How was it that your monastic vocation led you to earn a PhD in microbiology from the University of Connecticut? Is it common for nuns to go back to school and get advanced degrees?
It is not common for cloistered nuns to get advanced degrees in agriculture. Ten years earlier, two members of the community had been sent for degrees in fine arts and horticulture at Michigan State University. Sending four of us at once to the University of Connecticut, with such a commute, was a first and a big sacrifice for the community. Initially I was asked to study nutrition in relationship to my work in cheesemaking. We are a small farm, and we were up against industrial farming and regulations. The community decided to send some of us for advanced degrees so that we could defend what we were doing with traditional agricultural methods.
But none of us had really studied agriculture. To ultimately proceed to an advanced degree, I had to take undergraduate courses because I had never completed a bachelor’s degree. It was a long process, especially for someone who in high school avoided all science and math! Suddenly, after twelve years as a nun, I was taking algebra and trigonometry. It was a challenge. I never could have done it without the support of a strong community.
At that time the Nutrition Department at the College of Agriculture at the University of Connecticut was very clinically oriented. I arrived with the smelly, moldy cheese that I had developed over the years according to a traditional French recipe. I did not fit in well into the department. It was the microbiologists who eventually appreciated what I was trying to do. So I ended up studying microbiology in the College of Liberal Arts. I later went on for a doctorate in that same department. I was also blessed to get a Fulbright scholarship to France where I studied biodiversity and the natural succession of native cheese-ripening fungi within traditional caves.
So your journey from the Vietnam War protest movement into a monastery eventually led you back to college and then to cheese caves in France?
Yes. Many years earlier, a young woman from the Auvergne region of France had visited the Abbey and shared a recipe with me for making cheese using a very traditional technique taught to her by her grandmother. I spent many months implementing the technique, and I fed many disasters to my community and to our pigs. When she visited the Abbey two years later, she was amazed to see that the same fungi growing on the surface of her cheeses in France were growing on our cheeses in our cellar in Connecticut! This was a natural ripening process, and the appearance of identical mold suggested that our visitor’s cheesemaking technologies and natural ripening process selected for the microorganisms that give this cheese its distinctive flavor.
I had access at the Abbey to our natural cave, but I needed access to other caves to continue my work. So, I applied for a Fulbright and got it, and then the National French Agricultural Labs gave me a fellowship for three more years. Actually, the woman who founded Regina Laudis, Lady Abbess Benedict Duss, had come from France to found the Abbey in America. Even though she was an American, she spent most of her life in France and survived World War II there. For us at Regina Laudis, it was very meaningful to have a project so rooted in the French soil.
Would you say that cheesemaking has helped you understand what a good human life is and grow in the virtues?
Yes. As a part of my Fulbright scholarship, I not only studied science, but I also delved into the history and lore of the caves and the culture around them. It was quite moving to see how, for these traditional cheesemakers, especially those who lived through World War II, cheese was so connected to charity and love of neighbor. They had a sense of gratitude because they had been given this fruit of the earth. In fact, many of the dairy cooperatives are called just that in French – fruitières, from the Latin fructus, a Roman term connoting the right to use (usus) and benefit (fructus) from an asset you do not own. The cheesemakers believe that if they have this cow, this milk, then you share that with others. Cheesemaking is part of the bounty that God has given you to share.
One woman, a dairy farmer, told me the story of her husband, who during World War II was a member of the Resistance and had been captured by the Gestapo. She thought he would never come home. When her husband came home alive and she saw him standing at her door, she knew that he had lived because she had shared her dairy products during the war.
Creation is finite. All of what lives also decays and comes to an end. In the case of cheese, that decaying becomes part of the flavor we enjoy. As a Benedictine, how do you understand creation and decomposition? Does decomposition in the natural world, like cheese decaying, tell us something about the spiritual journey?
Flavor is created through breakdown. The components of cheese and milk are lactose – that is the carbohydrate in milk – protein, and lipids, or fat. In the environment of a cheese rind, microorganisms get their nourishment and a place to grow. Their metabolism in turn contributes enzymes that break down the components of milk, transforming the flavor and consistency of a young unripened cheese into an aged creamy cheese with a distinctive aroma.
I have come to think that the process provides us with an unconscious way of preparing for death. We eat a breakdown product, and it is delicious. Even though it is the end of a cycle, at the same time, there is something opening up that is unexpected.
When people visit monasteries, even if they know nothing about the history of the Benedictines or understand their charism, how can they enter into your way of life? What are people looking to experience during their visits?
Sometimes, what happens to people who come to the monastery is not what they expected. Many women come to the Abbey to have time away from their families and away from what they have to do every day. It is their rare occasion for contemplative time. They will cry and say, “I don’t know why I’m crying.” I think it is because they finally have a chance to get out of the rat race of everything that they have to do. It is the same with professional women working in the world. They feel they cannot be too vulnerable in their professions. They have to keep a certain persona within their professional lives. But when they come to a monastery, they can let go.
I also think that because of the grille, because of the monastic enclosure, people feel safe. In this place apart, they might leave with new insights. In The Ratzinger Report, published in 1985 before Cardinal Josef Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, Ratzinger said there was a misunderstanding of contemplative life. Monasticism used to be called the flight from the world, but: “You didn’t go apart from the world to abandon the world, but you are set apart to get another perspective. The monasteries tried out new models of civilization to give back to the world.” That is what we hope a guest would find in coming: a new perspective, new insights, and rekindled energy to go back to her family and profession.
For those of us who visit a monastery seeking peace and then go back into our daily lives outside the monastery, how do we step out of the rat race of life?
When my friends and I first went to the monastery and found peace, we would be so afraid to leave, thinking, “Uh-oh. When I go home, is this going to all go away?” But the more we went, the more it stayed with us.
At the Abbey, we give a lot of attention to each person to help her become who she is meant to be. In the prologue of the Rule, Saint Benedict talks about this. We call it the bonum, the good. What we find is that many visitors often have no sense of the good that is in them, of who they are, and that they are good. People just get ground down and do not realize how beautiful they are. They do not know the gifts they have; they are unaware of the gifts their families gave them. So, we encourage each one to find her bonum, the good that she brings, and to develop it.
Having welcomed young people as visitors to the monastery for so many years, what advice do you give them for discerning the will of God in their own lives?
For one thing, find time to be apart from your daily life where you can be more vulnerable and listen. When you go to an abbey, you get to speak to one of the nuns or the guest mistress. They help you try to figure out what has prompted you to come in the first place, or to identify an intuition or passion you want to pursue. We are not counselors, but we feel people come looking for peace. We try to help people find that peace.
One of the things unique to monastic life is that we live the cycles of life – of birth and death – with creation. We celebrate the liturgy, the cycle of Christ’s life. I think back to that first visit with my friends to the monastery when we were college students. Coming into the monastery, we felt despair over the Vietnam War and the death we were seeing. We felt we could not affect anything. But by living out the rhythm of a liturgical cycle, we learned that while death is a reality, there is a resurrection on the other side.
This article is adapted from Margarita Mooney Suarez, The Wounds of Beauty: Seven Dialogues on Art and Education (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2022), Chapter 3: “The Beauty of God in Cheesemaking and Chant.”
