Dedicated to God (17 page)

“You’re just so used to functioning in a normal way,” Sister Mary Nicolette says. “Eighteen is the youngest a woman would come. But already, at eighteen, nineteen, twenty, you’re used to functioning a certain way. Usually, the
younger women find it easier to adapt because they’re not as set in their ways as an older woman would be, perhaps, who’s had a career and a home. But still, at that age, it’s like, ‘Hold on!’ You know?”

They say only what is necessary, in a low tone, in order to complete a task, and ask another nun to step out into the hall for the conversation so as not to disturb anyone else in the room. Anything a nun says must serve a purpose; otherwise she must refrain from talking (except during the daily evening recreation, when they are allowed to socialize). “Obviously, sometimes we slip,” Sister Mary Nicolette says, “but it’s a discipline that we try to cultivate and foster, and it’s a learning process because when you first come, you’re not used to that. So the novitiate is good for that.”

As a novice, Sister Maria Benedicta describes the process of integrating into the monastic community as “a time of orientation and learning.” “It’s really kind of unraveling for everybody,” she says. One evening as a postulant, Sister Maria Benedicta took her assigned seat next to her Novice Mistress for collation. When the dish of potatoes was passed, two portions remained—a full potato and half of a potato. Sister Mary Nicolette told her, “You may take a full potato.” She was not hungry enough to eat a full potato, though, and thought, “I may, but I may not.” She served herself the half-potato. “And then I realized, I think ‘may’ actually meant, ‘Take the full potato,’ ” she says. “It was like, ‘whoops!’ You realize what this really means is, I need to give my full consent, but I need to take a full potato. Even though you have the fundamental attitude that I’m coming to do God’s will, it’s really in the small things. Talk about countercultural from independence and doing things your way, to say, ‘Okay, I’ll eat a full potato.”

Sister Maria Benedicta explains,

It’s a life commitment and it’s very different from anything in the world, so it’s in the wisdom of the Church to say, “Live this life. See if it’s for you.” In Saint Clare’s day, a woman would come for a year and then make final vows. But gradually, the Church has said, “Let’s just take our time and say the person can decide over time, the community can decide, Is this person called here? Do they fit? Do they have the right dispositions to strive for holiness, those sorts of things it takes?” So you can take the commitment and have it be informed. It’s not just, “I love it! It’s great!” I have time to experience the difficulties I’m going to encounter and ask, “Can I live this? Can I make these sacrifices over time?” And it’s the wisdom of the community, too. You’re gradually incorporated into the community life. We get up at midnight, but when you first come, you don’t get up at midnight every night. You would just crash. So it’s gradual; everything happens kind of gradually. You lead certain prayers at certain times, with a gradual incorporation into the fullness of the life.

Forty-seven years old when she began to learn the ways of the monastery as a postulant, Sister Mary Michael pondered the unbending peculiarities. Working in the kitchen, she wondered, “Why do the vegetables need to be cut this way? And prepared this way?” But she accepted the structure imposed on her, and she deferred to tradition. She has seen others resist the tutelage. “They might be used to a better way, or may even know more about it than I do,” Sister Mary Michael says. “You notice sometimes they find it hard not to say something and to just do it. The work is done a certain way. I think that’s what some find hard; they know how to do something but we do it a certain way, and so you should follow the way we’re doing it. Maybe they question that, why it’s done that way.”

Sister Mary Michael attempts to convey the challenge of subjugating one’s own volition to the monastic customs: “It’s so restrictive, especially starting out. You have to. … You can’t. … There’s some place you’re supposed to be all the time. Somebody’s telling you what to do and where to go.”

“It’s just a different—very different—culture that, at first, you’re just like, ‘Wow,’ ” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “You know how to do normal things, but here we do it differently. With monastic life, you do things a certain way so that it doesn’t take a lot of conversation to discuss. It’s just, there’s a way that we do it, but it makes it more peaceful and run more smoothly and we don’t have to talk about a lot of things so that our hearts and minds can be on God.”

Any domestic idiosyncrasies Sister Maria Benedicta possessed when she entered the enclosure have been undone during her tenure. She has relearned how to make her bed the monastic way, folding the blankets lengthwise in thirds—a symbol of the Trinity and also a practical measure that keeps the blankets from dragging off the low beds, sweeping against the floor, and getting dusty. She has relearned, too, how to hang the laundry outdoors with
her Novice Mistress silently, crisscrossing the courtyard in sync; how to clean her plate with her bread, then wash her dishes in a tub on the rolling cart in the center of the refectory, and then replace her dishes in the drawer at her assigned place at the table. “It’s like, I thought I knew how to do dishes,” she says, remembering her first impressions of the monastery. “But it’s like you don’t even know how to do dishes anymore! You don’t know where anything goes, you don’t know how anything is done. We have a very systematic way and it goes very smoothly, you know. But it’s like every aspect of your life you’re relearning and it’s like, ‘Wow, you know.’ And at first, it’s really like, ‘How do we do dishes again?’ Everything in your day is like this: ‘How do we do this? How do we eat? What’s the ritual for eating?’ You take out your plate at a certain time. You know, it’s very, very different.”

Failing to register each new instruction, Sister Maria Benedicta told her Novice Mistress, “I know you told me how to do the dishes yesterday, but you also told me how to do five hundred other things. It’s really overload at first. My goodness! And you forget. It’s like, ‘Oh, I heard that, but I forgot.’ ” Sister Maria Benedicta, the most recent member of the community, is supposed to lead each procession. She recalls her confusion when the Divine Office would end and nuns began leaving the choir chapel. “All of a sudden everybody’s up and it’s like, ‘I’m supposed to be first!’ It’s like, ‘Ahhh!’ It’s like, ‘Bye, God, we’re going! I don’t know where we’re going!’ All the time, we’re going somewhere and, okay, gotta go, and they’re tripping over you. They’re coming, they’re expecting you to know, but I don’t know where we’re going!” Confounding the normal routine were the alterations to the schedule for feast days and during certain seasons in the liturgical calendar.

Through the daily upheaval to her own habits, Sister Maria Benedicta slowly became familiar with the monastic customs. She drew consolation by reframing her foibles within the grander schema. “We know it’s between us and God,” she says. “In Scripture, it says, ‘Man looks at appearances, but God looks at the heart.’ That’s very comforting. I can be messing everything up, I can be doing everything wrong, but trying to do what God wants, and He’s pleased with us. And that’s very freeing. He doesn’t ask us to be these perfect beings all the time. Yes, we try, but He looks in the heart and He knows that we’re trying. That’s all we have to do. It’s so simple to live for Him.”

In this built and controlled environment, twenty women with varied experiences and personalities attempt to undertake radical lives. “If you
really have the call, you won’t feel hedged in,” Sister Maria Deo Gratias says. “If you don’t have the call, then the rules are burdensome. But, really, the rules are just a loving response to the Lord who called us to the life, and so there have to be some guidelines. That’s what the rules are. And there have to be some challenges of, okay, you said ‘yes’ to God, you said you would give yourself to God, so there has to be something to give.” Until making solemn vows, a nun can petition the community to leave the monastery.

Sister Maria Deo Gratias says that the monastery’s dwindling population has not altered the community’s recruitment strategy or diluted the customs; one exception is the raised age limit for women wanting to join. “The community won’t hold onto anybody and say, ‘Well, we’d like to have numbers,’ because sometimes numbers—if you’re not living the life the way you’re supposed to live the life—can be a detriment to community,” Sister Maria Deo Gratias says. “So adding to our numbers isn’t the answer. It’s the quality of life. That’s the most important thing.”

“What draws you here? What makes you stay?” Sister Maria Benedicta asks of the hiccups and frustrations she has encountered. She answers her own question: “Love. At first, it is unsettling, but once you learn it, you can really settle down and really, like, enjoy the benefits of the life, rather than being puzzled by it. Your mind and heart can be on God. It is like a fundamental motive; as much as we can, we think about Him. But the love grows—love for Him, rather than love for ourselves, so that we’re not still wanting to say five years later, ‘But if we did it my way, it would still be a lot faster!’ No. You give that up. Or you may still be thinking about it five years later, but you say, ‘Okay, Lord, you can have this again. I’m doing this for you—just for you—not for myself,’ even if you don’t agree with it. It’s all for love.”

As Sister Mary Nicolette explains, “We’ve set our hearts on God—love of God. So even the work that we do, some of it is very common and mundane, you know, cleaning and keeping house. But it’s done for the love of God. And when everything is done for the love of God, that sets kind of a higher standard because you won’t do it sloppily if you know you’re doing it for the Lord and for the love of God. That’s what keeps us here and would keep us doing the same things—that desire to love and serve God. And also—this would be secondarily, but it always comes in—is it’s for the good of community. We serve community. In Scripture, the two greatest commands are to love the Lord with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself. God is first, and then neighbor. But they really go together because our way
of expressing our love of God often is in the very common day-to-day life with one another.”

Prospective nuns are initiated to the daily rhythm of work and prayer, meals and sleep with the sounding of two bells. One bell is called Peter, for Saint Peter, whom Jesus described as the rock on which the Church would be built; the other bell is named Paul, for Saint Paul, a Jew who persecuted Christians before he was blinded on the road to Damascus and then became a follower of Jesus. “Peter does the most work,” Sister Mary Clara says. That bell signals the start of Mass and summons the nuns working outdoors to the chapel for the Divine Office.

In an early lesson in cultural adjustment, postulants and novices are taught that obedience is a free choice. Sister Mary Nicolette explains that a superior—a Novice Mistress in the novitiate, or the Mother Abbess for the entire community—always first “invites” a woman to undertake a task; rarely would a superior need to word the request more strongly or directly by making a command. A superior might ask, for example, “Would you like to go outside today and prune the fruit trees?” “It’s an invitation so the person can make the free choice to obey,” Sister Mary Nicolette says.

Today, the nuns are amused by anecdotes when previous newcomers simply accepted the strangeness of monastic culture, miscalculated their environment, and exhibited unquestioning obedience to a humorous conclusion.

Sister Joan Marie says that when she first arrived in 1950, the culture was stricter: In the spirit of anonymity, the nuns were not allowed to share personal information about themselves, and they were supposed to begin any verbal exchange with “Dear Sister.” “We still try to,” Sister Joan Marie says, “but we had to say, ‘I humbly beg, sister, would you do this or would you do this?’ Or, ‘I humbly beg, sister, can I have your pencil, can I borrow your pencil?’ We were supposed to say all that. One sister—another postulant—thought that we were saying ‘Honey Babe.’ She thought the Mother Abbess was saying, ‘Honey Babe, would you do this, would you do that?’ That was really funny! I knew that right away; I knew she would never say ‘Honey Babe!’ Well, I knew we were supposed to say, ‘humbly beg,’ ‘humbly beg.’ She was older, see, so I think it’s harder to come when you’re older. I don’t know. That’s just my theory.”

Sister Mary Gemma’s all-time favorite story—“the funniest story I’ve heard since being here,” she says—dates to before her arrival, to the 1950s. At the
time, the novitiate was on the second story of the building, furnished with a large round table for studying. The Mother Abbess told the postulants and novices that she would like the round table brought to her on the first floor. “So all the novitiate sisters were struggling to get this round table down the stairs,” Sister Mary Gemma says. “They were narrow stairways. When they finally got it to the Mother Abbess’s office and she saw, she started to laugh so hard tears were coming down her face! She said, ‘I meant the book!’ There’s a book called
The Round Table
that was up in the novitiate. The sisters just love to tell that story. The Mother Abbess laughed and laughed and the tears were just going down her face!”

A chasm has always existed between secular culture and religious communities. In the lapse from the order’s founding eight hundred years ago to postmodernity, a continental drift has widened the distance between mainstream popular culture and the cultural oasis that is the Corpus Christi Monastery, described by Mother Miryam as “a whole different secluded world.” A fundamental unity of purpose and values prevents any significant culture war within the monastery between women hailing from different eras of the past century and different experiences around the globe. When Sister Mary Nicolette was a novice alongside women her mother’s age, she felt an unexpected kinship she does not think would be possible beyond the enclosure. “We shared the same ideals, and we were striving for the same thing—living the same life—and so what was dearest and closest to our heart was what we shared, and so that kind of transcended any kind of generation gap as far as what we were striving for,” Sister Mary Nicolette says. And yet it is no small feat to knit together several generations of women from a range of personal experiences, who departed their own versions of contemporary culture. The difficulties have intensified over the centuries for would-be-denizens willing themselves to release their fascination with what popular society suggests is significant.