after a successful campaign by her older sister, was baptized into the Catholic Church. Two years later, she joined the Poor Clare Colettine Order. Monastic life—her new life—seemed like a riddle. And she lacked the code to decipher it. “I just never knew what was going to happen next,” she says.
Sister Joan Marie did not grasp the meaning of every custom or comprehend the significance of all the events she witnessed or participated in. She shares an anecdote about the predicament of observing monastic silence while adapting to her new culture: Every day, the nuns lined up in the refectory to confess their faults and weaknesses of that day before their community. Sister Joan Marie remembers standing with the other nuns, waiting her turn to step into the center of the room; the Mother Abbess and Vicaress sat at the head table at one end of the room, and the other nuns lined the two tables that ran the lengths of the room, their backs to the walls. Each nun stood before the Mother Abbess and recounted to her community her imperfections—confessing, for instance, if she accidentally broke a dish.
After the public admission, each nun prostrated herself on the floor facing the head table. Because they lived in such close quarters, Sister Joan Marie says, no disclosure was truly a revelation. “They knew anyway,” she says. “It wasn’t anything new.” If a nun confessed that she forgot to perform a duty, she was given a broken clothespin to wear—presumably a symbol of the omission and a visual cue to remember the next time. If a nun was concerned she might have forgotten to mention a sin of omission or commission, she wore a “forget hat.” Sister Joan Marie remembers one nun in her eighties always took the forget hat. Habitually, the elder nun recited her list of faults, adding, “Something else I forgot.” A few minutes later, when she bent forward to eat her soup, the hat inevitably fell into the soup. “She forgot she had the hat on!” Sister Joan Marie says. “It was so funny!”
Following the communal ritual, one of the nuns walked to a chart and flipped the numbers. Sister Joan Marie assumed the nun was tallying for the scorecard the collective faults and weaknesses confessed that day. “Later on,” Sister Joan Marie says, “this other postulant came to me and said, ‘What doesthat number mean?’ I said, ‘I really don’t know.’ I said, ‘There’s some things you just don’t ask about.’ Well, she was smart enough she asked the superior, which I was afraid to do because everything was so mysterious to me.” The postulant relayed to Virginia what she had learned; the number denoted the temperature outdoors so the nuns knew how to layer up for their manual labor in the gardens. “I was amazed it was so simple a thing!” Sister Joan Marie says. “I thought for sure it had to do with those faults or something mysterious!”
Virginia’s new home, with its foreign routines and formal construct, baffled her. “It was so different than anything you had imagined,” Sister Joan Marie says. “I guess that was good. In a way, if you see all that’s coming, you can’t adjust very well. I would have liked to have some relaxation. There was none. Like when you go home, you can relax. But there was no going home. There was no time when you could just be yourself. You were kind of on edge every minute. There’s advantages to being young. I couldn’t have done it later. I would have been too set in my ways by that time.” Virginia arrived at the monastery directly from high school. She was accustomed to a structure bracketed by bells, and so she had no trouble responding when the monastery’s bells prompted her to move on to the next activity—prayers, or work, or recreation. “You know the schedule is pretty tight,” she says. “But in the evening, I would have liked to relax. You know, when you came home from school, you could be yourself, you know. You didn’t have to be on edge.
Sister Joan Marie did not grasp the meaning of every custom or comprehend the significance of all the events she witnessed or participated in. She shares an anecdote about the predicament of observing monastic silence while adapting to her new culture: Every day, the nuns lined up in the refectory to confess their faults and weaknesses of that day before their community. Sister Joan Marie remembers standing with the other nuns, waiting her turn to step into the center of the room; the Mother Abbess and Vicaress sat at the head table at one end of the room, and the other nuns lined the two tables that ran the lengths of the room, their backs to the walls. Each nun stood before the Mother Abbess and recounted to her community her imperfections—confessing, for instance, if she accidentally broke a dish.
After the public admission, each nun prostrated herself on the floor facing the head table. Because they lived in such close quarters, Sister Joan Marie says, no disclosure was truly a revelation. “They knew anyway,” she says. “It wasn’t anything new.” If a nun confessed that she forgot to perform a duty, she was given a broken clothespin to wear—presumably a symbol of the omission and a visual cue to remember the next time. If a nun was concerned she might have forgotten to mention a sin of omission or commission, she wore a “forget hat.” Sister Joan Marie remembers one nun in her eighties always took the forget hat. Habitually, the elder nun recited her list of faults, adding, “Something else I forgot.” A few minutes later, when she bent forward to eat her soup, the hat inevitably fell into the soup. “She forgot she had the hat on!” Sister Joan Marie says. “It was so funny!”
Following the communal ritual, one of the nuns walked to a chart and flipped the numbers. Sister Joan Marie assumed the nun was tallying for the scorecard the collective faults and weaknesses confessed that day. “Later on,” Sister Joan Marie says, “this other postulant came to me and said, ‘What doesthat number mean?’ I said, ‘I really don’t know.’ I said, ‘There’s some things you just don’t ask about.’ Well, she was smart enough she asked the superior, which I was afraid to do because everything was so mysterious to me.” The postulant relayed to Virginia what she had learned; the number denoted the temperature outdoors so the nuns knew how to layer up for their manual labor in the gardens. “I was amazed it was so simple a thing!” Sister Joan Marie says. “I thought for sure it had to do with those faults or something mysterious!”
Virginia’s new home, with its foreign routines and formal construct, baffled her. “It was so different than anything you had imagined,” Sister Joan Marie says. “I guess that was good. In a way, if you see all that’s coming, you can’t adjust very well. I would have liked to have some relaxation. There was none. Like when you go home, you can relax. But there was no going home. There was no time when you could just be yourself. You were kind of on edge every minute. There’s advantages to being young. I couldn’t have done it later. I would have been too set in my ways by that time.” Virginia arrived at the monastery directly from high school. She was accustomed to a structure bracketed by bells, and so she had no trouble responding when the monastery’s bells prompted her to move on to the next activity—prayers, or work, or recreation. “You know the schedule is pretty tight,” she says. “But in the evening, I would have liked to relax. You know, when you came home from school, you could be yourself, you know. You didn’t have to be on edge.
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