It was the morning of Halloween when I emailed Sister Theresa to set up another spiritual direction appointment. I had let more than three months pass since I’d cried in her office. Since then, Josh and I had bought our first house in North Minneapolis, and life had gone haywire with packing boxes, our eldest’s first day of kindergarten, and transition hiccups that included both a mice infestation and a broken toilet.
In my email, I said I would be driving near Saint Benedict’s Monastery later that week for work. Would she have time to meet with me? “O, I am so sorry, Stina,” she wrote back, explaining she would be out of town. “Do try again when you are in Collegeville.”
I had loved talking with Sister Theresa, but it was becoming obvious that spiritual direction with her wasn’t going to be a practice I could regularly sustain. It was hard enough to find time to drive an hour to a Benedictine monastery, let alone coordinate with work and find childcare. And I found that, in the midst of my busy family life, I didn’t have the discipline to read the Rule of Saint Benedict on my own. I could barely keep up with the daily Give Us This Day readings.
That evening Josh and I were fighting about something or other, but it was Halloween, so we took our bad moods and went trick-or-treating as a family anyway. Eliza, our five-year-old daughter, was dressed as a cat with eyeliner-smudged whiskers; Rowan, our two-year-old son, was dressed as a dinosaur with pointy white teeth framing his face like a bonnet. Josh and I trailed them closely as they knocked on doors and filled plastic buckets with candy in our new city neighborhood, which was often stereotyped as a high-crime area. One neighbor was handing out paper travel cups of apple cider; another passed out Dixie cups of red wine for the grown-ups. Our grumpy moods began to lighten.
I held Rowan’s hand as he navigated the steps of a large house down the street in the Old Highland neighborhood, his dinosaur tail wagging with excitement. At the door, a group of fresh-faced college students with shiny ponytails greeted us with jubilant “Happy Halloweens!” They beckoned us onto an enclosed porch, through a narrow hallway, and into a living room.
I followed my son curiously into the strange house, my eyes glued to his swinging tail as he walked straight up to several kind, elderly women holding baskets of candy. One woman, her body slightly bent to one side, asked my children to explain their costumes, which were half-hidden under winter coats and hats. There was something different about this house. As I rubbed my cold hands in the warmth and looked around, it began to click into place: I saw copies of Give Us This Day on a side-table, and a framed painting of the biblical characters Elizabeth and Mary embracing on the wall. I was handed a brochure.
“I’m Sister Karen and this is Visitation Monastery,” a woman told us in her slightly raspy voice, her warm eyes twinkling, her gray hair curled around her face in a bob. She wasn’t wearing a nun’s habit, but she did have an oversized silver cross on a chain around her neck.
“Monastery?” my husband asked, turning to me and poking me in the ribs. I shot him a look as I turned back to Sister Karen and explained that we had just bought a house a half mile down the street, that I wasn’t Catholic but, as my friend Christiana likes to say, Catholic-attracted. I didn’t tell her that I was unsuccessfully trying to meet with a Benedictine spiritual director or that I was regularly reading a Catholic prayer book; I didn’t tell her that I was struggling to hold on to faith after my husband had lost his faith in God.
“Come for Mass!” Sister Karen implored me, and she pointed to the brochure in my hands. “All the information is on our website.”
I said I would as I turned to follow my kids and husband, who were already making their way out the door, down the steps, and back out into the night. The young women on the porch, who I later learned were there for a monastic immersion experience, waved goodbye. As we walked away, I stopped to look back at the house. There was no sign announcing its religious identity, except for a yard sign reading Peace!
“So those were nuns?” my husband asked. Both our childhoods had included multiple viewings of the film The Sound of Music, where nuns looked like the Mother Abbess, wearing a black-and-white habit, singing “Climb Every Mountain” to convince Fraülein Maria to return to Vienna. They weren’t supposed to invite kids in Halloween costumes into their living rooms. At the very least, I imagined modern sisters to be more like Sister Theresa: living in quiet, contemplative monasteries far away from city neighborhoods like ours.
“Yeah,” I replied. “I guess they were.”
Later at home, once my kids were asleep, I stole a Snickers bar from the candy basket and looked up the monastery’s website. The sisters were not Benedictines but were part of the Visitation Sisters of Holy Mary founded in France four hundred years ago. This particular monastery had sustained a ministry of prayer and presence in the neighborhood for nearly thirty years.
Sister Theresa and Saint Benedict’s Monastery were over an hour’s drive away, but these nuns were practically next door.