One of the paradoxes of monastic life is that those who try to leave the world are often pursued by it. Take Thomas Merton, who struggled for years to make a career as a writer in New York, only to become a best-selling author after he joined a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. It’s been almost seventy years since Merton detailed his journey to the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in “The Seven Storey Mountain”; like Simeon Stylites atop his fifth-century pillar, he sought solitude but attracted followers.
That paradox animates Abbie Reese’s new book “Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns.” For six years, Reese, an independent scholar and artist, visited the twenty women of Corpus Christi Monastery of the Poor Clare Colettine in Rockford, Illinois, recording their oral histories and documenting their routines of labor and prayer, worship and meditation, bell ringing and meal taking. “Dedicated to God” is the fruit of her labor. In the book, thematic chapters and individual oral histories are punctuated by her simple, striking photographs of the nuns in their cloistered community.
The Order of St. Clare was founded in 1212. Inspired by the preaching of St. Francis, Clare of Assisi, an aristocratic young woman, refused the marriage planned by her parents and embraced a life of poverty. St. Francis gave her a church to make into a convent. Though she was not the first woman to found an order, St. Clare became the first to write her own rule for monastic life. (For instance, a nun “should go and sell all that she has and take care to distribute the proceeds to the poor” and “once her hair has been cut off round her head and her secular dress set aside, she is to be allowed three tunics and a mantle … she may not go outside the monastery except for some useful, reasonable, evident, and approved purpose.”)
The order spread quickly throughout Italy and around Europe, reaching North America by the late nineteenth century. The community at Rockford, one of around fifty or so in the United States, was organized in 1916. It was first housed in a Victorian home, then in a former sanitarium. In 1962, it moved onto its current fourteen-acre campus. The Poor Clares at Rockford observe extreme poverty, by fasting and going barefoot. Theirs is a contemplative order, meaning that, unlike active orders, they separate themselves from the world, embracing solitude and silence, devoting themselves to prayer and worship. Reese writes in the book’s preface that her project began with this question: “What compels a woman in this era of overexposure—at a time with the technological means to reach a global audience—to make a drastic, lifelong, countercultural decision for her life, in favor of obscurity?”
That curiosity, of course, is why so many artists are interested in religious orders, which have been depicted in everything from Kathryn Hulme’s examination of what brings women to their vows and what can take them away in “The Nun’s Story,” made famous by the film adaptation starring Audrey Hepburn, to Ron Hansen’s searching interrogation of religious experience in “Mariette in Ecstasy”; from John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt” to Christopher Durang’s “Sister Mary Ignatius”; from the Poor Clares in the popular film franchise “Sister Act” to the Franciscan nuns in Danielle Trussoni’s novel “Angelology.”
In a time when abstaining from social media for a few days passes for asceticism, the lives of poverty, chastity, obedience, and enclosure to which the Poor Clares make vows seem especially worthy of our attention. They use a phone only to operate a prayer hotline; have heard of iPods and text messages only through family visits, which are limited to four times a year; and only one of their members has used the Internet. Such technologies, they believe, are a distraction from their contemplation.
Few claim to have been especially religious as children, although many went to Catholic schools or were raised in families that attended Mass. Almost all of them remember reading something as children about monasticism that interested them, but most entertained the possibility of some other vocation: one wanted to be a cowboy because she loved “The Lone Ranger,” one completed a few years of medical school, some yearned to have children, one worked almost two decades at an insurance firm, another abandoned a college scholarship for softball.
A few felt called to the religious life at an earlier age. “I have the exact day that it started,” Sister Maria Deo Gratias of the Most Blessed Sacrament said. “it was a Friday afternoon at a quarter to three.” At precisely that time, when her sixth-grade peers were checking their answers on a spelling test, she felt the desire to go to church. After she went to Mass, the desire grew and grew; a few years later, she told her mother that she wanted to become a nun. It didn’t matter that she didn’t like wearing dresses (she sensed that the habit would be a bit different) or that she loved sleeping in (she was sure that she could get used to rising early). Even though her relatives bet against her following through on the impulse, by age fourteen she had left home for an aspirature, a boarding school for those interested in a religious vocation.
What does it mean to be called to the religious life? Even the most articulate of these women cannot find the precise words to explain how she came to understand her vocation. The youngest nun says, “I’m sure anyone who falls in love, they look back and say, ‘Oh, remember how we met? Or he showed his love?’ It’s the same, how God has shown his personal love.”
But how does one fall in love? These women are no more capable of explaining their love of the holy than we are of understanding the reasons two human beings are attracted to each other, and yet they try. One sister compares it to God “playing hide-and-seek,” drawing her to the religious life, but leaving her unsure of where to go. Like any love, there is struggle, not only with which of the various religious orders to join but how to live once there; it is not desperation which brings these women to the cloister but desire.
If it were easy, then you might believe they came on a lark, but it takes at least six years to join the monastery. The women spend one year as a postulate, followed by two years as a novice, when they take a religious name and are first clothed in the habit. At the end of the novitiate, the candidate makes her temporary vows. After three years in the juniorate, she may make her solemn vows, at which time a wedding ring is placed on her finger, making her a permanent bride of Christ. Poor Clares make four vows: poverty (“we are emptied of things to be filled with eternal riches; we are set free from slavery to materialism, secularism, and consumerism”), obedience (“we are surrendered to Christ and live by His Will for us as expressed through our Rule and superiors”), chastity (“we become Brides of Christ and spiritual mothers of countless souls”), and enclosure (“we are consecrated for a life of intimate union with God; pledging to live within the solitude of the cloister of our monastery”).
For those six years and all the years that follow, the women’s lives follow an horarium, a fixed pattern: rising at half past twelve for matins and meditation, then sleeping for three more hours; rising again at five and readying for morning prayer; meditating for an hour and then praying the rosary to prepare for Mass; a simple breakfast follows, and then they work until midmorning prayer; they work again until midday prayer, then take dinner at noon; another work period follows until a time for quiet, followed by more work and then Vespers; they take supper at half past five, then enjoy recreation; next comes Compline, then free time, and finally to bed by nine. Reese’s photographs illustrate the nuns at prayer, at rest, and at work; driving tractors and cleaning boilers, operating saws in the woodshop; tending gardens, feeding the cat, and swinging on tree swings.
Their vows are what they have in common, but each woman interprets them distinctly, living her marriage with Christ differently. “There’s so much more to poverty than not having the latest modern conveniences or the most comfortable whatever in your life,” Sister Maria Benedicta says. “It’s being stripped of everything that’s not God.” Sister Mary Monica of the Holy Eucharist defines obedience as “a crucifixion,” saying, “If it doesn’t cost anything, you know, it doesn’t make a very good story.”
And there again are the familiar contours of love, where struggle makes meaning. The costs of obedience at Rockford are Sister Mary Clara crying at the sound of school buses, which remind her of the children she used to teach; claustrophobic Sister Mary Nicolette, who hoped to have a large family, but lives now in a seventy-eight-square-foot room; and Sister Maria Benedicta saying that making vows means “everything you’ve ever believed in, you’re giving up; or everything you’ve dreamed of, it’s not important anymore.”
But sacrifice can be made into a discipline, an art of loss that can be mastered. That is how Sister Maria Deo Gratias can describe the vow of chastity as “freedom, because we can give ourselves totally to God and we don’t have divided responsibilities.” And how the women can experience enclosure as liberty, not prison: laughing instead of recoiling when one woman’s four-year-old great-niece says they live in a “Jesus cage.” They laugh because the world thinks that the metal grille keeps them caged in, but they feel that the bars keep the world out.
Reading that story and so many others in “Dedicated to God” reminded me of Philip Gröning’s stunning documentary “Into Great Silence,” which portrays a community of Carthusian monks in the French Alps. The film is almost entirely silent—no commentary from the director or dialogue from the subjects—until a scene where the monks go sledding, when it explodes with the sound of their laughter.
That is another one of monasticism’s surprises: where the world expects sorrow, the cloistered feel joy. Reese’s attentiveness and patience allows that joy to reveal itself. She also shows clearly that these women are not disingenuous: they know all they have left outside the cloister walls, and they acknowledge how hard it is to live together, not only in quotidian ways by sharing space and limited resources but in spiritual ways, praying for a peace that none of them may live to see.
Reese points out that while America had some hundred and eighty thousand religious sisters in 1965, the number had fallen to about fifty-four thousand by 2012. Thomas Merton’s autobiography filled seminaries and monasteries with young men newly interested in a religious vocation, and these sisters hope that by sharing the stories of their own callings and the rewards of their devotions they might attract new souls to the cloister. By giving us a view into their lives, they hope to make sure that nuns don’t disappear.
Casey N. Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. You can follow her on Twitter @cncep.
Photograph: Abbie Reese