Dedicated to God (33 page)

The youngest member of the Corpus Christi Monastery, Sister Maria Benedicta swam upstream to reach this place. “It’s amazing that God can, in these days, break through all the noise to get to the heart,” she says, “which is so crowded with so many things. But He’s all-powerful so I guess He can do it. But you have to allow Him.”

As a child, Sister Maria Benedicta’s faith was relegated to church life on Sunday, not integrated into her daily life with her family or school. She did not know then, she says, that saints were in her midst, that angels were praying for her, and that “God is everywhere.” The idea that a spiritual realm
eclipses any physical reality dawned on her in college. Her dorm room was above the chapel, and she could hear the Mass below. One day, she attended chapel. She still remembers a visiting priest’s homily about the Eucharist: “Jesus Christ comes down into this chapel every day. What is more important than that?” “Wow,” Sister Maria Benedicta thought. “He’s right. I was thinking, in college you’re searching for answers about your life, and the purpose of your life. The purpose of life is to love and to get to heaven, you know? When he said that—‘what is more important than God coming down to be with you?’—I said, ‘Yeah, there’s nothing more important than that.’ It was so clear this is the purpose of life. This is why we’re here. Everything else is to lead us to God and to heaven.”

She contemplated the Blessed Sacrament and realized, “That is God. That is almighty God right there in the form of bread. That is so unbelievable. Why would He make himself so small in this little host? It’s unfathomable. The only reason why He would do that is because of His immense deep love for humanity. I kept thinking how much He loves us, to do this.”

Despite the unanswerable questions, Sister Maria Benedicta had received the gift of faith. She thought about God descending to earth every day into what she describes as an “obscure chapel” in a dormitory building because He loved her completely. “Everything changed,” she says. Her perspective and priorities shifted. She began to think, “Now what’s more important, God coming down to earth, or this phone conversation, or this math assignment? My friends told me I was falling in love,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “I was. I was falling in love with Jesus! They laughed. And I said, ‘I’m sorry. I just can’t get enough!’ I was a fanatic, falling in love with Jesus.”

Soon afterward, the dorm director invited her on a group outing to a convent; the trip conflicted with her softball practice schedule, though, and so Sister Maria Benedicta said she could not make it. “It was true, but I was glad I had an excuse,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “I thought, ‘She’s crazy. I’m not a nun.’ I didn’t know anything about the religious life. You have in your mind it really is not fun.” A week later, the dormitory director told her she had signed Sister Maria Benedicta up for the road trip. “It was terrible,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. She thought, “I can’t tell my coach I’m going to visit a convent. Good grief! ‘Where are your priorities?’ ” Although the softball team practiced every weekend, the coach happened to cancel practice, and so Sister Maria Benedicta rode with a van full of girls for an “eye-opening” weekend. The nuns laughed. They played tennis. Their convent rested on
beautiful grounds. “Oh,” Sister Maria Benedicta says she thought, “these are real people.” Sister Maria Benedicta remembers the superior singling her out to ask what she thought and if Sister Maria Benedicta might be called to religious life. Sister Maria Benedicta said she did not think so. The Mother Superior replied, “If God calls, He will turn your heart to only want that.” On the drive back to her college campus, Sister Maria Benedicta thought, “My heart does not want that, so I’m off the hook.” She prayed that if she did desire more than anything to live as a nun, she would know that desire was from God, “and I would do it because I knew it wasn’t coming from me.”

After the visit to the convent, the dormitory director offered Sister Maria Benedicta a ticket to hear Pope John Paul II speak in St. Louis. “Absolutely!” Sister Maria Benedicta said. “It was no longer, ‘I have softball practice.’ It was, ‘Absolutely, I’m going.’ ” Once in St. Louis, every conversation, every occurrence seemed a message sent directly from God. “It’s the way God turns your heart,” she says. Standing in line for the restroom, a nun handing out literature bypassed dozens of women to give Sister Maria Benedicta a pamphlet about the religious life. “It’s a sign,” her friend told her. Then, emerging from the masses, Sister Maria Benedicta saw a nun from the convent she had recently visited. Inside the bag of freebies, which included a flag to wave when the Pope appeared, she found a prayer for discerning one’s vocation. Sister Maria Benedicta dropped the prayer back in the bag. She was startled to pull out yet another prayer to discern her vocation. Then Pope John Paul II, stricken with Parkinson’s disease at the time, took the stage. “He was on fire. We saw the Church was alive and young,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. She remembers listening to the Vicar of Christ—the voice of Christ on earth—say, “ ‘Go now, don’t wait, God needs you.’ He was so emphatic that God uses human beings. God could do it Himself, but He has chosen to use human beings. I just knew that what I was called for was to love God in a special way in a religious life. That’s a special grace, too,” she says, “because everyone else heard it, too.”

Sister Maria Benedicta was convinced that God was giving her the confirmation she needed. “God knows every soul and what’s going to get them—what one person can say to you to turn your heart,” she says. “He inspires that person. It’s really amazing.” When a friend asked Sister Maria Benedicta to travel with her to another convent, an active religious order of Marian Sisters in Lincoln, Nebraska, Sister Maria Benedicta intended to decline. She had procrastinated on an assignment to read a three-hundred-page book,
and she planned to cram that weekend. But when she opened her mouth to say “no,” she heard herself instead agreeing to go. “It was the weirdest thing,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “I’ve never experienced that before. I don’t know what happened.” When she visited the Marian Sisters, she was smitten. “Everything about the life was so beautiful,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “Everything was for God—the sacrifices they make. It was all so beautiful.” In the convent’s chapel, Sister Maria Benedicta prayed, “I don’t know what you want, but this is what I want more than anything.” She remembered then her prayer following her first visit to a convent—that if she desired the life of a nun, she would know it came from God and not herself. “And so I knew this was what God wanted,” she says.

When Sister Maria Benedicta returned to college, her best friend told her she seemed like a different person. Sister Maria Benedicta confided that she wanted to become a Marian sister. Her best friend told her that she was going to miss her at college and on the softball team, but Sister Maria Benedicta explained she wanted to complete her two final years of college. In the days that followed, Sister Maria Benedicta fished out her notes from the St. Louis speech by Pope John Paul II. She read, “Don’t wait, God needs you now.”

“I said, ‘Lord, let me know,’ ” she says. “ ‘I will do what you want, but you better let me know, because I’m not going to do something crazy, quit school, leave everything, scholarship, my whole livelihood. But if you let me know, I will do it.’ Boy! Ask and you shall receive!”

Like an allegory, Sister Maria Benedicta faced three obstacles in quick succession. First, she felt pain in her pitching shoulder. She asked her father, her lifelong coach, to watch while she pitched to see what she was doing wrong to trigger the pain; he could not see a problem. “I thought, I’ve been doing it for fifteen years,” she says. “Maybe it’s wearing out. But if I can’t play, I don’t have my scholarship, I can’t come here.” Next, when Sister Maria Benedicta tried to sign up for a full load of classes for the following semester, she was not able to schedule more than nine hours—which would be part-time status. “I couldn’t graduate with this type of a schedule,” she says. And then, when two sets of friends were sorting out lodging, separately, both groups assumed she was planning to live with the other group, and Sister Maria Benedicta realized she did not have anyone to live with. “God was showing me through the very ordinary circumstances what His will was. It was not to be there,” she says.

Her thoughts were starting to anchor beyond the physical sphere. She remembers standing on the pitcher’s mound in the last inning of one game, a high-pressure situation that should have prompted her to focus and perform well, she says. Instead, her mind drifted: “This really isn’t important compared to eternity.” “I’m thinking about this at the strangest times!” she says. Hearing her astronomy professor lecture on the expanding universe, Sister Maria Benedicta thought that although “billions and trillions and gazillions” of years had passed since the earth began, “compared to eternity that is just a drop. I mean, eternity is so far beyond what we can imagine and this life is so small compared to that eternity, which a gazillion years is just a fraction; it’s just a second compared to that. This life is just so short we have to do all we can to get all these people to heaven.”

Sister Maria Benedicta adopted the philosophy of a college friend who said that she lived thinking about her deathbed. “I realized I have one life—one life—and you’re not reincarnated,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “We live this one life, and we either go to heaven, or we go to hell. We have one life. I remember thinking, ‘If I’m laying on my deathbed, if I’m eighty or ninety, what will I wish I had done in life? Will I wish I had that car? Probably not. Will I wish I had a better house? Probably not. You know, when you’re dying, you want to know you’re going to heaven. That’s the purpose of your life.” At twenty, Sister Maria Benedicta asked herself, “Would I rather have said, ‘I finished my two years of school and had fun and was on the softball team,’ or would I rather say, ‘I did the will of God’? It was, what is more important? What is the most important thing in my life? It’s doing God’s will.”

When Sister Maria Benedicta received an invitation from the Marian Sisters to attend a retreat, she told her best friend it conflicted with the upcoming softball tournament. “I made a commitment to the team,” Sister Maria Benedicta said. Her friend replied, “Don’t you dare miss that retreat. You know you’re supposed to go.” “She was so good in helping me keep perspective,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “She was a very good friend because we truly were striving to be holy. We had our priorities: It was God, family, friends, school. There’s a hierarchy of what’s important, and if you obscure that, if I put softball above God, that’s wrong,” she says.

Her coach agreed, reluctantly, that she could skip the tournament. “I knew that was God because I had prayed, ‘God just show me,’ and it was the answer. He had closed the door to the next year of school. But He showed me right there, ‘This is what I want,’ ” Sister Maria Benedicta says. She prepared to
inform her parents, who attended all of her softball games, that she would not be at the tournament because she would be on a retreat at a convent. This first shock would be a mere segue to another revelation: She planned to ask the Marian Sisters if she could return and join their community.

In Sister Maria Benedicta’s master plan, she would tell her parents after the final game before the softball tournament. “I was so nervous the whole game, I didn’t think a bit about the game,” she says. “Afterwards I was so nervous; I was stalling. Usually, we would just jump in the car and go to Sonic or McDonald’s. I said, ‘Oh, just let me jump in the shower real quick first.’ So I was really stalling and taking my time. Usually, I would throw my hair up; I was blow-drying my hair—really stalling. My parents were thinking, ‘What has gotten into her?’ It was just so countercultural and I knew it was going to be a shock. We were in my dorm room. My parents were very patiently waiting. At my dad’s work, they had old computers on sale and he said, ‘I bought you a computer.’ I was thinking, ‘Oh, boy, I don’t need it.’ I said, ‘Oh, Dad, that’s really nice.’ I didn’t ask anything about it; I didn’t care. I’m sure he thought that was kind of rude. I was just so focused. So we get in the car and it was a Sunday and the school was in a small town and everything was closed. I was panicking, ‘Oh, no, what if we don’t find anything open?’ So finally we walk into the one place still open and all the softball team is there with their parents. I thought, ‘What a disaster! I can’t tell them with all these people here.’ But I had stalled so long they were almost finished eating and they were leaving. So finally I said, ‘I’ve got to tell them.’ My dad said, ‘For that game before Easter, can we just take you home, or do you have to come back to school?’ I said, ‘I’m not actually going to go to that game.’ I said, ‘I’m going to go on this retreat and ask these sisters if I can join them.’ Dead silence. You want to kill a conversation, that’s the way to do it! Oh. Oh. Shocked!”

While Sister Maria Benedicta was agonizing about the retreat—“I was just in knots,” she says; “how do you ask someone to join their family?”—her family asked if dropping out of college to enter a convent seemed like the hallmark of a stable and secure life. They asked if she would have health insurance at the convent. She did not know. She remembers telling her family, “I just love Him and I’m going to live for Him and that’s it. That’s all I know about it, really.” It was as if, for the first time, Sister Maria Benedicta and her family were speaking different languages. “We have the highest security—in God, who’s all powerful, all loving, all knowing,” she says. “But it’s looking beyond the visible to the true reality.” In retrospect, Sister Maria
Benedicta understands her parents’ concern and bewilderment. They wanted her to explain her logic and the rationale for her livelihood. Maybe, she says, it also felt like she was rejecting her family’s values. “They want you to be happy and they can’t imagine you being happy living a life of poverty, obedience, and chastity, because they found happiness in marriage and through children and they think you’re giving that up,” she says. “That’s where they found happiness and they think you’re not going to be happy. It’s just a different way that God leads you to find your true happiness and fulfillment, and once they realize that, then gradually they’re okay because you’ve found what they wanted you to find, which is happiness and your purpose in life.”