Well, there was no relaxing because you had work you were supposed to do. You had something you were always supposed to do—except when you went to bed; you were so tired, you dropped. What got me was there was no free time where you could just be yourself because I felt they were all looking at me, watching every move.”
As the youngest member of the novitiate, Virginia led the group’s processions into and out of the chapel. Another postulant directed Virginia to pick up all the “dust fuzzies” she saw on the ground, for love of God and mortification. This spiritual act, she was told, would prompt other young women to join the monastery. Whenever the postulant pointed out a dust ball for Virginia to stop and pick up, the line was forced to halt behind her in a pileup of postulants. “I just wasn’t ready for all those little things, details,” Sister Joan Marie says. “She was trying to help, but it just discouraged me because I couldn’t understand why you had to pick them up.” Virginia learned the postulants saved the “dust fuzzies” for Feast Days, when they counted them up, and she prayed that each ball of dust represented one woman with areligious vocation who would be called forth and hear her calling to enter a religious community. “I know it seems crazy,” Sister Joan Marie says. “It seemed crazy to me, too.” Still assimilating her conversion from Protestant to Catholic, Sister Joan Marie was moved by the teachings of Saint Therese of Lisieux, a contemplative nun nicknamed “the Little Flower of Jesus.” The canonized Carmelite summarized the vocation of the monastic life not as a series of heroic acts of virtue, but as a process of honoring God in little acts that demonstrated great and steady devotion. “She always did something for souls,” Sister Joan Marie said. “That’s all we’ve got to offer—little tiny things. We don’t have big martyrdoms.”
Still, the senior postulant’s unsolicited guidance frustrated Virginia, who eventually took the matter to her Novice Mistress. The Novice Mistress agreed the other novitiate was too “zealous,” and she permitted Virginia to overlook the dust fuzzies when she was leading a procession. Virginia could, however, continue the practice of collecting wayward dust for prayers at other times, the Novice Mistress said, when she found her itinerary freer. “I could talk to her,” Sister Joan Marie says of her Novice Mistress. “I was close to her because she was like my mother. Especially at that age, I needed somebody.”
Sister Joan Marie says she was “ready to be formed” when she arrived, but she was also worn down by notations of her missteps. “They saw all your faults and all your defects,” she says. “That’s what they wanted to point out. They say the novitiate is the ‘seed time’ in life. They want to point it out so that you get a little better before you get with the professed nuns. Of course, the professed weren’t all saints, either, but it seemed to us they were because we didn’t recreate with them much.”
Incongruous as this life seemed to Virginia, an outsider to the Catholic faith and a rookie at the monastery, she feared that she would be found lacking and would be asked to leave the premises. “I was just so afraid. They didn’t realize how scared I was,” Sister Joan Marie says. She witnessed, in Clothing Ceremonies, postulants become novices, receiving the habit and a religious name, only to be asked to leave months or years later. One novice refused to talk during the community’s one-hour social recreation each day. The girl was moody, Sister Joan Marie says. “Well, that wouldn’t work in a community. She got sent home. When she got sent home, I thought, ‘Oh, I’m next!’ As a novice, you’re supposed to get a little better—at some things, anyway. I didn’t either, but they kept me somehow. I guess they knew; they knew I didn’t want to go back to what I came from.”
Sister
Lisa Black
Margaret Duffy
Erin Bowman
Kate Christensen
Steve Kluger
Jake Bible
Jan Irving
G.L. Snodgrass
Chris Taylor
Jax