Read Online Dedicated to God by Abbie Reese - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Abbie Reese
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Maria Deo Gratias says,
Our love for God spills out, and it spills out on our sisters in community. When you have love, you can’t keep it to yourself. We take care of each other’s needs, but when we’re taking care of each other’s needs, we’re taking care of the needs of Christ in that person. There’s that perception of that other sister as the body of Christ and that whole mystical body idea. In community, we show our love for God by how we love our sisters. We form a happy family, in the sense that the family is a group of adult women responding to God together. And people are different. They have different personalities. But that’s kind of like a given. You know you’re not going to find a perfect human on earth.
Even in a cloistered monastery, where like-minded women convene, for life, after internalizing their common beliefs, and aiming together toward holiness and perfection, there are conflicts. “You know, each person is so different, unique, and then sometimes we clash on each other; and sometimes we agree,” Sister Joan Marie says. “Most of the time we agree.”
“I think men religious have different struggles than what women religious would have,” says Sister Mary Gemma. “A woman by nature likes to arrange things and have her kitchen the way she wants, but in community you have to learn to let go of that. I think that’s one of the hardest things—you aren’t the woman of the home. There are twenty other women. That’s something you struggle with. It’s more of a struggle when you first come. You have to let go of the way you want things to be, otherwise you’re just not going to get along.” Although Sister Mary Gemma has never heard “a bad word” uttered in the monastery, she adds, “I would say probably what I found most surprising was that once in a while there would be a couple of sisters that would get into it with each other. Then later, I found that there’s so much forgiveness here. Later, that’s what struck me more than anything.”
The inherent tensions that can fester within an enclosed community have been mythologized in oral tradition. The stories are like fables, or parables, with morals. Sister Mary Gemma shares a story passed along from the early days of the Corpus Christi Monastery’s founding through the generations of novices and nuns: Two young nuns were assigned to work in the garden together, but they could never agree on anything, namely how they should conduct their work. One day, one of the nuns introduced a novel attempt atdiplomacy, to quash the inevitable quarreling. She walked out to the garden and greeted the other nun. She had either filled her pockets with marbles in the monastery, or she picked up stones off the ground. She proceeded to place one marble or stone after another into her mouth, as Sister Mary Gemma says, “so that she would keep her mouth shut, because she had a hard time controlling her temper. In charity, she thought she had better put something in her mouth to remind her to be quiet when she didn’t agree with something. She recognized that it was wrong of her to get so upset about things, and since she couldn’t control herself that way, she did it another way.”
This “real old story that goes way back,” Sister Mary Gemma says, has been told and retold. Its themes strike at the core of the nuns’ values: Discipline. Obedience. Silence. Love. Selflessness. Peacemaking. It illustrates the virtue of caring for someone else over the desire to express one’s own opinions, or get one’s own way. “Those are the kind of thing we share at recreation,” Sister Mary Gemma says. “The sisters that have been here longer like to tell the stories that bring out the foibles of one another. It’s a joyful acknowledgment. We’re acknowledging that we’re all struggling. You can look back and laugh, even though something was so hard at the time; and yet you can look back and laugh.”
Sister Mary Gemma sees humor and truth
Our love for God spills out, and it spills out on our sisters in community. When you have love, you can’t keep it to yourself. We take care of each other’s needs, but when we’re taking care of each other’s needs, we’re taking care of the needs of Christ in that person. There’s that perception of that other sister as the body of Christ and that whole mystical body idea. In community, we show our love for God by how we love our sisters. We form a happy family, in the sense that the family is a group of adult women responding to God together. And people are different. They have different personalities. But that’s kind of like a given. You know you’re not going to find a perfect human on earth.
Even in a cloistered monastery, where like-minded women convene, for life, after internalizing their common beliefs, and aiming together toward holiness and perfection, there are conflicts. “You know, each person is so different, unique, and then sometimes we clash on each other; and sometimes we agree,” Sister Joan Marie says. “Most of the time we agree.”
“I think men religious have different struggles than what women religious would have,” says Sister Mary Gemma. “A woman by nature likes to arrange things and have her kitchen the way she wants, but in community you have to learn to let go of that. I think that’s one of the hardest things—you aren’t the woman of the home. There are twenty other women. That’s something you struggle with. It’s more of a struggle when you first come. You have to let go of the way you want things to be, otherwise you’re just not going to get along.” Although Sister Mary Gemma has never heard “a bad word” uttered in the monastery, she adds, “I would say probably what I found most surprising was that once in a while there would be a couple of sisters that would get into it with each other. Then later, I found that there’s so much forgiveness here. Later, that’s what struck me more than anything.”
The inherent tensions that can fester within an enclosed community have been mythologized in oral tradition. The stories are like fables, or parables, with morals. Sister Mary Gemma shares a story passed along from the early days of the Corpus Christi Monastery’s founding through the generations of novices and nuns: Two young nuns were assigned to work in the garden together, but they could never agree on anything, namely how they should conduct their work. One day, one of the nuns introduced a novel attempt atdiplomacy, to quash the inevitable quarreling. She walked out to the garden and greeted the other nun. She had either filled her pockets with marbles in the monastery, or she picked up stones off the ground. She proceeded to place one marble or stone after another into her mouth, as Sister Mary Gemma says, “so that she would keep her mouth shut, because she had a hard time controlling her temper. In charity, she thought she had better put something in her mouth to remind her to be quiet when she didn’t agree with something. She recognized that it was wrong of her to get so upset about things, and since she couldn’t control herself that way, she did it another way.”
This “real old story that goes way back,” Sister Mary Gemma says, has been told and retold. Its themes strike at the core of the nuns’ values: Discipline. Obedience. Silence. Love. Selflessness. Peacemaking. It illustrates the virtue of caring for someone else over the desire to express one’s own opinions, or get one’s own way. “Those are the kind of thing we share at recreation,” Sister Mary Gemma says. “The sisters that have been here longer like to tell the stories that bring out the foibles of one another. It’s a joyful acknowledgment. We’re acknowledging that we’re all struggling. You can look back and laugh, even though something was so hard at the time; and yet you can look back and laugh.”
Sister Mary Gemma sees humor and truth
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