Dedicated to God (25 page)

Sister Mary Nicolette says,

When you’re listening all day long, you’re listening for God’s voice and every day is new. He’ll ask something new of you. He’ll put some new situation in your life or ask something different of you. Every day is different. One of the things that I always thought was, “Lord, I’m offering up the great sacrifice of a very monotonous life and I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’ll make the sacrifice, Lord!” But there’s no monotony. No monotony. There’s a regularity.

Monastic life has presented other challenges. When her family visited for the first time, Sister Mary Nicolette had not seen them for a year. Her first reaction was to hug everyone. “But the grille was there,” she says. “And it was just striking. And it made me realize there is a definite, a real separation.” The last time she hugged her parents was in 1999, when she made solemn vows. “My mother didn’t want to let me go. But they were very good about it. It’s always very moving—not just for the sister herself and for the parents, but for all the sisters. You know, everyone starts crying. It’s just very moving.

“When it is a sacrifice that costs, you can offer that for someone who’s maybe struggling with something,” she says, like a mother who cannot hug a child serving in Iraq. “That makes it all worthwhile and bearable, really, and
something that you feel this is something that I can offer this for someone,” she says. “It’s a very heavy burden on them, and so if I say by my offering I can help alleviate that heart of that other person. It’s just the idea of helping carry one another’s burdens.”

In her effort to become a spiritual intermediary, living on behalf of humanity, her novice Sister Maria Benedicta finds herself lacking. “That’s the hardest thing—you want to love God,” she says. “That’s why I’m here. You want to love God with all your heart, all your soul, with all my mind, with all my strength. But I don’t always do it. Because when you see how much He loves us, how much He’s done for us, to die on the cross for us, to give us the Eucharist, to be in the Tabernacle with us constantly, to forgive all our sins, you just want to give Him everything. But sometimes you just fall into your own selfishness. And you think how could I do that? And He’s been so good. It just crushes you.”

Not long after Sister Mary Clara arrived at the Corpus Christi Monastery, the three aged extern sisters passed away. Sister Mary Clara offered herself as the next extern sister, to operate as a conduit between the world and the enclosure, communicating with visitors to the gift shop and running errands by car. The Mother Abbess turned her down. “No,” Sister Mary Clara remembers being told. “You joined the cloistered sisters, so you will remain cloistered. Your original calling wasn’t to be an extern sister, out there. You’re supposed to be in the cloister, in here.”

Sister Mary Clara’s innate social temperament found an outlet at the monastery as one of the few nuns assigned to answer the phone calls for prayers. Every morning, Sister Mary Clara expects to hear from one woman who recites the names of her immediate and extended family; she asks that the nuns pray for their safety and well-being and for her own health, that the cancer remain in remission. Sister Mary Clare does not often speak to the woman directly; her caller prefers leaving a message on the answering machine and will hang up the phone gently if Sister Mary Clare picks up.

Typically, Poor Clare nuns do not reveal to the callers their religious names, even if pressed; the nuns are instructed to say, if asked, that they are just one of the sisters, in keeping with their aspiration for anonymity and separation from the world. This also helps prevent callers from becoming too attached to a particular nun and asking to speak with her. But Sister Mary Clara cannot help but bond with some of the callers.

One elderly woman tells Sister Mary Clara she is nearly blind and lives alone. “I don’t know what I would do without you sisters,” Sister Mary Clara says the woman tells her. “I know that you’re there and I know that you’ll pray for me.” Sister Mary Clara says she replies, “Keep calling and we’ll keep answering. And if we’re not here, you just leave it on the answering service. You talk to the answering service and we’ll listen.” Sister Mary Clara describes the answering machine as the monastery’s “salvation” because it allows the nuns assigned to phone duty to participate in the Divine Office.

At times, when Sister Mary Clara answers the phone, a caller reminds her of a previous call and asks if she remembers the conversation. “You have to think, ‘Who was it who called?’ ” she says. “You wrack your brain, ‘Who is it that’s calling?’ But in order to keep peace, you say, ‘Of course I remember.’ ”

Other callers are cautious, reluctant to disclose their names. Sister Mary Clara tells them they do not have to disclose the information. If the person asks how the nuns’ prayers will be directed to the appropriate individual, Sister Mary Clara says, “All I know is that God knows. God knows who you are, and He knows your petition, and He’ll take care of you. All I’m going to do is pray—pray for all the people that called today and then leave it to Him. That’s all we do.”

Although Sister Mary Clara revels in her assignment for her delight in interacting with people, the phone calls are a disheartening glimpse into the state of the world. “They’re desperate,” she says of the callers. “They’re very desperate.”

One woman phoned after her husband died and asked if the nuns would pray for her daughter, who had turned to drugs and tried to take her own life. The widow still calls, at times after long intervals; she always sounds rushed and always requests prayers for her daughter and herself. “That’s one that I feel very close to,” Sister Mary Clara says. If she hasn’t heard from the woman in a while, Sister Mary Clara asks permission from the Mother Abbess to write the woman a note. “She needs me now and she knows who I am because of the telephone calls,” Sister Mary Clara says. “I can write to her and console her, and let her know that I’m praying for her.”

Sister Mary Clara ends each phone call with a promise that the nuns will pray and make penances on their behalf. “What kind of sacrifice are you going to make, sister?” Sister Mary Clara remembers one caller asking. “Your
life is a sacrifice already.” Sister Mary Clara concedes that she cannot give up food, if the nuns are already fasting. “I cannot drink some water, just not take a glass of water when I’m thirsty. That doesn’t break my fast, so I can say I will offer that up,” Sister Mary Clara says. “The Lord knows who needs something, so He’ll take that sacrifice. He’ll take that glass of water and give it to somebody who needs water.”

As Sister Mary Clara ended one phone call, the woman told her that she would also do something for her. “Alright, you do that,” Sister Mary Clara said. “We’ll help each other out.” Many express their plans to pay back the nuns for their supernatural efforts, offering to buy presents for the nuns during pilgrimages, but Sister Mary Clara tells them the nuns do not need anything; they have enough. “What would we do with all the things they want to bring us anyway?” she asks. She tells the callers that the Poor Clares would welcome prayers or the lighting of candles at shrines or sacred sites. “Everybody tries to remember us because we remember them to the Lord,” Sister Mary Clara says. “That’s the exchange we make.”

Sister Mary Clara says there are days “that you get moods.” “I miss going out. I miss going out with a friend like Sister Michelle,” she says. “I guess there are days that you just wish you could go out and go for a walk. Well, we can go for a walk because we have the back filled with trees and we can walk around back there. But it’s different. The devil’s out here saying, ‘Aha, I’ve got her wanting to go out.’ If I allow myself to dwell, to think about it, he can win over and he can get me out there. But I think I’m stronger than I was before. I wasn’t as strong before, but I’m stronger now. When my family left I found it a little difficult, but now it’s okay because I know if I live longer they’ll come to visit me again.”

In becoming a cloistered contemplative nun, Sister Mary Clara’s charges are no longer her students, but the public at large. “I can listen and I can feel for people. I can understand their needs,” she says. Answering phone calls connects her with humanity.

“We’re a little bit different than anyone imagines,” Sister Mary Joseph admits. She recalls her first exposure to manual labor in the novitiate: Performing garden duty, she and another novice, the current Mother Abbess, spent the day plucking strawberries from the patches; nearly sixty years later, they recount their exhaustion and their lighthearted response. Feeling sorry for themselves, they agreed to sing to keep their spirits up; with a hint of irony they borrowed the tune of a Jewish lament. “When we were
feeling down we would go, ‘Woe, woe, oh woe, is me. Oh woe, oh woe, oh woe, is me,’ ” Sister Mary Joseph says. “We’d do that for the fun of it.”

“People think, ‘Oh, you’re going to do all this, and you’re going to be all disciplined and you’re going to accept sufferings, and voluntary mortifications—you’re going to be miserable,’ ” Sister Mary Monica says, citing a stereotype of what she calls the “prune-faced” nun—women in the past who found themselves in cloistered monasteries even if they weren’t truly called, or who became teaching sisters even if they did not want to work with youth. “But, no, if you do it right, you’re not going to be miserable. You’re going to be joyful and nobody’s going to know the difference.”

Their whimsical outlook appears to have physical benefits. Sister Mary Nicolette was surprised when she first began to learn the ages of the nuns in her religious community. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, I thought she was like twenty years younger than that,’ ” Sister Mary Nicolette says. She articulates the phenomenon of extended youthfulness: “Cloistered nuns are removed from the pressures, the fast-paced, go, go, go modern culture that is otherwise a source of twenty-four-hour stress. When you’re removed from that, there’s a certain peace that your soul is steeped in. It doesn’t mean that our lives are stress-free, you know; I don’t mean that. Everyone has a certain amount of personal stress that you work through and whatnot. But what I mean is the stress from the outer environment is closed off. This is a very peaceful and like a controlled environment, almost. We cut out the outside noise and all the worldly news and concerns. So I think that has a big, big impact, on our lives in general.”

Sister Mary Nicolette, whose family teases that the decades of observing monastic silence have eroded her skills at small talk, jokes that there could be another explanation: “But also there is a secret. The habit covers a lot. It covers the double chin and the gray hair!” Sister Mary Nicolette laughs and says she knows she has just blown “the mystical illusion.”

“The whole purpose of sacrifice and penance,” says Sister Maria Benedicta, “is to strengthen your body against wanting all these comforts that aren’t good for you, strengthening your mind against all these thoughts that aren’t godly thoughts. But if you go beyond that and say, ‘I’m going to not sleep, not going to give myself that luxury,’ well, then you’re going to be so down. When you don’t sleep, you don’t have any defenses against temptations. It’s not strengthening you; it’s making it worse. There has to be a balance. There’s a saying, ‘Virtue is in the middle.’ ”

In a spiral-bound booklet handmade by the nuns to mark the Golden Jubilee—the Corpus Christi Monastery’s 1916 founding—the caption under a photograph of five tombstones in the cemetery states, “Fifty years have passed and only in the annals of eternity can the true record be found of the joys and sorrows, the hard work and many sacrifices of this half century. Five times death came to the monastery forming a closer tie between heaven and earth as God called cloistered and extern sisters to enjoy eternal life and the hundredfold promised to those who leave all to follow Him.”
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Cloistered nuns serve as intermediaries between the physical world and the unseen, eternal realm. Sister Mary Nicolette enacts her deepest beliefs in an invisible, all-powerful God, laboring on behalf of people she will never meet. This vocation delivers an unknown, intangible harvest. She will not learn in this lifetime the results of her life of devotion and sacrifice. “Sometimes we just have to go by faith that what we’re doing really makes a difference,” Sister Mary Nicolette says. “Because we don’t see the fruits of our lives. I think one of the trials that every cloistered nun goes through at some time is just clinging to that faith to know that, ‘Yes, what we’re doing makes a difference.’ Because you don’t see the fruits, and so that’s all you have sometimes—to go by that faith, that you believe little sacrifices are going to do something, that your prayers that you don’t feel are worthy—your whole life given over, and you don’t see the fruits of it.”

“She’ll never see how many hundreds, thousands of souls receive the fruits of her prayers,” says Sister Maria Benedicta of her Novice Mistress.

The nuns assigned to field phone calls share repeat calls that credit the nuns’ prayers for keeping a marriage intact or a disease at bay. “Sometimes we get calls like that and it helps us to continue,” Sister Mary Nicolette says. “But many times we just go by faith that there is a purpose, that there is a reason, and that it’s good.”

The Mother Abbess reads the newspaper each day. She chooses which stories to share with the nuns. She always tells them if there has been a murder in Rockford. On occasion, she clips an article to be placed on a table in the library. Sister Mary Clara answers the phone, taking note of personal tragedies and global catastrophes. And then the community takes action: They pray, and then they “wait and see,” Mother Miryam says, what God “has in store.”

Called
Sister Joan Marie of the Child Jesus

My mother was home all the time. She was always home. When I was born she got sick. A nurse kept a heating pad on her too long. First her arm got stiff, and then her leg got stiff so they called up my grandmother who lived in Parsons, Kansas—that’s where my mother came from—and so she took care of me when I was little, when I was just a baby. I don’t remember it, but that’s what they tell me. My mother couldn’t walk very well because she had that stiff knee. My father took her to a specialist, and he said, “Walk to me. Walk.” She said, “I can’t.” “Walk,” he kept saying. “Walk.” And so she walked. Evidently, she could walk after that, but with a stiff knee. My brother used to blame me because before that, Mother used to take him on the sled, but when I came along she couldn’t do that anymore.