Opening a Citadel of Prayer

Their order facing extinction, 11 Carmelite nuns end decades of solitude and go dot-com. 'The life we lead, it has to go on,' one says.

By STEPHANIE SIMON

Times Staff Writer

August 3 2002

INDIANAPOLIS--Secluded in a fortress of stone, behind thick, high walls to block the world, the Sisters of Carmel of the Resurrection pray.

Their monastery bristles with battlements, commanding a hill. Inside, the 11 aging nuns walk polished halls in austere silence. Their retreat is a blankness of white walls without end, of oak doors shut tight. The only sound is the prayer bell chimes.

The Carmelites of Indianapolis do not teach or nurse or spread the faith, as other Roman Catholic sisters do. Private prayer is their vocation.

Theirs is not a formal supplication on bended knee. It is a meditation. They unfold their souls and they wait for words to come. The sisters pray as they sit in their rocking chairs, watching the birds peck seeds. They pray as they walk through the courtyard garden, a tangle of green.

They venture out of the monastery but rarely. It has been rarer still for them to invite outsiders in. The isolation has brought them joy. It has also brought them crisis.

The Carmelites have not welcomed a new member in a dozen years. Their average age is 70. Two sisters have died in the last few months and another is ill.

To ensure that the contemplative life they cherish will survive them, the nuns have taken a momentous decision. They have forsaken the seclusion that defined them.

They have not given up their two hours a day of private prayer, or their morning and evening silence. They still celebrate a daily Mass. They still make a modest living selling altar bread and prayer books. They still rotate the chores so each sister takes a turn with the laundry, the cooking and the yard work.

But the Carmelites of the Resurrection have opened up their fortress. It has been a startling journey. Nuns of such simplicity that they live on $1 a day have put their future in the hands of an ad agency famous for fast-food commercials. Sisters who were once so isolated they didn't know the Vietnam War had begun have requested advice from the security director for the NFL's Indianapolis Colts--who gave them all team T-shirts.

The Carmelites hired a part-time development director, Linda Hegeman, to represent them. She rounded up an advisory board of two dozen prominent citizens, each with a skill she thought might help the sisters navigate a world they had long since left behind.

The advisors--most but not all Catholics--included a software designer, a public relations specialist, an administrator from the local Catholic college and a former city police chief, now working security for the Colts. The group is eclectic, but effective: Meeting every month or two, its members pushed the nuns to move beyond their original vision of a promotional brochure to consider a punchy online campaign that had them posting their private prayers on the Internet.

Timid at first, the sisters prayed over each suggestion--and ended up taking most of them, with gusto. They now consider their advisors as friends, hosting pizza parties for the board inside the monastery.

"It has been a stretch," Sister Joanne Dewald says.

In the arched hallways of the monastery they helped build, the sisters with hearing aids and white hair are determined to keep stretching. They have discovered unexpected joy in engaging the world. Their revolution has enriched their faith. It has also brought them hope for a future. Nearly halfway through a five-year outreach plan, the Carmelites are speaking with several young women who might be interested in joining.

"The vocation is so dear to us," says Sister Rachel Salute, 76. "To see it dying out.... " She stops. She has been a Carmelite nun since 1953.

"You would go to such extremes," she says, "to prevent your community from dying."

"The life we lead, it has to go on," says Sister Ruth Ann Boyle--at age 45 the youngest by two decades. "Just as much as the work of teachers or nurses needs to go on, the life of prayers must go on."

"It's a calling. It's a service," Sister Joanne says. As a girl, she dismissed the Carmelites as "loony." Now 72, she's the monastery prioress--and she is convinced that when women give their lives to prayer, their devotion can help heal the world. "It's hard to explain this life. It doesn't make much sense," she says. "But you're drawn to it."

Sister Joanne first suggested several years ago that the nuns consider reaching out to young women who might feel that same mysterious call.

The concept was not novel. As the number of nuns in the United States has plunged--from 180,000 in 1965 to fewer than 74,000 today--many orders have tried marketing. Dominican nuns in Michigan ran a commercial on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" with the tagline: "Life is Short. Eternity Isn't." The Sisters of Mercy in New York advertise in bus shelters, asking: "Do You Have a Call Waiting?"

For the Carmelites, though, self-promotion did not come easy.

Like other cloistered sisters--there are at most 4,000 in the U.S.--the Carmelites of Indianapolis live sparingly, eating but one cooked meal a day and sleeping in barren cells with barely enough room for a bed, a desk and a chair.

For decades, they were so sequestered that neighbors had no idea whether nuns or monks lived behind the imposing turrets. The nuns could not leave the monastery, even to visit a dying parent. Relatives could visit just one hour a month, talking to the sisters through an iron grate so thick, even fingertips could not touch.

The nuns' main interaction with outsiders took place through the "turn," a wooden cabinet set on a turntable at the front door of the monastery. Visitors would place messages or packages in the cabinet. A veiled sister on the other side of the wall would spin it, wordlessly, to her. Sometimes, to the nuns' discomfort, Catholic parents seeking a blessing would place a baby in the cabinet. The sister inside would offer a hasty prayer, then whisk the newborn back.

That extreme isolation began to ease in the late 1960s, when the Second Vatican Council called for reforming church life and its rituals.

The nuns started shopping for groceries instead of having them delivered. They ordered their first newspaper subscription. They even began opening their morning Mass to local Catholics; on weekdays, a dozen visitors might gather with them behind the blue glass doors of the chapel.

Even now, however, the nuns keep their forays to the outside world brisk: They buy groceries at Sam's Club (or pick up Subway sandwiches as a treat) and then promptly return. They don't stop to chat. They don't go out for fun. They shun what they call "clutter"--any interaction that distracts them from prayer. Sister Joanne still turns down invitations to address young women at the Catholic college down the street.

So it was a remarkable leap when--at the suggestion of their development director--the sisters invited half a dozen executives from the ad agency Young & Laramore to the monastery two years ago to discuss marketing.

They met in the reading room, the only space in the cloister that has been decorated--with a crystal wind chime, a black-and-white ink drawing of a mountainous landscape, a straight-backed couch with thin pillows. The sisters gather there in a circle to pray aloud each morning. They were uneasy letting strangers in.

The executives were a bit uneasy, too. They expected the sisters might be slightly dotty from their self-imposed exile. Instead, they found them witty, incisive, even irreverent.

In their younger years, in full black habits, the nuns drove bulldozers, dug postholes and hammered roof beams to build the monastery. Now, in sandals and sundresses from Goodwill, they drink diet Mountain Dew and wrestle pillows from their black Labrador retriever, Lucy. They watch documentaries on ancient Greece. Also, "Karate Kid II."

They write prayer books with inclusive language (referring to God as "you" instead of "master"). They joke about their years of suffering in virtual quarantine. They even mock their own devotion to two hours a day of private prayer.

"What am I thinking about? I'm thinking I see a leak in the roof over there. I'm thinking, why has this stock gone from $95 to $2," says Sister Betty Meluch, 70, laughing.

After an hour with the sisters, Paul Knapp, president of Young & Laramore, was captivated. He volunteered at once to take on--free--the job of selling the nuns to the world. His firm had scored big with clever ads that made Goodwill clothes hip and Steak & Shake burgers saucy. The nuns were an irresistible challenge. All he needed was a hook.

"Whether it's a steak burger or a nun, [you have to ask] 'What do you want people to think of when they see them?' It's all about strategic positioning," said Tom Denari, an agency vice president.

Searching for that hook, the marketing team asked the nuns: "So, what do you do?"

"We pray," the sisters replied.

"What do you pray?"

"We pray the news."

Indeed, the sisters devour current events. They read Time, Atlantic Monthly, the Economist, National Geographic, Arthritis Today. Often, a sister will don headphones during morning prayers to catch National Public Radio. After Mass (led by a visiting priest), they take turns discussing world events that merit special prayer.

The ad team wanted to play off that passion. In a flash of inspiration, http://praythenews.com was born.

The interactive Web site offers Carmelite history and a prayer of the day. The nuns post a sample daily schedule (feed the birds, pray, change oil in the Taurus), and essays explaining the contemplative life.

The heart of the site is the News Perspective page, where sisters post essays about current events--from famine in Eritrea to pedophilia in the church, from corporate scandals to the temper of basketball coach Bobby Knight.

"It's like we're raising our antenna, so if someone out there has a calling to this life and is raising her own antenna, we might be able to communicate," says Sister Terese Boersig, 69.

Since http://praythenews.com was launched in March 2001, the site has logged more than 12 million hits. Many readers return once a week to read Sister Betty's take on the Taliban or see what Sister Joanne has to say about Iraq.

Virtual visitors from around the globe have e-mailed prayer requests to the Light a Candle page. Those prayers have opened the nuns' eyes to the struggles they left behind when they took their vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. So many asking for help finding jobs, Sister Ruth murmurs. So many asking for help finding love.

More than three dozen women have contacted Sister Joanne online to talk about Carmelite life, including eight who seem genuinely drawn. One woman explained that the Web site had awakened the same joyous feeling she felt when she prayed at the monastery years before. "It made me wonder once again," she wrote, "whether I am called to religious life."

The outreach campaign forced the sisters to wrestle with the modern world in ways they had never imagined.

They have prayed much over whether to sell their books through the Web site. They reluctantly agreed--on advice from Mike Zunk, the Colts security chief--to conduct background checks on any woman who applies to enter the monastery.

Most dramatic, the sisters have found themselves, for the first time, under pressure to produce something.

The nuns who write the News Perspective face a deadline every Monday. They dread it. For years, they have let their thoughts unroll in languor. As they put it, they have focused on being, not doing. Now, they must direct their musing to a particular topic, then commit their prayers to paper. "A chore," Sister Joanne calls it.

Yet the sisters cannot imagine again withdrawing behind the veil.

"This is transformative," Sister Terese says. "We're not going back."

Adds Sister Joanne: "I don't think we could."

The nuns have found joy in breaking down their cloister. For years, they were convinced that steeping their souls in solitude brought them closer to God. Now, they find spiritual strength from their readers' words on the Web site.

As they pray for a mother to recover from cancer, for an end to civil war, for a raise, for a safe journey, the Sisters of Carmel of the Resurrection feel they are performing a great service.

They no longer pray for the world. They pray with it.