By Thea Jarvis

Sister Jose Hobday sat at the lunch table in the monastery guest house and said goodbye to her friends. Between bits of fish and a visitor’s questions, she blessed and hugged the Glenmary priests and brothers she had led in a five-day retreat.

“I’m glad I met this Indian,” a departing Glenmary jested as he exchanged farewells with Sister Jose. Her native American heritage was a building block of the week of prayer and recollection, which marked the first time a woman had directed a full retreat at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit.

“Thomas Merton said that until people study native American spirituality, they cannot be American,” Sister Jose pointed out. Her own background – her mother was a Seneca Iroquois, her father part Seminole – colors and enhances her approach to prayer and spirituality, subjects of the conferences and retreats she gives throughout the United States and abroad.

Sister Jose Hobday is currently based in Great Falls, Montana, where she works with the national Tekakwitha Conference promoting Catholic native American unity. She lives out of a suitcase three out of four weeks each month, but, in keeping with the simplicity of lifestyle she recommends, travels lightly.

“Two dresses and a sewing kit” are far better than a satchel full of clothes, she advises.

At the close of her time with the Glenmarys, Sister Jose wore a faded blue cotton shirtwaist and simple Indian jewelry she had been given by friends.

“Blue is for the sky and for Mary,” she explained, adding that her necklace and hair ornament were similarly symbolic.

Indians don’t relate well to a dove, she said, pointing to the eagle at the center of her pendant, “but this they understand – the Spirit!” Buffalo bone backing on each piece was “symbolic of God’s providence,” the food, shelter, and clothing buffalo shared with native Americans. Intricate bead patterns of bright yellow, orange, red and burgundy represented the sunrise to sunset cycle of life to death. Feathers meant man was meant to lift his spirits, to soar high.

Taking the hairpiece from her long salt and pepper hair, Sister Jose jangled narrow metallic decorations that hung below the beading. “This is just for music when you march along!” she said mischievously.

Speaking with, listening to Sister Jose Hobday is a playful, joyous experience. But her theology is sound and taught with an authority she doesn’t claim as her own.

“Before I speak I pray for poverty,” she admitted, recalling a crisis of confidence that erupted shortly before she took final vows as a Sister of St. Francis of Assisi of Milwaukee. Twenty-one years old, with five years of college behind her, Jo Hobday, whom her brothers had nicknamed “Jose,” felt she couldn’t live up to the Franciscan ideal.

“The Lord told me I couldn’t do it,” she said firmly. “He said, ‘Let me do something through you.’”

That “something,” she feels, is sharing a simple secret of faith: the love of God, especially as expressed through prayer, is available to everyone. It’s there for average everyday folks who live in the world, in the midst of a family, in the heart of a monastery, in despair and doubt. Union with God in prayer – deep, enriching, renewing prayer – is at our fingertips if only we allow ourselves to be open.

“We have so many definitions of prayer,” Sister Jose said, that she has stopped defining it, “except as a conscious, willing invitation, an alert welcoming of God into anything we do.”

The ecstasy that flows from dance, art, music, the joy of friendship, of loving and being loved, all are prayerful, she says. The satisfaction of holding a child in our arms, the thrill of exercise, the appreciation of a quiet garden can be part of our prayer life once we let God into the experience.

“Anything that transports us – a sunset, a flower, a child” can be hold if we don’t hold back or cut the link to God for fear of fanaticism or extremism. “God is beauty, love, life, goodness. You have the name of God in the experience.”

Sister Jose often recalls a significant event in her own life in which she was literally forced to let God in. At her Colorado home awaiting the arrival of a friend, pre-teen Jo became impatient and complaining. Tired of his daughter’s attitude, her father told her to pack a book, an apple and a blanket and join him in the car. He drove her to a desert area and left her there with instructions to shape up before the day was over.

Young Jo promptly threw her apple, book and blanket into a canyon and stomped around until she realized she wasn’t getting anywhere. She retrieved her belongings and sat under a tree where she ate the apple. Gradually, her anger lifted and she took a more objective look at her behavior. As she grew more peaceful, she became aware of the presence of God with her at that moment, in that place, and of the beauty of the world around her. When her father came back later that day, he found his prodigal with a changed heart. To this day, Sister Jose Hobday returns to her desert experience as a refuge and reminder of God’s overpowering love and the happiness one finds in solitary prayer.

Experiences like her own are not uncommon, she insists. “People have them and don’t recognize them. Contemplative prayer is everybody’s gift and everybody’s call.” Such prayer “can only be discovered in solitude. Solitude is not loneliness. Solitude and aloneness can work for spirituality.”

The hardest part of opening ourselves to the natural flow of prayer and prayerful moments, Sister Jose believes, “is waking up” to the reality of the spiritual, “to stay awake and not be lulled into spiritual complacency.”

Gospel passages reminding us to keep our lamps lighted, to be ready for the bridegroom and not hide our lights under bushel baskets, she said, are all calls to be alert to God’s presence. Scriptural admonitions against a surfeit of worldly goods underscore the need to stay awake and shake off the hypnotic effects of materialism and the frenetic compulsion to acquire that walls us off from God.

How does Sister Jose share her message with the multifold audiences she meets in her travels.

“I’m out convincing people that Jesus is affirming them, calling us to freedom,” she said simply. “I tease out of people an awareness of their own goodness, of their own potential. You can teach more with humor than with castigation.

“Jesus is my teacher. He is the master in affirming people and downplaying the negative. Jesus would never go after little people – the suffering, the misunderstood, the put down or cast out. He goes for the heart, never for the jugular!”

After people are convinced of their own goodness, of the love of God that permits deep union in prayer, Sister Jose said, they must become aware that Jesus expects “action on a few fronts.”

“You have to make choices. You have to embrace reality, put your arms around all of life. Then you gain the capacity to discern what is death, what is evil. Some things you accept, some you live with, some you reject. But such discernment is not possible from people who don’t know life.”

Making choices, prioritizing and discerning the Lord’s will, said Sister Jose, becomes easier when lifestyles are simplified and uncluttered by possessions that can rob us of our freedom.

“It’s much easier to be complex than it is to be simple,” she emphasized. Ridding our lives of the extraneous is a real and constant effort.

As if in illustration, Sister Jose related the story of her orange chairs. The chairs, she said, were given to her and she admired them greatly. They were upholstered and somewhat grand compared to the other furnishings of her little house in Great Falls. Sister Jose’s tastes do not run to the upscale.

An Indian couple arrived on her doorstep shortly after the two orange chairs had been installed in her home. They had rented an apartment thinking it would be furnished and were anguished over a last minute revelation that furnishings were not included. They had young children, a little food, and $10 in their pockets.

“Indians never ask for anything,” Sister Jose explained. They tell their story and if it elicits a compassionate response, they are grateful. If not they leave without embarrassment for either party.

“I told them we would split everything down the middle,” she continued. Everything from eggs in the refrigerator to tables, benches and linens were divided so each household had a proper share. Everything, that is, except the orange chairs.

“I had already become too attached to them,” Sister Jose said matter of factly. Her new friends left with two orange chairs added to their meager belongings and a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe in their hands.

Sister Jose’s stories – of herself, her family, people in her neighborhood, Jesus – are the charm and truth of her spirituality. Despite advanced degrees and an abundant intelligence, she chooses the simple, direct path to spiritual fulfillment.

“There’s too much theological language that’s esoteric and sophisticated and not people’s experience,” said Sister Jose. “The Spirit which is life is in everything that lives. That’s life. That’s real.”