The life of a contemplative nun might seem isolated, but enclosed orders are reaching out to communities online using social-networking sites. ÁINE KERRasks what life is like on the inside.
BEFORE THE DAWN and the chapel bells begin to toll, 16 women in distinctive red habits rise in quiet unison to pray. Their day within the enclosed Monastery of St Alphonsus in Drumcondra, Dublin will bring songful prayers, silent prayers, spiritual readings and labour.
For one technologically savvy Redemptoristine nun from Offaly, Sr Lucy Conway, the day will also involve posting updates to the monastery’s Red Nuns website, writing a new blog entry, checking the nuns’ Facebook messages, replying to emailed prayer requests, and partaking in Skype chats. This is the new generation of monastic nuns, who live life away from the eye of the storm in an enclosed private setting, but reach out in new, evolving ways.
Pope Benedict XVI is among their “friends” on Facebook, as are their nieces and nephews, who they keep a watchful eye on via their own personal social-networking accounts. The time spent online is strictly rationed. It tests their self-discipline. Ever mindful of the need to exist in a deep state of contemplation, Sr Conway recently took what she calls a “sabbatical from Facebook”, but soon returned, given the need to promote one of their upcoming monastic experience weekends.
The work day of the 36 sisters in St Mary’s Abbey in Glencairn, Co Waterford, who rise at the appointed hour of 3.45am, follows a similar beat, carefully juxtaposing prayer with labour. The sisters at the monastery in the Blackwater Valley might follow the sixth century Rule of Benedict but they also have 520 real-time 21st-century Facebook followers. They take responsibility for farming their 200 acres, making Holy Communion hosts and creating greeting cards, while Sarah Branigan (38) takes charge of the online engine and new vocations. “We’re trying to preserve the integrity of contemplative life but we also know we need a certain level of visibility,” says Sr Branigan.
It’s a curious mix. Orders are removed from the bustling world without, yet use Facebook and other mediums as a distant lens on that world. Each order is quick to insist that nothing, including Facebook, TV, radio and email, will impinge on their life of sanctity and prayer. But they concede they need to reach out to potential new recruits, need to be aware of the world’s problems that form the basis of their hourly prayers, and occasionally keep in contact with family and friends they rarely see.
Vocation weekends, organised three or four times a year, operate an open-door policy. Four or five women who see the Facebook posts, website notices and church leaflets travel to Waterford and stay in the on-site guesthouse, which is normally open to the public, in exchange for a donation of their choice. On vocation weekends, it becomes a place for reflection, outside of the timetabled prayers, gospel readings, meals and power-point presentations.
The hands-on monastic experience is a process of “mutual discernment”, enabling the established nuns to get to know a potential new member, according to Sr Branigan. “If we feel the person shows potential for a vocation and is suitable, we encourage them to apply. We get references, a medical cert and a psychological assessment,” she says. Not everyone, however, is accepted. And some have been known to leave.
The vocation process is rigid. Postulancy, or candidacy, lasts eight to 12 months, novitiate lasts two years, first profession takes the vows of obedience, chastity and poverty for three years, and solemn profession requires taking the vows for life.
Sr Katherine Duncan is embracing what she terms a “simpler life” after training as a midwife and maternity nurse, and working for 10 years as a hospital nurse in Tullamore, Co Offaly. A year working in a compound in Saudi Arabia provided the mental preparation for the enclosed monastic setting that would soon become the norm of life.
“I got to a point in life where I needed to take stock . . . seeing so much suffering and pain as a nurse gives you a different perspective on life. You see people without love, you see the rise in suicide, a lot of despair,” says Sr Duncan.
Despite sporadic moments of questioning, Sr Duncan was socialising, networking and enjoying shopping expeditions and twice-annual holidays. Soon, however, she began to question their worth and importance. “I loved the day of shopping but I began to wonder about that, whether it was satisfying me any more, and it felt empty. I just felt there was more to life. These things just didn’t have the same pull,” she says.
World Youth 2000 events and retreats heralded a dawning realisation. Sr Duncan stopped going to pubs and quit the shopping circuit, choosing instead to spend more time in prayer. Having “ignored the call” for some time and fought with traditional “preconceptions” of nuns, she began to ask two fundamental questions: Is there a God; and I do I have a vocation?
Sr Fiachra Nutty (49) was also what she calls a “late vocation”, having entered Glencairn Abbey six years ago. The co-owner of an award-winning garden centre in Malahide, Co Dublin, she had been in business for 20 years when she started to face up to the “big 40 that was heading my way”.
On approaching that milestone birthday, Sr Nutty was satisfied she had seen the world, having experienced 26 countries. The next major item on the ambitious checklist was a degree, having left school in her mid-teens. It was while studying for a horticulture degree in Writtle College, Essex that the then businesswoman began to consider an extremely different life.
“It was at Writtle, while sharing a hall of residence with 15 other mature students of many faiths and no faith at all, that I first began to question my Catholicity, spurred on by the informal religious discussions which occurred in the common room from time to time,” says Sr Nutty .
Unsure about the next move, she briefly worked in a garden centre near Cambridge, became involved with a vibrant local parish, and came to know a parish sister who was a Brigidine nun from Ireland. After months of daily prayer and daily mass, attendance at a “monastic experience” in a monastery in Kent and a conversation with a nun who suggested the Cistercian life might suit her, Sr Nutty returned to Ireland and entered Glencairn on January 3rd, 2006 for three weeks to experience the daily rhythm of monastic life. “There wasn’t room for God to get a word in edgeways, so it was a dramatic change,” says Sr Nutty of her former busy life as a businesswoman. “Friends would know me as a great talker . . . I’m sure they were saying to themselves ‘I give her three weeks and she’ll be back’.”
The gathering of so many different characters in one community remains an “endless fascination” for her: “Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I’d be going to bed at half eight, and become a vegetarian.”
Seeing parents just twice a year is the norm. And when a friend’s husband suffered a nervous breakdown and another friend died of cancer, Sr Nutty remained in situ. “You’d love to up sticks . . . it’s terribly hard not to go, but it’s part of life. You knew this when you entered.”
However, when pressed about her former life and the social elements she once loved, Sr Nutty simply insists she was “blessed with a late vocation . . . I saw 26 countries. I would have been a disaster with that sort of wanderlust had I entered when I was younger.” And while other orders have communal recreation time, Glencairn opts for solo time-out, allowing nuns to read and listen to music, sew and paint, check the news headlines while checking their emails. At the moment, they pray for “good leadership” as the Irish presidential elections draw closer.
THE REDEMPTORISTINEnuns in Drumcondra recently stayed up past their usual bedtime to watch the presidential candidates on the Late Late Show. Sr Gabrielle Fox (62) says the community of nuns don't watch much television, because they simply don't have the time. "But with something like the presidential elections, we like to inform our consciousness and I would have encouraged the nuns to watch the debate," says Sr Fox. "I like them to know what's going on because we are here to pray for the world."
One of the younger nuns, Sr Monica Boggan (28), believes it’s important for them to know who they are voting for and to take the opportunity to weigh up the best candidate. “Sometimes, you’d have people in the chapel saying ‘we’re lucky to be in here’, but we don’t escape things just because we’re here. We all have our struggles, life isn’t easy.”
Of the 14 nuns in the enclosed order, seven joined in recent years, among them teachers and business women. Two are in their 20s, two in their 30s, one in her 40s, while the rest are aged 50 and over. Unlike other enclosed orders, the Redemptoristine nuns enjoy a later start of 7am. But many of the older nuns, accustomed to a traditional 4am start, still rise early. The younger generation don’t have any appointed time for retiring at night.
Each day, their prayers are guided by emails, messages left in the chapel box and phone calls. And while the nuns live a life of confinement separate to the noisy world outside, a webcam in the chapel enables people to join them online every day for prayer.
“It’s enrichment for us. We often get at least 200 people joining us [online] every day,” says Sr Fox of rednuns.com. Daily mass is broadcast, as is the 7am meditation, the 7.30am morning prayer, the little hour at 8.20am, the office of readings at noon, the little hour at 3pm, meditation at 4.50pm, and evening prayer at 5.20pm.
Ultimately, because the nuns don’t leave their place of worship, they invite people in instead. And they are acutely conscious of the issues of unemployment, suicide, financial strife and emigration. “We are all affected,” says Sr Fox.
Understanding those problems and issues requires life experience, and life experience means not joining an enclosed order immediately after secondary school.
Sr Boggan, like many others, knew at the age of 12 that she wanted to be a nun and talked to local nuns when she was 13 about her “call”. She took their advice to heart: do your Leaving Cert, get educated and decide if it’s definitely without any hesitancy what you want to do. Throughout the years, she kept in contact with the nuns, often visiting them, while she moved on to work as a secretary and child-minder. But the urge to become a nun never subsided, and that urge brought her to an order in Italy, before she returned home and joined the Drumcondra-based order in April 2007.
“When I arrived, I had a great peace in my heart. I felt a belonging. I felt like I knew them all my life. I felt at home, only after walking in the door,” she says. It wasn’t until January 2008 that she entered the order full-time, giving her one last Christmas at home with her family in Meath. They make contact once a week by phone and they visit every few months. And while she concedes that she misses them, she insists the community of nuns has filled that gap in other ways.
FOR AS LONGas she can remember, chartered accountant Sr Teresa Dunphy (31) wanted to be a nun. The only time she ever discussed this burning unyielding urge at home was at the time of picking her Leaving Cert subjects. She informed her mother the subject choice didn't really matter because she was going to be a nun. Sensible motherly advice followed. The advice was accepted.
“She told me that nowhere would take me straight from school. I’d have to go to college or work for a few years first, so I should choose my career as if that was what I was going to do in life because I might feel differently in six years [after two years in school and four years in college]. So I decided to become an accountant and never mentioned it again.”
The call remained and became a quiet awareness in her consciousness before a period of active discernment began after only one year working. At the age of 26, in October 2005, Sr Dunphy entered the monastery of St Catherine of Siena, in Drogheda, Co Louth and joined the community of 20 nuns. Of the 20, four are in their 30s, and two are in their 90s. Six nationalities are represented, among them Irish, English, Scottish, French, Maltese and Belarusian. Their main apostolate is prayer, and the daily celebration of the Eucharist is at the heart of their entire life. The nuns meet in the chapel seven times a day.
“So often our friends and family members can challenge us to come out from our monastery and do some good work among the poor and needy, but we believe that staying here with our lives focused on God and praying for others is a ‘good work’,” says Sr Dunphy. “So many people come to our chapel and our hall door asking to be remembered in prayer and they tell us what great help they receive and that their faith is strengthened by knowing that we are here praying for them.”
Living a social, family and professional life before entering an enclosed order is a prerequisite for entry. The nuns don’t view their life in two halves but as one complete journey. The new era of blogs, emails, website posts, Facebook and webcams means this is a tech-savvy generation that will stay tuned.
The nuns have done their homework. There are more than two billion internet users and half a billion people on Facebook, thereby presenting an opportunity to publicise their work, engage a new audience, and try and reverse the dwindling number of women signing-up for a life of prayer. Their technological outreach is fuelled by stark vocation trends.
The number of mass-goers and vocations is in decline, at a time when child-abuse scandals have triggered a negative domino effect in sentiment, perceptions and trust with the Catholic Church.
The number of nuns is falling by around 200 every year because elderly members have died but recruitment levels have failed to keep pace. Most of the 123 communities of religious orders manage just a handful of new members every year, if any. In some communities, such as the Sisters of Mercy in Drogheda, the nuns have left the town after 157 years in the community. But rather than accept the bleak decline as passive observers, many enclosed orders have gone on the offensive.
All the while, those of us on the outside world will try but often fail to understand the life choice and commitment of contemplative nuns in enclosed monasteries. One Spanish nun, Sr Teresita (104), who is now the world’s oldest contemplative nun, recently tried to explain the call, the vocation, the life choice on leaving her convent for the first time since the Spanish Civil war between 1936 and 1939. Bluntly put, she said: “I know that many won’t understand my way of living, but I don’t understand any other.” It’s a sentiment that binds Ireland’s contemplative nuns.
A monastic experience weekend takes place at Glencairn in Waterford on November 25th to 27th, and St Catherine of Siena in Louth holds its vocations weekend from November 11th to 13th
