Abbey offers peace, prayer, community and vocation

VIRGINIA DALE, Colo. - At the Abbey of St. Walburga in Virginia Dale, life is marked by the pattern of the Liturgy of the Hours from the early church - matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline - and is as peaceful as breathing in and out.

It is a life of work and prayer, where work is prayer, and where the fruits of one's work are readily visible and pertinent to daily life - the cattle are fed, the crops are planted, the linens cleaned, meals cooked for the next guest. It is a life that increasingly draws young women like Angela Read, who recently turned 21 in the monastery, located just north of Fort Collins. It is the clear mission of the monastery that the Benedictine superior, Mother Marie-Michael Newe, believes draws the women, regardless of age. "I believe that when a woman comes here to visit our community, our priorities are simple and clear," Mother Marie-Michael told the Wyoming Catholic Register, the official publication of the Diocese of Cheyenne. "We follow the holy rule of St. Benedict, we live in community, under an abbess, and all of this for the love of God. Our prayer life and our search for God we take very seriously leading us to 'prefer nothing to the love of Christ,'" she said. The abbey is located in the Archdiocese of Denver, which borders the Cheyenne Diocese. Read is a member of what has been referred to as the "John Paul II generation," young Catholics who grew up under the late pope. She was encouraged in her Catholicism by her mother, but at a young age she began coming into the faith on her own. Her contact with the Benedictines began when she was a child in Boulder, living near where the monastery used to be located. She recalled going to the yearly monastery fair, seeing the nuns in habits and wondering, "Will I ever do that?" Her journey toward the monastery came into greater focus when she received the sacrament of confirmation. The priest said, "I'm going to make her a nun." "He saw something in me I didn't see in myself," she recalled in an interview in between moving chairs and mopping the dining room in the retreat center. She is now a postulant at the abbey. The women are postulants for one year, novices for two and then take temporary vows, committing to three more years in the monastery before taking permanent vows. Looking back to her youth, Read remembered a conversion where "I came to a point where my faith was my own. I felt like God said, 'You will do this.' I realized God exists and is involved in my life and I'll be a nun." Still, after high school, she chose to attend Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan. The dorm experience was a bit difficult, but still she learned to get along with a variety of people, paving the way for her experience in the monastery. Even when Read was in high school, she would visit the Abbey of St. Walburga and mop the floors. When she decided it was time to get serious about her vocation as a nun, she visited a Carmelite monastery. She spent her time thinking to herself, "That's not how they do it at Walburga." Finally, she said, "Why don't I just go to Walburga?" Read said people cannot come to religious life because they are running away from something. "You have to learn to be a good person wherever you are," she advised. She said those trying to discern a vocation should "listen to God with your heart. Wait. Listen. Pray." "It's important for people to understand that young women don't become a nun because they are ugly, nerdy girls who can't do anything else," Read said. "The impression is that this is something that people do who are weird and have nothing else to do. "This isn't for wimps," she said, smiling, as she anticipated her afternoon tasks of feeding and watering the cattle and helping fix a tractor. "You have to do it out of love and a desire to give of yourself." The monastery supports itself with retreats and a gift shop, and feeds the sisters with meat and eggs from its farm. The older sisters repackage and sell altar breads. Benedictine Sister Hildegard Dubnick, vocation director and coordinator of the retreat house, said living in a religious community isn't easier than living in a family. "It's just different." Benedictines are called to one monastery, unlike other religious orders where members might change from place to place or live on their own. Benedictines who do live in other places - such as two members of St. Walburga who each served for five years at the Vatican - retain their membership in their home monastery. Sister Hildegard said it is possible to transfer from one house to another, but it isn't advised, particularly if one is trying to get away from a particularly irritating person. "God picks people and puts them together," she said, laughing, "and if you pick up and go somewhere else, someone with that very same irritating habit will be there, too, because you need to learn from that." She advised people to just stay and learn to cope. "It's like being in a rock tumbler," Sister Hildegard said. "Everyone is rolling against everyone else, and at the end we are all shiny gemstones."

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Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops