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Most of the orders are "active," i.e., members live under the full vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, but they offer themselves to God through service to others. In contrast, the cloistered orders have different tasks: to set an example of the Christian life, to pray, to serve as a source of penance for the sins of the world. Today there are only 65,000 nuns in strictly cloistered orders (some 1,500 cloistered contemplatives in the U.S.), but their numbers are actually growing faster than those of their "active" sisters.
The World Inside. Despite a new interest in monasticism, relatively few Americans have actually ever been inside a convent. It is still surrounded by a feeling that the world inside is strange, forbidding, perhaps a little frightening.
There is nothing to frighten the visitor to Maryknoll's mother house at Sunset Hill, in Ossining, N.Y. It is a sprawling, yellow brick structure, vaguely Spanish-looking. There is no wall to separate it from the outside. The keynote is bustling activity. Sisters hurry along in silence, but they will murmur "Excuse me" if they bump into someone, because "courtesy is more important than strict adherence to a rule." As missionaries, the sisters will be on their own on the outside, and their superiors feel that too strict a rule would hamper their self-reliance.
In "free periods" the sisters are apt to act as gay and carefree as schoolgirls. Last St. Patrick's Day some of them dressed up in green and staged impromptu skits in honor of the saint. There are games, sports (tennis, basketball, ice-skating), sometimes even movies. But existence at Maryknoll nevertheless moves by firm discipline. Its watchful voice is the bell that sounds the hours and rules the day.
At 5:15 each morning, the bell rouses the sisters from their brown metal beds in their sparsely furnished cells. They wash quickly and silently in a large lavatory lined with shower stalls and basins (but no mirrors). They are at their places in their choir stalls at 5:30 a.m. to say Prime, the morning prayer of the Divine Office. (Throughout the day, Maryknollers recite all eight of the hours—Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline.)
The Day. After Prime the sisters meditate at their places for half an hour, sitting or kneeling as they prefer, until Mass at 6:25. At 7:30 there is breakfast of cereal, eggs and coffee in the long, brick-walled refectory, eaten in silence. At a microphone-equipped lectern one of the sisters reads aloud throughout all silent meals. (Some recent selections: Kon-Tiki, Whittaker Chambers' Witness, Romano Guardini's The Lord.) Dinner (at noon) is ample: juice or soup, meat, potatoes, vegetables or salad, and dessert, with tea, coffee or milk, and good, home-made bread.