EVANSVILLE, Ind. (AP) - Sister Jane Marie walked slowly into the dimly lit chapel.
The other nuns followed behind her. One by one, they found their pews and bowed their heads. Apart from the rustle of prayer books, and the occasional squeak of a walker, the Monastery of St. Clare’s chapel was silent.
Sister Jane Marie’s voice broke the stillness.
“We adore thee,” she said.
And the sisters launched into their prayers. The women spoke in unison, their words timed perfectly from decades of praying together.
“A lot of people just don’t understand what this life is about,” said Sister Jane Marie. “They often say, ’What a waste, what a waste of time,’ because they just don’t understand.”
The sister cupped her hands in her lap and smiled.
Nestled in the woods on Evansville’s far West Side, she and her sisters are cut off from the world. They are enclosed within their monastery and spend most of their lives in silent prayer.
When Sister Jane Marie came to this monastery 25 years ago, it was a lively place. Twenty-one sisters lived within its walls. Some tended gardens while others cooked, played music, or wove on a loom. Together they baked the communion bread for Catholic churches around the city. Their prayers and hymns were full of strong, synchronized voices.
But Sister Jane Marie was the last new nun to join the cloister. And as the years passed, the sisters grew old.
“We have become less and less as life goes on,” Sister Jane Marie said. “The sisters grow old and die.”
Their way of life is dying with them. Only seven sisters now remain.
With that in mind, the sisters of the Monastery of St. Clare allowed the Courier & Press to peek inside their enclosed lives. And, though she is a deeply private person, Sister Jane Marie agreed to share a bit of her story.
“People call this a higher calling,” Sister Jane Marie said, as she sat in the monastery’s guest parlor in early January. “But I don’t see it that way. It is just a different calling. It is my calling.”
On the parlor wall above an antique, lace-covered dining room table hung a picture of Jesus. Out the window, she could see a line of bare trees. Beyond that, a lifeless cornfield stretched into a wooded valley.
“Coming here was like coming home,” she said, softly.
It took her a long time to get here, she said.
Sister Jane Marie was born in Michigan to a Methodist family. As a child, she knew nothing of the Catholic faith. Though, looking back, she says she felt a longing to be closer to God from an early age.
“I can remember walking to school and talking to him,” the sister said. “I wanted to be close to him, but I didn’t know what that meant.
At 10, Sister Jane Marie’s mother died. Two years later, her father remarried a Catholic woman who Sister Jane Marie grew to dearly love.
At 14, her step mother took Jane Marie to her first Catholic mass.
The moment the priest held up the Eucharist, Sister Jane Marie was forever changed.
“I thought, ’There He is,’” she whispered. “The consecrated bread. And I thought, ’I want that.’”
The sister paused.
“He works in different ways with all of us,” she said. “How it happened to me is very individual. No one would relate to it.”
Jane Marie spent the next 30 years drawing slowly deeper into the Catholic faith.
She became a nurse and took a job in public health. She loved the work, and the independence it afforded her. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be.
She was in her 40s when a friend gave her a brochure for the Sisters of Poor Clare - and something clicked.
“I called information, and the nearest place was Evansville, Indiana,” she said.
The idea of joining an enclosed order excited and terrified her.
Traditionally, Poor Clare monasteries are surrounded by high, brick walls to the monastery grounds separate from the rest of the world.
After years of moving freely around the state of Michigan as a public health nurse, Jane Marie didn’t think she would like being confined within a walled convent.
So when she arrived in Evansville, she knew she had made the right decision.
“You see how the Lord provides?” she said, glancing out the parlor window at the rolling corn field and wooded valley.
A wide smile spread across her face.
“There are no walls here,” she whispered.
Sister Jane Marie fell pretty easily into cloistered life.
All her life, she wanted to be close to God.
“This is what I have always wanted,” she said. “When I finally made it here, I just felt like, I’m free!”
Sister Jane Marie threw her arms in the air.
“At last,” she cried. “I’m free.”
Though the years have changed the number of sisters, the structure of Sister Jane Marie’s life as a Poor Clare nun has remained virtually the same.
She wakes each day around 5 a.m. and spends several hours in private prayer. She attends mass with her sisters and several community prayers.
The sisters prepare and eat their food in silence, in order to pray as they work.
In the afternoons, they have two hours of free time. Some sisters take walks through the forests surrounding the monastery. Others sew, play music, or read. As abbess, Sister Jane Marie often spends this time answering correspondence or making calls on behalf of the monastery.
Free time is followed by additional prayer times, meals, and a short recreation period.
Each day ends as it began, in private prayer.
“There are days when we’re all in sync,” Sister Jane Marie said. “Then there are times when we can’t get in sync, and we’re not singing the hymns right.”
She laughed.
“And the Lord, I know, is just smiling at us,” she said. “I love this life, if you haven’t caught on.”
That’s not to say that there are no challenges in the sisters’ lives. In its own way, the life of a cloistered nun can be very taxing, the sister said.
“This life is so demanding because we are so enclosed,” she said. “It’s like a family, you didn’t ask for these people to spend your life with. But you have to live together, in peace.”
Conflicts inevitably arise, she said.
Over the years, Sister Jane Marie has learned to cope with the conflicts by praying - and letting go.
“I always remember, this is not about me,” she said. “It’s about being close to God. So you have to pray for the person you are having problems with.”
Not everyone can survive in a cloister. In fact, many sisters who express interest in joining contemplative life at the Evansville monastery do not stay beyond a year or two, Sister Jane Marie said.
“About one in four will stay,” she said. “And that is OK. Not everyone is called to this life.”
But as the years pass with no new sisters taking orders, Sister Jane Marie worries for the future of her beloved monastery.
With so few nuns now, they no longer bake communion bread. A sister from a convent in St. Louis now does most of their sewing, as the sisters’ eyesight is now failing.
One of the sisters has Alzheimer’s, and others require extra care.
The once-lively convent is now quite still, and Sister Jane Marie wonders if it will survive beyond her generation.
“Only God knows,” she said.
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Source: Evansville Courier and Press, https://bit.ly/2jZzcly
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Information from: Evansville Courier & Press, https://www.courierpress.com
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