Dedicated to God (10 page)

“You know, so many things don’t matter,” Sister Maria Deo Gratias says. “It just matters that we love God. It’s just a beautiful way to live. We all strive to live that way.” She refers to her visual image of nuns standing in a circle, directing their attention to Christ at the center, and conceding their own rights. “When you have somebody coming in that’s not used to that, that’s used to everything revolving around them, as center, you have to say, ‘You have to step on the side with the rest of us and let Jesus in the center.’ But they’re not used to living that way because everything has to be around them. That’s the way the culture is now. When they come into our community, we’re all on this side together and Christ is in the middle. The closer we come to Christ, the closer we come to each other.”

In a process of mutual discernment, an aspirant and her community might discover they do not make a suitable match. “I think more women today have a different idea of what it’s really about,” Sister Maria Benedicta says of religious life and the cloistered monastery. “They are unconsciously seeking something else—acceptance or something else.”

When Sister Mary Nicolette, the Novice Mistress, first arrived as a Poor Clare postulant, she was one of thirteen women training together; of those, seven stayed and professed final, solemn vows. She says this is a high ratio; typically, fewer than 50 percent of women who enter as postulants join the order permanently. When a woman comes to the monastery “for the wrong reasons, or the wrong motives,” Sister Mary Nicolette says, “then obviously they’re not bound to stay, and they can’t stay because it wouldn’t be right. You know, our intention and our motive is a big thing. We could be doing the correct things, living poverty. But if we’re doing it for the wrong reason—‘oh, this sister is going to think that I’m really poor and great’—well, that’s the complete opposite of what poverty is for. You can be living this life for completely the wrong reasons. Or someone might say, ‘I’m going to live perfect poverty,’ but not make it interior, and then it’s completely pointless.”

“Obviously, if you’re staying and this is not your expression, it’s going to agitate you,” Sister Maria Deo Gratias says. “And even if you wouldn’t say anything, the atmosphere is there, and so you don’t want to contaminate the atmosphere with agitation. If the shoe doesn’t fit, you take the shoe off. It’s as simple a thing as that.”

Asked if she reflects on her experience in the monastery as an entirely different milieu, as Sister Joan Marie experienced it, Mother Miryam says, “I wouldn’t see it that way myself at all. I suppose it was. Maybe. Maybe she’s right. I just experienced it as a gradual change. I would have to think about it, but I wouldn’t make a statement like that myself. I really don’t see it that way. I can see it that way and she’s a simple soul. She really is a sweet and simple soul. I could see why she … but I couldn’t.”

Even though Virginia’s father detested the notion that his daughter wanted to become a nun, her mother helped usher her to this place, conspiring to keep secret her daughter’s plans to enter the Corpus Christi Monastery. The mother and daughter tucked behind the couch a few belongings Virginia planned to bring with her to the monastery. When her father discovered the small stockpile and he registered his daughter’s intentions were real, he stopped objecting. “My father—he always said a lot of things, but in the end he brought me up,” Sister Joan Marie says. “He was proud of me, really, but he wouldn’t let on to it. They had brought us up to choose our own religion, so they couldn’t complain when we did.”

When she left home, Sister Joan Marie says she did not think at first to pray for the family she left behind. “I’m afraid I was all wrapped up in myself,” she
says. “It was such a new experience and I thought I was doing something so great. And they all thought I was a saint because I was a teenager and most teenagers were looking for a good time and I wasn’t. I wasn’t. But I soon got that out of me. It didn’t take too long to go out.”

Before she embraced monastic living, and the constant alternation between manual labor and prayer, Sister Joan Marie does not remember ever being asked to pitch in with family chores. “To work was a shock,” she says of the monastery. Having overcome bronchial pneumonia and the measles shortly before she entered, Sister Joan Marie says, “Mother kind of babied me, I guess, and I just laid around and read books before I came.”

Still, she found stability, if not comfort, in the cloister. “I always loved everything about it,” Sister Joan Marie says, “because, I guess from having trouble at home, I was so grateful to be away from that—that emotional upset all the time. I think it made it seem like heaven, in comparison, except I was young; that was the trouble. I mistook things. I was afraid. I was scared to death to ask anything. I thought they would send you home. I was scared I would get sent home; mostly, I was scared of that than anything else.”

As she struggled to figure out what was expected of her and scrambled to keep up with the physical demands, Sister Joan Marie was stricken with a series of illnesses. “You think the harder you work, maybe they’ll keep you,” she says. “No.”

She enjoyed preparing meals, but she was domestically deficient. Her mother never taught her to cook. Believing she needed a break from their troubled family life, Virginia and her brother were encouraged to play outdoors. When she was assigned to work alongside the monastery’s cook of fifty years, she failed to measure up. “I did more or less whatever she told me,” Sister Joan Marie says. “I tried. But then I got the pan in the wrong place and there was always something I was doing wrong. I tried to write down everything she was doing to learn to cook. She said ‘Sister …’ She didn’t like it. She wanted me to work, not write things down. She said, ‘Sister, you’ll never be a cook because there’s always somebody that comes that will know how to cook.’ And she was right.”

In time, Sister Joan Marie learned that for years after she left home, her mother continued to set her place at the dinner table every night in front of a long-vacated chair. Virginia’s absence was observed daily. Decades the wiser, Sister Joan Marie interprets the experience of loss from a parent’s perspective: “I think what was hard was when they got home and you weren’t
there. We went to a new life, thinking, ‘Each day is new,’ you know, and each day you learn something new. And here they are left with an empty nest. It’s almost like a death. They’re left empty until you write your first letter. I think once they have visits and they come, then they get adjusted, then they realize that you’re happy, and then they’re happy. But it does take time, I’m sure.”

After sixty years in the monastery, Sister Joan Marie cannot say for certain if she has adjusted to monastic living.

When you get older, it gets a little easier. Seems like. I mean, now I’m not too sure yet. I’ve been sick so long.

I think the beautiful thing is praising God. And you’re called to that seven times a day and at night. But that’s the hardest. That was the hardest for me because I had to break my sleep. And I couldn’t. I had a hard time adjusting to that. In fact, I thought they were going to send me home because of that. I just slept. In fact, I still do at Mass because I couldn’t break the sleep. It wasn’t my cycle. Anyway, I had a hard time with that. I guess you have a hard time with everything when you first enter. Well, I think you just think more of God, what He got out of you. It wasn’t much. And pleasing Him and praising Him—and you’re happy that you were able, that He let you do that. Nobody else can take the time. And it’s not so much the work; the work is more of a penance. Any poor person has to work, and so that’s part of the life. But that’s part of the life in the world, too. I would have had the same trouble. Had the same, maybe more….

A lot of it was to find out that you are your biggest enemy. Yourself. To realize that took a long time. I was pretty critical of others, and you think, “Well, they shouldn’t be doing that. They shouldn’t be doing
that.’ ”
You have to look, “Well, am I always on time? Am I always … ? No.” When you really try to see yourself, you realize they’re doing pretty good. And, you know, in sickness and everything else, they can keep going. And can you? No.

From within the same fourteen acres, Sister Joan Marie’s perspective on the world, herself, and God have changed. “You get a different view of things,” she says. “The whole thing is terrific, sort of like what God must feel sometimes. You take in the whole world. I think you kind of get God’s view of things, because you see all these terrible things to pray for. There’s plenty to pray for. It’s a wonder He doesn’t destroy us, but He loves us. Loved us
all. Love makes it seem easy. And it was easy, when you think of it, compared to what He did for us—the crucifixion. We didn’t have to go through that. Nobody could. Nobody could. Really, He spoils us more or less. We’re spoiled little children, especially us, because we’re in the cloister, because we’re His, because we belong to Him entirely. We gave everything up for Him. I guess He spoils us in many ways.”

Sister Joan Marie lists what she calls her “consolations”: The monastery’s pet dogs that “keep us going,” along with a cat that turned up in the dump-ster. These are some of the ways that God has provided. Sister Joan Marie adds that the nuns do find joy in their lives. “When we celebrate we really celebrate,” she says. “There’s no limit. I mean, according to our life, there’s no limits.”

Still, she does not think she can ever expect, in this lifetime, to acclimate to the rigid structure and the severe Rule of Saint Clare. “It’s just a supernatural life and it’s not natural,” Sister Joan Marie says. “You would rather live a natural life. The body would rather sleep when it wants to sleep and forget the bells. It’s just so different. You really have to have a supernatural outlook; otherwise, you can’t persevere. And you have to keep it. You know, you have to somehow realize that there is an afterlife and you’re going to get rewarded. And it’s going to be nice. It’s going to be wonderful. All your dreams are going to come true, but not until you die. You have to die first.”

Called
Sister Maria Deo Gratias of the Most Blessed Sacrament

My mom was a re-weaver. She mended clothes at home. She went to school when she was sixteen in Milwaukee to learn this trade. It wasn’t real common. Most of the people that called themselves re-weavers didn’t really re-weave the cloth. She was a re-weaver in the true sense of the word, in that she re-wove cloth that she’d take apart from the hem. Under the lining, there would be cloth that she would cut out and she would fray the edges, and then she would re-weave each thread into that so you didn’t see the hole. She did a superb job. She had an art that not many people had.

Different customers would go to different re-weavers and they would do a patch. And then it’d come off. She never advertised. She always had enough work because people would see her work, and they’d say, “We’d like ours done.” She did it in her own home. She did that purposely because she wanted to be there when the kids came home from school.

She wanted us to take it up and I tried, but I don’t have good eyes and you had to have good eyes for that. I was born with a very high nearsightedness. In fact, when I was born, I would scream every time that I was fed, and Mom and Dad were just frantic, trying to figure out what was going on, trying to find out what was wrong. And no doctors could find anything. All of a sudden Dr. French says, “Did you ever check her eyes?” And Mom found out I couldn’t see the bottle until it was an inch away from my face, and then I screamed because it was there. That’s how they found out that I needed glasses. Of course, I was put in glasses when I was two years old. It was really a real trip for my mom to try to keep glasses on a little kid because I was quite active. I’ll never forget, when I was older—I must have been in third or fourth grade—we were helping Mom clean up the attic and we found those glasses and my sister said, “Mom, look at these glasses. Aren’t they cute? They’re little!” My sister Mickey said, “They’re a
doll’s glasses.” She said, “Whose are those?” And Mom said, “Those are
my
dolly’s,” and then she pointed at me. Those were my glasses that I wore when I was two and three years old. That was kind of clever: “Those are my dolly’s.”

We came from a very good family. It wasn’t overly Catholic. We went to Mass every Sunday. Other than that, we were a very good, very close family, but we weren’t overly religious.

My vocation is quite unique because I have the exact day that it started: It was a Friday afternoon at a quarter to three. We were at spelling class in sixth grade. We had just taken our test and we were checking the answers. The teacher had a little extra time, so she was writing on the board the different spellings. At a quarter to three, all of a sudden, I got this inner desire: “Go to church.” I didn’t pay too much attention. But it was very strong. I looked at the clock and my heart was pounding. It was, “Do I go? Do I don’t?” Back and forth.

The inner voice was getting stronger and stronger. “Go to church. After school, go to church.” Three o’clock, the school bell was going to ring; we were going to get out. I thought, What am I going to do? So I thought, I’ll go.

My sister and I usually walked home together. I thought, “How can I tell her I’m going to church?” I told my sister that I was going to stay after school for a little bit. She said, “Why? Did you get in trouble?” I said, “No, I want to stay after for a little bit.” She kept on me, “Well, what’s the matter?” I said, “I’m going to go to church.” “To church?” I said, “I don’t know myself. I don’t know anything about this. I’m just going to go to church. So then you just tell Mom that I’m going to be late. I’m just going to go to church for a while.”

Well, then I went to church and I knelt down before the Blessed Sacrament. It’s very hard to put something like that into words, but two hours went past in just a flash and I experienced God as I had never experienced Him before. It was just awesome to experience God that way. I knew I would be His the moment I knelt down. It’s very hard to put into words. It wasn’t that I didn’t see anything; it was more of an experience of God in one’s heart and that you knew He was speaking to you—that inner sense of His presence, there in the Blessed Sacrament. It was very, very, very real. It wasn’t so much an emotional trip or an experience. I had experienced God in such a way that I wanted to give my life totally to Him and there was that firm desire to be
His alone. And that was it. It was just that experience with our Lord that I came to know Him as a person and wanted to give my life totally to Him.