The Deeper Call To Stay

For some Sisters, the novice period and the life that followed afterwards were too much, and as a result, left Assisi Heights and the life of a Sister. At one point when Sister Avis was a novice, there were about 50 other young women in her training class; however in 2014, this very class was down to six, having lost only one to death. The other 40+ left the community.

Some left early on, during their novice years, in search of careers of their own. They had entered at young ages, and when they started to grow up, they realized that there was a whole other life somewhere else for them. At the same time, others found that the lifestyle of a Sister was not for them. “They didn’t like getting up. They didn’t like keeping Sabbaths. They didn’t like all the prayer. They didn’t like living with just women. So a lot of them just left.”¹ Others left for love: they remained throughout their novice years, but once they started their service work in teaching or nursing, “they just plain fell in love with someone, and then they left to marry.”²

..."Well, if this is what God put before me, then I better take it; I better do it..."-Sister Avis

On the other hand, some Sisters were asked to leave by the Congregation during their novitiates. The novice period was not just a time for the Sisters to test out life at Assisi Heights. It went both ways. Just as the Sisters evaluated Assisi Heights, they were also being evaluated on whether life as a Sister at Assisi Heights suited them. They were, in the words of Sister Avis, “under a microscope.”³ Therefore, some women were asked to leave. These were women who Sister Avis remembers as being a bit too rigid for this lifestyle: "Some people took it real seriously. They’re probably not here anymore. The rest of us, we sort of said, 'Okay, if that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do.' We weren’t that taken up by the rubrics of the whole thing, but some women would get overly religious. They would get scrupulous to the point of if you didn’t do this just right, it wasn’t right. This life then is too rigid for them. So either they left or they were asked to leave."⁴ Furthermore, if people were not suited for community life – if they were loners or frequently argued with others – they were also asked to pursue a different life.

In reaction to seeing so many Sisters leave, Sister Avis shared: “It was hard. It was very, very hard to see these women leave because we’d been through a whole bunch together – starting this whole different life.”⁵ Yet despite seeing so many of her friends leave, Sister Avis never felt like she should follow them. She recalled a time right after her parents died when she felt a strong conviction to stay at Assisi Heights: "I thought that I should go home and take care of my younger brothers, but I knew there were all kinds of other possibilities for them. Also I didn’t want to leave. I thought: Well, if this is what God put before me, then I better take it; I better do it. One of my younger brothers… wrote to me, and he elaborated about what everyone in the family was doing to help with that whole situation. And his rule for me was that I prayed. I was so mad at him. Just sitting up here praying… But I realized that it was some kind of pillar of faith that the family needed, that they could relate to. God was somehow in all of this. And although it might be difficult for me to stay because I couldn’t be part of the family and everything that was going on, I knew that that’s where I needed to be."⁶

"I have an identical twin sister, and she married a man…And so here we were, identical, and I was called to this life, and she was called to that… That’s what was true for the both of us." -Sister Avis

This conviction is what Sister Avis described as “that deeper call: the deeper call to stay, and to dedicate my life to God, to the Church.”⁷ A particularly exceptional way in which Sister Avis felt (and still feels) this “deeper call to stay” was in viewing the life of her identical twin sister: "I have an identical twin sister, and she married a man… At present, they are retired and live in Florida. They have two children and three grandchildren. And that is… for me… an authentic point to my vocation because you’re not really called yourself; you’re called by God. And so here we were, identical, and I was called to this life, and she was called to that… That’s what was true for the both of us."⁸