Dedicated to God (23 page)

The back of the pamphlet listed six or seven convents of Poor Clares. I had to choose one of the convents. I went to Sister Michelle and she helped me write a form letter. I said, “How am I going to know where I’m supposed to go?” She said, “You’ll know. I don’t know how, but it will come about.” I said, “I trust you, Michelle. I don’t know how this is going to happen.” So we wrote this introduction to my life, that I was a Felician sister, that I was still teaching, and that I still had a few months to go—in fact, the whole year to go of teaching. “I’m committed to my apostolate here, so I can’t promise anything,
but I want information about your order.” I wrote to Mother Mary Francis in New Mexico, I wrote to two convents in California, and then I wrote to one in Cleveland, Ohio, because I knew that would make my brother happy, in case I was accepted there. Then I wrote here, to Rockford, Illinois. Well, Mother Mary Francis answered and said, “It is our policy not to accept transfer sisters who have another community, especially the many years you spent as a Felician Sister.” She said, “We’re sorry, sister.” I accepted it. In California, they said the same thing: “It is our policy not to accept transfer sisters.” The Cleveland, Ohio, monastery had a number of older sisters that needed care, so they really had to devote themselves to the sisters. They said they would pray for me that I would find a suitable place for my vocation. I wrote all these places just after January. Mother Dorothy answered me in February. She said, “We would be happy to meet you and to talk with you.” That was it. She put in a few other nice sentences. She wrote again every two weeks, just a short note. In March, she asked me to send my life story, why I wanted to come all the way to Rockford. I didn’t know why I wanted to go to Rockford, but I knew I wanted to be a Poor Clare. In March I told her I couldn’t come any time except for during my Easter break because that was the only time I wasn’t in school. That was March 25th in ’78.

I flew here in March; my superior was kind enough. That was the first and only time I flew. My family was not exactly poor, but we didn’t think of flying anywhere. We traveled by train because my father used to work on the railroad, so we had passes. We never flew. It was interesting. It was exciting; especially looking at the clouds, it just took the breath out of me. I loved it, I really did. I was hoping I would fly one other time.

I came here for an overnight visit, made my papers, met the community, and they interviewed me. From all the letters, I guess the Mother Abbess knew me quite well. I entered in July that same year.

I went home, finished school, and then I had to go to my superior and close up things and get my records, my baptismal records, and all the other records I needed—physical and dental, like you have to have. Then I went to my brother and he wasn’t too pleased about it. My father already had passed away. I knew that when Dad died, I knew that if I wanted to do something drastic like join the cloister, I was free. I wouldn’t have to hurt him, or disappoint him, or leave him here alone. I was free. But John just couldn’t understand. He was young yet. His kids were young. The girls were just in eighth grade, sixth grade, and then the two little boys were just small. He
couldn’t get it in his head. My brother was stubborn like a lot of men are. We knew each other, what we were struggling with. He couldn’t understand why I came here, all the way over to Illinois. I could have gone to New Jersey or Cleveland, Ohio. I said, “This is my calling. This is where the Lord wants me. He wants me in Illinois. I don’t think I’d make it anywhere else.” John accepted it. He brought me over, set me up, put my suitcases up, and that was it. It’s not that I appeared heartless or cold, but some people are just like that.

My brother passed away in ’97. That was a struggle for me. I knew I couldn’t go to the funeral. I couldn’t go see him. I could talk to him while he was in the hospital before he died. Mother Dorothy allowed that, because that’s just compassion for the family and the sister. She said, “Pick up the phone and see if you can reach your brother John.” I did, but he wasn’t able to talk that night. He said, “I don’t feel like talking.” That was it. I said, “I’ll call another time.” I knew John. I knew he wasn’t feeling good. He was sick. He was dying. When you have someone that’s very close to you and you know the person and you know the struggles, it’s not difficult to accept his “no.” So then I called my sister-in-law, and I started crying. She said, “Why don’t you call tomorrow night and I’ll be there. I’ll pick up the phone.” We agreed, and I called and she picked up the phone and gave it to John and we had our last talk. About two weeks after that, he died. He died in July, the last day of July. I called sometime in May.

I found it difficult to say goodbye this last time when my family left because it might be the last time. You never know, because it’s so hard to get here—ten hours from Buffalo, New York. It’s a long trip. They write to me. I don’t always answer the letters, but I know that their love is always there for me and if ever anything should happen, if the devil gets in the way too much and I get tempted too much, I could be tempted to go back home. And I know that the door is unlocked. But of course I’d have to find a new place, because they’re moving. I know the door will still be unlocked somewhere else. I would still be accepted.

5
Mothers of Souls

He has not only redeemed us, He has raised us up to the divine life itself. And He couldn’t have done that without becoming human, Himself, because He came to earth. He’s taught us that we can live a divine life, because He has shown us how, by taking on our humanity. And, of course, we have to have His life within us because the divine life itself is out of our reach except through Him.

Sister Mary Gemma of Our Lady of the Angels

The phone calls seem to arrive in patterns: requests for prayers for children with brain tumors one week, couples who want babies another week; threats of divorce one day, financial troubles another day.

The cloistered nuns assigned by their superior to answer calls to this prayer hotline of sorts write notes by hand, and then the names and requests are transcribed by typewriter. Sometimes, the Mother Abbess tapes the list to the doorframe outside her office. Each evening before collation, the Mother Abbess reads the day’s prayer requests to the members of the community so that together they can “share in their pain a little bit,” Mother Miryam says of the callers, and “take it away a little bit by prayer.”

Asked if it is burdensome to hear about tragedies day after day, Mother Miryam says, “Sometimes it gets a little heavy.” She adds, though, that cloistered nuns consider the callers their wards, in a similar way that nurses and doctors must regard their patients. “That’s what we’re supposed to do,” she says. “You know, if we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t be faithful. It’d be like if you left your patients in the hospital and didn’t bother about them.”

And so the nuns intervene on behalf of humanity. They pray for healing, for safe pregnancies and deliveries, for reconciliations, for financial solutions. They are the comforters and caretakers of the world, believing that their own suspended desires and dreams, their directed intentions, their prayers and their penances, can alter the course of history.

Sister Maria Deo Gratias explains that her role as a cloistered contemplative requires that she act as an intermediary, making reparation through prayer or fasting or some other penance for other people’s sins. “There’s a dimension in the spiritual life; where there is much sin committed, for instance in a city, there has to be reparation from man,” she says. “Man committed the sin; man has to make reparation for it. That’s a part of our life; we try to balance out the accountability of others living in sin. And so we make reparation and supplication to love God, because they do not love God. That’s part of our apostolate: ‘They won’t stand before you, God, and so we stand before you, God, in their names so that we can praise you in their names.’ For the whole city, there’s a special spiritual grace that’s given because some people have that apostolate to offer up reparation.”

The nuns are active agents; each endeavors to call forth God’s plan in lives beyond their cloistered grounds. They merely need a prompt—a phone call, a patron’s request, news passed through the Mother Abbess of a crisis. “There’s a sensitivity that we’re kind of the center of the city, trying to supply the spiritual energy that they need along with their own graces, that they receive from God—that extra help to them. They know they have someone backing them up in prayer,” says Sister Maria Deo Gratias, the Vicaress.

“I mean, people have so much faith in prayer. It just makes you really humble,” Mother Miryam says of those who phone repeatedly to ask for prayers or to report rescues from their troubles. “They say, ‘Ever since I asked you to pray for us, everything’s been … ’ ” she trails off, explaining the caller says the tide has turned. “And you think, it’s their faith,” she says. “That’s what the Lord said: ‘If you have faith, it’ll move mountains for you.’ It’s their faith. They just have wonderful, wonderful faith, and people have so much goodness in them to respond.”

“It’s just all in God’s care,” Mother Miryam says of an aging member of the community, though her words could apply to the nuns’ outlook in general. “We watch and care, but just wait and see what He has in store, just in case someone would take off for heaven.” The cloistered contemplative Saint Therese of Lisieux, a nineteenth-century French Carmelite nun also known as “the Little Flower of Jesus,” inspires and directs her spiritual progeny. “She considered our life as contemplatives to be the heart beating, sending out the blood to the other members of the Church,” Sister Mary Gemma says. “That was the way she understood our life and I think that’s probably the best description that I can think of. We’ve had so many missionary priests
come and tell us how much they appreciate our life, because they know they would not be able to convert souls to Christ if there weren’t these contemplative orders. They believe very strongly that the heart of the Church is in these contemplative orders, and that’s why the Church has always encouraged this kind of life.

“I’ve been thinking about these things ever since I was young. I was thinking, ‘Gosh, all those people in the world and so many of them don’t know God and I would love to help. How can I help people come to know God?’ ”

Sister Mary Gemma’s parents were Catholic. Her family’s house in the midwestern countryside was exposed to natural elements, and so Sister Mary Gemma remembers taking shelter, on occasion, from tornados. No one seemed to worry more than she did. She collected the cats and the dogs and made sure that all of her family members found their way to the safety of the basement. “I mostly wanted my family safe, safe in God’s arms in heaven, but I used to often think that I have to have that same concern for everyone because everyone is special,” she says. “Everyone is special to God. I had to have that same concern not just for my own family, I had to have that for everyone—people I had never heard of. Everyone is special. And there’s so much ignorance of God in the world.”

Once, as a teenager, Teresa, as she was called then, went to the county fair with a “whole troop of cousins,” as she remembers it. The eldest, Teresa, was charged with keeping track of her siblings and cousins. “I was counting everyone all the time,” Sister Mary Gemma says. Her mother was unconcerned for the children, Sister Mary Gemma remembers, because Teresa was “taking care.” “She knew I was counting. I could not enjoy that fair at all because I was always counting heads making sure we were all together.”

In this mayhem, Teresa identified her deepest desire. She remembers thinking, “Dad says prayer is more powerful than anything else. That’s what I should do. I should go and pray at the monastery so that I can help all those souls get to heaven. Since I was small, my dad taught us to be concerned about the salvation of souls. He said there’s nothing more powerful than prayer. My dad always taught us that, and so it’s probably natural that I would kind of be drawn to this kind of life.

“It seemed to me there was no better way to help people find God than to live a life of prayer and just pray for the world continually,” she says. “You
can touch any soul around the world. And, of course, we don’t know who we’re praying for actually, but God knows.

“I would guess that’s been a big reason to choose this life; it’s a love for the world, but in a different way. We don’t want anyone to be deprived of the love of God. It was also that I wanted to live an intimate life of prayer with God. But it’s not a selfish life since we want to do it to bring as many souls to God as we can.” In this life, Sister Mary Gemma feels responsible for all of humanity. “I mean I’m limited, of course,” she says, “but I have to do the best I can, at least.”

Sister Maria Benedicta acknowledges that prejudices develop in the course of one’s upbringing; but a life of prayer can erode an inclination to judge others. “It’s called expanding your heart,” she says. “The more you allow God to change your heart and open your heart, the more you realize Jesus went to heal sinners and the tax collectors, you know, the people in the world that others would ask, ‘Why is He with them?’ But you see, God loves everybody. And it does expand your heart to pray. When we hear terrible news stories, we think to pray for the man who did that. I never would have thought of that before. I would have thought, ‘How horrible.’ But it’s like that man really must be suffering to have done that. To realize
that man
has a soul, too. Or woman. And obviously he doesn’t know God. But it is a broadening of your heart. I’m not just cleaning the floor; I’m doing it for God. And you think of all the suffering that people endure and I can do this little thing for God. And He can help those who are suffering. I couldn’t help people in Africa if I was doing whatever sort of a job. But, here, your heart can expand to the whole world.”