22 ON VOWS

Most of the Visitation Sisters I know joined the convent when they were young: nineteen, twenty, twenty-five. At the same age when their peers were getting married and starting families, these women were taking lifelong vows to celibacy, to live in community, to submit their own wills and desires to a rule of life devised by Saint Francis and Saint Jane over four hundred years ago.

But one morning in early May, Sister Karen invited me to come to something unusual: a first profession of vows for a woman in her fifties. Sister Brenda was formally entering the community. She had an unusual story: after living for decades as a Baptist missionary in Asia, Brenda had been confirmed in the Catholic Church just five years before, when she came to live and pray with the sisters at Visitation Monastery. She was an anomaly, an outlier, and a full twenty years younger than the next older sister in the community.

The first vows service was held at Ascension Catholic Church, where I had kissed the cross on Good Friday and where the sisters went to church each Sunday. I walked over from my house, making my way down Fremont to Broadway, passing empty lots and the newly opened gas station on the corner. The grass was a luminous green. A group of kids biked back and forth on the sidewalk while music blared from an open window. Trees were just starting to leaf out, their branches bobbing with mini leaves. The snow had finally melted and new life was emerging everywhere.

After walking past Broadway’s bus stops and storefronts and honking traffic, I turned right on Bryant Avenue. Already I could see the red brick and sandstone of the church, the towering white spire looming over the intersection a few blocks away. When it was founded in 1890, Ascension Catholic Church was home to Irish and German immigrants who lived in the surrounding Old Highland neighborhood. Now the Gothic-style church holds Masses in both English and Spanish, serving more recent immigrants to this area.

What would a first vows ceremony be like? I wondered. And what had led Brenda from a life as a Baptist missionary to a life as a Catholic nun?

I marched my way up the concrete stairs of the church, opened the heavy wooden doors, and walked into the sanctuary, which was about half full. Someone played a piano prelude in the background amid rumbles of chatter. Middle-aged people in church clothes—pastels and suit jackets, skirts and nylons—greeted one another, they hugged and shook hands. I looked down at my jeans, trying to smooth the wrinkles in my blouse before sliding into a pew behind two older women I recognized from Wednesday Mass at the monastery. The front of the church was decorated with potted flowers, all lavenders and pinks and cheerful mums. On a small table covered with a white cloth sat cut pink flowers in a glass vase, a white pillar candle, and a stand holding a heavy-looking, brown book.

Sister Mary Frances, dressed in a smart white pantsuit, welcomed the crowd. Processional music began, and a stream of people walked down the center aisle led by a woman carrying a tall, bronze crucifix. People carried candles, and one man in a white alb swung a bronze ball of incense back and forth, leaving a smoky perfume in the air.

Brenda appeared next, wearing a crimson brocade jacket and a corsage of roses and baby’s breath. She walked down the aisle with her mother. Next, her two biological sisters walked down the center aisle, followed by the Visitation nuns, two by two: Suzanne and Katherine, Mary Virginia and Karen. Finally, Mary Francis wheeled in Mary Margaret, who looked fragile and thin framed in the chair. It was the first time I had laid eyes on this founding sister of the monastery, who I often heard referred to as the “resident mystic.” She had just celebrated her ninetieth birthday and was mostly confined to her upstairs bedroom in the Girard House following a debilitating stroke. The sisters hired a skilled caregiver to come in the mornings, and they took turns sitting with her, acting, they said, as “Mary Margaret’s afternoon angel.”

The Visitation Sisters filed into the front pew, like seven beads on a string. I watched Brenda’s mother and sisters settle into a row behind them, and I wondered what her Protestant family thought of all this Catholic business, of the porcelain stations of the cross that ringed the sanctuary, of the statue of Mary in the alcove, of the dramatic white spires behind the altar, of the life-sized, bloody Jesus hanging on a wooden cross off to the side.

Had her mother instead imagined a wedding for her child, processing down the aisle someday in a humble Baptist church with no graven images of God, no special veneration of Mary or suspicious medieval saints, as a mother of the bride? Had she prayed for her Brenda’s spouse since she was a little girl, just as Josh’s mother once told me she had done for him?

The parallels to a wedding were inescapable: the corsage, the procession down the aisle, the vows. Presiding over the Mass was Father Dale, who remarked that there had not been a vow ceremony for a religious vocation at Ascension Church in decades.

Brenda had been a novice for two years prior, spending her novitiate studying the Visitation vows and living as a fully integrated member of the monastic community. Her experience is a very different one than many of the other Catholic sisters in the community, most of whom were novices before Vatican II when they wore special habits and didn’t see their family members for months upon entering the enclosure. In those days, first vows were even more like a wedding—some women wore wedding dresses as they became the brides of Christ.

Some nuns really get into the nuptial metaphors—their marriages to Jesus, their identity as Christ’s brides. But when I asked Sister Katherine later if she feels married to Jesus, she scoffed. Some people, she said, have this overly romantic idea when they make their monastic vows. (I later read in a book about the Visitation Sisters’ vocation stories that Sister Mary Frances, who once had a young man very interested in her romantically, heard God say to her: “I want you for myself.” This voice confirmed for her that she should join the convent instead.)

There is no theology in my tradition that encourages women to eschew marriage. Yet in one of Paul’s letters, he recommends Christ followers not to marry. Even Jesus says so in Luke’s gospel. When did that clear biblical admonition fall out of favor with evangelicals? Is there something very Protestant about rejecting celibacy as an honored way to serve God?

When I interviewed Brenda a few months later, she spoke to me about how hard it was to be a single woman in the Baptist church. “They didn’t know what to do with me,” she laughed, then described the tediously titled “Spares and Pairs” social groups in Texas churches where single women like her were essentially compared to extra parts. Even in the missionary community, it was hard to be single when most others were married with children. It’s no wonder that the monastery, with its rhythms of daily prayer, would be compelling in comparison.

Joining a monastic order is more than heeding the call to singleness, she told me. It’s about making vows to God and committing to live them out in community.