Dedicated to God (3 page)

Here, the cloistered nun becomes anonymous to the world. She is hidden from view. Each follows her convictions at incredible personal cost. A few describe that when they first felt called to religious life, it seemed “too radical.” Some families were so adamantly against monastic life, which appeared so restrictive to them, that they ended all contact after their daughter or sister became a Poor Clare Colettine. For others, the decision to enter a contemplative order could not have been more natural.

Sister Maria Deo Gratias recalls the moment she was called. She was in her sixth-grade classroom when she heard a directive to go to the chapel after school. Before the Blessed Sacrament, she says, “I knew I would be His the moment I knelt down.” Although she was not yet familiar with the terminology for giving her life totally to the unseen entity she believed spoke directly to her heart, she told God, “I will marry you.”

“From the experience I had,” she says, “I never doubted ever my vocation from that moment on. I was His.” Since then, she has accepted each degree of commitment that has opened before her, from the aspirature (a boarding school for girls interested in pursuing religious life), to the active order of nuns where she worked first as a gym teacher and later on at a hospital psychiatric ward (having trained in pastoral care), to her life now at the Corpus Christi Monastery.

To her, the challenge is basic: Become a saint.

Others in her community are less stoical. They share their doubts and struggles. In pursuit of perfection, they list the practical challenges, chief among them, twenty women sharing a kitchen. Each sleeps on a carpet-stuffed mattress; the older generations remember stuffing their pillows and mattresses with straw. They rise at midnight, four hours after retiring for sleep, to pray at the first of seven scheduled prayers in the Divine Office.

Sister Joan Marie, who has lived here longer than any other member, is not sure if, in more than sixty years as a cloistered monastic nun, she has ever adapted. “When things got hard, I got sick,” she says. “So I escaped that way.”

Mother Miryam was the youngest of twelve siblings, born to parents who modeled a beautiful marriage. “It’s hard to give up marriage,” she says. “It’s hard to give up that type of love. It’s hard to give up children.” She was moved by her parents’ intimacy: “They just worked for each other. You could tell they were very close. Every evening for as long as I could remember, when we were doing the dishes, they would go and sit down. Dad would sit in the big chair and Mom would sit in his lap. Always. Always. Always. There was just always a lot of love and care there.”

When she felt called to religious life, she was stymied, intellectually. She thought, “How can I deny life to all the children I could have had? How can I ever do that? It’s not right.” “Of course,” she says now, “it’s very simple. It took me a while until it dawned on me: ‘Well, if God didn’t want you to marry, He never wanted those children to exist.’ So that was fine. But it really was a struggle until it finally hit me. ‘Don’t be so stupid! You could have maybe had ten, twelve children, but God never wanted them to exist if He wanted you to be a religious.’ ”

Poor Clare nuns devote their lives to prayer and penance and sacrifice; this is what they call their charism—the special spirit and focus of their community. Sister Mary Nicolette describes their charism as “living a life for others. We withdraw from the world into an environment that enables us to make those sacrifices, to call down graces and to obtain graces for people. So it’s a willing penance and a loving sacrifice.” A select few nuns are assigned the duty of answering phone calls from the outside to a prayer hotline at the monastery and they all pray, seven times a day during the Divine Office, for personal and catastrophic events around the globe. In one of the paradoxes of this life, they believe that in removing themselves from the world and embracing a life of anonymity, unseen and unknown to the world at large, by undertaking lives of self-sacrifice and prayer behind the scenes, they have a greater impact on mankind than if they maintained direct contact with strangers and loved ones. Each member of this community believes that there is power, along with challenges, in this life.

Poor Clare Colettine nuns give up their birth names, as well as all material possessions, as concrete, external signs of their vows. They walk barefoot indoors as a sign of the poverty they embrace. (An exception is that the nuns are permitted to wear shoes as they age.) Just as their lives are anonymous, they are not memorialized in death. Burial takes place in a small cemetery on the property, with a stone marker at the gravesite revealing only the
woman’s religious name and death date, not her birth name or birth date, to signify the start of her life in eternity.

The nuns operate, although they might not use this term, as agents of change. They intervene in the course of history, believing that their prayers and penances for strangers and family can alter outcomes. At the ceremony when a nun makes final, permanent vows, she hugs her family members for one final time. This sacrifice serves a purpose: The material world is not the end, and their sufferings and martyrdoms allow God’s will to become manifest in the world.

Members of this unique subculture live as intermediaries to another realm, and for the afterlife. Cloistered contemplatives “embody the exodus from the world in order to encounter God in the solitude of the ‘cloistered desert,’ a desert that includes inner solitude, the trials of the spirit and the daily toil of life in community,” according to
Verbi Sponsa
.
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Expatriates of mainstream culture, the cloistered nuns work to adapt to an ancient religious rule, an enclosed culture loaded with visual imagery and symbolic identifiers. They learn to tie the prayer cord, worn around their waists, with four knots, which represent their four vows. In this highly selective and self-selected subculture, the women choose to enter this place and the community decides whether to receive or reject them when they are eligible to become novices, make temporary vows, and make their final solemn vows, through voting and anonymous ballots.

The nuns observe monastic silence, a custom to preserve their spirit of recollection, speaking only what is necessary in order to complete a task. Even written communication is abbreviated;
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each nun is assigned a mark when she enters the Corpus Christi Monastery as her identification. The mark—a chalice or crown of thorns or wild rose—is used when the nuns write notes to one another. This symbol is stitched or written with permanent ink on the items the woman is assigned for her use. (She does not own the items, since each gives up her worldly possessions when she joins the community.) The Mother Abbess might assign a mark that corresponds with the Feast Day a woman enters the monastery, or she might be inspired by what she gleans of the woman’s spirituality. A former Mother Abbess often assigned new entrants a mark that was one letter from the name Jesus, Joseph, Mary, Francis, Clare, or Colette.

In a place imbued with ritual, where members do not explain every custom, the cloister can be a mystery to its residents. Sister Joan Marie,
the community’s eldest nun by what the nuns term her rank (of longevity), having joined the monastery before any of the other current members, says, “It seemed very mysterious to me when I first entered, I guess, because I just never knew what was going to happen next. Pretty soon I got onto the rhythm, to the schedule. And now it even seems tighter because I can’t make it. I can’t run fast enough. But then I was able to keep up.”

The cloistered life is one of paradox. The nuns live in the tension of certainty and uncertainty, maintaining deep belief and embodying their convictions in total commitment, yet are aware that they will not experience resolution—or know the results in this lifetime—of their lives of dedication and sacrifice. They are comfortable with the uncertainty.

Six decades after joining the enclosure, Sister Joan Marie can still view monastic life (and convey it) through the eyes of an outsider. She follows the order’s strict rules, not knowing the fruits of her life of penance. The nuns perceive that others, even family, even Catholics, do not understand their decision to enter the order. Loved ones have expressed their disdain for their vocation. Some deem their life as irrelevant. Or crazy. Or different, hard to decipher.

A metal grille makes tangible the signature vow—enclosure—of this otherworldly realm, a cultural time capsule. The concrete and symbolic demarcation sets the nuns apart from the world. Even during visits with family (they are allowed up to four visits a year), a nun sits on one side of the grille, inside the enclosure, and she visits with her relatives—out in the world—on the other side of the grille. While the nun and her family could reach through the five-inch square gaps in the seventy-inch-wide by forty-five-inch-high metal grille to holds hands, they are not supposed to touch.

One nun tells an anecdote of an outsider’s impressions of the cloister. Sister Sarah Marie’s four-year-old great-niece had visited the monastery several times before, when her mother announced another visit. The child had replied, “ ‘Oh, yes, Mommy, that’s the one that’s in the cage.’ And her mom says, ‘Caylee!’ And she says, ‘Yes, Mommy, a Jesus cage.’ ”

The girl’s mother prodded, and the girl described the “bars” she had seen—a zoo-like association with the place where religious women are kept and sometimes seen. Sister Sarah Marie believes the childlike understanding of her life is both profound and humorous. Sister Sarah Marie says it is an apt description of their physical space and their spiritual lives. “A Jesus cage,”
Sister Sarah Marie says. “A little four-year-old. She knew this looked like a little cage at a zoo or something, but she knew it was much deeper than that. This connected Jesus. I thought that was pretty profound. I told the sisters and we all kind of laughed. We laughed and said, ‘Yes, the cage.’ We laughed and laughed.”

The nuns are lighthearted. They laugh at themselves and each other. Sister Maria Deo Gratias commends the nuns charged with maintaining the gardens; if it were her job to tend to the plants, she says, the monastery would host “ever-browns.” Their childlike amusement says more about them and their outlook than it reveals of the strict demands of their vows to their order—a religious order the cardinals in Rome were reluctant to approve eight hundred years ago because they said it seemed impossible to live out Saint Clare’s high ideals. Sister Mary Nicolette, who is translating from Italian to English a compilation of Poor Clare writings throughout the ages, recently translated this poignant sentence, by the Venerable Mary of Jesus of Agreda (1602–1665): “One of the lofty purposes of Christ coming into the world was to raise up poverty and to teach it to mortals who are horrified by it.”

While others struggle to understand the nuns, they consider themselves chosen. They are the brides of Christ. Sister Maria Deo Gratias says,

A person can be very prayerful, and live her life on her own and consecrate herself privately to God; that’s a private consecration. But if you want a public consecration, there has to be that acceptance. And then the Church accepts that and then in that acceptance of the superior, you pronounce the three vows. In the very beginning of the Church, that was lived but it wasn’t specified in the terms that we say it now.

There was always what we called the Consecration of Virgins; there were some women who would give themselves to God—very early, even in the very beginnings of the Church in the 100s. In the very, very beginning of the Church there were people who set themselves apart to give themselves to God. They lived in chastity, they practiced poverty, and they certainly had obedience, to a limited degree, in the very beginning. Those individuals who were separate formed a community, and they had a superior that they could obey. You still had those who chose to be hermits on their own, just like we have today. We have hermits and consecrated virgins in the world, and then we have those that choose—and it’s really a choice because of a divine inspiration that that person feels—that they’re called by God to live in a community, so they join a community. And in joining that community, they freely give themselves to God by following the rule and the superior of that community.

The founding of the Poor Clare Colettine Order harkens back to 1212, when Clare Offreduccio, a young woman of noble birth whose parents planned to marry her off to a rich man, slipped away from home on the night of Palm Sunday to follow Saint Francis of Assisi, the founder of three Roman Catholic Franciscan orders: the Friars Minor (the Grey Friars), the Poor Clares (which began when he handed Clare her new garb), and the Third Order (laity who live in the world as Franciscans and who can marry).

Saint Clare, like Saint Francis, was born an aristocrat. Both embraced high ideals to live in absolute poverty and abandon material possessions—to the extent that Saint Francis initially restricted his disciples to one woolen coat and forbade them from wearing shoes. Pope Benedict XVI, in a biographical sketch of Saint Clare of Assisi, refers to her as “one of the best loved saints” whose “testimony shows us how indebted the Church is to courageous women, full of faith like her, who can give a crucial impetus to the Church’s renewal.”
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Saint Francis turned over the Church of San Damiano to Saint Clare for her new order to use as a convent.
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The first woman to write a rule for a monastic community, Saint Clare met with resistance to her “Privilege of Poverty” from church authorities. Based on Saint Francis’s ideal of utter poverty, the rule established that members of the community would not own any possessions, even the building they inhabited; this was deemed too extreme and impractical, impossible to live by. But at last, in 1253 Saint Clare’s rule was approved.

Saint Clare’s biological sister Agnes, her mother, an aunt, and a niece joined her community of Poor Ladies. In the 1300s, when the Poor Clare Order became lax in enforcing its original rule of possessing nothing in order to depend solely on God’s provisions, Pope Benedict XIII nominated Colette of Corbie (a French hermit) to reform the order. The existing monasteries and new foundations that followed the reformed Holy Rule became known as Poor Clare Colettines.