Meet a Sister

Sr. Mary’s Story

When I was little, every few years my parents would pack the five of us kids into the minivan and drive us from Michigan to Milwaukee, to visit my great Aunt Agnes, a Dominican Sister of the Perpetual Rosary. At the sound of the doorbell, a smiling sister would appear and usher us into a small parlor. We would gather on the guest-side of the little wooden enclosure railing and wait eagerly for mom’s favorite aunt to emerge from the sisters’ quarters.

Aunt Agnes was always full of joy and jokes, and I loved to see her. But as the adults talked on, I would soon become drowsy; the parlor was stuffy, and I’d barely manage to stay awake by munching on the popcorn Aunt Agnes would pass to us across the railing.

I understood that Aunt Agnes was cloistered, and that this meant she did not leave the convent. She didn’t go to the beach or the swimming pool or the park. Our afternoon visit would be over soon, and Mom and Dad would take us to go swimming at the hotel. But Aunt Agnes would stay behind.

When people would ask what I wanted to be when I grew up, different possibilities floated through my head, but I was never really sure. But when I thought about how Aunt Agnes was always stuck in that stuffy old house, on the nuns’ side of the railing, with only a little inner courtyard in which to walk, I knew for sure there was one thing I wouldn’t be when I grew up—a cloistered nun!

In high school I had an experience of call to commit myself totally to relationship with God, holding nothing back. In my twenties I began to see this as a call to religious life. I got to know many wonderful communities of sisters who serve in ministries such as teaching, healthcare, and outreach to the poor. I learned a lot from each one, but I never met a group that I felt called to join. As the years passed, this became frustrating and disappointing. None of the doors I was trying were opening.

In my mid-thirties, I found myself once again in a house of contemplative nuns: Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey. I was a busy elementary school teacher at the time, and a couple of friends invited me for a weekend of rest at the Abbey retreat house, and to see a mutual friend who’d recently joined the community.

In the course of the weekend, I had the opportunity to receive spiritual direction from one of the sisters. In light of the frustration I shared, she asked if I might entertain a new question: could it be that maybe none of the communities I had visited seemed like a fit because in fact I was called to contemplative life? In my head, my immediate answer was, “No way! There is no way that I am called to be a cloistered contemplative nun!” I had my own dreams of what my life would look like, and while active religious life seemed to fit, cloistered contemplative life seemed opposite of what I wanted in every way. Still, her comment got me thinking: there was a door that I simply hadn’t tried.

Six months later I opened the door a crack, with another visit to the abbey. And several months after that, I opened it just a little more, then almost slammed it shut. But at a certain point I decided to give the Cistercian life a real, honest look. The more time I spent with the sisters, the more I saw that they didn’t fit my stereotypes at all, and their day-to-day life wasn’t what I expected. They actually seemed a lot like me… or, perhaps more accurately, they seemed like the real me, the “me” I wanted to become. The quiet monastic work, the balance of solitude and community, and the rhythms of work and prayer actually fit me quite well. I began to see that the Cistercian way of life was a framework within which I could both turn towards God and become more truly myself.

After a couple of years of living and working with the sisters, something clicked. I realized that all the dreams I had for my life had come out of an even deeper desire within me, a dream that I didn’t realize I even had, but that was underneath them all. It was God’s dream for me, and it both encompassed and infinitely surpassed all my dreams for myself. Cistercian life was something I never, ever would have thought to choose, by my own way of thinking. But it is the very way of life that enables me to live into the mystery of a dream more beautiful than anything I could’ve imagined.

Now I realize that Aunt Agnes was the opposite of confined. As she walked back and forth the length of her little courtyard, Rosary in hand, she was deeply present in our lives and in the world. In dedicating herself completely to seeking God, she’d helped to open a way to God for others… and in a special way, for me.

My new home isn’t as small as hers was; we have acres and acres of farmland and woodlands where we can walk, and even a pond—so I still get to swim. But I bet she’s smiling from Heaven to see that I’ve chosen a journey which at its core is the same as hers. And, to see that when my nieces and nephews come visit, we’re still serving up plenty of popcorn!