I didn’t tell Josh about the spiritual singleness episode in the woods. I wasn’t sure how to explain it to him; I wasn’t even sure how to understand it myself. All I knew was that I needed to return to Visitation Monastery.
“Come for Mass,” Sister Karen had said on Halloween, and I finally took her up on her invitation in late November. That, and Jody had emailed me again about the spiritual formation group for those interested in becoming Visitation Companions. An informational meeting would be held after the service.
When I stepped outside my back door, my heavy winter coat stayed in the closet. The weather was unseasonably mild in Minnesota; the forecast said it would hit sixty degrees. Our neighbor had a new wreath hanging on the front door, and our own Christmas tree was already up in the alcove, heavily decorated with ornaments on the bottom third, where our kids could reach the branches.
I was too late to walk, and I couldn’t quite remember what the monastery looked like, so I typed the address into Google maps and drove down Fremont half a mile, slowing down when my phone said, “Your destination is on the right.”
There it was. The yellow house with its Peace sign in the yard, a house that didn’t look all that different from its neighbors. Easily missed, like Harry Potter’s platform nine and three-quarters. I climbed the two flights of stairs up to the monastery’s front door. A discreet sign was in the window, reading The Sisters Are at Prayer. Shoot. Even with the four-minute drive, I still managed to be late for the 8 a.m. service.
I pushed open the door and made my way onto a front porch with a neatly stacked pile of firewood to one side and a set of white wicker patio furniture on the other. Everything looked bright in the morning light. The next door, leading into the monastery, was locked. It was a solid door with dark brown wood, probably original to the house, which was likely built over a hundred years ago like the others in this neighborhood. I rapped my knuckles on the glass.
A tall woman wearing khaki slacks and a button-down blouse appeared through the window and opened the door, letting me inside a long hallway.
“We’ve already started,” she said in a hushed voice.
“I’m sorry to be late,” I said.
The woman smiled and beckoned me down the hallway to an opening. I followed her, wondering if she was one of the nuns. Stairs to the right. A dozen visible people seated in chairs to the left, their backs to me. She handed me a blue hymnal and offered me an open chair. When she dragged a heavy chair over and placed it beside my own, I realized that she must have given me her seat.
Someone was talking, but I couldn’t see far into the room from where I sat. The house had been built long before open-concept floor plans were in vogue. I could see just part of the living room where the nuns had handed out candy on Halloween and, when I strained my neck, I caught a glimpse of an altar set up with a white cloth. Around twenty people sat in a large circle around the edge of the room, some in easy chairs and couches. They were listening, so I listened too.
I can’t remember many of the details of that first Mass at Visitation Monastery. I don’t remember who sat next to me, or what I talked about with others after the service. I can’t recall the songs we sang or what I did with my hands when everyone else crossed themselves on their foreheads, lips, and hearts before the Gospel reading.
But I do remember a few things: a time of prayer for a homeless couple that had come to the monastery’s door earlier in the week. A hymn that Sister Karen led on her guitar. After a priest gave the homily, one woman reflected on the strangely warm, in-between season we were in. (Later I would learn that it’s not typical for people to share openly during Mass and other daily prayer services, but this was a practice of Visitation Monastery.) She admonished the group not to rush into Advent. Instead, enjoy this Thirty-Fourth Week in Ordinary Time. Extend the Thanksgiving holiday another week.
After Mass I stood around with a paper cup of coffee, waiting for the Visitation Companions meeting. Jody, the lay leader of the companions, and Sister Suzanne walked me downstairs into the basement. There must have been some of the others from the formation group, Jane or Kristin or Kathie, but the details are fuzzy in my memory. We must have talked about the one-year spiritual formation process ahead of us: about meeting monthly to learn about Salesian spirituality, about the history of the order and of its founders, Saint Jane de Chantal and Saint Francis de Sales.
All I remember with any clarity is Sister Suzanne, sitting in a blue chair, telling a story about brushing her teeth next to Dorothy Day during some activist trip she took in the 1970s. Dorothy Day was the one Catholic I knew something about, having read her memoir The Long Loneliness and volunteered alongside Josh in a ministry that was inspired by the Catholic Worker communities that Day helped found in the 1930s.
I took one picture that morning. It was of a book on the coffee table called Saved by Beauty, about Dorothy Day’s spiritual journey. I sent the photo to the women in my writers’ group with the text: Went to Mass. Dorothy Day is all over this place, so you know these nuns are very cool.
I didn’t know that the book was on the coffee table because it was Dorothy Day’s death day. She is not canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church (though many have taken up that cause), but she was another single woman who lived out her faith in radical, unconventional ways.
It felt like another sign that I was in the right place.