Dedicated to God (29 page)

Sister Mary Michael, known then to her relatives as Jenny, told the children that in the story of the Fatima children, an actual modern-day morality play, she could identify with the little boy who quit dancing and stopped singing to contemplate quietly behind a bush. She wanted to spend her life praying, growing closer to God. “Just to be nice to me, they would, but they weren’t interested,” Sister Mary Michael says. “Of course, they weren’t going to understand. They were going to lose me. We were real close.” As Jenny’s interests and attention tunneled in a religious fervor, her nieces and nephews complained that she was changing; they distanced themselves from her. “It was like I went overboard and they couldn’t understand,” she says. “I feel sorry for them because I was so excited and I was trying to push this onto them.”

At her niece’s confirmation party, Jenny stood in the hall with the other celebrants. She felt ignored by the guest of honor, but she was not sure the slight was intentional until her niece apologized. “Later, she told me she was sorry she didn’t introduce me to her friends because she was upset,” Sister Mary Michael says. “They were just so hurt because what they had was going to be lost. But they were getting older and they were going to have their own lives pretty soon. But at that time they were still quite young, so this was quite hard for them to let go.”

On weekends, Jenny typically brought her mother to her nieces’ and nephews’ basketball games. She remembers that when she first started desiring the cloistered life, she went to one of the games. “You know how it is in the gyms, with those bands playing and the crowd?” she asks. “I had never noticed how loud and how awful the noise was before. It just seemed so horrendous and I didn’t want to be there with all that noise. When my mother and I were going home, my brother called my sister and wanted to know what was happening. It went on like that; I went up there again a couple of times, and they’d get upset, and I’d try to talk to them, and they’d try to understand.”

Jenny’s family was bewildered by the middle-aged woman they once knew as a tomboy who stole cigarettes from her parents’ gas station store and swiped the complimentary maps to roll cigars stuffed with weeds.

As a medical student in college, Jenny was impervious to dissecting cadavers and remembers, matter-of-factly, trying to scrub her fingernails free of the
fatty tissues that accumulated there before she and her lab partner went to dinner. Jenny dreamed of becoming a missionary doctor, but, fearing interactions with patients and the pressure to diagnose and cure their ailments, she quit medical school after her third year. She says now she might have enjoyed clinical research if she had thought to consider that as an option. Her parents, who had claimed her desire to become a doctor, were distressed by word that she was about to drop out, and they sent her older brother as an emissary on a fruitless mission to dissuade her. An advisor, who mistakenly believed that her parents held too much sway in suggesting that she quit, badgered her to reconsider abandoning the program.

Jenny enrolled in computer classes at a technical school and then began working as a programmer analyst for an insurance firm that overlooked Lake Michigan. For eighteen years, Jenny worked in Chicago, commuting from her home in Indiana to her job. She saved money, bought a house, drove a convertible. “I was fortunate to have such a good job and to have something I enjoyed to do so well,” she says.

In her mid-forties, living with her sister and brother-in-law in northwest Indiana, just down the street from her mother, Jenny had a reputation as easygoing and averse to conflict. For the second time in her life, Jenny charted a course in direct opposition to her family’s wishes.

The changes in Jenny began with meager gestures—her reading material now consisted of biographies of the saints—that shifted her path completely. “What drew me was just a desire that God put there inside of me,” Sister Mary Michael says. “It wasn’t anything that I did. It wasn’t anything I was searching for. It just happened. I mean I had this desire to love God. It’s like I fell in love with God and nothing else mattered anymore. It’s like from His side because the desire was put there. I didn’t have anything to do with it, and so it just became stronger.”

Jenny’s family members became bystanders, shocked by her changing values, priorities, and temperament, uncomfortable with the new dynamic in their relationships and their passive status. Jenny’s stamina in the face of her family’s opposition to her fortified spirituality surprised her. “I was really close to my family and it was grace that I could stand up to my family because normally I would say, ‘Well, forget it. They don’t want me to do it, I won’t.’ That was really hard,” she says.

Jenny told her sister of her impending first visit to the monastery only “because I lived with her, so she and her husband had to know,” she says.
“They weren’t real happy about it. It was really hard because they didn’t understand. I can understand because it’s such a switch, such a shock to say you’re going to leave and live a contemplative life. So we didn’t tell my mother. I was gone a whole day or so. We just didn’t tell her.”

Her visit was disappointing: “It seemed like everything was so dark and dingy.” She learned from the Mother Abbess for the first time that there are “even priests that don’t believe in cloistered life. That was a shock. It got late and I was planning on going home that night, but I stayed overnight. I woke up at midnight for the Mass choir to listen. Then I got up in the morning, they gave me breakfast, and I went home. When I got home, I was just kind of confused. I wasn’t impressed,” she says. “But there was still that feeling that I wanted this life.” Sister Mary Michael remembers that her sister tartly—perhaps hopefully—said of her visit: “You expected to see saints flying around.”

Still, she had not thought about home while she was visiting the monastery, and she attributes that to God’s grace. “I know it was,” she says. “I wasn’t wishing I was back there. I was here and I was supposed to be here and that was it. It was like I was real strong inside, I guess, like you’re doing the right thing, whatever had to be done.”

After Jenny returned home, she informed her mother she planned to enter the Corpus Christi Monastery. “No, you’re not,” she remembers her mother saying. But Jenny told her mother, who was terminally ill, “I have to.”

Jenny was drawn to the radical and idealistic roots of the Poor Clare Colettine Order, and she identified with the original mission; she wanted to live as Jesus lived. Sister Mary Nicolette draws strength today from the simplicity and poverty of Saint Francis, who was initially met with disapproval by the approving body in Rome for his community of contemplative friars. “They said, ‘This is just not livable,” Sister Mary Nicolette says. “ ‘It’s just phooft,’ ” she sweeps her hand over her head, signaling the lofty standards set forth by Saint Francis of Assisi. “And they were saying idealistic is not realistic.” Sister Mary Nicolette summarizes the historical account of the exchange that followed and led to the founding of the Poor Clares, the second order of Saint Francis: One wise cardinal stood up and warned the others, “Brethren, beware of saying that we cannot approve this, that it’s not livable, because if you say that, you say the gospel is not livable.” “And no one could argue with that,” Sister Mary Nicolette says, “because Christ gave us the ideal in the gospel. And if you say we can’t live that, you’re saying that
Christ asked us to live something that’s impossible, and that’s not true. So it’s something that’s very on my heart.”

Sister Mary Nicolette matured in a breathtaking scene—the rim of the earth’s crust that is the Alps. She developed, spiritually, during solo hikes in the Italian mountains. A self-professed woman of high ideals, she says, “It was like nature spoke to me of God and I realized that there was something deeper in life than I had ever experienced.” An heir to the eight-hundred-year-old order who still marvels at finding herself free of an incurable disease, Sister Mary Nicolette comes by her romantic outlook rightly.

Sister Mary Nicolette, a visionary, is within prayer’s reach of eternity. She, like all cloistered nuns, is “entirely dedicated to God,” according to the book
Verbi Sponsa: Instruction on the Contemplative Life and on the Enclosure of Nuns
, which is given to each new postulant at the Corpus Christi Monastery to assist in her formation and training. Called to renounce not only “things” but also “space” and “contacts” and the other “benefits of creation” in a “ceaseless straining towards the heavenly Jerusalem,” the cloistered contemplative yearns for fulfillment in God, alone, “in an uninterrupted nostalgia of the heart” toward “the realization of this sublime contemplative ideal.”
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Those who abide by Franciscan virtues submit themselves to a radical way of life. Sister Maria Deo Gratias explains her aim in elementary, yet incredible, terms: “The challenge is to become a saint in the life. That’s the challenge—to give 100 percent each moment of the day no matter how I feel—100 percent in the virtue of charity, 100 percent response in the virtue of my own prayer life, and giving God totally all the facets of our life. If I can just give 100 percent, that’s the challenge that I see.”

Sister Mary Nicolette believes the same hands that struggle against nature’s restrictions should reach for perfection. Sister Mary Nicolette says the gospels give readers the example of Jesus’ flawlessness; the saints proved that it is possible for men and women—nondeities, who are not God incarnate—to attain this: “They made it. They got there. Now it doesn’t mean that they didn’t struggle, but we know with certainty that they reached the goal that they were striving for. And we have their example and that’s why the Church raises them up as examples. That’s all the Church is saying, is that they lived heroic virtue and it’s possible, and that you can arrive at this. And it’s going to be a struggle; it’s going to take your whole life, but it’s not impossible and it’s not in conflict with reality.”

Not everyone—not even all of the monastic nuns at the Corpus Christi Monastery—believes that idealism and a full acceptance of reality can be reconciled. Sister Mary Nicolette describes a recent theological exchange. “We were talking about reality versus ideals,” she says. Sister Mary Nicolette does not place the two concepts on opposite ends of a spectrum or regard them as mutually exclusive, “because I really believe that the reality is the vehicle that leads us to the ideal. I don’t believe that being idealistic is being unrealistic. I wed them together. I believe that the reality that we live should be such that we’re growing toward the ideal and that the ideal is something that can be reached. We’re going to be short; most of the time we’re going to be living short of the ideal because we have a lot of growth to go through before we get there, but I personally reject the idea that being idealistic is being unrealistic. I think the two go together. I think you’re on your way if you’re idealistic.”

The reality of the cloister can conspire to subvert the spiritual pursuit of ideals. Some women are simply not equipped for cloistered monastic life. The principled—and arduous—quest is for those who can cope with reality, who can reconcile the impossible standards and their own limitations with the rigors of the cloister. “When you enter the monastery, the life is structured,” Sister Maria Deo Gratias says. “And so I don’t just say, okay, I’m just going to ‘x’ it out and I’m going off to spend the time walking in the woods. It’s a total giving of yourself. And that time is not yours to ‘x’ off. That’s part of your poverty—that we don’t own anything. And we don’t own the time that we have either.”

Interrupting one’s sleep at midnight for the Divine Office, never again hugging one’s family—all of this is “not natural,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “God chooses the weak to make them strong. He gives them His power to be able to do it. And it’s like, okay, I can do it. And you realize your utter weakness because He has to come in and He has to do it, because we can’t. It’s beyond our own capacity.”

When she was a postulant, in training and learning about the ancient customs, Sister Mary Gemma was nonplussed by her fellow spiritual travelers. “You are very idealistic and you want to keep that idealism, but you’re not quite realistic when you first come because you see the beauty of the monastic life and you expect that everyone’s going to be a saint,” Sister Mary Gemma says. “And then you find out more about yourself. As time goes on, you find out that you have a lot to work on, too. You understand when
you notice faults in others, as you grow in the spiritual life and you grow with your own struggles with your faults, it makes you more compassionate with your sisters. You realize this life is hard; striving for a life of perfection is going to be hard, even though there’s so much joy—so much joy living in community. But it’s hard, too. The religious life is a life of perfection. But you’re striving for perfection. You don’t come perfect; you’re striving for perfection. That’s what you promise when you make your vows. You’re promising to strive to follow Christ, and to become perfect, like He said: ‘Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.’ So our life is a striving for that. But we fail and we get up and we keep trying because we’re human and we have that tendency to fail. That’s just the way life is. The important thing is to get up and to keep trying.”

Sister Maria Deo Gratias believes that the monastic island within a crime-ridden urban area is “a suburb of heaven.” “Our destination is heaven,” Sister Maria Deo Gratias says. “We’re not camping out forever. We’re passing through. Even in this suburb of heaven, it’s not heaven yet. So, therefore, I’m traveling. We’re all pilgrims and coming to that perfect union, which is heaven.”

Disarming in her frankness, Sister Maria Deo Gratias personifies two competing interests: a compulsive industriousness to embody her ideals, and an acceptance of her present circumstances. She sacrifices daily for her beliefs; she also detaches from that which she believes she cannot or should not control or change. Sister Maria Deo Gratias’s last assignment in an active order—working in the psychiatric unit of a Chicago hospital—illustrates her willingness to bend herself, but not her beliefs, to each situation. When this former teacher was asked to work in the psychiatric unit, another religious sister offered to lend Sister Maria Deo Gratias “civilian” clothes, because she thought the modified habit of her active order, which did not cover her ankles, would create conflict with the patients. Sister Maria Deo Gratias dismissed the suggestion; she felt the other nun was already “putting the expectations on” that she could not come into the unit as she was. When Sister Maria Deo Gratias was interviewed by the director of the psychiatric unit, he, too, raised the topic of her hospital uniform. She said she would wear her habit. “I said, ‘If you want me to come into the unit, I’m wearing the habit. If you don’t want me to wear the habit, then I don’t come in.’ I just said it like that because that’s how I felt,” Sister Maria Deo Gratias says. She remembers the director replying, “No, I want you to come in. I’ll give you space.” Sister
Maria Deo Gratias, who says the uniform issue was “rigamarole,” told the other religious sister in the unit that she would just try the post and leave if it did not work.