Dedicated to God (14 page)

“I had a few minutes where I thought, ‘What am I doing? I’m crazy.’ I had moments that I wavered. You get cold feet. But when you get past moments like that, there was just a real eagerness; I know this is it, I’m not going to let anything stop me—fear or the uncertainty.”

Sister Mary Nicolette repeats and laughs at another nun’s joke, that a few of them who did not finish college become members of the Dropouts for Jesus Club at the monastery. Her new life, her hidden life, began when she gave up her shoes and was given a new name. Sister Mary Nicolette is not, in fact, this cloistered contemplative nun’s real religious name. Humility is integral to the Franciscan spirit, and anonymity is treasured as a virtue of the enclosure. Sister Mary Nicolette is the name she chose as an alias, a condition for disclosing this story of her life.

Sister Mary Nicolette discovered when she entered the monastery that God indeed equipped her to live as a cloistered monastic nun when He called her. “It’s a mystery,” she says. “There’s really no way to be able to explain that, but when you get the vocation, you get the strength to do it. So it was a sacrifice to leave my family, and it was a sacrifice to leave everything, but at the same time there’s something so much deeper that fills you. It’s like
it makes up for everything else. It makes up for that sacrifice. And you know that it’s worth it. There’s a reason for it and it makes it all worth it.”

Since entering the monastery, Sister Mary Nicolette has heard from the friend she argued with in college about evangelism. He wrote to her that he understands the point she was trying to make: Someone can have an impact on the world quietly, behind the scenes, praying for souls and for the conversion of souls, praying that a missionary will speak the right words at the right time. Sister Mary Nicolette says, “You need both. You need the prayerful support of the religious—of cloistered contemplatives—to support those who go out and evangelize, to prepare the way for them so that people to whom they are speaking will be receptive. And a lot of times that’s only going to come from someone praying for them. We don’t know who they are, of course, but we can pray that souls will be receptive to God’s message.”

Ironically, this worldly woman does not know the layout of the city beyond the cloistered grounds. She does not know the neighborhood just past the monastery’s stone wall. One winter night, when traffic was light, Sister Mary Nicolette went outside the wall with a novice to shovel the driveway and the parking lot next to the Shrine of Mary. A car stopped. The driver asked the two for directions. Sister Mary Nicolette smiled and told the driver, “We don’t get out much!” She imagines the driver might have been searching for a street around the corner from the monastery, but she had no context for her physical environment.

Having embodied her gifts and hopes in a life she did not realize she longed for, Sister Mary Nicolette says that her question to God as she debated, internally, the veracity of her calling—if He really knew her personality, if He might be placing impractical demands on her God-given temperament—has also been resolved. “That’s the thing,” Sister Mary Nicolette says. “He knows us better than we know ourselves.”

Although claustrophobic, Sister Mary Nicolette has never felt restricted in her private seventy-eight-square-foot cell, or in the 25,000-square-foot cloistered monastery, or within the fourteen-acre enclosed complex.

Sister Mary Nicolette, who once hoped to have a family as large as the one she was born into, believes her desire for motherhood was not abandoned, but satisfied in the cloister, which she describes as a “powerhouse of prayer.” “I love the whole idea of spiritual motherhood, that we’re the spouses of Christ—another name for sisters—and our fruitfulness in the Church is to bear spiritual children,” she says.

“That’s one of the things that struck me very much, that struck a chord in my heart, is that you’re not only responsible for a few souls, like you would be in your own family if you had your own children; you would be responsible for
these
souls. But you’re responsible for a multitude. It’s something that’s very deep in every woman’s heart, probably, to give herself for others. I think that’s a part of our nature—to give yourself for others, and even that is fulfilled in our vocation. You know, we’re not physically mothers, but we are mothers to souls. And that’s something that’s very fulfilling in our hearts.” It’s a paradox, Sister Mary Nicolette says: Cloistered nuns leave the world in order to be for the world, albeit absently and anonymously. She has removed herself from the world in order to give herself wholly to others.

During an especially harsh midwestern winter, Sister Mary Nicolette and Sister Maria Benedicta, shoveled for hours to remove piles of snow from the monastery’s premises. During communal hour with the other nuns, Sister Mary Nicolette shared a lesson inspired by their manual labor. She showed them a cartoon she had drawn with the caption, “You don’t have to go to the North Pole to reach all four corners of the world.” It is Sister Maria Benedicta who recalls and tells about the cartoon. “Here,” she says, “your heart can expand to the whole world.”

In her spare time, Sister Mary Nicolette deploys her language skills to translate religious texts. She is translating into English a compilation of writings by Poor Clare nuns over the centuries. The journeys of this thoughtful, seasoned traveler are now entirely internal.

Called
Sister Mary Michael of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary

Both my father and mother were German. We lived right in town, just a little town—five hundred people, and only eighteen in my high school senior class. My dad owned a garage and filling station. They had a little restaurant with one counter, one booth. My mother worked there. I just got in the way.

My dad could fix almost anything. He was a workaholic. The garage was right next to the house, a few steps down, and he was there at all hours. It was hard to get him to come in and eat; he worked very hard.

We were the first ones in town to get a television set. The neighbors would come over and watch on our “snow TV.” You had to put the antennae up high, and all the neighbors would come over when we’d say, “It’s good; it’s clear tonight. Come on over.”

They were good parents. They got along well and it was a good thing my father died first because he couldn’t have gotten along without my mother. I couldn’t see how he could live alone.

They were just always there. My mother was always home. We came home from school and she was always there. Our home was
everything
. You always wanted to be there. Our Christmases were great; we had our tree and the gifts were way out to the middle of the floor. I’d go to our friends’ houses and they didn’t have many gifts, but we always had lots of gifts. We weren’t wealthy, but I never felt I was lacking anything.

I was a tomboy. I should have learned about fixing cars, but I didn’t. And I didn’t learn anything about cooking. My older sister’s a great cook. I don’t know what happened to me. I really don’t. My sister would go shopping and see things in the store and bring things home. Not me; whatever was on the list, that’s what I came home with.

I think there were thirteen years between my older brother and me. And then my younger brother, he was five years younger. It was like two families.
We were always trying to get away from him, when we were doing things we didn’t want him to know, like smoking under the railroad cars. We had a lot of fun. We went swimming down in a crick, a river. We had to track through all this grass and woods to get to this hole—a swimming hole. Then we’d build grass huts down there. Can you imagine? And then we’d crawl in there. I just can’t imagine. There must have been snakes. I’m just petrified of snakes. That would be a good place where we would do our smoking, too.

My family was real easygoing. Even friends I played with, we just didn’t have all their rules. We were fussy kids with eating, but my mother just tried to fix something we liked. I didn’t eat much; I was just in a hurry to go out and play outside. As I was running out the door, I would grab candy. We didn’t have to do the dishes or anything like that. They were good parents but they weren’t real strict. I’d be running down to get my friends to play and they had to finish dishes. Well, we didn’t.

We didn’t have a Catholic school because it was just a small town, but we were good practicing Catholics and went to church every Sunday. Some of the nuns came to teach us in the summertime, and I enjoyed going to classes but I didn’t have thoughts about becoming a nun. Some of the girls from our town would go there to a boarding school for high school, maybe forty miles away. They stayed the week and then came home. My sister-in-law did that. The thought was too much for me. To be away from home, I couldn’t think of doing that at that time. I couldn’t see how the other girls could leave home and go there for school; it wasn’t something I would ever think of doing. It frightened me. I just couldn’t imagine doing that.

During high school, I was a cheerleader. That was fun. We went to all the basketball games and I liked that. In fact, I was a cheerleader all four years.

In high school, I wanted to be a doctor, so I went to the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point for the first four years. I studied a lot and worked hard to get good grades. I wasn’t involved in a lot of things; I was concerned with studies and getting good grades. Then I applied to medical school. At that time, I think there were only seven in the class—just a few—and I was accepted. I guess I had these ideas of helping people and being a missionary doctor. When I went to college, I still went to Mass. Sometimes, I would go during the week. I didn’t have any devotion to the Blessed Mother. I didn’t even pray the rosary after a while. But that all changed later.

My younger brother lived with me in a small apartment when I was going to medical school. He was completely carefree, and I was working so hard
and spending all my time studying and trying to get good grades. Maybe I envied him because he was so carefree. He worked in a florist shop and he had these crazy friends. One drove a hearse!

This was during the Vietnam War, a kind of wild time with a lot of demonstrations. I remember getting involved, and the tear gas, which burns. I went a couple of times when they were hooping and hollering, or they’d be stopping traffic, but I was never that involved. I observed more than I took part. I was against the war at that time. My father was against it because he didn’t want my brother to have to go.

In medical school, you’re assigned a cadaver. It’s in a large container. And to work on it you just crank and it comes up. You start and you work from the outside, every part of the whole body. That wasn’t any problem. That didn’t bother me. You get kind of cold. You don’t think about it too much. It’s something you have to learn to work on. It’s not like you’re thinking this was somebody’s father or somebody’s brother.

I had a real close friend—Bill—in medical school. We worked on the same cadaver. I can remember when we’d finish at night—the fat tissue it gets under your nails–and I can remember a lot of times we’d go to a restaurant nearby.

It was getting into the clinical work, working with people, that I found hard. I don’t think I had the personality for it. I wanted to leave my first year. I was having a hard time and didn’t want to go anymore but my older brother came over and talked me into staying. We weren’t close. We got along okay but we weren’t real close; not like with my younger brother where you can say almost anything and you think along the same lines. My older brother was real nice. He was just trying to help me out.

It was a disappointment for my parents, for my family, because they were going to have a doctor in the family. I don’t blame them, I suppose. It was a disappointment. It was hard to say, “I don’t want to do this.” There was one class I had a hard time with, but I stuck it out. I kept going.

In my third year, I left. It was traumatic. It was hard—the whole thing, telling them you’re leaving and quitting medical school. It was a hard time. I mean, I’m glad I left. I mean, I didn’t want it, I just didn’t want it. In the third year, I guess I was kind of panicky about doing an externship at a hospital. I got panicky over the whole thing and I couldn’t take it anymore. It was too much for me, so I said I want to leave. You had to talk with the head of the different departments. They question you up and down. It was awful.
They try to figure out what’s going on in your head. And why you really want to leave. And they have other ideas. I can remember one saying something about where I was going to go. He was accusing me of something about my parents. I can’t remember—insinuating something about being close to them. I just remember it was upsetting. I guess he thought that maybe I was letting other people control my life; I wasn’t in charge, something to that effect. Maybe he thought I was too close to them, that I couldn’t do things on my own. I just remember it was an unpleasant conversation.

After med school I went to a technical school for a little while to learn the computer. I went to Milwaukee, and I was going to work on a graduate program, but I didn’t carry that through. I stayed in a crummy apartment. Actually, now when I think of it, it was really scary; the apartment I stayed in, they said that somebody was murdered in it. I think it was on a bad side of the city. It was the east side of Milwaukee. Then I went to Chicago and I found work at a large insurance company in the Loop, right on Lake Michigan. You looked out one side and you could see the lake. It was a real good job. I worked there almost eighteen years. That’s where I was working when I got this call.

I liked my job. I didn’t have any reason to want to leave. I really loved that work. I couldn’t wait to get there in the morning. We had “flex time,” so we could come in during a range of time in the morning as long as you put in a certain number of hours. You didn’t have to be there at seven; you could come between seven and nine. And your lunch break wasn’t just boom-boom. Some days it was longer, and some days it was shorter. It was a beautiful job. I just loved it. I was a programmer analyst. We wrote the programs, designed the programs to pay insurance bills.