Dedicated to God (30 page)

Sister Maria Deo Gratias recalls that once, possibly on her first day in the psychiatric ward, she was told that a woman, accompanied by police officers into the emergency room, had been found “running around on a billboard, hardly any clothes on, just really drugged up.” “They brought her into the unit and then, like dummies, they took the cuffs off. She ran all over and I’m trying to calm her down.” When the woman was finally subdued, the woman asked Sister Maria Deo Gratias, “Why aren’t you wearing a long habit like the sisters used to wear?” Sister Maria Deo Gratias laughs. “I said, ‘See! See! Now I’m getting into trouble because I don’t have a habit long enough!’ ”

Raised in a Catholic family that built their own cottage together, stone by stone, Sister Maria Deo Gratias was an independent child who defied her mother when she announced in the sixth grade that she intended to become a nun. Today, she appears to be a well-adjusted cloistered monastic nun, casually indifferent to whatever might fall in her path. “When I enter a new experience, I guess I don’t expect anything,” she says. “I just say, ‘What is there? I’ll find out what is there when I get there and I’ll go with the punches, go with the flow.’ ” Sister Maria Deo Gratias might be a spiritual pragmatist in her efforts to participate in the redemptive work of Jesus on behalf of humanity. “I just fell in love with God, and said, ‘Whatever you want, I do,’ ” Sister Maria Deo Gratias says. “That’s just the way I came about it.” She says that since she didn’t have any expectations when she came to the monastery, no hopes were ever dashed. “There was nothing to get disappointed about,” she says, “because I didn’t know what the life is. But I just know that I’m called to be a cloistered contemplative in this particular community. And so I entered and whatever unfolds in my training as to what it means to be a cloistered contemplative nun, I’m learning that.”

More than two decades after entering the Corpus Christi Monastery, Sister Maria Deo Gratias says she still catches herself walking too fast in the corridors at the alert pace she kept in the psychiatric unit. She reminds herself to slow down, to enter into the silence that is the presence of God: “Wait. Where I have to go isn’t an emergency.”

In Sister Maria Deo Gratias’s life devoted to prayer, she asks God to “give the special graces and the nudges you need to think things out. And I think it’s a very important role that I can’t take for granted. I’m only an instrument, as each of us sisters are; but we have the responsibility to be good
instruments in our apostolate of prayer. And God does give extra graces when you ask, but a lot of people don’t think about asking. So even those who don’t call us and don’t contact us in any way, that don’t believe in us, we can touch their hearts. It’s really a privilege to live this life and I think we get more than we give. That’s definitely true. He didn’t have to call me, but He did, and I wouldn’t want anything other, so I’m really grateful God called me! You know, I would not choose another life.”

Aware that she is subject to “the human condition,” a fragile and imperfect state, Sister Maria Deo Gratias does not cling to anything too tightly, including her own perceptions of life, others, and herself. She readily accepts that she will not see the full, or completely clear, picture this side of heaven. “You stand in the truth. And the truth sets you free,” Sister Maria Deo Gratias says. “I am who I am regardless of whether you think I am that way, or not that way. I am who I am. And I may even come to realize I am not who I think I am, and that’s where my growth comes in—you know, I’m fooling myself, and I’ve got deeper growth to go because I’m seeing the truth that isn’t the truth. So I have to be humble enough to say, you know, I don’t have it all together here. I have to go back to the drawing board and say, ‘Lord, help me to know myself so that I can know you more.’ There’s that sense of openness that even though we stand in the truth, I still may not be seeing the whole truth. We should always, until maybe ten minutes after we die, always see ourselves with that possibility—that we may not have the whole truth, that we still have things to learn. And be open to life, whatever comes your way—to be open and respond in a charitable way, in a virtuous way, in response, no matter what it is. I think that’s where true poverty lies.

“So we always live like on the pilgrimage to heaven. Then, in heaven, I’ll say, ‘I’ve arrived.’ But until that, I haven’t arrived yet. I still have growing to do.”

Sister Mary Nicolette says,

Like we always say, the Church is composed of human beings who have faults and are sinful, so naturally there’s going to be a little bit of that in religion. We’re all fallen, so to speak. But I think looking at the life as we strive to live it, our rule of life is really living the gospel so if you look at Christ in the gospel, there’s nothing narrow-minded about Him. That’s the ideal. That’s what we’re trying to live and what we’re trying to imitate and take on. And it’s very simple—the gospel life. That’s our Rule. Our rule of life is to live the gospel for our Lord Jesus Christ, of our Lord Jesus Christ, and plain and simple without any alterations, without any adaptations. And what it comes down to is that—there won’t be a narrow-mindedness the more and more converted and the more and more changed deep in our heart we become, because, naturally, we all come like that. But the more we grow in Christ the more we shed that off and become more embracing and more loving.

The maximum age for women entering the Corpus Christi Monastery is forty years old. This criterion was raised in recent years on account of the dwindling population. After she first visited the Corpus Christi Monastery, Jenny called one other monastery in the hope of scheduling a visit, but she was turned off by what sounded like a standoffish tone when the nun learned her age. She was welcomed into the fold at Corpus Christi, which made an exception in accepting her when she was forty-seven.

Believing quite fervently that she belonged in this foreign subculture, Jenny gave her family everything, including her Oldsmobile and control of her checking account and retirement savings. “When I came I didn’t have any questions. I didn’t have any doubts: ‘Did I do the right thing?’ ” Sister Mary Michael says. “It was really funny. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t have any doubts—from the day I came. And it was awkward. I had to learn to chant the Office. I didn’t know how to chant the Office and I had to learn to do all that. I stuck it out. I just knew I was supposed to be here so whatever happened, happened. I never had any doubts. I felt so much inside of me that God wanted me here. I knew this. I don’t know why, I just knew this. So everything that came along, I just accepted this was the way of life. This must be what God wants because He asked me to come here. I just didn’t question things. However they lived it, that was fine. It didn’t bother me. But I do know some that come and they want to know, do we do this, do we do that, and it makes a difference to them. Well, I didn’t. I just knew I was supposed to be here and so I accepted things. I know for some it was harder, but for me that was an advantage because I didn’t question everything: ‘Why do they do things that way?’ ”

In adjusting to the pace and purpose of the monastery, Sister Mary Michael exhibited the same easygoing temperament her family expected from her. She admits, “If God didn’t really call us here we couldn’t live this life. You can’t live it unless you’re really being called. Because it’s so
different—countercultural—especially today when so many people are so self-centered. You give up everything, really.”

The transition was excruciating for her family and her colleagues. Sister Mary Michael remembers them asking her, “Why do you want to throw your life away? What will you do all day?” “It was just like somebody died when I came here. It was that hard,” she says. “And I can see it because if it was the other way around I would feel the same way, I’m sure, because it’s hard to understand. You’re cut off. You don’t go home anymore. It’s very hard to understand. It’s all faith.”

Her colleagues did not want her to leave and phoned her sister for updates. Still, they celebrated with her at a going-away party, eating a cake decorated with a depiction of a nun.

Sister Mary Michael’s younger brother, whose children struggled to comprehend her metaphysical changes, yielded eventually when she insisted that she belonged in the monastery. “They thought they should let me go and try, that I’d probably come back home, I knew I wanted to come here,” she says. For years, every time they visited, Sister Mary Michael remembers their tears. “They depended on me in some ways, financially—not totally, but I did help them a lot because they had three kids. They missed me, too, but financially it was hard for them.” “You can come live with us,” she remembers her brother telling her. “Why don’t you come and live with us?” Eventually, her brother, sister-in-law, and their children seemed to understand; they yielded their resistance to her choices. “They know that I am real happy here and they even said, ‘We know that you belong here,’ ” Sister Mary Michael says. Her brother’s family, although scattered geographically, with families of their own now, visit once a year. “I marvel at it,” she says. “They’re real faithful. They write all the time.”

Her sister still writes in every letter, almost twenty years after she joined the monastery, that she misses her little sister a lot. “I feel sorry for her,” she says.

Her older brother and sister-in-law visit the monastery but Sister Mary Michael does not think he has made peace with her religious vocation, although his opinion has improved; she remembers that during an early visit he said, “You’re living in the Dark Ages.”

Sister Mary Michael’s mother visited her several times after she became a postulant. “It was hard,” she says, “because she would come and sit here and say, ‘Are you happy?’ And she looked miserable. Of course, she was sick. And
I was content. But it was hard for her.” The two did not talk much during those visits, just sat awkwardly, she says. She learned from her older sister that her mother became “gloomy and grumpy” back home, upset over Sister Mary Michael’s absence. When her sister informed their mother that the situation was not going to change, she says her mother “snapped out of it.” Her health digressed, though, and she moved in with her other daughter. “It wasn’t like I was leaving her uncared for,” Sister Mary Michael says, “because that you wouldn’t do.” Her mother died four months after she joined the monastery. “And again, the grace was there because I didn’t fall apart or anything,” she says.

Sister Mary Michael remembers, as a child, overhearing a conversation between her parents: a neighbor’s daughter had joined a Carmelite order of cloistered nuns. When family brought food to the girl at the monastery, they could not even see her because a curtain covered the metal grille. “That’s the only time I ever heard of contemplative life and it was this kind of on the negative side,” Sister Mary Michael says. “They couldn’t understand it, how she could do that.” Asked if this influenced her mother’s ability to accept her new life, she admits, “It could be.” Asked if this life feels natural to her, she says, “Oh, yes.”

Today, Sister Mary Michael reflects on what she perceives to be the few negative aspects of her life. “What makes a bad day? Let’s see,” she says. “I think it’s mostly community living. You live with the same people in a small area and I think it’s marvelous how we are able to get along that well. You have normal problems and sometimes they seem like mountains, but they’re not—I mean, different personalities. We’re all not the same. So I mean, sometimes you might get on each other’s nerves, little things that are annoying. A lot of that is just living in community and normal problems of community life and struggling with that.”

Sister Mary Michael has considered that she might have wanted to leave the monastery after her whirlwind arrival. “Just think—if I went back, if I went back soon enough, I probably could have gotten the same job I had, but I don’t know that for sure, either,” she says. “At that time, I was forty-seven. That isn’t that ancient. That isn’t
that
ancient, but the longer you stay here, that gets to be scary because what are you going to do, especially with computers where everything keeps advancing and if you don’t keep up with it you’re going to be lost? It keeps changing. So that would be a real problem. It would be scary. What would I be doing if I was in the world? I would be retired, I’m sure. You retire early. I’m sure I wouldn’t be working. I’m glad I’m here because what would I be doing?”

Called
Sister Ann Marie of His Holy Wounds

God never tells you, “I want you to go here, go to Rockford” or “This is where I want you.” It’s an inner feeling. And the call is there. You can feel it. You can feel like you can hear it, and yet if it’s true, why can’t I see?

I just liked to know if God is really calling me or not. That’s the thing. It’s in me, and yet is it? Is it? You don’t see any calling to join this community. You want to see a tangible answer. But God is playing hide-and-seek, you know; it’s kind of like that.

I was born in the Philippines, and I was born in my mother’s hometown, where my father and mother met. And then we moved to Manila, and that’s where my family still is.

I’m the oldest. I have three brothers and one sister. I remember my three brothers were super-active. They loved to play. As soon as we’d get home from school, they’d just throw their things out and go out and play. And my sister used to stay home and the two of us would play with dolls.

When we were young, my father had to go to Vietnam, to work there to help support our family. He’s a civil engineer. He was hired by part of the US government to work in Vietnam. He worked there for eight years, and so my mother was the one who took care of us. One time, my father got sick; they found that he’s diabetic. He was hospitalized there, and so my mother had to be with him; she brought my two youngest siblings with her to Vietnam, and I was left with my brother, the next younger one, because we were both school age. He was in kindergarten and I was in first grade, so we stayed with my grandmother—my father’s mother—in my father’s hometown. It was only a year or so, I think, and then my mother came back, and we were back together. My father continued to work in Vietnam. He came home once in a while, once a year, or every three years. I can’t remember how many times he came home; I was so small then.