Mary Hastie grew up in westen Iowa, near a town called Tabor in the Loess Hills. “At home you could find me out wandering in the hills. I love nature and was always seeking adventure. I dug caves into canyon walls, and tried to build little huts and rafts. I played in the creek and climbed trees.”

She first heard the word “Catholic” when she was in the 7th grade. (Her parents are protestant.) “I was drawn to the word and wanted to learn what it was all about. I went to the school library and looked it up in the Encyclopedia. From that point on I knew I had to become Catholic and I read everything I could get my hands on about God and Catholicism. I would wait until everyone went to bed and then watch the Catholic station EWTN on TV late at night.”

It was around her 13th birthday that Mary started thinking about being a nun. “I realized that this was how I could give my entire life to Jesus. I wanted a whole-hearted surrender, and this was it. Even though I wasn’t Catholic and I had never even seen a religious sister, I knew it was the answer for me.”

Mary was 16 when she finally entered the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil, one of the happiest days of her life. “I was so elated to receive the Eucharist for the first time.”

It was after she went to the Monastic Experience in Clyde, MO when she was 18 that her desire for religious life was strongly re-awakened. She also started working full time as a nursing assistant, a job she loved. She worked in a nursing home for several years and most recently before entering, she worked in a critical care unit in a hospital in Omaha, Nebraska.

“I was also active with the National Catholic Youth Conference and began teaching Faith Formation my first year out of high school at my parish. I really loved working with the kids and continued teaching until before I entered.” “I want to become a sister because I aspire to a deep relationship with Jesus Christ and want to spend the rest of my life, praying for others. I am striving to make God the center of my life and to seek His will in all things.”

Clarisa Cutaia was no ordinary teenager.

Other students her age were busy with normal high school activities while Clarisa was more interested in something else.

Religion.

“Most of my friends weren’t practicing Catholics,” Clarisa said. “So it wasn’t cool for me to suggest, ‘Hey, let’s go to church,’ when we were looking for something to do on a Saturday night.”

Regardless, the young woman was being pulled by a desire to learn more about the religion she was born into but had little knowledge about.

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Clarisa and her family moved to the United States when she was just 3 years old. They settled in Metairie, La., a large suburb of New Orleans. Growing up in a large city meant everyone was “always on the go, doing their own thing,” Clarisa said. Life was busy for her, her two sisters and parents.

Clarisa attended a Catholic school until the third grade but became more curious about her faith when she reached 13. She asked her mom if she could attend a Catholic religion education class.

“I was so eager to learn more, but the class only met once a week,” Clarisa said. “I started getting jealous of the other kids who had class each day.”

So she began reading on her own after her class ended. She read anything she could get her hands on. She read about the Bible and the Bible itself.

“I was doing lectio (spiritual reading) before I even knew what it was,” she laughed.

The years went by and Clarisa graduated from high school. Having worked since she was 15, she decided to take a year off from school to contemplate what the future had in store for her.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go to college because I love to learn,” she said. “I spent a lot of time in prayer asking what I should do with the rest of my life, not just the next three or four years. I was searching for a long-range answer.”

While working at a daycare, the same one she attended as a child and where she had learned English, Clarisa decided to attend a local community college and earn a degree in early childhood education. After that, she was off to study theology at Our Lady of Holy Cross in New Orleans.

At least that was the plan.

“I danced with the idea of religious life for a while and felt a marvelous sense of peace with the idea,” she said. Her spiritual adviser gave her a copy of “Vision” magazine, a directory of religious communities. She checked out the Web site and put out feelers to those that caught her eye.

“The next day I was swarmed with e-mails from communities all across the country,” she said. “I read every single one because I didn’t want to miss out on anything.”

However, it was a message from Sister Ruth Starman, vocation director for the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in Clyde, Mo., that caught her eye.

“Sister Ruth mentioned that the community was a semi-cloistered one. So I looked at their Web site and immediately fell in love with it,” Clarisa said.

She began a correspondence with the sisters, which led to her attending their Summer Monastic Program, a weeklong residential program for young women discerning a call to religious life.

“I had never done anything like that before. I had never heard of the Liturgy of the Hours. It was all very new to me,” she said, “but it felt like home.”

She returned that fall for a two-week visit, realizing that the sense of home she had felt in the summer was still there. She began the process to apply for entrance, a procedure that was unfamiliar for her since no one in her family had ever entered religious life. She returned once more for a month-long stay the following spring.

In August of 2007 Clarisa, at the age of 22, entered the postulancy in the monastery at Clyde, MO. While her original plan to study childhood education and theology didn’t work out, Clarisa doesn’t seem to mind.

“That’s OK,” she said with a smile. “I prefer God’s plan any day.”

Nancy Gucwa was born and raised in Staten Island, N.Y., the second oldest of six children. Before entering our monastic community, she worked in the banking and financial industry.

Previous to that, Nancy was in the first class of women admitted to the United States Military Academy and was in West Point’s first graduating class with women in 1980. She served active duty for six years and thinks there are a lot of correlations between military life and monastic life.

“There is a common thread,” Nancy says. “Monastic life and military life, for one, is a life of service. In one, you’re serving your country. Here, we’re serving God, a higher authority I guess you could say. I think both ways of life require a certain kind of discipline and total dedication.”

She worked with a trusted priest to discern how she was being called to serve. She admits the transition from a ‘traditional’ lifestyle to a monastic lifestyle has been challenging.

“Giving away my stuff, my furniture, my car, those kinds of things that you don’t need anymore, that was tough. Saying good-bye to a lot of friends that I no longer see on a regular basis, not seeing my family as frequently as I used to, being obedient to my superiors here at the monastery, giving up the freedom to come and go as I please, those were some of the challenges, I guess, of monastic life, but there’s also so many graces and blessings, you know, the grace of prayer, the blessing of living with many other sisters called to the same path of serving God.”

Nancy’s increasing desire to attend Mass and go on retreats got her thinking about religious life, but the actual “lightning bolt or moment of truth” came in 2004.

“I was on a retreat, talking to a priest there and I was telling him about my dreams and in the process, it prompted him to ask ‘Have you ever considered a religious vocation?’ As soon as he said that, I knew that was exactly what I had been seeking and desiring.”

“I had a good job, a good income. I had friends. It is a strange thing to do, but when you’re called to serve God, somehow, getting rid of things actually feels good when you’re done with it.”

“I went from a life of intense busyness surrounded by millions of people to a life of quiet, solitude and prayer. Thankfully, it has been a gradual transition, I haven’t had to make it all in one day.”

Nancy works in the business office of our altar bread department handling customer service and processing orders. Some of her hobbies are playing the piano, riding her bicycle and running. Before she entered, she had run in 5 marathons.

She looks forward to making First Profession in 2009.