my brothers, I had a whole forest of such Junipers.” Once, Friar Juniper was asked to prepare a meal for the rest of his community. But because he considered food preparation an undesirable interruption that took friars away from their prayers, he produced a soup on a massive scale and in a less than conventional manner—“the fowls in their feathers, the eggs in their shells”—in the hopes the food would last two weeks. His time and efforts proved a waste of time; when “he set down his hotch-potch” in front of the other friars, “there was never a hog in the Campagna of Rome so hungry that he could have eaten it,” according to
The Little Flowers of St. Francis
. Chastised initially for his abuse of resources, Brother Juniper was later commended for his simplicity and charity. “All those little stories were cute. It struck me, the simplicity of it. I wanted to be like Saint Francis,” Sister Joan Marie says. She toted bread to work and then tossed it to the birds in the hopes of communing with nature. Drawn to the contemplative life of Saint Francis that was mirrored by Saint Clare, founder of the Poor Clare Order, Sister Joan Marie says, “I knew I wanted to be a Poor Clare right away.”

Virginia’s father was, at that point, baptized as a Catholic and focused on his next business venture. He worked two shifts at two newspapers as a linotype operator to raise capital for a system that would render obsolete shoveling coal to power trains—the job his brother had been working when he died. Her father carved the designs for his inventions in potatoes.

Although he was a new convert, Sister Joan Marie remembers that her father tried to dissuade her from a religious vocation. He told his daughter that underground tunnels connected nuns and priests. He drove her to a monastery surrounded by a high wall, and Sister Joan Marie remembers him saying, “You’re going to be behind that wall. You won’t be able to come out.” It did look awful to Virginia. And yet she applied to join four Poor Clare communities. A friend of hers—Sister Rose—had entered the Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford, Illinois, one year prior, and because Sister Rose was considered by members of the community to be very devout, Sister Joan Marie says she was invited to join without the requisite visit. The Mother Abbess only gave her one mandate: She had to wait two years from her baptism as a Catholic to enter. “They took me, thinking I would be that good,” Sister Joan Marie says of the nuns’ esteem for Sister Rose. “I wasn’t quite that good. She was real vivacious. One sister told me, ‘You’re just the opposite
and you’ll never last.’ Big help! The ones that didn’t want you to go really helped you more.” Sister Joan Marie says the harsh words gave her more resolve to endure the trials.

In their cumulative centuries of life within the Corpus Christi Monastery, as adherents to a lifestyle that Sister Mary Monica describes as a “work of art,” the nuns have developed philosophies about community living, as well as opinons about who is capable to endure it. Sister Sarah Marie says that the strict rules and intense emotional demands of mandated silence and interrupted sleep would self-select members who must be completely normal, immune from psychological abnormality. “I think when you enter an enclosure, if you’re abnormal, it’s going to come out if there’s something wrong,” she says, laughing. “In the active world, you can keep it under for a little bit, if you’ve got a little psychological disorder. Not here! Not here.

“That’s why, I mean, when people think they must be a little bit dingy to be back there, it’s just the opposite,” she says. “We’re more psychologically healthy here than most people out there because you have to be, because you get a little ding-dong here. See, there has to be that calling, there has to be that calling from our Lord for this particular life, this vow of enclosure.

“Sometimes we get ones that come here and think they have a calling. And that’s what you should do if you feel that you’re being called—well, come!” Sister Sarah Marie says. “Find out if this is where our Lord’s calling you. That’s the only way you’re going to know. And after a couple of days, if they say, ‘Gee, I miss going to Wal-Mart,’ well, it’s kind of an indication, because we’re not going to keep someone here if they’re dying to go to Wal-Mart, you know! Well, then, maybe this isn’t where God is calling you to.”

In a separate, later conversation, Mother Miryam says that a young woman called to religious life could really miss Wal-Mart but still belong in a cloistered monastery. Mother Miryam remembers, as a novice, glancing toward the wall encompassing the cloister’s acreage, hearing the traffic, and wishing she could hop in a car and drive somewhere. Anywhere. She, too, believes, though, that psychological disorders and emotional issues make for a difficult pairing with religious life. Years might lapse before a disorder emerges or a repressed issue becomes visible, she says, but it will become apparent in the enclosure. Mother Miryam gives an example: Humans, in general, need self-esteem; in the close quarters of a cloister, if a woman has poor self-esteem, she might think another nun is ignoring her, or trying to hurt her, or doing something to get under her skin, when, in fact, the woman
has not even registered on the other nun’s mental radar. Mother Miryam says that God often works not on the spiritual level, but on the human level.

It’s like in relationships on the human level. You really can romanticize, “I love God, I love God, I love God.” But He says if you don’t love your neighbor, you don’t love me. So on that level, you can’t kid yourself. You can’t kid yourself, “I’m just going to go pray and I love God so much,” if you can’t get along. And of course there are going to be times when it’s going to be hard to get along. That’s just normal, because we’re all different. But you have to grow in that. You’ve got to grow in tolerance. You’ve got to grow in sensitivity. You’ve got to grow in gentleness—all these things will make it easier for others. You’ve got to grow in self-sacrifice. Are these on the human level? Yes, they are. They are on the human level. But you’re lifting yourself to another level. That’s the only way we can really grow is on this human level. A wounded person—maybe they can’t do a lot of that. But maybe God will use them. He’ll work with them and sanctify them in their own way. You never know.

It may take years for someone to arrive at a moment of self-honesty and clarity, Mother Miryam says, following a pattern of problems relating to others in community that actually points to a problem that needs to be resolved within oneself. Mother Miryam believes the full picture of these hiccups in relationships can emerge only with an admission of one’s own emotional hangups and shortcomings; this acceptance of one’s defects can allow one to move past them, no longer under the illusion of perfection, or the powerlessness due to denial.

Those who are mistrustful by nature remain mistrustful in the cloister, and the same holds true with social butterflies, confrontational personalities, and critical spirits. It is easy to conceive of ways that these qualities and imperfections can affect others in the cloister. I became privy to the magnification of such traits creating tensions—with conflict and drama inserted in community life—when one nun pulled me aside in the kitchen during one of my visits to tell me she did not know what Mother Miryam wanted to tell me, but she thought I should learn the story of the statue overlooking the gardens. Mother Miryam happened to walk in as I was trying to clarify what she wanted me to ask the Mother Abbess, and the
nun in question was startled and flustered, as if she were being discovered mid-transgression. She put her finger to her lips, indicating silence, and her face turned red. I forgot, in subsequent visits, to ask about the statue. A few months later, the same nun talked with me one-on-one in the parlor and told me that other nuns had a question for me, and so she would take notes and relay my words to them; I suggested, instead, that she retrieve the Mother Abbess, the authority of the community, the elected channel of practically all external communications, so that she could take part in the conversation. The nun informed me she did not want to bother the Mother Abbess. Later, I explained the interaction with Mother Miryam, and I learned that even in an atmosphere of monastic silence the telephone game emerges as a means of moving information, stirring conflict. Mother Miryam told me there is a saying, “the angel afar, and the devil within.” I am sure that I appeared shocked by her use of the phrase. Mother Miryam quickly added that each individual possesses her own set of issues that she must contend with; all are fallen. She quoted the Catholic Church’s historical perspective, that “holiness is wholeness,” a notion that was finally—and rightly, Mother Miryam says—dismissed in light of the examples of “wounded saints” who overcame many weaknesses and flaws in their struggle for, and attainment of, holiness.

Vicaress Maria Deo Gratias suggests another prerequisite for adapting to cloistered communal living: A woman must be able to detach from her own vantage point, her own personal desires. Joining a religious order might imply that a woman is willing to disavow her own interests and cede her will to the vows and the direction of her superiors. But Sister Maria Deo Gratias believes, from her interactions with young women visiting the monastery, that today’s youth are deprived of skills such as negotiating relationships, which are essential for community living. “Let’s say a person comes in and they find in the novitiate a novitiate sister she clashes with personality-wise. And it isn’t that either one of them is causing it, that’s just the natural way it is; then because they’re not used to living with people, it’s like they don’t know how to handle it, where it can be handled very well if you have the natural ability and then the grace can build on that.”

Negative emotions naturally well up and might spill out, unchecked, she says, but growth in the spiritual life derives from reflection. “What is it, when we fail, that we need to change?” Sister Maria Deo Gratias asks. “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

In what might appear to be an inversion of the natural order, Sister Maria Deo Gratias says that if life were to play out smoothly, without trouble, she might make the mistake of believing she possessed more virtue—more patience, for example—than she could actually claim, and she might not concede there was room for improvement. “Then you develop that virtue and you thank God for that opportunity, that I was able to acquire a greater practice of the virtue of patience because there was the opportunity,” she says, “and you don’t hold it against the person because of whatever it was that tried you. It’s just one person will try one person one way. And we all try each other. We all have flaws.”

Sister Maria Deo Gratias has transferred to communal living a pattern of relating to others, built upon a childhood dictum she learned from her parents: “You stood for the person you were and you make the person you are. You are who you are because of your own choices.” As a high school student in the aspirature, Sister Maria Deo Gratias says she learned that everyone arrives at any given moment from different personal histories and frameworks. If she could not understand the actions of one of her religious sisters, she always asked, “Could you tell me why you did that?” She says she has gleaned, through their disclosures, “My mind didn’t go that way at all. But if my mind went that way, I can obviously see her behavior now. It was so clear. Then you say, ‘If I had a mind like that, I would come to that conclusion, too.’