Dedicated to God (34 page)

Word spread that Sister Maria Benedicta wanted to join a convent, which came as no surprise to friends and teammates, even though she says she only shared her interest with her best friend. “They said, ‘We knew that,’ ” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me? It would’ve been a lot easier!’ ”

The day she signed away her softball scholarship, Sister Maria Benedicta walked outside and thought, “What have I done? Honestly!” She knew she would never be able to afford college without a scholarship, and she had the nagging suspicion that her plan was not only contrary to what she thought she wanted for her life, it simply was not the way she thought “life is done.”

“I realized, Lord, I’m giving you everything. I’m putting my trust in you. I’m going to take a leap of faith because I don’t know. Give me a sign, a word, anything,” she says. Sister Maria Benedicta opened her Bible to Psalm 119. She read the word “nun,” which gave her the assurance she wanted that she was making the right move. Later, she learned she had merely stumbled upon a man’s name in a biblical genealogy, as in Joshua, son of Nun. “I thought, ‘Oh, isn’t God funny? Some man’s name, and I’m like, ‘I’m supposed to be a nun!’ I just needed a direct answer. That gave me the courage to leave everything for Him.” Upon reflection, Sister Maria Benedicta is not put off by the message she accepted as divine direction for her life from that one word; despite her ignorance of the proper context, she does not believe she was mistaken in interpreting the meaning. Sister Maria Benedicta believes her naïveté reflects the gospel message: Jesus told His disciples they must become like children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. “In so many ways, He was just saying, ‘You’re such a child,” she says, “and I think I was in the hands of the Father saying, ‘Okay, here you go. I don’t know anything.’ ”

Sister Maria Benedicta became a Marian Sister, and the community became her family. Almost six years later, when she appeared to her parents to be at home in the order of active sisters, with the stable and secure life they desired for her, Sister Maria Benedicta informed her family that she planned to transfer to the even stricter, more removed world of a cloistered monastery. The notion began to percolate when, as a twenty-one-year-old pilgrim with the Marian Sisters to Assisi, Italy, the spiritual birthplace of Saint Francis’s Friars Minor and Saint Clare’s Poor Ladies, she toured the Poor Clares’ motherhouse, San Damiano. When she saw the abject poverty of their lodgings, that they “had nothing,” it reminded her of Jesus, who was so poor He had no place to lay His head. “I just fell in love with Saint Clare. But I just loved where I was, and so it didn’t enter my mind to do something crazy like enter the Poor Clares.”

Several years passed. Less than a year remained before she was to make final vows as a Marian sister. “It was a sense of this isn’t fitting,” she says of the other religious community. “Saint Augustine says, ‘Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, my God.’ And it’s that way; once you finally discover what God is asking, there’s a peace and, yes, there are struggles, but it’s okay. ‘This is what God wants and he’s going to help me.’ There’s a peace. If you join any community, everything is not going to be perfect all the time. That’s a given. There are going to be sacrifices. But there should also be a peace. You fit; it’s just like a peacefulness, you are at home, you fit with the apostolate.”

Sister Maria Benedicta had tried various jobs with the active religious order. She taught catechism. She studied nursing. “Nothing ever really fit,” she says. “So that kind of added to the unsettling, the searching. It was just like He wasn’t asking me to make this sacrifice. It was, like, that’s not the sacrifice He was asking me to make.

“Looking back, I can see God was asking something of me that I couldn’t quite put my finger on,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “I thought, ‘I think I can just do more by praying.’ ”

It became increasingly clear to Sister Maria Benedicta that she was meant to take a path away from the Marian Sisters. She felt unsettled, thinking that God was asking something of her that she did not yet know, and so she went on a retreat and met with a priest to seek spiritual direction. She said she could not fathom leaving her community. Then she said, “I just love Saint Clare and I want to live like her.” “I just threw that in there,” she says. The priest asked if Sister Maria Benedicta was considering the contemplative life.
The question surprised Sister Maria Benedicta, although she says now that if someone wants to live like Saint Clare, it is likely she would choose to withdraw from the world and contemplate God in a cloister. “When he said it, it was like, ‘Oh, oh,’ like a light bulb.”

Still, Sister Maria Benedicta struggled to reconcile her calling. She did not want to leave her close-knit community in Nebraska. “I couldn’t believe it because I was so happy,” she says. Plus, when she was called to the Marian Sisters, she says “it was so obvious that God was calling me there. It was tangible almost. ‘This is what God wants.’ Being in a community is different. You can’t just go visit these Poor Clare convents whenever you want. It took me a couple of years to come to terms with it and to discover what God was showing. I prayed about it a lot; really, it has to be through prayer.”

Sister Maria Benedicta learned of the Corpus Christi Monastery through a search on the Internet. She prayed for guidance from the Holy Spirit before she went online. “Oh, this is it,” she thought when she read about the Rockford Poor Clares. “This is it. I can’t even describe it, but I just knew. God was speaking to my heart, I guess, ‘This is how I want you to love me. This is the way it should be.’ ” Every day for several months, she heard one of three words: Illinois, Clare, contemplative. “You can hear those words a lot, but something jabbed in my heart like, ‘Are you listening? There it is. There it is.’ Day after day after day after day, it was God showing me. He was asking me every time, ‘Are you going to go? Are you going to wait? Are you going to serve me? Are you going to love me?’ It was always, ‘I should do this.’

“When God asks that of you, you kind of really make sure that’s what He’s really asking,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “It’s a commitment and you really have to believe with all your heart that this is what God wants. It’s for life—not five years down the line, ‘Whoops!’ ” After the novitiate, the Marian Sisters renew their temporary vows every year for five years until they make final, permanent vows. “I knew I had to find out before making that commitment,” she says. “I think that’s a human thing, ‘Are you sure, God?’ I think He really did show me.” Halfway through the year before she was to make final vows as a Marian Sister, before she even visited the Rockford monastery, Sister Maria Benedicta determined she would leave when her yearlong commitment ended in order to embrace the Rule of Saint Clare.

During her visit to the Corpus Christi Monastery, she heard the same Scripture reading that “flipped everything upside down” in college, when she made her first retreat with the Marian Sisters. Sister Maria Benedicta
paraphrases: “Jesus said to Saint Peter, ‘Put out for the deep for a catch of fish.’ And then he said, ‘From now on, you will be catching men, souls.’ That really struck me. Put out into the deep; go out, go to where you’ve never experienced the deep, deep things of God. Go deeper.” When she returned to Nebraska, another biblical passage, read in Mass, cut to the core of her decision. Two sisters, Martha and Mary, were friends of Jesus and hosted Him at their home. While Martha served Jesus and His disciples, Mary sat at Jesus’ feet and listened. Martha complained to Jesus, “Tell her to help me,” but Jesus replied, “Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.” “The better part was to sit at the feet of Jesus, to love Him, to contemplate Him, and I just knew that was what He was asking of me,” Sister Maria Benedicta says.

“Yes, it was so difficult to leave my family the first time to join the convent,” Sister Maria Benedicta says, “but that’s what we’re made to do; we’re made to leave our home and our family and pursue our vocation, whether it’s marriage or the religious life. But once you’re in the religious life, you think, ‘This is where I am.’ It’s difficult to leave.” Sister Maria Benedicta knew that if she left the Marian Sisters, her decision would hurt her religious sisters. “When you’re on the deeper and the spiritual level and you share things that are very important to you, it’s very hard to break those ties,” she says. The decision would also affect her family, who had grown to love the Marian Sisters when they saw how happy she was there.

Her parents insisted on traveling with Sister Maria Benedicta on her first visit to the Corpus Christi Monastery; they hoped to participate in her decision-making process. After the trip, her father was disappointed. “It seems you already made up your mind before you visited,” she remembers him saying. “That was hard,” Sister Maria Benedicta says, “but God had already given me that assurance, through prayer, that this was what He wanted.”

Her parents tried to dissuade her, knowing that the cloistered monastery would erase any last vestige of normalcy they had managed to retain: She would never be granted another home visit; they could not hug her; she would never hold her niece again. “They didn’t understand why,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “They said, ‘You have so much. Why would you give it up?’ I said, ‘I would only give it up for one thing, and that’s for God.’ I told them, ‘I’ve already given my life to God. I’m going to do what He wants. When I made my vows, that’s what I meant: I give my life to God completely
for whatever He wants. I had no idea He would ask that, but He did.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I’ve already given my life to God. He asks, I say, ‘Yes’ because I’ve already given it. He asks something else and I give it in a different way.’ That was difficult for them, very, very difficult.”

Other voices—of reason, skepticism, and antagonism—weighed in, unsolicited. Sister Maria Benedicta remembers feeling as if her college softball coach was grilling her: “What are you thinking? Have you lost your mind? Wasting your life? What are you doing?”

The decision-making process—refuting the outside world, a world her loved ones would remain part of—was not without temptations. At a family reunion several months before she planned to join the Poor Clares, Sister Maria Benedicta looked around at her relatives. “In my mind, it went over and over, ‘Can you give this up forever?’ And it was like ugh, ugh,” she sighs. “I love my family. But it just kept going in my mind, ‘Can you. … ?’ And I was like ugh. It was like, ‘I can’t, but God can.’ You know, God can do it because I cannot.”

Another scene tested her resolve. She was completing her training to be a nurse; she felt constant pressure, always worried she was about to make a mistake. Tending to a newborn in the maternity ward, she considered a sacrifice she had not thought of before. When she first made her vows to the Marian Sisters, she says, “I was just so swept away with Jesus.” Six years later, while carrying an infant to his first-time parents, Sister Maria Benedicta says, “I just saw their love, and it was like God was saying to me, ‘Look what you’re giving up. Will you give this up for me?’ ”

She says she believed she was being called, “But it’s like He does require that leap of faith, too. It’s not like you’re 100 percent sure all the time. He does give it, but He also asks for the leap of faith, ‘Do you trust me enough to do it?’ It’s such a hard time, particularly, because everything is bombarding you. You’re giving stuff up in your heart, but you’re still there. It can be hard.”

Sister Maria Benedicta’s college volleyball coach cried when she learned of her impending move to a cloistered contemplative order, which she thought conveyed a rare act of selflessness. “If you realize that the giving of yourself is the ultimate fulfillment, it really does strike something,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “It’s really something that people see, that God is the fulfillment, but we can let everything get in the way and say, ‘That’s what’s most important,’ and forget about Him.”

On April 6, 2006, the day Sister Maria Benedicta graduated from nursing school, her parents drove from Kansas for her pinning ceremony. They picked her up in Lincoln, Nebraska, and with her two sisters, drove her to Rockford, Illinois, so that she could join the Poor Clare Colettine Order.

“Now I have this wonderful family here. Now I have two wonderful religious families,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. The Marian Sisters in her first religious community still write to her. “There were no hard feelings. It was beautiful how they prayed for me.”

In the six years before a nun makes permanent vows as a Poor Clare, several events indicate her progress, a sequence that ends when she dons a ring during her solemn profession of final vows. At the Clothing Ceremony one year after she arrived, Sister Maria Benedicta put on a habit for the first time. Her hair was cut short. “It really struck me that I’m a new person,” she says. “You turn away from the things of the world. A woman’s hair, I think Saint Paul says, it’s her adornment, and we just chop it off. We just offer everything. It’s not important to us. We come to be holy, and so we give everything. It’s really, really something—that you’re just a new person.” For the second time, Sister Maria Benedicta was given a new religious name.

Forty-year-old Sister Mary Nicolette, the second youngest nun in the Corpus Christi Monastery, instructs Sister Maria Benedicta as her Novice Mistress. Although there is just seven years’ difference in age between the two, Sister Mary Nicolette knows that she was exposed to an America that changed radically while Sister Maria Benedicta was still experiencing it. When Sister Mary Nicolette entered the monastery in 1993, she had heard rumors of the Internet, but she had never used it, and she has never sent or received e-mail. “I have a very basic understanding of how that functions, how that works,” she says. “And even, like, cell phones, most of the women who come to visit bring their cell phones with them; that’s something that I never experienced.” Only a few years after Sister Maria Benedicta departed popular culture, Sister Mary Nicolette thinks that elements of America might be unrecognizable to her pupil today. Sister Maria Benedicta agrees. She has heard family members discuss iPods and texting, devices and modes of communication she cannot picture. “It’s changing so fast,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “I mean, we can’t even keep up with it. And we do choose, thankfully, to give it up.”