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PARISH PROFILE
 Our Lady of the Angels Monastery: Prayer, work and community
By Jean Denton
Special to The Catholic Virginian
Cheesemaking is on hold at the Trappistine monastery in the hills a half-hour drive west of Charlottesville.
What?!
Okay, so this may come as a surprise.
What are you surprised about: that the normally year-round cheesemaking operation is temporarily halted?
Or that there are cheesemaking nuns in the Richmond Diocese?
Those who have been in the diocese for a while may have read about Our Lady of the Angels Monastery before. Also, people who live in the Charlottesville area likely are familiar with the cheesemaking contemplative sisters who have run the monastery farm near Crozet for more than 20 years.
But except for their cheese, the community of a dozen women keeps a low profile, which is fitting. They are contemplatives, after all.
 “We don’t give tours and we don’t sell it on the internet,” community treasurer Sister Barbara noted gently.
“The amount of cheese we make is according to what we can do and according to our need,” she explained.
That amounts to about 20,000 pounds of Gouda cheese a year.
Despite the fact that they don’t advertise, they always sell it all, Sister Barbara pointed out, smiling.
“The cheese is very popular,” she said.
Indeed, there are only a handful of two-pound wheels in the refrigerated storage room that customers haven’t yet picked up — all that’s left since the sisters suspended production in November.
They’ve stopped making cheese until May in order to upgrade their equipment for the first time since they began operations in 1990.
Of course, cheesemaking isn’t the main focus of the community whose members range in age from 39 to 76.
By way of explaining their vocation, one can put aside the phrase that probably comes to mind (thanks to a famous line from 1970s British comedy troupe Monty Python) upon hearing about nuns making cheese: “Blessed are the cheesemakers.”
 These women, who have chosen an ascetic lifestyle in a remote place, are not blessed by making cheese. They are blessed by the radical way they live their relationship with Christ. And they make cheese.
Sister Barbara, who is the formation director and also acts as the “PR person” for Our Lady of the Angels Monastery, explained that the community strives for a life of simplicity and quietude as a way to better commune with God.
Following the tradition St. Benedict established in the sixth century, Cistercian spirituality combines a life of prayer, work and community. Currently there are 12 monasteries of monks and five of nuns in the United States. The men and women are a single order and share governance of the community.
In 1987, when the farm near Crozet was for sale “at a reduced rate,” Sister Barbara explained recently, the Trappistine motherhouse in Wrentham, Mass., purchased it and sent six sisters there to establish a new monastery.
Coming from a sizable community in the motherhouse in Massachusetts, Sister Barbara recalls the move as “the adventure of my life.”
She and Sister Mary David are the only two sisters who remain in the Crozet community from the charter group.
Although the cheesemaking operation at the farm had been dormant for three years, the equipment was functional. After taking a couple of years to settle in, the nuns undertook to learn cheesemaking as a means of financial self-sufficiency.
“We were so naive,” Sister Barbara recalled with a laugh. “We thought: Milk, a few lessons, and — cheese! Of course, life’s not so simple.”
 But providence quickly shined as a neighbor couple showed up at the sisters’ door offering to help in any way, and it so happened that they knew how to make cheese.
Jim and Margaret Morris, self-described aging hippies, shared their cheesemaking skills and knowledge and before long the nuns were on their own.
Now cheese production runs from mid-January to mid-November. From November to Christmas work at the monastery “is all about ordering and shipping,” Sister Barbara said. They actually make cheese one day a week, she said, “but there is quite a bit of aftercare.”
Time spent on cheesemaking is only about four hours a day.
“The labor,” she said, “is a good balance to the silence.”
She pointed out that in the Cistercian way of life, silence “is not absolute. We don’t take a vow of silence — it’s more of an observance. We aren’t chattering all day.” She explained that members become very comfortable in each others’ presence without conversation.
“It permits a deeper communion (with each other),” Sister Barbara said.
 The women’s commitment to one another in community includes necessary verbal sharing of deep concerns, she said, “but we find that chatting about the weather or the stock market doesn’t really serve a human need.”
Sisters are assigned specific daily tasks by the community. Most jobs alternate among them, but special individual gifts are employed and encouraged.
Some tasks — what they call occupations — are maintained by one person when continuity is necessary.
Life at the monastery excludes television, computers (except for community business) or email, and daily newspapers. One sister is assigned to listen to the radio news each day to keep the community informed about major world events.
Sisters don’t communicate with their families by phone unless there is an illness, but they write them letters about once a month and occasionally communicate “with some limits” with close friends by regular mail.
 Family members visit the monastery once or twice a year for a few days at a time, but the sisters don’t “take vacations,” returning home only to care for a seriously ill parent or sibling.
“We are not cutting off contact, but cutting off frivolousness,” Sister Barbara explained, pointing out that choosing to limit outside communication is aimed at “not infringing on what the (monastic) life is meant to be doing for us.”
Sister Barbara, who this year at age 71 celebrates the 50th anniversary of her first vows with the order, said the monastic life in small community is both challenging and supportive.
 “It is a life in which you can move from selfishness to love. Of course monastic life has no monopoly on this — it is the basic human vocation — but it is the Christian life lived in a radical way.”
While the order’s spiritual tradition limits interpersonal relationships outside the community, Sister Barbara pointed out that contact with neighbors and friends of the community is valuable to the sisters’ prayer life. The cheesemaking function helps in this aspect, as one sister daily serves as receptionist for cheese sales and greets visitors.
While most sales are done by mail order many people in the area come to the monastery to buy cheese in person. The sisters also do their community shopping and medical visits in Charlottesville.
“We always wear our habits and are pretty well known in town. Many people will come up to us and ask for prayer,” Sister Barbara said.
They also have friendships with some of their neighbors including the nearby Mennonite farmer who sells and delivers their weekly order of milk — 750 gallons. Another neighbor, Carol McIntosh, regularly volunteers to help in the cheese barn.
The nuns don’t seek volunteers, Sister Barbara noted, but Ms. McIntosh is a friend who enjoys a chance to briefly share their contemplative attitude.
A semi-retired lawyer visits once a week to help with odd jobs and maintain the grounds.
“There are others who are very good to us,” she added, mentioning community professionals who provide services to the sisters without charge.
 While the Our Lady of the Angels community insists on self-support, Sister Barbara noted that the sisters are very thankful for donations they receive. She also pointed out that they receive various kinds of support from the Charlottesville parishes and their individual members.
“It’s a help to us and a way of sharing some of our life with them,” she said of the friendship.
The sisters also enjoy having people from the neighboring area join them for Mass. Usually about 30 people come to Sunday Mass in the monastery’s chapel and a handful join them for daily Mass. Father Joseph Wittstock, a monk from the Trappist abbey in Berryville, is assigned to be the sisters’ chaplain and lives in a house on the farm. He presides at all the Masses.
Those contacts “are good for us,” Sister Barbara emphasized. “They keep us in touch with the human family and help us to be more aware of what people are dealing with.”
Sister Barbara estimated that a third of all mail orders are accompanied by a prayer request and she said through continued contact with regular customers “we become friends.”
“We take those requests very seriously,” she emphasized. Referring to the fact that different religious orders have different vocations, Sister Barbara mentioned that while “some are called by God specifically to a ministry to the poor, the Cistercian sisters’ fundamental ministry is one of prayer.
“It really is a life of faith,” she explained. “We don’t see the fruits of our labors. We cannot live for results. We live in the present the best we can.”
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Copyright © 2008 The Catholic Virginian Press. Articles from Catholic News Services, including Fr. Dietzen’s column, may not be reproduced due to copyright considerations.
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