By Gretchen Keiser

Within the octagonal chapel in Snellville, a soprano voice softly intones the day’s office and other voices join, carefully measuring the phrasing and volume to try and be as one.

The sisters of the Visitation Monastery pray this way five times a day and the rhythm is like a webbing that loops together a simple day’s chain of humbling work, hours of silence and vowed commitment to their superior and one another.

This strand, like the black veil and habit and crisp white frontpiece, called a barbette, which the sisters wear – seems to be unchanging over time. To a world speeding along like a roaring train, the sisters’ life is in the background, blurred by the rapid pace of everyday life and its changing concerns. But stepping into this community of women – the oldest 94 and the youngest 26 – is not to stop, but to join a different flow. It is the steady movement of a deep commitment to a life of prayer which, the sisters know, is tremendously at odds with the world outside and, always, something of a mystery even to themselves.

“We’re just little people who are able to live together because we love Him so much,” said the superior, Mother Mary Jozefa Kowalewski, describing the spirit of the order and its cloistered life. Without that great love, she said, “it would be impossible.”

There are 15 sisters living in the monastery on 26 acres of land off unpaved Ridgedale Road on the edge of Snellville. They have been there for the last 10 years, moving out into the country from their original Georgia home at 1820 Ponce de Leon Avenue in the Druid Hills section of Atlanta. Of the 15, four have been living in this community for 30 years – the four remaining “foundation stones” of the 10 who came to Georgia in June 1954 to open a monastery of the order founded by St. Francis de Sales and known as the Sisters of the Visitation of Holy Mary.

Sister Mary Immaculata Collin was a 16-year-old novice in the visitation Monastery in Toledo, Ohio when she was asked by her novice mistress if “someday we were to make a foundation” would she like to go.

“I said yes, I was ecstatic,” she recalled of that first conversation with the sister who was to become the founding superior of the Georgia monastery, Mother Francis de Sales Cassidy. A native of Macon, Mother Francis de Sales had always desired to bring the order to her home state of Georgia.

“It wasn’t just the idea of adventure” to the young novice from Detroit, but a call from the Lord. When she thought that if she did not enter the Visitation order, she would become a missionary in the South. When the decision came to make a Visitation foundation in Georgia, “it was like a vocation within a vocation,” said the sister who is now novice mistress herself to the women who enter the Georgia monastery.

Sister Mary Helena O’Connell, who will be 95 years old July 23, had entered the Visitation Monastery in Toledo in 1936 after working for more than 25 years in an electrical contracting business with her brother in Rochester, N.Y.

The order, which by design of St. Francis always opened its doors to women who were older, to widows and to those with physical impairments, welcomed Sister Mary Helena’s vocation to the cloistered life.

“Even if I’m in my forties I can serve the Lord maybe for 20 years and be some help,” she thought then, smiling now as she reflects on the actual passage of 48 years since she entered the order.

“It is all God’s designs. He has certainly been wonderful to me,” said the sister, who has served as superior of the Georgia community at one time and briefly as first superior of a foundation in Stamullen, Ireland, where the American sisters encountered a chill that was unshakable and temperatures of “28 and 30 in our cells at night.”

Sister Maria Charitas Batista, who was to be elected superior of the community four times, serving 12 years came to Toledo from Havana, Cuba. A petite and self-effacing woman, Sister Maria Charitas recalled that she was the “youngest” – the one most recently received into the order when they arrived in Georgia. She was also the first to arrive at the doorstep of the former Asa W. Chandler mansion on June 29, 1954, while the other sisters were taken on a tour past the Cathedral of Christ the King and other Atlanta sights. Sent ahead with one sister who had been ill on the airplane trip from Ohio, Sister Maria Charitas was the one to discover that Bishop Francis Hyland, the diocese’s vicar general and a number of clergymen were waiting patiently to greet the touring sisters.

Mirthfully, she recalled stories of the early days of the foundation while the community adjusted to a new part of the country with fewer Catholics and a less established church and new life in a monastery which had been designed as a mansion with 16 rooms and sculptured gardens to the rear. The first night in their new home, the sisters arranged their few possessions in their quarters. Rods had been placed up above, where curtains were to be hung in the future so that a measure of privacy was created. Climbing atop the bed, the diminutive Sister Maria Charitas stretched to place her habit on a hanger upon the rod. Instead, the new contraption, a rollaway bed, began to move across the room, with the tiny sister and habit and hanger in tow. Monastic silence was broken by shrieks and laughter. On another occasion, she recalled the prayer of the day was interrupted by a ringing bell which seemed to indicate a visitor at the door. But a check of all entrances showed no one there. Instead, Sister Maria Charitas said, laughingly, they discovered she had inadvertently knelt upon the mansion’s butler bell.

The fourth “foundation stone,” Sister Mary Clare Paszko, now 72 years old, entered at the age of 18 and, unlike the others, simply went a few blocks from her childhood home to the Toledo monastery which was already a familiar place. Also guided as a novice by Mother Francis de Sales Cassidy, she had no thought of being one of those to leave Toledo as a pioneer.

“I never thought I would go on a foundation,” she said, remembering her belief that the choice should be to “take the big people. I am just a little nothing.”

Sister Mary Clare has spent more than 50 years in the order, worrying now that rheumatism has affected one knee and forced her to use a cane. She quietly asked for prayers that her knee might be restored, saying she has no time to fuss over herself.

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“This life is so beautiful,” Mother Mary Jozefa had observed earlier in the day. “There is no retirement. You can live it unto death. We don’t have to have a place for old people. They can live within the family.”

The order was founded in 1610 in Annecy, France by St. Francis and St. Jane Francis de Chantal, a widow who was receiving spiritual direction from St. Francis. From the beginning it was reflective of an openness that is more associated with recent change in the church.

“St. Francis really presaged the Second Vatican Council. He preached holiness for everyone,” said Mother Mary Jozefa – preaching it at a time when other contemplative orders stressed rigorous physical penance and austerity that seemed beyond the reach of all but a few.

For the Visitandines “moderation was the order of the day,” she said. “We can take pride in nothing. We don’t have long fasts. We have sufficient sleep.”

Calling pious women to “a very ordinary hidden life,” St. Francis demanded instead an austerity of heart and renunciation of will to the rigors of love and obedience. That internal austerity was all the more demanding, but Sister Mary Jozefa said the early Visitandines suffered the sarcasm of being called by some “the Order of the Taking Down from the Cross” because of the contrast with severely austere contemplative practices.

From the beginning St. Francis wanted “women of prayer whose lives would influence others simply by their union with God,” she said.

Today, rather than being seen as somehow lax, the lifestyle of the Visitation Monastery is “more and more countercultural with time,” the superior noted.

Rising at 5:30, the sisters spend an hour in silent prayer and, following breakfast, chant the morning prayer and then attend Mass. The morning is spent in work – “always more work than the sisters to do it” – cleaning the living quarters, maintaining the garden and orchard, working with ceramics, sewing and baking the 100,000 Communion wafers which will be used by parishes throughout the archdiocese each month. Except for two recreation periods, at noon and in the evening, when the community gathers to talk and socialize, there is silence or limited necessary conversation to encourage constant inner direction toward God.

There is a simplicity to every aspect. The habits of the sisters are made by hand, as are the altar cloths and vestments at the monastery. Unlike the first home on Ponce de Leon, the new monastery in Snellville where the community moved 10 years ago, allows each sister her own room. There is a greater privacy – a much-needed complement to the continuing demand in community for shared life – and creating more for the sisters is a desire of Mother Mary Jozefa, who was elected superior a year ago from the Visitation community in Wilmington, Delaware.

Another new addition is a regal doghouse outside where a playful dog named “Benji” has found a home. Obviously a favorite, Benji came romping for attention from two novices who were taking down laundry in the bright sunshine of the early afternoon.

The gentle and homey addition of the dog is part of a spirit Mother Mary Jozefa is bringing to Georgia’s monastery – the smallest of six primitive observance Visitation monasteries in the United States – from Wilmington, Delaware, the largest.

Several sisters, gifted in sewing and music, have also come from Wilmington to stay with the Snellville community for a period of time and share the strength of their talents and their added witness to this complete commitment to religious life.

The monastery, beginning its fourth decade in Georgia, is also stressing that it is a place where women can come for retreats, to share in the life of prayer for a few days and to return renewed to their own vocations. “We are leading hidden lives, but we do not want to be hidden” from the world, observed Mother Mary Jozefa.

Despite the demands of their life, there have been women who have entered the community from Georgia and those who continue to inquire today. While the community began as 10 people and has never risen to more than 15 in Georgia, Sister Mary Immaculata expressed the intangible sense that in this life it is not great numbers which dominate, but the intensity of the life lived in community.

Had the Visitation not come to Georgia there would have been a closed door for the particular women who found their way to Ponce de Leon “became saints there and died,” she observed.

Despite the changes in the world, there continues to be a call to those who desire, not to be a conformist, easily surrendering to someone else’s direction, but to be conformed to Christ.

“You are really integrating yourselves into a very different culture,” said Sister Mary Immaculata.

“The life is a life of prayer. The test of authenticity of our prayer is our obedience.”

Another aspect of the life is that its accomplishments are largely hidden, but the sisters know that they are there. After 30 years of prayer for and within the archdiocese, one of the four “foundation stones” was asked about it.

“I think He wants sisters to pray for the archdiocese,” said Sister Mary Clare. From the sacrifices of a simple life, without many possessions and without the freedoms that are common to others, and from the daily focus upon union with God, “the blessing comes upon the archdiocese. It comes through prayer, anonymously.”