"Introducing Sister Linda-Susan and Sister Diane"

My last confirmation service was Saturday, April 27th. The liturgy was just glorious and worshipful – it felt like a glimpse of what the kingdom can be like. We had a very mature group of people who were making promises they intend to keep. It wasn’t about making ceremonial promises – the stuff you stand up and say because it’s written in the book. It felt like the promises were being made from the heart. I commend the clergy of the diocese for sending a mature class of people, and for continuing to help people in the work of making mature commitments, which I know they will do.

We confirmed people. We received people from other denominations, while others reaffirmed their baptismal vows.

Also that day, we received the sisters of the Emmaus Community and Monastery into the Episcopal Church from the Roman Catholic Church.
Sisters Linda-Susan and Diane were received into the church, and took their vows as well. I know many people in the congregation that day had questions about the only sisters in the Episcopal Church in Michigan. Sister Linda-Susan has written an eloquent essay about their journey.

– The Rt. Rev. Robert R. Gepert, VIII, Western Michigan


A History of the Emmaus Community

Sr. Diane Stier and I met in 1979 at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.  I was an English professor and she was completing her doctorate in developmental psychology.  Both of us were planning on entering contemplative monasteries and were introduced to one another by the Carmelite Monastery of Indianapolis, Indiana, where Diane planned to enter.  I was headed to another Carmelite house.  The Indianapolis nuns were so taken by the “coincidence” of two women – both bound for the cloistered life – sharing the same space that they suggested we come together for prayer and daily Mass, which we did.  As time passed, the novice mistress of the Indianapolis Carmel came to believe that there was more than happenstance in our shared vocations.  Sr. Joanne suggested to us individually that God might be calling us to find a way to live contemplative life outside the walls.  When that idea was seconded by two other nuns, independently of Sr. Joanne or one another, we knew providence was in process, though our reactions were like the two disciples on the road to Emmaus: broken hearts and excruciating disappointment.  Each of us had felt called to the convent from very early years – Diane at the age of 12 and me at the age of 8.  What were we supposed to do with such long years of vocational discernment and the request to reconfigure how to live as contemplatives-in-the-world without the structural support of established tradition?  There was no blueprint and we were completely at the mercy of God.

Thus began Emmaus Monastery while we were still resident in South Bend.  We discerned each component of what this new community might look like with prayerful and direct advice from the Carmelites in Indianapolis.  We thought that the community would need a religious rule with the flexibility for the experiment ahead and decided on the Rule of Saint Benedict.  Then Emmaus needed to find its home on a farm in a small, rural community.  Neither of us had financial resources for the purchase (or lease) of farm property – and bit-by-bit providence made money available to us through loans from family and friends so that we could make a down payment on a 40-acre farm in Vestaburg, Michigan.  I was offered a teaching position at Michigan State University to help support the new endeavor and we asked the Diocese of Grand Rapids to assist us in moving toward our goal of becoming a monastic community.

It took 17 years for us to work through the necessary processes to become a private community with judicial person and a canonical part of the Diocese of Grand Rapids.  In all that time we made first vows, with permission, in April 1983.  We made the Benedictine vows of stability, conversion of life, and obedience for three years according to the Rule of Saint Benedict and the Constitution of the Emmaus Community. Shortly thereafter we began an Associates Program for “lay contemplatives” who felt called to live contemplative lives in the world.  In 1987 we made permanent vows, with permission, promising to be faithful to contemplative prayer and to the fruit of that prayer lived out in service in unusual settings, focused particularly on those outside the usual reach of church ministry.  As members of Emmaus we were particularly attuned to the workings of the God of the unexpected, the Stranger of the Emmaus account in Luke’s telling.  For Sr. Diane, that unusual location was the state bureaucracy where she serves as a licensing consultant for adult foster care homes.  Her responsibility is to protect the needs of the vulnerable adults who live in such circumstances.  For me, that location was the world of higher education, particularly in the privileged sector of elite liberal arts colleges. I have been an English professor at Bryn Mawr College for 20 years now, going back and forth between the College and the monastery such that I spend about half the year in one place and half in the other.  Sr. Diane has been a consultant for about the same time during which she survived the challenge of two breast cancers and two mastectomies.

With the help of two very generous Episcopalian benefactors, we were able to add to the original acreage about 15 years ago so that Emmaus Monastery (click here for map) is an 80-acre complex with a convent (called Marcella), two guest houses – one cottage and a second 3-bedroom home (Bartimaeus and Elizabeth), and a 3-bedroom hermitage.  People come to Emmaus for retreats, days of recollection, workshops, reading groups, prayer groups, and parish meetings.  We have always wanted our facilities to be available in the spirit of Benedictine hospitality and have never charged fees for use of the property, but accepted donations and stipends.  We have lived in this way in the corner of Montcalm County for 30 years during which we have helped support ourselves as music ministers for the two nearby Roman Catholic parishes, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque and Saint Bernadette of Lourdes.  I have also participated in training as a spiritual director and I offer the directed retreats for individuals and groups.

Our discernment to seek a home in the Episcopal communion has been a long eight-year process set in motion by a number of factors: the silencing of conversation about women’s ordination, the responses to the pedophilia scandal, the Catholic Church’s teachings about birth control and homosexuality, and the gradual erasure of the liturgical, ecclesial, and spirituality changes wrought by Vatican II.   Sr. Diane has felt a lifetime call to priestly ministry and she was able to function pastorally in our area for 30 years in her roles as chaplain and president of Hospice and in the request by area families, churched and unchurched, to help them through the dying, death, and bereavement processes.  Just as a dying patient was about to make a confession, however, after an intimate conversation with Sr. Diane, however, she would have to stop the exchange and find a sacramental minister who could actually perform the sacrament of reconciliation.  This was often a disruption of the trust established, especially if the priest available was a stranger.  Such encounters reminded her of her own call to priesthood and the final irrevocable teaching that women’s ordination was as serious a moral evil as pedophilia.

We remained convinced of our monastic calls and sought guidance from a number of sources (including long term spiritual guides and directors) about a new home where we would be able to continue our sacramental theology and our liturgical lives while opening up spaces for the free exchange of ideas, for honest and respectful dissent, and for growth in the Spirit.  Sr. Diane also hoped to test her vocation as a priest.  Never in our lives had we imagined making the journey from Rome to Canterbury, but we found ourselves increasingly in a crisis of conscience about following the call of the Spirit in the straightened circumstances of an increasingly silencing and repressive ecclesiology.  We discovered a way to become more “catholic” by attaching ourselves to another part of the Christian communion, one that could be home, familiar, and welcoming of the gifts of soul and intellect God had given us.

We have been very discrete about the journey from Rome to Canterbury because it is not our intention to make any commentary on our Roman Catholic inheritance.  We also wish to be deeply respectful of those who disagree with this phase of our Emmaus “on the road” movement or who feel betrayed or wounded by our departure.  We make this journey in faith and in trust and we carry in our hearts all those relationships of the past 30 years.  We are praying that, in time, any ruptures experienced by those heartbroken, as were the first Emmaus disciples, will experience resurrection healing.

– Sr. Linda-Susan Beard, EC