Sister Joan Marie is on a mission at Essentia Health

By Connie Wirta

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Joan Marie Stelman came into this world at St. Mary’s Medical Center and expects she may leave it there. In between, she has followed her intellectual curiosities into a variety of studies and careers that culminated in becoming a Benedictine nun.

“I tell people that if it wasn’t for St. Mary’s, I wouldn’t be here,” Sister Joan Marie says, explaining her parents met when her mother attended the hospital’s nursing school and her father worked as an orderly. “I often tell children that I had three brothers and no sisters, but now I have more than 50 sisters.”

It wasn’t until she was 38 that Sister Joan Marie followed her calling and joined the Benedictine Sisters of St. Scholastica Monastery in Duluth. She had worked as a civil servant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Forest Service. To serve her parish, she had joined a lay befriender ministry and made home visits to elders. “I felt called to be part of a community,” she recalls. “I’d been a bit of loner, and I had to challenge myself to be involved in the church in a way I had

Sister Joan Marie had explored her interests in botany and English at the University of Minnesota, earning a bachelor’s degree in English and sparking an interest in medieval studies. “In medieval times, there was no separation of disciplines in arts and sciences,” she says. “I loved how they saw God in everything.”

While doing research on illuminated manuscripts at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, Sister Joan Marie wrestled with what direction her life should take. Staying in a guest room near the chapel, she observed monastic life. “Something was possessing me, and I asked the monks to pray for me,” she recalls. She spent a whole night writing in her journal until she arrived at: “I think God wants me to be a nun.”

It took several years and visits to different orders before Sister Joan Marie found her home with the Benedictine Sisters in Duluth. She arrived in 1995 as a postulant, took her first vows in 1996 and her final vows in 1999. She went on to earn a master’s degree in medieval studies at the University of Toronto and worked toward a doctorate degree there. She returned to Duluth in 2009 to serve in alumni relations at the College of St. Scholastica. In 2010, she joined the board of St. Mary’s Medical Center and in 2014 became a regional director of mission integration at Essentia Health.

Sister Joan Marie now works from an office in St. Mary’s. She and Sister Sue Fortier, a hospital chaplain, are the only nuns from the order working in positions at Essentia Health. Other sisters serve on boards and committees as part of their sponsorship of St. Mary’s Medical Center, St. Mary’s Hospital in Superior and other Catholic hospitals.

In her role, Sister Joan Marie brings Essentia Health’s mission and values to its employees and to its care of patients and their families. The mission statement includes a calling — “We are called to make a healthy difference in people’s lives” — and four of its seven values come from the Benedictines. Sister Joan Marie helps blend and balance the tenor of an organization that is both Catholic and secular.

“I don’t come in and teach people how to be respectful or just; they’re already doing that,” Sister Joan Marie says. “I help people see how doing that connects to our traditions.”

When Essentia Health recently added joy to its values, Sister Joan Marie led the initiative. She explained joy not as “a superficial happiness or something that's simply pleasure. It's a much deeper thing that involves our whole being,” such as a sense of fulfillment from a connection to each other and serving patients.

At employee orientation, Sister Joan Marie talks about the Benedictine order and how pioneering sisters brought their health care ministry to Duluth and founded St. Mary’s in 1888. She also shares how the legacy lives on in Essentia’s mission and values.

“Sister Joan Marie shares the history, but it’s not just in the past with our founders. She helps us live it today,” says Stacey Jutila, the director of chaplaincy who joined Essentia Health last spring. “She invites each person to be part of that in the present and in the future.”

Sister Joan Marie guides celebrations of saints’ feast days and ceremonies, such as the blessing of hands for health care workers. She offers prayers at meetings and special events, often drawing from other faith traditions “so people can focus on what we have in common, not our differences,” she says.

“Sister Joan Marie plays a key role in celebrating and lifting up our mission,” Stacy says. “She epitomizes the word joy. She deeply embraces our Benedictine values, and she welcomes everyone to learn from them and be part of them.” D

Connie Wirta is an editor for Essentia Health marketing. She wrote this for The Woman Today.