THE INTERPOSITION OF PERSONAL LIFE STORIESAND COMMUNITY NARRATIVESIN A ROMAN CATHOLICRELIGIOUS COMMUNITY

Susan Carpenter StuberWest Palm Beach, FL

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This study investigates the interplay of community narratives andindividual stories in a Roman Catholic religious community. Catholic sisterswere asked about their personal life stories and the community narrative of their religious order. Links were found between the values and actionsconveyed in the community narrative and those reported in the individuallife stories. The community narrative acted as a vessel for the preservation of the principles on which the community was founded. This narrative is central to the life of the sisters, being taught to new sisters, told atcommunity events, and used during times of renewal. New sisters choose tointerpose their own life story with the community narrative in the face ofattractive alternatives. After a period of formation, they develop a sense ofcommunal identity. In this study, the number of stories members generatedabout each other reflected their strong sense of community. © 2000 JohnWiley & Sons, Inc.

Scholars in religious studies have written of the importance of religious narratives andmyths to create worlds, to engage readers (Comstock, 1993), and to guide moral behav-ior (Hefner, 1991). Stories are unique in their capacity to draw us in, tell us about real-ity, and instruct us how to act. Our identities, both at the collective (Carroll & Roozen,1990) and individual (Hammond, 1988) levels, are affected by participation in religiouscongregations.

A R T I C L E

JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. 28, No. 5, 507–515 (2000)© 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Correspondence to: Susan Carpenter Stuber, 2607 Flamango Lake Drive, West Palm Beach, FL 33406.

Roman Catholic orders of women are likely to be visibly shaped by narratives andstorytelling processes because of the distinctive, separate, and life-encompassing quali-ties of their communities. These communities have been researched by social scientistsfrom diverse points of inquiry including life events that influenced sisters’ decisions toenter the convent (Wolf, 1990), the effects of Vatican II on sisters’ formation (Eisikovits,1983), changes in patterns of communal living (Wittberg, 1993), and issues involved inthe transition of ex-nuns from religious to secular life (SanGiovanni, 1978). This studyanalyzes related issues in one such community by drawing upon individual stories andcommunity narratives told by a group of sisters during a series of informal interactionsand formal interviews with the author. In particular, the study focuses on how the sis-ters interpose the community narrative on parts of their life stories to explain their deci-sion to join the order and to give meaning to lives lived within a religious community ofwomen.

METHOD

Participants and Setting

This study was conducted with women in a small Roman Catholic religious community,but not to learn about the community per se. Rather, it was hoped that such a commu-nity would be in a special position to provide information about the functions of and in-terplay between community narratives and personal stories. This community was partlychosen for study because it is a total community; it is much more than a group of peo-ple who get together once a week. It encompasses every aspect of the members’ lives.Membership in this community has deeply molded their identities. They have reflecteda great deal on what it means to be a member of this community, and it was thought thatthey could easily talk about it.

Researchers cannot avoid having subjective opinions and biases which influence whatthey see when they enter a community to investigate it (Peshkin, 1988). Denzin (1990) haswritten that ethnographers study that which is biographically meaningful to them. Fromthis perspective, my personal affiliations with Roman Catholic communities are importantto discuss. I am a Roman Catholic, with past and present affiliations in Catholic commu-nities. I have known the Superior of this religious community for many years. These con-nections and commitments led me to study this particular religious community.

The community described is part of a Roman Catholic religious order of womenwhich has its international base in Montreal. Members take vows of poverty, chastity, andobedience, and live together in different places with others in their order. The orderowns a hospital in town, and this particular community used to be comprised largely ofnurses and administrators who worked in the hospital. Currently, the sisters live in ahouse adjacent to the hospital; most are employed at the hospital in medical, adminis-trative, or counseling and ministerial capacities.

Interviews

Stories were solicited at two levels. Individual life stories included those in which the sis-ters recounted memories of formative moments, for example, stories about teachers orfamily members who inspired them, or events that challenged them. Life stories also in-cluded those about roles, lifestyles, and activities that reflect who the person is and thevalues they hold important. People vary in the extent to which they have freely chosen

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the life story they are living, and this may be an important factor in one’s feelings of con-trol over one’s life.

Stories were also collected about the community. Howard (1991) has written that cul-tural differences are rooted in the preferred stories that communities tell. Communitynarratives are central to the identity of the community, or reflect what is characteristic ofthe community. They act as concrete vessels for fundamental values and principles, giv-ing an historical anchor to the community, and a sense of purpose and identity to its mem-bers. They are told to educate new members of the community, in community meetings,or at moments when explanation or inspiration are called for in the community, and pro-vide a role model, a morale, and guidelines for modeling the behavior and values of com-munity members (Rappaport & Simkins, 1991). One sign of a strong sense of communi-ty is the extent to which members can generate stories about each other.

I first explained my ideas and desire to interview the community members to the Su-perior. She then told the community about my project, and they decided to invite me todinner to hear more about it. At that time I presented my ideas, answered questions, andthen scheduled 2-hour interviews with each of the sisters. Over the next 2 weeks, I cameto the sisters’ residence (or in a couple of cases to their offices at the hospital) for theindividual interviews. I began with questions about what it was like growing up, what washer family like, what were her parents like, how would her family have described her, andwere there any formative stories from her childhood that she could recount. I askedabout her decision to enter the religious community, alternative stories she may haveconsidered, when she learned about the founders and principles of the community, andwhat the formation process (first 3 years after entering the community) was like. I askedthe story of the founding of the community, the degree to which she identified with thefounders, the principles that come out of the stories, and the use of the principles. Iasked about favorite stories from the Bible, and stories about other sisters in the com-munity. I refined the interview over time, dropping some initial questions that did notseem useful, and adding others as I learned more about the community.

ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS

It was important that the interpretations made from the interviews make sense not onlyto me, but also to the community members themselves. Kieffer (1984) has utilized amethod he calls “dialogic retrospection,” in which tentative interpretations made duringresearch projects are regularly referred back to the participants for reflection and refinement. Lincoln and Guba (1986) also encourage regular “member checks,” or solicitation of informants’ feedback on researchers’ findings, as a means of insuring cred-ibility in naturalistic research. Therefore, after the interviews I circulated copies of myarticle among the community members, and we met for a feedback session. The womengenerally had very positive comments about the article and its portrayal of their com-munity narrative and personal stories. We discussed the themes and key concepts of thenarrative and then I made appropriate changes in the article.

History as Community Narrative: The Foundation and Fundamental Values of the Order

One type of community narrative is the historical account of a setting provided by itsmembers. Roman Catholic religious orders have well-articulated historical narratives that

Narratives in a Roman Catholic Community • 509

distinguish their order from others and which provide a foundation on which the activ-ity and values of the order rest.

The following history of this order has been written based on the sisters’ recountingof the story of the founding of their community. The father founder was a priest in Parisin the 1800s. He was described as a dreamer, visionary, and spiritual guide. He was verytroubled by the conditions in which street children were living—having no place to stay,no one to show them love or teach them about God. With no thoughts of founding a re-ligious order, he asked a friend of his (who became the mother foundress) if she wouldtake in these children, and teach them some skills so that they could support themselves.She agreed, and found other women to help her. The sisters consider the motherfoundress to have been a very practical, strong, hard-working woman. She had previouslytried out and left two religious orders because they were too austere and removed fromthis world. She and her helpers eventually requested that the father founder petitionRome to make them an official religious congregation, which he did.

The central themes and principle values represented in this history were lived by thefounders, captured by their stories, and transmitted to the sisters to be lived out in theirlives. Principles associated with the father founder are faith, ascesis (self-giving/sacri-fice), and family spirit. When I first met with the Superior about my project, she told mehow busy she had been lately with committee meetings, and laughed that she justthought of it as her ascesis. Family spirit was also exemplified in many stories. One sis-ter told about a young man who was experiencing a family crisis. The sisters sponta-neously offered him a place to stay until things settled down for him.

The principles of trust, simplicity, love of work, and self-giving were associated withthe mother foundress. Prayer and responding to need as it is seen are other core prin-ciples. A story was told about the mother foundress that she was not like the typical sis-ter of 19th century France. She was able to relate to street children, hold them at night,and comfort them. This shows a community value of responding to need as it is seen,and being present to the real needs of this world. These values contained in the com-munity narrative reflect those in the stories that individual sisters told about importantevents in their lives. Many of the sisters I interviewed told stories about their own moth-ers, their role models in the community, or themselves being very nurturing and presentto children, rocking them to sleep, having fun with them, and accepting them and com-municating with them on their own level.

A story often told by the sisters describes how the mother foundress would beg onthe streets for bread for the children, and eat their leftovers before taking any for her-self. This exemplifies the community values of simplicity and self-giving. On the individ-ual level, one sister said that she often returns home to have leftovers at lunchtime ratherthan eating out. When entertaining a friend at other times, she fixes a nice dish fromleftovers rather than going out.

The sister’s stories about the mother foundress characterize her as a “do-it-yourself”person. For example, she would figure out how to build a chimney when no one else wasaround to do it. This shows the community’s value of simplicity and love of work. Oneof the women identified with this characteristic of the mother foundress. She said shewould roll up her sleeves and try to fix anything, and the other sisters were always sur-prised at what she could fix.

Every sister interviewed discussed responding to need as seen in the world. The ori-gins of the religious community are in the father founder’s spontaneous response to theneed he saw of the street children. The order was not founded to stay in one specific

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place and do one particular task. The community has responded to need as they haveseen it. They have become teachers and nurses in response to apprehended need, andthey maintain an openness that the need they are currently serving may end, and theremay be another to respond to in the future. Most of the sisters have done a number ofvery different things in their lifetimes in the spirit of responding to need. One womanbegan as a school teacher, but moved on to open a school in a Black urban communityto teach adults to read, to open a school in a prison, and to found a human relations de-partment in their hospital. Another began as a nurse and served as director of nursingin their hospital, as well as head of the nursing school. She later began the pastoral caredepartment of their hospital.

Choosing the Roman Catholic Order as an Encompassing Life Context

Each sister’s considered choice to live within the Roman Catholic order and to take onan entirely encompassing role, lifestyle, and set of activities reflects her identificationwith the values and goals of the order. Most of these women were very clear that this de-cision was made in the face of other concrete alternatives. Several envisioned beingnurses, several had been engaged to be married, and others had considered some oth-er life story before becoming a sister. These observations suggest that making a clearchoice of a life story leads to greater feelings of control in one’s life. One sister’s storysupports this point:

The straw that broke the camel’s back was that for Valentine’s Day (we had beenengaged for maybe 6 or 8 months) F. came up to the house to get me, westopped at some friends of his on the way back and he came out with this roll ofpapers. I didn’t think too much about it, not remembering that his friend was an architect. And we had always looked around, as lovers will do, saying,‘Wouldn’t that be a beautiful place for a house?’ So on the way back to campusthat night he went to the place where we had looked, a nice wooded lot, pulledin, and reached around and handed me the deed to the property and the plansthat he had had drawn for the house. I got furious! He didn’t understand why,but it was that I could see that I would always be taken care of, but I would nev-er be an equal partner. I got out of the car and I walked back to campus. And acouple days later I gave the ring back.

Soon after that she decided to join a religious community, where, though she gave upsome control in the beginning, she felt she had more personal control in her life. In herwords,

It’s a paradox. You give up control with the vow of obedience, but then there’sthe other side. You gain control in that you’re constantly faced with choosingagain and again. And the option of choosing always includes the option of notchoosing.

The sisters saw their decision as precipitated by a call, and the choice—sometimes a verydifficult one—was in answering the call. Strength and conviction were necessary to makethis conscious choice. By choosing something different from the norm, the sisters weremore aware that they were actually making a choice, and for that reason, felt more con-trol. Their life story was chosen from among other desirable alternatives.

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But what makes a person choose this life story over another? How could thesewomen reject the dominant cultural narrative of being a wife and mother, one that wasand still is extremely powerful for young women? Most of the sisters told stories aboutthe influence of role models in making the decision. Some had grown to know the char-acter of the religious community, particularly its value of family spirit. One woman toldstories of what the sisters were like when she was in boarding school:

What impressed me was, in a boarding school they really were with us all thetime, not just during the class day. You had one sleeping in the dormitory withyou. It was just like they were a mother to the girls.

She also told about how they would scrub floors together—they would never ask the stu-dents to do something they themselves wouldn’t do—and really get to know each other.The sisters would take the girls on picnics in the woods and prepare and pass around thefood “just like your mom or aunt.” They would be just as likely to play a joke on you asyou on them. She and others felt drawn in by what they saw of this alternative for theirlives. Most said it was the best choice for them at the time, and they have never regret-ted it. They saw it as a story that would enable them to accomplish more of what theywanted to accomplish in their lives—to live out their values more fully.

The powerful draw of choosing to have a family and be a mother appears as a par-allel theme in the narrative of this, and perhaps many, religious communities. Commu-nity members hold family spirit as one of their highest values and consider themselves afamily. They live together, but also have meals together, pray together, and celebrate com-munity events and religious and civic holidays together. The sisters in the community val-ue extending hospitality to others, as a family would. Several sisters also talked about the“mothering” they did as teachers, particularly as teachers in a boarding school with chil-dren whose parents were far away. As in the campus ministry community studied byMankowski & Thomas (this issue), the theme of providing a home away from home ap-pears in this narrative.

One hypothesis investigated in the study was that the sisters joined the order becauseof the influential power of the founder’s life story as a model for their own. However, itturned out that most of the sisters had never heard the stories that made up the com-munity narrative until after they joined, and not one said that she joined because of thefounders’ stories. One pointed out that neither of their founders are canonized saints,nor are they well-known figures outside the community.

Nonetheless, the community of sisters clearly values the narrative of the founders.The older sisters repeatedly tell versions of the narrative to the novices during a 3-yearperiod of formation before vows are taken, especially when it is re-enacted on occasionat important community events. The narrative was also a focal point during a period ofrenewal in the 1960s—what they looked to when they went “back to the basics.” As oneof the sisters reported:

At the time of renewal, we were mandated to go back and look at ourselves tosee if the original values of the community were still alive. Then the stories tookon a new meaning for me. There was an awakening of the spirit of the congre-gation.

The narrative is so important because it acts as a concrete vessel for the principles thatunderlie the community, and the lives of the community members. Members did not say

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that they thought about the founders or their stories when they were making life decisions.They did not need to because the community narrative and the principles on which thecommunity was founded were woven into their lives at many levels. They spoke in termsof “breathing out and breathing in,” “infused,” and “osmosis” to describe the way in whichthese principles envelop their lives. The sisters learn the principles during formation whenthey learn about the founders, by seeing them modeled by other sisters, by hearing storiestold about older or deceased sisters, and by acting them out for other members and pass-ing them on to younger ones. One sister summarized the point by talking about a charism:

A charism is really a gift that you receive that you share with others, and I thinkthat because you live together, you’re imbued with this spirit, this history. Andso much of it keeps coming. Like we have retreat days, and sometimes we’ll pullthings from history, or we’ll sit around and have storytelling, so that all that be-comes a part of you.

The women also expressed that they each become a vessel for carrying on the storiesand values of the community. They know each other very well, and work together to de-termine the goals toward which they should be working. This collaborative process is an-other way that the community values are learned and lived by the members.

After a life story is chosen, there must be a process of incorporating the principlesof the story into one’s own. The sisters described the formation process of 3 years dur-ing which they were trained, molded, and educated in the life of a community member.As a formal process, some talked about the regimentation of the lifestyle:

Your personal life changed completely and instantly. There was a time to get upand a time to go to bed. There was a time for prayer, a time for work, there wasa time to talk and a time to be silent, a time to recreate, a time to pray. And thatwas your life. I was a registered nurse, and if I had a headache, I had to go askthe novice mistress and ask for aspirin . . . We had three handkerchiefs a week.If you needed an extra handkerchief you had to ask for it. These kinds of thingswere considered at that time important in terms of forming you (which to peo-ple now would be ridiculous).

Similar to the military’s “basic training,” each sister develops a collective identity in ad-dition to her individual identity.

Other Types of Stories Commonly Told in the Order

Humorous stories. An unexpected finding in the study was how much the sisters enjoyedtelling stories about each other. They had many stories about older sisters whom theyhad known in the past, and ones with whom they were currently living. As in AlcoholicsAnonymous (Humphreys, this issue) these stories are told to have fun, release tensions,and to build a sense of community. One sister reported that telling stories about eachother built a sense of family: “This is what we did at home.” The stories implicitly com-municate that “these are the kinds of people we are.” In some stories, the sisters are rep-resented as funny, in others as generous, encouraging, strong. For example, one sistertold a story of encouragement from her superior:

She was a wonderful woman. I know when they first asked me to go on nightduty I had charge of the whole house [hospital]. And they didn’t tell me one

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thing; I didn’t know what I was going about. I was young. And she had her bed-room on the first floor there, and she always told me that if any time in the night,or any time that I needed any advice I could always come to her. And that wastrue. She was always ready to help you. That was the type of woman she was. Iknow when I went to surgery as a student nurse I just couldn’t take the super-visor who was there. I went down to Mother S. one time and I was crying, and Isaid, “Mother, I can’t take this any longer. I don’t think I’m going to make anurse. I cannot do it.” And she said, “Listen, things are not permanent, thingsare passing. In just a few more weeks you’ll be out of surgery and you’ll neverhave to go back if you don’t want to.” Later in my life I read that Theresa of Avi-la said, “Let nothing disturb thee for all is passing!” I always remembered that.

The sisters told another example of a humorous story about aging and dying:

There were two sisters, and I don’t know if they were blood sisters, but they hadlived together for years, and when the one was dying, the other one thought shewas already dead, or was too far gone to know what was going on, and she wasgoing in her room and taking her prayer book and stuff and the other one be-came alert enough to say, “Leave my things there, I’m not gone yet!”

Biblical and family stories. Because I was interested in the role of stories appearing in thecentral text on which the community is founded, I also asked each sister if she had a fa-vorite Bible story. Most mentioned stories that were thematically related to the centralvalues or characteristics of their community. They told stories about the strength and dig-nity of women in The Bible whom they admired, about responding to need, and doingthe will of God. I also asked them to describe their parents, and most of these descrip-tions also reflected the core values of their community: They were good to the poor,showed hospitality, were religious, made room at the table for anyone, and had a strong,solid faith. Several of the women considered their mothers to be exceptional women intheir day—strong, educated, working outside the home. The sisters currently recall theirparents as having the same general characteristics and values as the religious communi-ty in which they chose to live these values out more fully in their adult lives. In this way,their life stories achieve continuity and purpose. Living in a community where these val-ues are central makes the sisters notice and appreciate stories that contain these values,and to recall early memories that demonstrate these values (see also Greenwald & Pratka-nis, 1984; Markus & Nurius, 1986).

CONCLUSIONS

This study supports the view of narratives in spiritually based communities as resourcesfor members to create group cohesion, integrate new members, and remind membersof the values to which they are personally committed. The religious community has cen-tral stories of its founders which act as vessels for the preservation of the principles onwhich their community was founded. Because the sisters have a primary identificationwith their community, the stories are also central in their lives; though they may not thinkof them every day, they know that they contain the principles and values on which theirlives are built. They believe that the preservation of the stories is essential, as reflectedin their use of them in instructing novices, celebrating community events, and getting attheir own roots during a period of renewal. The decision to live this life story is made as

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a conscious choice in the face of attractive alternatives, and followed by a period of for-mation in which the woman begins to develop her sense of communal identity. The num-ber of stories the women told about each other—stories that capture the values of thecommunity—indicates that the sisters feel a high sense of community. Finally, the the-matic similarity in their stories suggests that living life within a religious communitystrongly shapes what the sisters value, notice, and remember. The finding that the sistersinterpose their community narrative into their individual life stories might be replicatedin other settings that have a strongly identifiable and encompassing narrative.

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