adulthood and seniority within the same fourteen-acre enclosure. Decade after decade elapses, and Sister Joan Marie rarely leaves the Corpus Christi Monastery campus. She knows that she will die here, unless, she teases, they kick her out. “They overlook a lot, I hope,” she says. “You know you’re not under that tension. You know they’re not going to send you away. They’d like to …” she trails off.
Sister Joan Marie ranks eldest in the community by longevity, having entered the Corpus Christi Monastery in 1950, before any other current member. She moved here at age seventeen; now eighty-one years old, she recounts her first impressions when she walked into the monastery, when life as a Poor Clare began: In the reverential moment when she first approached the tabernacle housing the exposed eucharist in the public chapel, she heard the novices and nuns who had already made temporary vowsand final vows singing from their hidden choir chapel, which faces the public chapel but is separated and hidden from it by the sanctuary (past a swinging gold gate at the Communion rail that separates the nave, where the churchgoers sit, from the altar of sacrifice and altar of repose, where the priest offers Mass and the Blessed Sacrament is exposed). Sister Joan Marie and the other aspiring postulants walked single file, past the stained-glass windows that depict scenes from the lives of Christ, Saint Francis, and Saint Clare on both sides of the public chapel and under the frescoes with gold detail. The young women knelt before the Blessed Sacrament. “We were just overawed, and so all you could think about was, ‘God and me,’” Sister Joan Marie says. “That’s all you saw. I just thought I was in heaven. I just thought, ‘There’s God and here’s me. Nobody else. Nothing else. I left everything.’ And in a way it’s true, but not quite so romantic. But I was in seventh heaven.
“I thought this is it. Live happily ever after. Oh dear. It was so different than anything you had imagined. When you get here, you realize more and more every day, I’ve still got a lot to learn.”
Virginia (a pseudonym Sister Joan Marie selected for herself to represent life before she was assigned a religious name), was led to her new quarters, a cell that measured eleven feet, eight inches by six feet, nine inches. Seeing little more than a bed with a straw-stuffed mattress, she says, “That woke me up a little bit.” She changed into the outfit for first-year postulants and then wound her way back through the corridors from the novitiate wing of the monastery to the parlor, where she met her parents and siblings to say goodbye. For the first time, the metal grille separated Virginia from her family and from the rest of the world. Debuting her uniform further startled the dream. “Here I thought I was all grown up, leaving my home and family,” she says. “And when I came in with these cuffs and a big bonnet, I wonder, ‘Am I a baby again?’ ” she laughs. Her mother told her she looked like the Dutch girl from a popular advertising campaign.
Before she entered the monastery, Virginia pictured life as a cloistered nun. She thought of Saint Colette, a hermit. “Of course, I was young and idealistic,” she says. “I thought it would just be me and God. Nobody else. I didn’t know about community. I had a lot to learn. You’re that age, you’re pretty idealistic, and even my parents—I don’t think they knew exactly what I was getting into. We trusted the Church. We were so enthused by the Church, being converts.”
Raised in an environment of upheaval that started with her father’s job loss, followed by episodes of migrant family life and then periodic separations from her parents, Virginia believed her mother and father hoped she would choose her own religious preference. She took cues from her spiritual surrogate and standin mother figure—her maternal grandmother; Virginia claimed the Protestant faith but,
Sister Joan Marie ranks eldest in the community by longevity, having entered the Corpus Christi Monastery in 1950, before any other current member. She moved here at age seventeen; now eighty-one years old, she recounts her first impressions when she walked into the monastery, when life as a Poor Clare began: In the reverential moment when she first approached the tabernacle housing the exposed eucharist in the public chapel, she heard the novices and nuns who had already made temporary vowsand final vows singing from their hidden choir chapel, which faces the public chapel but is separated and hidden from it by the sanctuary (past a swinging gold gate at the Communion rail that separates the nave, where the churchgoers sit, from the altar of sacrifice and altar of repose, where the priest offers Mass and the Blessed Sacrament is exposed). Sister Joan Marie and the other aspiring postulants walked single file, past the stained-glass windows that depict scenes from the lives of Christ, Saint Francis, and Saint Clare on both sides of the public chapel and under the frescoes with gold detail. The young women knelt before the Blessed Sacrament. “We were just overawed, and so all you could think about was, ‘God and me,’” Sister Joan Marie says. “That’s all you saw. I just thought I was in heaven. I just thought, ‘There’s God and here’s me. Nobody else. Nothing else. I left everything.’ And in a way it’s true, but not quite so romantic. But I was in seventh heaven.
“I thought this is it. Live happily ever after. Oh dear. It was so different than anything you had imagined. When you get here, you realize more and more every day, I’ve still got a lot to learn.”
Virginia (a pseudonym Sister Joan Marie selected for herself to represent life before she was assigned a religious name), was led to her new quarters, a cell that measured eleven feet, eight inches by six feet, nine inches. Seeing little more than a bed with a straw-stuffed mattress, she says, “That woke me up a little bit.” She changed into the outfit for first-year postulants and then wound her way back through the corridors from the novitiate wing of the monastery to the parlor, where she met her parents and siblings to say goodbye. For the first time, the metal grille separated Virginia from her family and from the rest of the world. Debuting her uniform further startled the dream. “Here I thought I was all grown up, leaving my home and family,” she says. “And when I came in with these cuffs and a big bonnet, I wonder, ‘Am I a baby again?’ ” she laughs. Her mother told her she looked like the Dutch girl from a popular advertising campaign.
Before she entered the monastery, Virginia pictured life as a cloistered nun. She thought of Saint Colette, a hermit. “Of course, I was young and idealistic,” she says. “I thought it would just be me and God. Nobody else. I didn’t know about community. I had a lot to learn. You’re that age, you’re pretty idealistic, and even my parents—I don’t think they knew exactly what I was getting into. We trusted the Church. We were so enthused by the Church, being converts.”
Raised in an environment of upheaval that started with her father’s job loss, followed by episodes of migrant family life and then periodic separations from her parents, Virginia believed her mother and father hoped she would choose her own religious preference. She took cues from her spiritual surrogate and standin mother figure—her maternal grandmother; Virginia claimed the Protestant faith but,
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