Dedicated to God (21 page)

Today, tears surface when she describes the challenges the pioneers faced. She knows that the
Little House
books were written for children. But, she says, “They’re so simple and beautiful.” Poor Clare Colettines at the Corpus Christi Monastery do not generally read novels. During the limited time that is unscheduled each day, in between meals and chores and prayers, and when they retire to their cells at night, they sew baptismal gowns or make prayer cards using dried flowers plucked from their gardens to be sold in the store. They read biblical and inspirational texts. Sister Mary Gemma assists in the monastery’s infirmary; her primary charge is the only full-time resident of the infirmary: Sister Ann Frances, bedridden with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. Sister Ann Frances speaks a language the other sisters cannot comprehend. At times, she grows distressed. She demands time and attention, often keeping Sister Mary Gemma from other duties or attending the Divine
Office. To soothe Sister Ann Frances, Sister Mary Gemma reads aloud. Sister Ann Frances smiles—the best smile in the monastery, Mother Miryam says.

At times, it has seemed like Sister Ann Frances might pass away soon, in a matter of months, but each time she has rallied and recovered under Sister Mary Gemma’s watchful eye. Meanwhile, as Sister Ann Frances has become more needy, Mother Miryam says she does not know “quite how to entertain her.” Mother Miryam says that she is happy to visit with Sister Ann Frances, who “talks back a mile a minute,” and even though the nuns do not understand what Sister Ann Frances says, listening appears to comfort her.

“She’s mystifying us,” Sister Mary Gemma says. “She could last a long time yet. She takes a lot of my time, though. I do spend a lot of time with her because she gets confused and she gets restless and it’s best to keep her entertained. I’m good at entertaining, I guess. And I’m pretty good at calming her down if she gets upset. Right now this is the necessity of the community.”

Sister Mary Gemma’s assistance in the infirmary is a blessing, Mother Miryam says; she does not know what the community would do without her. Maybe Sister Mary Gemma’s voice or face suggests a memory. Maybe Sister Mary Gemma remains unfamiliar to Sister Ann Frances, yet she still manages to bring solace.

Like the rest of her community, Sister Ann Frances made lifelong vows to the enclosure. She committed to remaining until she died. And so she stays, even as she no longer knows where she is, no longer understands the symbolism of Communion, or why she must wear the small veil worn by the ill. She may no longer know herself or the vows she made.

Sister Ann Frances enlisted in the Marines during World War II. Ever since she transferred to the contemplative order from an active order, she has depended on others. While the public relies on the Poor Clares for prayers, the nuns pray for donations and gifts for their own sustenance. The cloister’s inhabitants depend on benefactors from the outside world. Doctors, dentists, and chiropractors pay house calls to the monastery. Locals donate food. One delivers salmon he buys in Chicago. Other food requires effort to salvage, for instance cutting away the wilted parts of vegetables. All of this supplements fruits and vegetables the nuns grow in their gardens. Sister Joan Marie says the donations sometimes appear to be a miracle of redundancy. “As soon as we eat something, the same thing comes in. So it’s miraculous, really!” Sister Joan Marie laughs. “I think, ‘We ate that! It’s at the door! We ate all that!’ ”

Just as the nuns hope for provisions, Sister Ann Frances looks to Sister Mary Gemma, who indulges her love of books, especially children’s stories. “Sometimes it can seem like if you haven’t read the stories for a while, you can tell her mind can’t comprehend what you’re saying to her,” Sister Mary Gemma says. “And of course she can’t express herself at all anymore. But when you start reading the stories to her, somehow there’s some part of her mind that takes it in. She laughs at the right time. She smiles when I show her the pictures. She’s so happy. I show her the picture on the cover: ‘I’m going to read this to you today.’ She remembers and she gets excited. She doesn’t remember what we read exactly, but she remembers the picture when she sees it. It’s so good for her. It’s probably good for me, too, but I do have the joy to care for her and I do have the gift of gab and that’s good for her.”

The
Little House
series and Sister Mary Gemma’s love for the plots and characters have unfurled a new drama, a present-day conflict for Sister Mary Gemma within her own psyche. “After reading those stories to sister, I get fascinated by the history of it,” she says. “So much of the history I never knew before, and so I start looking up things in the encyclopedia, or I’ll go look up on the map to see where this Indian Territory was, which was actually Oklahoma. I get so fascinated with it. I have to be very, very careful that I don’t let it grip me so much that it takes me away from my relationship with our Lord. You admire this family’s faith in Providence. Even though they had these worries, they had a great trust in Providence.”

In caring for Sister Ann Frances and trying to keep her own appreciation for the Ingalls family in check, Sister Mary Gemma submits to the hierarchy of the Poor Clare Order: In living out her vows, Sister Mary Gemma waits until Christmas each year to ask the Mother Abbess for permission to ask her parents for one more book in the
Little House
series. “I have to keep asking myself, ‘Am I getting these books for myself, or am I getting them for sister?’ ” Sister Mary Gemma says, “Because I really do love those books very much. That’s a struggle for me. I often wonder if I should be asking for something like that. Sister is getting to the point she can’t understand anymore anyway. She does all right, but you could keep reading the same book to her over and over again; she doesn’t remember that she already heard it, but she enjoys it. That’s something I struggle with right now. I love books, and stories like that are so interesting to me.”

Even as Sister Mary Gemma recognizes her mixed motives and worries about indulging her imagination, she can hardly wait to read again what
happens next, to learn again how the plots are tidied up, the characters evolved, the conflicts resolved. “We don’t realize how hard it must have been for people who pioneered the United States and made the beginnings of America,” Sister Mary Gemma says.

The Ingalls family left a culture known to them, foregoing comfort and convenience for a life of simplicity and faith. This mirrors her own narrative: Sister Mary Gemma has embraced with monastic life the traditions of a bygone era. Sister Mary Gemma is a pioneer, staking her claim in an unseen world to come. “Here in the monastery, we’re living in a different world than what so many people are living in,” Sister Mary Gemma says. “Because the Christian message is countercultural. What our Lord teaches us in the gospels is countercultural. There’s just no two ways about it. And that’s our vocation. Our vocation here is to live the gospel life to the full. We’re not distracted here, and we have the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, which help us tremendously to live completely for God.” Like the Ingalls family, the nuns are usually barefoot.

Sister Mary Gemma was drawn to enact the ideals and virtues in the Ingalls books—to embrace, generations later and voluntarily, a life of poverty. But although a cloistered monastery strips away many material distractions and creates the space to focus on God, Sister Mary Gemma names a vice: She daydreams too much. She always has, she says, and her grades were poor in school because her mind often wandered from the teacher’s lesson. She believes she missed out on a lot because of these mental flights. When it was time for her to become a novice, Sister Mary Gemma gave one name to the Mother Abbess as her selection for a religious name, not realizing she was allowed to submit three choices. (She was given the English version of the Italian name she requested.) Sister Mary Gemma struggles to stay focused; when the nuns gather for the Divine Office, she says, “something we’re praying will make me think of something else and then my mind will be all over the place before I know it.”

Sister Mary Gemma is accustomed to admitting her weaknesses publicly. During the Chapter of Faults, the sisters confess aloud their imperfections and weaknesses that have defied the Poor Clare customs. Sister Mary Gemma often admits that she talks too much. She loves to talk. She has learned to appreciate silence, yet she is often tempted to speak in the company of others because she is, by nature, social. “It is a paradox, I suppose,” she says of her calling to observe monastic silence. She adds, “God can call anybody,
you know.” It has been challenging for Sister Mary Gemma, now fifty-seven, to live decade after decade attempting to adhere to a strict code of speaking only what is necessary outside of the community’s one hour of daily recreation, when they can socialize. “I did fail in silence many times, and I still do sometimes,” she says.

Sister Mary Gemma entered the order when she was nineteen years old. Before she was Sister Mary Gemma, she was Teresa. As a child, she learned she was placed on earth to love and serve God and that her true home was in heaven. Her father, a strict disciplinarian, imposed many rules on his children. Sister Mary Gemma shares a few of the rules: Do not lie. Sit up straight. “That was one I had trouble with; I was always slouching,” Sister Mary Gemma says. Clean the house before their father arrived home from work. Go to bed on time. Say the rosary every day, and if they stayed overnight at a friend’s house, her mother told them to say the rosary while they fell asleep.

If Sister Mary Gemma’s parents went out and left the children home alone, they were always admonished, “Don’t fight!” “We usually did anyway,” Sister Mary Gemma says. “So we weren’t terribly obedient that way. We weren’t supposed to hit each other, which we did all the time. We were good friends, but we picked on each other a lot.”

When she was five or six years old, Teresa saw a nun for the first time. She was visiting her older brother at school. She learned then that nuns give themselves completely to God; she felt that she, too, wanted to belong completely to God. “I know that I was attracted to her in some way. I thought that’s what God wants me to do,” Sister Mary Gemma says. “I don’t know why I felt that way. Somehow, I knew I had to give Him everything.” Her father approved. “He would have been willing to give all his children to the religious life,” Sister Mary Gemma says. “I think that’s just the way my dad is.”

Her childhood religious inclination waxed and waned through her turbulent teenage years, when desires incompatible with life as a nun stirred. These tensions became tangible when Teresa began sleeping with a photograph under her pillow of a boy she had a crush on, a boy she says did not know she existed.

“I was actually afraid of falling in love because I felt—I felt so sure God was calling me,” she says.

As Sister Mary Gemma describes it, she was on the fence, sometimes wanting religious life, sometimes wishing desperately against that fate and crying herself to sleep, hoping it was not her destiny. On Christmas vacation during her sophomore year, Teresa read a spiritual book that served as the tipping point. Sensing that God was “calling me in a deeper way than I felt as a child,” she reached under her pillow, tore up the photograph, and threw it in the wastebasket. She felt happy then. This relief stayed with her when Christmas vacation ended, school resumed, and a friend, in tears, told Teresa that her own boyfriend had broken up with her over the holidays. Teresa thought, “Well, Jesus, I know I never have to worry about you turning your back on me.” Feeling pulled back and forth by her own unsteady whims until that point, Sister Mary Gemma says, “I knew I didn’t know whether I could trust myself, but I knew I could trust Him.”

The summer after high school graduation, Teresa went to work at a nursing home. When an aunt—her godmother—invited Teresa to stay at her home in California for the winter holidays, Teresa imagined what the trip might yield, particularly how her life might unfold if she met a young man while visiting her family on the West Coast.

Teresa’s aunt was married to a doctor; Teresa admired the family’s home, their parties, and their outgoing personalities. Her aunt asked if she was sure about her vocation to the religious life. “Don’t you want to get married?” Sister Mary Gemma remembers her aunt asking. “I said, ‘Well, I do feel that way,’ ” Sister Mary Gemma says. Her aunt replied, “That’s a sign that you don’t have a vocation.” Another aunt interjected: “That’s not a sign. That’s a sign that she’s a woman. She could still have a vocation.” Asked if she wanted to be home for Christmas Day or stay longer in California, Teresa answered slowly, “I’d like to stay here.” Before she finished her sentence with “but I think I should go home,” her aunt said, “Well, then, you’ll stay here.” Teresa was shy, afraid to offend her host. She also felt persuaded to the other side of the fence—the possibility of marriage and a family. “I was hoping something would rescue me from going to the monastery,” she says.

Her reverie was temporary. It ended when Teresa phoned her father and explained she planned to stay with the relatives for the holiday. She added she might wait to enter the monastery. Sister Mary Gemma remembers her father saying she should do what she felt she should do. “Somehow, even though I didn’t say much, he knew I was struggling and he was afraid I would end up
not following my vocation,” Sister Mary Gemma says. “He understood me. My dad and I were real close spiritually. We had an understanding.”

After talking with her father, Teresa regretted agreeing to stay in California. If she joined the monastery, as planned, this would be her last Christmas with her parents and siblings. Teresa told her aunt she was homesick. An airline strike almost prevented her return home, but the strike lifted on Christmas Eve. One of just a few passengers on the flight, Teresa cried en route to Illinois, knowing she would probably never see her California relatives again.

Her father installed new carpet in her bedroom. Her parents settled on the Christmas gift after considering she might continue living with them and find a job, or leave for the monastery. “I really think this is a temptation,” Sister Mary Gemma remembers her father saying. “If you have felt God calling you so often, you should really enter the monastery and just put the temptation behind you. You have felt this call for so long.” He may have understood her heart, Sister Mary Gemma says. But in struggling to define her father in precise and charitable terms, she says, “I should say he’s Irish. That makes me Irish, too. But he—how shall I say about my dad? He’s delightful. Really, we tease him so much. He’s overly optimistic, I shall say.