Dedicated to God (24 page)

Each woman who joins the Poor Clare Colettine Order takes on a new name; embracing anonymity, she performs her duties before the small audience within her community, and for an unseen, immortal God. “The hiddenness is part of our enclosure,” Sister Mary Nicolette says, “that we’re not to be known to the world, that we are here, we’re here for God and it doesn’t really matter who we are, you know. There’s an anonymity and hiddenness because what matters is what God sees and not necessarily to be known to anyone outside.”

The “hiddenness” of the cloistered monastic life empowers others’ lives, Sister Sarah Marie says. “It’s the little pulled away, hidden, nobody really knows about you, nobody even cares—might not even care to know about you—that does, I think, have tremendous impact.”

Before entering the enclosure, Sister Mary Nicolette knew she would be allowed to leave the enclosure’s premises only on rare occasions. She had heard the mantra: The metal grille does not keep nuns in an enclosure; it is a sign that keeps the world at bay. Sister Mary Nicolette believed that with this separation she could give herself to God completely, paradoxically. “We leave the world in order to be for the world,” Sister Mary Nicolette says. “See, it’s like we’re removing ourselves from the world so that we can be wholly given over to others.”

Residing within these cloistered walls suits Sister Mary Nicolette. “I didn’t struggle with that because I understood it so much as part of the vocation and so much a part of what I desired,” she says. “So it was something I longed for—to give myself and maybe not be appreciated and maybe known in the world and, like you say, disappear into obscurity. Nature—human nature—obviously loves to be known and seen and appreciated. But as far as the vocation is concerned, it’s something that everybody who receives the vocation desires. It’s a part of understanding our purpose, that you desire; you’re counteracting something that is very natural, that’s perhaps not the best to want to be seen and known, and, ‘Aren’t I great?’ You’re denying yourself in a certain way. You’re counteracting that natural tendency.”

“This is where you want the totalness with Him,” Sister Sarah Marie says. “I want to be completely with Him, I want to be totally away from anything that would distract me from my life with Him, from my union with Him.”

Sister Sarah Marie was introduced to the Rockford Poor Clares when she still answered to the name Tiffany. Her mother, a member of the Third Order of Franciscans, taught her only daughter that no tornado ever touched down within city limits because the Poor Clares’ prayers kept the city safe. “My mom, to her dying day, said, ‘It’s the Poor Clare monastery that’s kept Rockford from being hit by a tornado,’ ” said Sister Sarah Marie. “Now others of more knowledge will say it’s the river,” she laughs. “So that’s debatable, if you want to fight the old Italian lady on that!”

Raised to turn to the Poor Clare nuns for prayers, Sister Sarah Marie says that when one of her brothers was sent to serve in the Vietnam War, the nuns prayed him safely through his military service; when a pregnant sister-in-law nearly miscarried, the nuns prayed her through a safe delivery; and when Tiffany was living in Kansas City and her fiancé broke off their engagement, her mother called the Poor Clares, and the nuns prayed the young woman
through that personal devastation. “It was just a constant outlet,” Sister Sarah Marie says of her mother’s prayer requests of the Poor Clares.

But when Tiffany announced her plans to return from Kansas City to join the Poor Clare Colettine Order in her hometown and become a cloistered contemplative, her mother resisted. It was an assault on her mother’s expectations. She knew more than most people what her daughter’s choice—what the vows and the enclosure—would cost. “There would be a line that would be drawn,” Sister Sarah Marie says. “Jesus would pull me even more. Here, you give it all. You give Jesus everything. Even visiting home. Even going to see Mama when she’s sick. Even going to her funeral. Even to go to the wake, just down the street at the cathedral. That’s what the enclosure is and that’s why we treasure it so much.”

Sister Maria Deo Gratias says,

Some people are called to that—to give to a person, and together they give themselves to God, and then they participate in the creation of God in having a family. Others, like ourselves, are asked—or invited, really—to give ourselves to God alone; so chastity, it’s a freedom, because we can give ourselves totally to God and we don’t have divided responsibilities. It’s not a divided love, because you don’t have to divide your attention in such a way that a married person has to. In their life, they fall in love with the person and they want to give that love to each other. We fall in love with our Lord and we want to give that love to God, undivided. We can be concerned with the things of the world, where a married person is concerned with their family.

Sister Mary Clara left home at eighteen; she took a religious name, Sister Eucharista, and became a teacher with an active order of religious sisters in upstate New York. The orphanage also housed neglected children and offspring of divorced parents. Sister Eucharista taught first and second graders. She became best friends with another teacher, Sister Michelle, who knew how to drive. The two would ask for permission to take the community’s car on drives throughout the countryside, sometimes stopping at a lake to watch the sun set and listening to music on a tape recorder; sometimes they asked along older religious sisters who would not have had the chance to go out otherwise.

After twenty-eight years as a teaching sister, Sister Eucharista sensed she might be called to transfer to an enclosure. She showed Sister Michelle a
pamphlet about the Poor Clare Colettines. “Wow,” Sister Mary Clara remembers Sister Michelle saying. “That’s all she used to say when something struck her as different,” Sister Mary Clara says. “She said, ‘Wow, that certainly has a lot in it.’ I said, ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ She said, ‘Is that what you want?’ I said, ‘I think so.’ She said, ‘Really? You won’t ever come back.’ I said, ‘I know.’ ” Sister Michelle reminded her she might never again see her brother John. At this, Sister Eucharista cried. “She was feeling me out,” Sister Mary Clara says. “That’s the way we were, the two of us, and so I reread the pamphlet a number of times. Every time I read it, I knew this was where the Lord wanted me.”

Since Sister Michelle could not dissuade her friend, she helped her draft an application seeking entry to the Poor Clare community. She was accepted, and Sister Eucharista ferried plants on the cross-country drive. “In class I always had plants in front of the windowsills. We always, I always, enjoyed them, so I came with a planetarium with plants in a little fish tank and I think I brought four plants in a box,” she says, remembering the day she arrived more than thirty years ago. “They’re floating around in the monastery somewhere. They might be dead already.”

“Somehow,” Sister Mary Clara says, “it was easy for me to turn my back on the world and just come here.” Poor Clare nuns can correspond with loved ones by letter, and Sister Eucharista is always happy to receive updates from her brothers and sisters-in-law. She does not usually reply, though. “That’s what they always cry about: ‘I’m still waiting for an answer!’ ” Sister Mary Clara says. “Well, I’m a cloistered sister,” she tells them, adding that she’s a terrible writer. “They know I pray for them and I think about them. I say, ‘You don’t need my John Hancock to remind you I’m here.’ So we joke around like that.”

Her first fall in Rockford, Sister Mary Clara was dispatched to the outdoors to work in the gardens. She remembers picking green beans and tomatoes and strawberries and apples, and then hearing school buses stop, within earshot, to fill with children. “If you spend a quarter of your lifetime in a community, and then the Lord calls you somewhere else, naturally your thoughts will come with you—whatever you were doing there,” she says. “That was a special gift I had received from God, to teach the little ones. I just loved them to bits. I really did. Anything I could do for a little child, I would do.”

While she was toiling in the green bean patch one day, there seemed to be an unending procession of school buses. “I thought, ‘When will they finish?
Why won’t they just go somewhere? Just get away!’ ” Sister Mary Clara says. “And there I was, sitting on the ground, on the grass, and I couldn’t hold the tears back. The tears were falling. A sister came behind me and said, ‘Are you all right?’ ” Sister Mary Clara busied herself, pretending she was fine. The other nun persisted. Sister Mary Clara explained that the sound of school buses reminded her of the children she taught. She missed the children, missed teaching them. The other nun told Sister Mary Clara, “By this time next year you’ll be so used to us and you’ll be so used to your new life that you won’t even think of the buses.” The prediction was true, Sister Mary Clara says.

Still, Sister Mary Clara says sometimes a group of children from Catholic schools in the diocese visit. Their chatter and laughter provoke her to ask the Mother Abbess if she can peek into the parlor and look at the children on the other side of the metal grille. Sometimes, the Mother Abbess tells her, “Now, now, you have work to do.” Sometimes, the Mother Abbess teases, “Aren’t you over that yet?” Sister Mary Clara responds, “I’m over it, but I’d still like to see the little kids.” Often, Sister Mary Clara is allowed to check in on the children but “not too often,” she says, “because it’s a distraction for me and it’s something that I have given up. I shouldn’t be that attached to the children. The Lord wanted me to do that over there, and now He wants me to do this over here. I have an entirely different life now.”

Sister Mary Clara thinks the replacement of her work as a teacher with her vocation as a contemplative nun must be similar to the transition from single life to marriage. “It’s the same thing with us,” Sister Mary Clara says. “There has to be a break for your own peace of mind and love, too, because you can’t have two loves. I can love the children, but I can’t have my heart over there, wondering what’s going on over there—if the kids are still growing up, still good, or whatever—and then be here in the monastery and praying the Divine Office. That doesn’t work well.”

Sister Maria Deo Gratias explains:

We are spouses of our Lord, and we said “yes” at our profession and then throughout every day of our life we continue to say that “yes” in a practical way because it’s one thing to stand at that altar and say “yes,” but it’s another thing in the daily nitty-gritty of life to continue to say that “yes” with all faithfulness. And we want to be a faithful community because that gives graces. Because our apostolate is prayer, and God hears the prayer of a holy person, we strive to be holy, to be heard by God, to intercede for all the people of the world, all the diocese, the people of this city and offer reparations for the sins of the world, the sins of the city. So, therefore, in order to be heard by God, we have to be faithful. But it’s out of love. It’s not like: “I have to do this.” It’s, “I want to do this because God has called me into that relationship of love with Him.” And part of that relationship is taking on the responsibility of the life, in saying “yes” all the time.

Cloistered nuns keep watch while the world sleeps, waking at midnight for the first of seven prayers each day. They pray each day for the worst sinner in the world, believing that the worst sinner cannot desire redemption without supernatural intervention.

Their sacrifices make way for blessings, they believe, and so they welcome hardships because increased suffering can yield greater rewards, submitting to “death for the sake of resurrection,” as modeled by Jesus, according to
Verbi Sponsa: Instruction on the Contemplative Life and on the Enclosure of Nuns
.

When her mother died, Sister Sarah Marie was not allowed to leave the monastery. “And it was hard,” she says. “I’m not going to sit here and say, ‘Oh, no, easy come, easy go. That’s the way it goes.’ No, of course, it was hard. But I was closer to my mom and the family spiritually than they were physically present at the wake, at the funeral. I was much closer because I was in our chapel while they were at the funeral. The funeral was at 10:30. I was before the Blessed Sacrament. I was before Jesus, physically present there. I was looking at Him. You see, there was a uniting there. Physically, I wasn’t there, of course, but spiritually I was there.”

She says her family and friends sensed her presence—perhaps a testament to the fervency of her prayers, the faith of her loved ones, and their shared belief that the most trying aspects of her life can be reclaimed. One friend said she felt that if she turned around at the funeral, she would see Sister Sarah Marie sitting behind her.

Sister Sarah Marie’s mother had asked the Mother Abbess if her casket could be carried into the monastery’s parlor after she died so that her daughter could say one final goodbye. In a departure from the cloistered community’s standard protocols, the request was granted. As in life, the two were separated by the metal grille. Sister Sarah Marie could not reach far enough to touch her mother, or to lay the roses that the Mother Abbess gave her in
the casket. Sister Sarah Marie cried. She cried in mourning; she cried because of the distance still between them. The priest walked into the parlor then. Silently, he touched Sister Sarah Marie’s hand. With his other hand, he held the hand of Sister Sarah Marie’s mother. “She was touched by me,” Sister Sarah Marie says. “Our Lord works. You give Him all and He gives it all back to you. He’s outdone in all His generosity.”

When Sister Mary Nicolette prepared herself to enter the enclosure, she believed that she had just enlisted in a lifetime of boredom. In two decades, though, she says she has never once been bored. “I was talking to my family when they just came to visit this summer. They were asking me, ‘Have you ever been bored yet?’ That’s a joke because I’ve never been bored since I’ve been here. When I was out in the world, sometimes I was bored to death. But since I’ve been here, I’ve never once been bored. It’s like you’re going from one thing to the next and it’s like a peaceful pace and you always know what you’re going to need to be doing next and there’s never a time when it’s like, ‘Oh gee, what should I do?’ ”