Dedicated to God (2 page)

In tracing the lineage of this project, it seems constructive to describe my methodology by way of analogy. One day, while interviewing Sister Mary
Monica, I asked if she could talk about her notions of or experiences with mysticism. She mentioned a movie about Saint Faustina—“a true mystic,” Sister Mary Monica said, “in that she gave up everything to be united with Christ.” She continued: “So there it is. A true mystic is someone who gives up everything to be united with Christ, and so in that way we all can be mystics.” She told me that in the monastery I should not expect to hear a lot of stories about mystical “experiences,” that if anyone did have those experiences, she probably would not want to advertise it. Referring to Saint Teresa of Avila, who is said to have searched for God in her daily routines (in the “pots and pans”), Sister Mary Monica said, “I have to say I’m really plain Jane. I think that God speaks to me in the pots and pans. I think God is training me through the everyday life. I just need to be faithful where I am.”

In a similar way, I think that the practice of oral history can be described as tending to the everyday, the “pots and pans.” Other practitioners in the field of oral history have advised:
Consider the silences, the voices seldom heard in popular culture
. Cloistered nuns pursue anonymity and hiddenness; their tombstones do not document their birth names or birth dates. To respect the nuns’ value of hiddenness and their desire for anonymity, we agreed that each would choose a pseudonym; their actual religious names would not be used. (At the Corpus Christi Monastery, the Mother Abbess assigns each woman her religious name; a postulant can submit three suggestions, and she is renamed during the Clothing Ceremony, when she progresses from postulant to novice.) The Vicaress chose the name Sister Maria Deo Gratias, Latin for “thanks be to God,” because, she said, “If you’re asking me about my vocation, that name depicts it. It’s ‘thanks be to God,’ because it’s all God’s doing.” The nuns also selected pseudonyms for their childhood names, for their lives before they were given religious names. One chose a pseudonym that was her actual childhood nickname; another chose the name of her niece.

After Mother Miryam and the community agreed to this project, each member decided whether or not she wanted to participate. One of the nuns explained her hesitancy to be interviewed but how she was compelled to take part. “Mother Abbess asked me,” Sister Sarah Marie said. “I was like, ‘Oh!’ Just from the depths of me, ‘Oh, Mother, no. What does she want to talk to me for?’ ” Mother Miryam told Sister Sarah Marie that I had seen the vase of roses on the ledge of the grille and had learned that when Sister Sarah Marie’s mother died, in that same town, her body had been brought
into the parlor for one final goodbye. “I was moaning and groaning,” Sister Sarah Marie said. “So I said, ‘You pray about it, Mother Abbess, and whatever you want me to do, I’ll do. If you want me to talk to Abbie, I’ll do it. But if you don’t want me to talk to Abbie, I won’t. You know my gut feeling is I’d rather not. But the only way I’m going to know God’s will on this is through you, so you let me know.’ So she told me, ‘I think you should talk to her. I think maybe she’ll understand our life a little bit more.’ See this is what’s wonderful about these superiors.” Sister Sarah Marie then said that she teased the Mother Abbess that “God’s going to get you.” “But it was up to her to decide,” Sister Sarah Marie said. “She knew my feeling, my gut feeling; I’d prefer not to because we live a hidden life. This is so precious to us. But Mother Abbess can see an insight into this, sees something more than I can see. She has a bit more direct contact with God than I do. Fine.”

If Mother Miryam convinced Sister Sarah Marie to participate, Sister Sarah Marie then encouraged others to take part in the oral history interviews. Often, by way of introduction, the nuns would greet me for the first time and say that they heard I was not what one expects of a journalist or reporter or interviewer. One nun described herself as “social” and told me, “I love to talk”; she seemed especially gratified by the connection afforded by this project and she arranged, within the constraints of her community, more visits (telling Mother Miryam and me that she would be happy to meet with me again, if I would like).

Once, Sister Mary Nicolette broached me with a dilemma. I knew by then that the nuns relied on a number of individuals for daily provisions, such as a weekly donation of milk, an occasional box of fish, and help driving to appointments. Sister Mary Nicolette had asked permission from the Mother Abbess to share with me that in the past the nuns hand-poured candles to sell in their gift shop; they needed a precise thickness of wick and had lost their old connection. I told Sister Mary Nicolette that I could research this on the Internet and bring her the results. She hesitated, not wanting to impose on my time. I assured her it was no trouble. I found a supplier, purchased the wick online for less than $20, and had it shipped to the monastery. When I visited again, I declined the nuns’ offers for reimbursement. I did this without hesitation or much reflection at the time. I believe in retrospect that this gesture impacted the dynamics of trust. This may have been, in anthropological terms, my contribution toward a gift exchange.

The nuns refer to themselves as “mothers of souls.” As counterintuitive as it might seem, at first blush, that cloistered nuns would choose to participate in a project that brings attention to themselves, they voiced many times the possibility that young women might learn about the cloistered monastic vocation, which could lead to prospective members of their community. Another factor influenced their involvement. Saint Clare, the founder of their order, is the Patron Saint of Television. The nuns express a feeling of responsibility for the world beyond their enclosure, the hope that sharing their own life stories might further their mission as hidden witnesses.

Dedicated to God

Introduction

Left to the human condition, we fail. But when we have a structure and we have God calling us, for instance to poverty, chastity, and obedience, then it’s like a gift. It’s a way of providing us to respond to God more fully. Those are all gifts that we give to God. And in giving those gifts, definitely we receive from Him. He’s not God way out there and He doesn’t care. There’s a personal relationship. So then I say, “I take you Lord for my all,” and I know that God is my enough. I don’t need to give myself in marriage, beautiful as it is.

Sister Maria Deo Gratias of the Most Blessed Sacrament

Like a crack magician, she pulls a photograph from a pocket hidden within the folds of her uniform. She shows no irony and does not register my surprise. She is presenting me a gift, showing me what she looked like before she came here a quarter century ago. She holds up the photo, and then slides it under the metal bars for closer inspection. I see an attractive twentysomething with teased hair and a revealing top.

She places a few more photographs on the ledge in front of me. She is smiling in each, caught midlaugh. She appears to be the center of attention, comfortable in her assigned or assumed role of entertainer. She claims she played the part well: the extrovert who knew how to have a good time.

Sister Sarah Marie, whom I have come to know as direct and self-deprecating—“Italian” is the word she thinks best captures her personality—wants me to study one of the photos and note the difference between her small nose in the picture and the big nose before me now. The reality of her improved features in the photograph is an illusion, she says; she wore makeup back then and knew how to apply it.

Maybe I did not seem convinced before today when we talked about her life on the outside. If the photos do not make the point clear enough, she
states it bluntly: Sister Sarah Marie was “normal” before she entered. This information—not the tangible object before me—is the gift. She wants me to know that she and the other women who joined this cloistered monastery, who made the three universal vows marking all men and women in religious life—vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—along with a fourth vow of enclosure, were once quite average.

In her twenties, when she was known as Tiffany, she intended to get married. “I always got along with men,” she says. “I never had a problem with them. I never had that feminist problem when they opened the door for me. I always enjoyed their company. I always had guys as just friends. It was just natural. There it is.”

Before embracing anonymity, before surrendering her name and shoes and freedom of movement for a demanding life in one of the strictest orders, she and the other members of this community dressed up and went on dates. One wanted to be a “cowboy.”

I have interacted with Sister Sarah Marie on occasion since 2005, as I have worked on an oral history and photography project with her community of cloistered monastic nuns at the Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford, Illinois. Members of the eight-hundred-year-old Poor Clare Colettine Order seek anonymity and observe monastic silence. A metal grille separates the nuns’ enclosure from the outside world. Family members are allowed a limited number of visits each year, always separated by the metal grille.

The calling to cloistered monastic life took many of the Rockford Poor Clares by surprise. It defied their God-given temperament. It violated dreams. It dashed plans for marriage and children. It meant their world would shrink, temporally, to a fourteen-acre campus, so that their minds could dwell on God.

Several nuns volunteered, in the course of the oral history interviews, that outsiders label their life as a form of escapism. They took pains to point out that religious life is not a rejection of the world or its inhabitants; the enclosure is instead a means for embracing humanity, a calling to, not a running from. This is not a place for the faint of heart or for women who could not survive elsewhere in the world. Mother Miryam says life in an enclosure is easier if a woman is functional, or “whole,” and that members should strive for wholeness, as humans, and for holiness.

“You know what you expect?” Sister Sarah Marie asks. “ ‘Yes, Abbie, that’s true, I am in this life and it is beautiful.’ Quiet. Never says a word. Shy. Withdrawn. You expect most women that would come here are introverted, withdrawn; maybe somebody should interview us that is majoring in abnormal psychology. But you have to be normal to live this life, Abbie. You have to be real normal. You have to date, go to parties. Because I think when you enter an enclosure, if you’re abnormal, it’s going to come out—if there’s something wrong. In the active world, you can keep it under for a little bit, if you’ve got a little psychological disorder. Not here, Abbie. Not here. That’s why, I mean, when they think, ‘They must be a little bit dingy to be back there’, it’s just the opposite.”

According to the treatise
Verbi Sponsa: Instruction on the Contemplative Life and on the Enclosure of Nuns
, a publication that is given to all Poor Clare postulants when they enter the Corpus Christi Monastery as part of their formation, a cloistered contemplative yearns for “fulfillment in God, in an uninterrupted nostalgia of the heart,” and with a “monastic recollection” that enables a constant focus on the presence of God, her “journey slows down and the final destination disappears from view.”
¹

Pope John Paul II described the institutes whose members are completely devoted to contemplation as “for the Church a reason for pride and a source of heavenly graces. By their lives and mission, the members of these Institutes imitate Christ in His prayer on the mountain, bear witness to God’s lordship over history and anticipate the glory which is to come.”
²

A daily schedule alternates prayer and manual labor. In the Corpus Christi Monastery, the Blessed Sacrament is not exposed perpetually, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; that would require constant shifts, one member of the community always absent to be with the Blessed Sacrament in prayer and adoration. The community values togetherness, and so the Rockford Poor Clares observe a prolonged exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, with one nun in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament during the day, and often through the night.

The nuns make altar breads that are shipped off to different churches. They tend their gardens, growing many of the vegetables they eat and solving bug troubles by slipping nylon stockings over the cabbage heads. They repair benches in their woodshop, fully equipped after one woman entered decades ago and had her tools delivered to the monastery. A small gift shop sits at the entrance of the monastery, where the Poor Clares sell Communion
veils that a few of them sew, cards that others make with pressed flowers, and rosaries they bead using Job’s Tears grown on their property. They pray, while working on these items, for the person who will come into possession of them. The nuns see the shop as a form more of outreach than of revenue; they depend on benefactors for food and monetary donations. Through the benefactors, their trust in God is realized.