Vocation takes cultivation

Sister Elizabeth Wagner is a diocesan hermit and the founder of Transfiguration Hermitage in Maine, a semieremitical (hermit) community following the Rule of Saint Benedict. Her book Seasons in My Garden was recently published by Ave Maria Press.

Vocation takes

cultivation by SiSterelizabeth Wagner

SISTER ELIZABETH Wagner works in the garden at Transfiguration Hermitage, a monastic community in Windsor, Maine.

Like plants, people, too, need to germinate in the right environment before they bloom. One monastic sister learned this lesson from tending her garden. Other religious learn similar lessons by their nurture of nature.

IGREW UP ON A SMALL FARM in Connecticut, so I guess gardening is encoded in my DNA. My paternal grandmother, my namesake, had a reputation as a miraculous gardener and a whiz at grafting fruit trees. She also entered a monastery as a young woman, although she then left to bring up younger siblings after her parents died. So perhaps monastic life is also encoded in my DNA.

But as a child, I didn’t see gardening or religious life in my future. I was raised

Protestant, nominally—church on Christmas and Easter and occasional attendance at

Sunday school, which I liked, most of the time.

In my last year of high school, knowing I was headed for college but with my future a blank after that, I discovered Catholicism and contemplative life, both at the same time. In one fell swoop, I fell in love. Yet it took several years before I was ready to embrace my faith and become Catholic. Once in, I knew right away that a monastery was for me. And so I entered one, but eventually it became clear that I hadn’t gone about it the right way. I still needed and longed for contemplative life, but somehow I had misunderstood what it was about.

BENEDICTINE SISTERS OF FLORIDA AT HOLY NAME MONASTERY

THE BENEDICTINE Sistersin St. Leo, Florida raise tilapia fish and garden vegetables using aquaponics—the marriage of aquaculture (raising fish) and hydroponics (the soil-less growing of plants). In other words, waste generated by the fish is changed into nutrients that then flow through a series of pipes to vegetable roots that are set on grow beds.

“This is my ministry, my reason to be, and all to the glory of God,” says Sister Miriam Cosgrove, O.S.B., who directs the aquaponics program. “This is not only a delightful, fun, and satisfying ministry, but also in keeping with our commitment to feed world hungers.

“Aquaponics is a better use of God’s earth and water and will enable us to produce the healthy food we want to consume as well as to become a sustainable monastery,” she says. “We hope in the very near future to provide food for those in need.”

THE AQUAPONIC system recycles its own water and requires no synthetic fertilizers, producing chemical-free food with less than 3 percent of the water used by big-business agriculture. THE COMMUNITY members at Transfiguration Hermitage hold this belief: “Like rain which nurtures the earth, causing plants to grow and giving food to all, this life of prayer is an invisible spring, pouring forth the grace of God's love to human hearts.”

When I was fresh out of college, I thought that having all the answers was what mattered. If I did everything correctly, prayed a lot, and made sure I had all the “exercises” of religious life down pat, then everything would be fine. I’d become a saint, and religious life would go well. And no doubt everyone would clearly recognize my holiness. Right?

Well, not exactly. It took many years to change my thinking. And that’s where gardening came in.

Digging deep

A vocation is about life, and so is a garden. In my early attempt to live out of my head and my misunderstood dreams, I had cut myself off from life itself, from God’s life, which comes to us in so many forms—in beauty, in nature, in friendship, and support.

I felt a strong desire to use my hands and physical energy and creativity, so I planted a garden and worked at tending it, and I found God there. A garden is real, not an abstract notion. I learned from gardening that I had to pay attention to reality, not my daydreams, learn from it, give it what it actually needs, not what I think it should need. The more I gardened, the more I relinquished my idealizations of religious life and the more I surrendered to the real religious life to which I was called, and I suddenly began to find God everywhere.

Bearing fruit

There are many kinds of gardens, and nearly unlimited kinds of plants, but we need to grow the type of garden that will flourish in the type of climate and soil we’ve been given. When we get it right, it’s beautiful and fruitful. Same goes for vocation. A vocation is not about growing in isolated perfection but produccontinued on page 71

CROSIER FATHERS AND BROTHERS

THE GARDEN of the Crosier community of Onamia is the pride and joy of Father Tom Carkhuff, O.S.C., who plants and maintains it each year.

Located at the gateway to the beautiful Lakes Region in central Minnesota, this Crosier community, established more than 100 years ago, serves as the formation house for new entrants. Crosier fathers and brothers combine contemplative routines with a shared apostolic life and serve as parish priests, retreat leaders, and jail ministers.

BENEDICTINE SISTERS OF CHICAGO AT ST. SCHOLASTICA MONASTERY

THE BENEDICTINE SISTERS of Chicago are a monastic community living in the heart of an urban environment. They grow flowers and vegetables as well as grapes in a small vineyard behind the monastery. They also share small plots of land with apartment-dwelling neighbors to tend gardens of their own.

According to the sisters, “Scripture calls each one of us to be stewards of God’s creation. While not all our sisters are gardeners, all benefit from the beauty surrounding the monastery. Seeing beauty creates the longing to share that beauty with the world. It is the same cycle of how God’s love grows—when we experience God’s love, we are eager to share it with the world. We invite all to visit the monastery to savor God’s creation and explore how to spread God’s spirit in the world.”

ST. SCHOLASTICA Monastery is located on 14 acres in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, providing a peaceful refuge for visitors. The gardens include an outdoor prayer labyrinth and benches for contemplation.

TRAPPIST MONKS AT ST. JOSEPH'S ABBEY

TRAPPIST MONKS live a contemplative life of prayer and work. St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts is open every day for all who wish to visit and pray with them.

The monks say, “We care about beauty. Our liturgy is beautiful. Our buildings are beautiful. The products we make to support ourselves are beautiful. As monks our vow of stability deeply roots us in the place we live, and the quality of our life manifests itself in our surroundings. Gardens are just a natural consequence of the love of our life.

“The brothers at St. Joseph’s Abbey have gardens scattered in a dozen places around the monastery. The gardens are also not confined to a single idea of what a garden should be. Sometimes they are just a simple stand of tiger lilies or the reliable rows of our apple orchard. At other times the garden is a profusion of color, shape, and texture that constantly changes if one keeps a close eye on it throughout the warm months. Perhaps the brothers’ favorite garden is the one where sweet corn, melons, and heirloom tomatoes grow. From that garden the work of our hands and the fruit of the earth become the beauty within us.”

THE FOUNDERS of the Trappists described themselves as pulchritudinis studium habentes—that is, those intent on beauty, the beauty of holiness, the beauty of God. “ When we become the creation in God’s garden that we were meant to be—a difficult getting-your-hands-dirty process—we find peace and fulfillment and joy.