The Catholic Review, December 30, 2004

By Christopher Gaul  
Senior staff correspondent  

Two of them were successful corporate lawyers, another was a political economist, and one was a registered nurse. Today these career women are making a dramatic change in their lives by leaving their lucrative, professional worlds for the contemplative, cloistered life of a Carmelite nun.

But it’s not only this kind of religious life to which they are drawn but most particularly to the Baltimore Carmel, the Carmelite Monastery on Dulaney Valley Road, the oldest Roman Catholic community of religious women in the original 13 states, founded in 1790.

Sitting around a table in a monastery meeting room waiting for a formation class to begin, five of the six novices and postulants, (one was laid up with a bad cold that day), talked about what brought them to this Carmel, to a life circumscribed by prayer, meditation, study, solitude and community.

Less than a year away from taking her first vows, 45-year-old Frances (Fran) Horner, a graduate of Our Lady of Mount Carmel High School, Essex, a high-paid attorney who worked in Washington, D.C., and then Paris, said she felt called to the Carmel community of the Dulaney Valley Road monastery some 15 years ago, “but couldn’t quite get my mind around a contemplative life then.”

While she finds Carmel a place where she can achieve a life of prayer, she said she has not had to abandon her intellectual life in the process.

“This is a group of well-educated, smart, interesting and interested women who are willing to explore what it means to live out a contemporary contemplative existence,” she said.

“This is the kind of life,” Ms. Horner noted, “that can make sense for a woman of today who feels she wants to live out a religious life, to devote her life to God and in which my personality or giftedness isn’t dampened but, rather, heightened.”

When for a short time 49-year-old Judy Long, of Wheeling, W.Va., tried Carmelite life in another monastery when she was in her late 30s, it didn’t work for her.

“They weren’t as contemporary as we are here,” said the former nurse of 24 years. “Here we get wonderful formation. I think the way we live life in a contemporary way and the way we try to bring spirituality to the people, how we open the monastery to people, and the way our prayer life is for the people really means a lot to me.”

Forty-year-old Mary Fleig, from Virginia, who has lived in Baltimore’s Charles Village since 1987 and who has just joined Carmel’s novitiate, said she hadn’t heard about the Carmelites and “didn’t want to be a nun.” She was content with her job as a corporate attorney and life in her expensive condo.

“I wasn’t unhappy, yet it wasn’t really filling enough and I found myself drawn to a life of prayer,” she said.

A Jesuit friend brought her to Mass at the Carmelite monastery one Sunday, and that was that.

She came back a few weeks later by herself.

“I would come and go, come and go,” she said. “I just found myself drawn here.”

She had tried to live a more spiritual life, spending a lot of time at Baltimore’s Jesuit St. Ignatius parish, attending retreats and other events, “but it still wasn’t enough.”

After experiencing a few months as a “live-in” at the Baltimore Carmel, she discovered something important to her, “that I don’t have to change the core of who I am to be here.”

While the community life made up of two dozen [actually 18, OCD editor] women religious can sometimes be challenging, Ms. Fleig acknowledged, she nonetheless loves it.

“It’s wonderful to have the support of the community; being with them, praying with them, living this life together,” she said.

A former political economist with the German government, 38-year-old Monika Bies had thought her calling was to a more apostolic religious life, and when she first came to the United States a few years ago she volunteered with the Franciscan Sisters and their youth ministry on Greenmount Avenue.

“But as fulfilling as that ministry was,” she said, “I always kept thinking there was something more.” Then she stayed with the Benedictine Sisters in Baltimore for about nine months. But as much as she liked them and their life, she still felt strongly called to Carmel.”

She, like the others, said she is glad for the experience she has had in life, but profoundly grateful that at last she has found her “heart’s desire” in Carmel.

The youngest of the group at 36, Agnes Ahn is a  soft-spoken woman with a gentle smile. A native of South Korea, she had been a Benedictine nun in Korea for nine years, but found the traditional life style too spiritually constraining.

“Then I prayed to live, but these days I live to pray,” she said.

She came to the United States to study psychology and found Baltimore’s Carmel instead.

“I began to discover how much God loves me, loves us,” she said. “I wanted more time to pray, to meditate, to just be with God. That was my hope. I said, ‘Let me know how I can give you my heart, how can I follow you,’ and now I’m here.”