This Is Uncomfortable May 8, 2025 Transcript

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Reema Khrais: Claudette Powell moved to LA with the classic Hollywood dream: to make it big as an actress and comedian. 23 years later, she found herself on set, but not in the way she’d hoped. 

Sister Monica Clare: I was getting props for the shoot and they kept saying, we need more guns, more blood, more guns. And we were getting gallons and gallons of fake blood, and I just thought, this is what I do for a living?!

Khrais: Claudette was on set, at a photoshoot for an action movie. She worked in advertising at a major film studio, crafting promotional images for blockbusters. It was 2012, a big year for dark, gory superhero movies. 

She had a job many people would kill for, but LA had taken a toll on her. In the years of failed auditions and dank comedy clubs, the glitz of the city had faded. 

Quietly, a new dream had started to take hold. One that seemed even more outlandish than making it as an actress. But to make this dream happen she’d have to pay off the debt she’d racked up over the years. 

Sister Monica Clare:  I had probably at that point, I hope you're sitting down as I'm saying this.

Khrais: I am, okay. I’m ready.

Sister Monica Clare: I had about 150,000 in debt. 

Khrais: The debt was the accumulation of a life in an expensive city - credit cards, medical debt, car repairs. She’d come of age in the 80’s, when a lot of young people were handed credit cards without being taught good money management skills. 

Now, decades later, she was spending nearly every free moment hustling to pay off that debt. Lots of odd jobs - dog sitting, house sitting, whatever she could get. And during the day, she’d edit movie posters and deal with Hollywood egos, all in service of her new dream. 

Sister Monica Clare: So sitting at my desk, I would open up my little Excel document that I had about my debt, and I would look at it and I would think, “Okay, this is how much I have to go. And this is how much is standing between me and living out my true self.”  I would always think of it as building a ladder over a prison wall. That’s the image I had in my mind.

Khrais: Every payment brought her closer to something she couldn’t quite say aloud: a life that would’ve sounded radical, or even like a joke, to most of her coworkers and friends. It took her more than a decade. But eventually she was down to her last payment. 

Sister Monica Clare: Writing that last check, I thought, “Is this the last check I will ever write?”

Khrais: She’d climbed that ladder over the prison wall. On the other side was the home of her dreams…a convent. 

At 46-years-old, Claudette was going to become a nun. You might be wondering why she had to first give up her debt…that’s because most convents won’t accept aspiring nuns unless they’re debt free. A vow of poverty doesn’t really lend itself to making timely payments. 

We’ve done a lot of stories on this show about debt: how people got into it and the lengths they’ve gone to to get out. But this is the first we’ve done where someone paid off all of their debt so that they could then take a vow of poverty. 

The idea came to us actually from a listener a while back. They emailed us and said “Hey, did you know you have to pay off all your debts before you can become a nun or priest? You should look into that.” 

So we did. And we learned a lot that paying off debt is just the beginning of how money can complicate life in a convent. Claudette’s dream was to leave behind the material world, but even inside the convent walls, she couldn’t escape the stories she told herself about money and self worth. 

I’m Reema Khrais… welcome to this is Uncomfortable. This week– is it possible to find financial security in a vow of poverty? 

12 boxes. That’s what Claudette reduced her material life to in preparation for her journey to the Community of St. John the Baptist in New Jersey. She’d spent months donating most of her clothes and furniture, and putting her most precious belongings in the back of a small u-haul.

Sister Monica Clare:  I got in the car to drive east. And I thought, I've quit my job. I have enough savings by the grace of God to get me through maybe three, four months. And it feels amazing.

Khrais: I’ve always been drawn to stories like Claudette’s - people who decide later in life not just to pivot, but to throw out the script altogether. Though if you’d asked her, she’d tell you she’s always been a nun fangirl. It started when she was seven.

Sister Monica Clare: And I saw the movie, “The Nun’s Story.” It was playing on the Saturday matinee on TV. I think it was, it was the early 70s, and um, I was just so drawn in by that. 

Movie clip: He that shall lose his life for me shall find it.  If thou wilt be perfect,  go sell what thou hast and give to the poor and come follow me.  

Sister Monica Clare: And it was, it became almost like an obsession with me to learn more about nun.

Khrais: To the point where she stole the book the movie was based on, from her local library, which might be the most forgivable sin. She read it like 50 times. It was about a courageous young nun, and it became a kind of blueprint for the life she craved: one that offered structure and ritual. When everything around you feels chaotic, order becomes its own kind of rebellion. 

Claudette grew up in rural Georgia, one of three kids…

Sister Monica Clare: The joke was always we were five dollars away from living on the street. We moved all the time. We were always being evicted from apartments and rented homes. Our phones were turned off cause we couldn’t pay the bill. It was like the ground kept shifting under our feet.

Khrais: For Claudette and her sisters, it was rare to have both cereal and milk for breakfast– sometimes they slipped cans of ravioli into their pockets at the supermarket so they wouldn’t go to sleep hungry. And she says her dad was often drunk and violent towards the family. Her family was Southern Baptist, going to church was her sanctuary.

Sister Monica Clare: Church seemed to be very safe and secure. Safety became a big thing for me as a kid and as an adult, too. That's one of my really basic needs is to feel safe. 

Khrais: Safe in terms of, like feeling like you belong or safe in terms of finances or both?

Sister Monica Clare: Both. I mean, the way I describe it is the life appealed to me as an adult on, on a spiritual level, of course, having a life of meaning, growing closer to God, but also on a practical level of being a single woman looking at my future and feeling like being part of a team is very secure as opposed to navigating by myself.

Khrais: Claudette had spent her life trying to find that sense of belonging. After college, she moved to LA to try to make it as an actress. A casting director told her, “You just don’t have that sparkle,” so she tried improv. Making people laugh made her forget about her bills and the loneliness she felt. But she never managed to turn comedy into a career.

Along the way she started going to church in secret. It was the only space where it felt like no one was trying to network their way to fame. She became an Episcopalian. She liked the structure - the formal services, chanting and priests in robes. It also aligned with her values: the church supports reproductive rights and the LGBT community. 

And they happen to have nuns. 

This nagging thought began to follow her through her life– what if I left Hollywood and actually became a nun? It felt like a fantasy. And the people in her life treated it like one. Her sister, her ex-husband, even her therapist dismissed it as a passing phase, as a way to escape the fog of depression. 

But as she quietly kept researching, meeting nuns, going on retreats, she became even more convinced that this was her path. In a religious community, you make a vow to care for each other until the day you die. It would solve all her problems. 

Claudette explained her decision to her mom in a letter, she wrote: 

Sister Monica Clare: “I will live a life that is free of chasing the almighty dollar and trying to get a husband and kids before I’m forty. I will never have to worry again about paying a phone bill, building up a retirement fund, fighting traffic or even how I look in a bikini. I will have a month’s vacation every year! I will also never have to worry about medical and dental care, or how to support myself when I’m old. Have you ever heard of such a great benefits package?”

Khrais: Claudette chose a convent in the lush New Jersey countryside. She emailed back and forth with them for weeks before finally making the cross country trip with a small U-Haul and her 12 boxes. She was enchanted when she pulled up the convent for the first time. 

Sister Monica Clare: You’ve reached the convent after you come down this half mile long driveway. It’s lined with trees, and it's just so beautiful and magical when you pull up on the hill, as we say.

Khrais: It was love at first sight.

Sister Monica Clare: Everything was covered with snow, so it was even more magical. It looked like a, like a storybook, you know, when you’re a kid.

Khrais: At the end of the drive are the cloisters, where the nuns live. Surrounded by pine trees is an imposing building with white stucco and pointed arches, mazes of covered walkways. It was quiet, in a way that felt peaceful and expansive.

Sister Monica Clare: And I just thought, oh, I really want to live here. It's so beautiful.

Khrais: She could picture it so clearly, gliding through the silent halls in a habit, at peace, surrounded by women who had made the same leap. 

Those first weeks, Claudette threw herself into learning as much as she could about her new life as a nun. But not long after she arrived, her novice director, the sister in charge of training her, pulled her aside.

Sister Monica Clare:  And she said, um, “Why did you bring a U-Haul? The sisters are asking me about that.” And I said, “Remember in your email, I asked you if I could bring 12 boxes and I told you what I was bringing and, uh, you told me that was okay.” And she said, “Yeah, that would be okay if you were coming in as a postulant, but you're not a postulant yet.”  

Khrais: A postulant is a nun-in-training. As in, the thing that Claudette had quit her job and driven across the country for. Claudette had assumed when she got the acceptance email that she had been accepted. But apparently, that wasn’t the case. 

Sister Monica Clare: And I said, “I'm not?”  I immediately got a hot flash.

Khrais: It was like she’d brought an engagement ring on a Tinder date. Way too much, way too fast.  She was also going through menopause and experiencing some intense symptoms. Since she had quit her job, she had no health insurance, no option but to tough it out.

Sister Monica Clare: So I just thought, I'm going to spontaneously combust sitting in this woman’s office because this is too much for me to take in. She said, “Yeah, you were only here as a visitor for a month and now you have to go away.” And I was like, “Why do I have to go away? Did I do something wrong?”

Khrais: No, the novice director said, this is a standard part of the process. There are five stages to becoming a nun, she explained. First, you’re a visitor. And then at stage two, you’re postulant, you join the team, but you’re more like an intern. And then at stage three, you’ll become a novice; you’ll change your name and be allowed to wear a habit: a black robe and head covering. You also get a monthly allowance and health insurance. 

Then, two to three years later, you’ll move to stage four: first professed. It’s like getting engaged to the church. You’ll close all your bank accounts and sign over all of your material possessions to the convent. Another few years later, you’ll move to the final stage: life profession. If you pass that vote, you’re essentially marrying the church, you even get a gold ring. At that point you’re in for life. 

So becoming a nun is basically a multi-year job interview where you’re living with the hiring committee. And every six months you’re evaluated by that committee, the board of approval, who decides whether to let you stay for another six months. The whole process can take six to eight years. 

But before Claudette could even start the process, her novice director told her,

Sister Monica Clare: “ You have to go away and then we'll call you and let you know if you're a postulant.” And I was like, I couldn't even breathe. I was like, “I don't,  I don't have anywhere to go. I don't have a job. I, I don't know what to do.” 

Khrais: It felt like a literal rug was pulled out from under her. Claudette called her mom in Florida who invited her to stay there while the nuns made up their minds. 

Sister Monica Clare:  And then I went away. 

Khrais: Have you ever left a party where the vibes were kind of off, and you spent the ride home analyzing the jokes you’d made, wondering if everyone was now talking about how you’d acted? Claudette had that feeling for two months, except there was no guesswork involved. She knew the sisters were spending hours talking about her. And those opinions wouldn’t just bruise her ego, they could decide her future. 

And now, she was alone. Just waiting. Time can feel different when you’re in solitude, especially if you’re not doing great. The past starts to bleed into the present. And it can become hard to not see what you’re going through as confirmation of everything you’ve always feared. Claudette started to believe that she might never have a safe place to land. She’d just left her career, had barely any savings and no place of her own.  

Sister Monica Clare:  It was really terrifying because I have a deep-seated fear of impoverishment.  And this ignited all of those burners of, “Oh my gosh, I am going to end up living on the streets. I am going to be under a bridge.”

Khrais: In our interview, she kept bringing up this specific fear of one day being forced to live under a bridge. The severity of it surprised me, but the more she talked about her childhood, the more it made sense. That image has always been her mind’s default, the place she goes when things feel unstable.

Sister Monica Clare: Growing up with a man like my father, he would threaten to leave us on the side of the road somewhere if we didn't behave. Or he would threaten to kill us if we didn't behave. And so, there was a real terror of, if you messed up you’d be either without any support system or you would be dead.

Khrais: That fear never really left her. And now, decades later, it was flaring back up. Claudette spent those two months mostly in prayer, waiting by the phone.

Sister Monica Clare:  And it was my novice director that she called me up. And she said, “You're going to officially be a postulant.”  I was just jumping for joy.

Khrais: She was crying and laughing. She’d no longer be a guest in the convent, she’d be a nun in training. She drove back to New Jersey, this time, she hoped, for good. 

 Sister Monica Clare: Even though I had visited convents so many times, the stakes were a lot higher this time.

Khrais: So she tried her best to be the perfect sister: demure and helpful, always in sync with the other nuns. But as it turns out that didn’t come naturally. She had a classic case of New Nun Syndrome. 

Sister Monica Clare:  New Nun Syndrome is– in the movie, “The Sound of Music,” they have that song, “How do you handle a little problem like Maria”?

Khrais: Oh, yeah. Great song.

Movie clip: How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? How do you find a word that means Maria? (fade out)

Sister Monica Clare: That's how you feel. You feel like the world has taught you one way to be that is nothing like it is in a convent. So, there's a tendency to feel like you're doing everything wrong.

Khrais: Claudette was mentally prepared for the challenge of spending hours of her day in silent prayer. What she wasn’t prepared for was all the criticism. 

Sister Monica Clare:  My clothes were wrong. My hair was wrong, I didn't look sisterly, I laughed too loud. I was always talking at the wrong time. I was in the wrong room. I didn't know which recycling bin to use. I broke a bowl of mashed potatoes.  

The sisters started getting really upset: “Oh we don't do that.”  “We're not supposed to talk about personal stuff.” “That's not right. We're not supposed to do that.” “We don't put this in that garbage pail. It goes over here.” “You're not supposed to talk!” Everything I said was the wrong thing.  I would just go through my list of what I had done wrong and think, is this going to be the thing that makes them throw me out?

Khrais: Claudette had always been a bit of a perfectionist. Doing her best and people-pleasing had kept her safe, emotionally and financially. It's what made her a great student, and later a great employee.

Sister Monica Clare: And it was different from starting a new job because every time I started a new job, somebody would walk me around and train me really well.

Khrais: Right, you'd get a little PowerPoint, have a conversation with HR.

Sister Monica Clare: You get a folder and, you know, you write down notes and, and people teach you very thoroughly.  And my novice director at that time was not capable of doing that. She couldn’t remember what she had told us and what she hadn’t. 

Khrais: Claudette didn’t know it at the time, but her novice director was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

Sister Monica Clare: And the other sisters were not aware that that was going on, so they were thinking that we had been trained properly and we were just doing things wrong on purpose.

Khrais: Not one to give up so easily, Claudette tried a different tack. In the past she'd used humor to break the ice– in L.A. she’d done improv comedy with the likes of Cheri Oteri and Jennifer Coolidge. So, in need of new friends at the convent, she leaned on her sense of humor. 

Like, one time while Claudette was on kitchen duty, clearing the table of tuna salad that looked like it had seen better days. 

Sister Monica Clare: So I walked into the pantry with it, and I said, “And here's the 2,000 year old tuna.” And, um, later on, the sister who was in charge of the kitchen told me that that really hurt her feelings that I said that. She said, “I try to make sure that everything is fresh and it really hurts me that you think that I would serve the sisters something that had gone off and had expired.” And I tried to say, “Well, I was just making a joke. I think everybody knew I was joking.” And she said, “But, but it still hurt.”

Khrais: On the surface, a convent is a home, where sisters live, eat and pray together. They're bound by a promise to love each other and God, which sounds a lot like a family. But it's also a workplace-- a nonprofit with rules that decide who's in and who is out. Having coworkers that also feel like siblings can make every interaction, or bad joke, feel high stakes.

Still, being in the convent was healing wounds she didn't realize ran so deep. She found that her childhood prepared her to happily live in the vow of poverty.

Sister Monica Clare:  Poverty doesn't mean deprivation. I thought it did, but it just means you take really good care of what you have and you only buy what you absolutely need.  And I was really shocked when I first came because I thought, “Oh Lord, I have $2,000 to live off for the next six months.” And then I started thinking, “I can't think of anything I need.”

Khrais: Was there ever a moment you questioned the vow of poverty, not necessarily spiritually, but practically? 

Sister Monica Clare: Not really, a lot of people think that would be one of the hardest things to grasp, but having grown up extraordinarily poor, I never developed a taste for the finer things. Possessions always come with a cost. You know, you have to maintain them. If your shoes wear out, you got to buy another pair. And everything you have, um, takes up your energy and your money. And the less you have, the more energy you have for other stuff. 

Khrais: So in the short term, a vow of poverty felt good. Claudette ate three meals a day. When she ran out of toothpaste, she went to the convent’s pantry and got some more. The time she usually spent pinching pennies was spent in prayer. 

But the long term was murkier than ever. She was often crying alone in her room at night and withdrawing from the other nuns. To make matters worse, the sisters would quote a particularly stressful part of the Bible to her: 

Sister Monica Clare: They said, “You know, there's an expression, many are called, but few are chosen. It comes from scripture.” And they said, “Most people who come here and try their vocation don't make it.” 

Khrais: The sisters told her that many newcomers build up this fantasy in their heads about what it is to be a nun and then find that they just aren’t up to it. And sometimes the sisters are the ones to say, “You know what, this isn’t a good fit.” Especially if they sense someone is there only because they see religious life as a retirement plan. 

Claudette was nearing six months in the convent, which meant her first evaluation was around the corner. It was more than a work performance review; it was a vote on whether she belonged, if she could become a novice. It was obvious to her from all the negative feedback that she was getting that several of the sisters would be voting against her.

The night before her evaluation, she lied in bed and imagined what it would be like. 

Sister Monica Clare:  I thought it would be like, you know, like in a Wes Anderson movie or something, with this really extreme angle of me sitting in a chair with all these very angry nuns looking at me, and one of them pulls out a huge file with all sorts of handwritten notes and typed pages and stuff, and starts rattling off everything I've done wrong.

Khrais: After weeks of agonizing, it was time. Claudette stood outside the convent’s library, ready to push open the door and face the board of approval. That’s after the break. 

[Break]

Khrais: Welcome back. When Claudette opened the door to the library for her evaluation she was immediately intimidated.

Sister Monica Clare: It has a two-story high ceiling. Books all around. The sisters sit in chairs in a circle. And of course I had to come in and sit in one of those chairs in the circle. So it was like everybody was looking at me. 

Khrais: It felt like group therapy meets “Survivor.” Claudette sat facing the board of approval and answered their questions - first, what are the positives of religious life? 

Sister Monica Clare: That section was really small. It was like, “I really love praying…” I mean, that was all very nice. 

Khrais: And then they asked, ok what about the negatives?

Sister Monica Clare: “Well, I feel like everybody scolds me all day long, and I can't do anything right. And I'm a disappointment to all of you, and I laugh too loud, and sometimes I'll say words that I didn't even know were wrong to use, and, uh, all I can do is go up in my room and cry or take a walk, and, um, I think I'm having a lot of health problems because I've been experiencing depression and anxiety, and um…” I just went on and on!

Khrais: When she paused to look at the sisters…

Sister Monica Clare: Their eyes were wide, their eyebrows were jumping off their foreheads and they were looking at me like, “What?!”

Khrais: In general, Episocopialians aren’t known for being touchy-feely people. 

Sister Monica Clare: So I was speaking a completely different language, and they were absolutely horrified because I was getting too personal. And then the novice director kind of broke the silence, and she said, “Actually, that part about the negatives, we just want to know if you need any more classes?” After the initial shock wore off, after I read my 900-page diatribe, they were sort of looking at me and saying, “Why do you feel like you’re in trouble all the time?”

Khrais: Claudette was like, “Well I’m being corrected constantly. And there’s no positive reinforcement. No one’s ever saying ‘thank you’ or ‘good job.’” 

Sister Monica Clare: And they said, “Well, there is a reason for it and it's a very ancient tradition. It's because you're just supposed to do what you're supposed to do. You don't need any acknowledgement of it.”  

Khrais: There was a fear that appreciation would inflate egos, that compliments encourage vanity.

Sister Monica Clare: And, I, you know, that was when I started getting rebellious.

Khrais: Claudette looked at the circle of women whose approval she craved and…argued with them.

 Sister Monica Clare: I think we do need acknowledgement. Just for our own mental health, we need encouragement and, uh, gratitude.  I said, “Cuz I know you all love each other!” They laughed nervously like they were uncomfortable with that kind of, uh, sentimental feelings.

Khrais: In the convent, obedience is highly prized, so this kind of talk was out of line. 

Sister Monica Clare:  I was really scared, but it just sort of leapt out of my mouth. And the minute I said it, I thought, “Oh God, I shouldn’t have said that. They’re going to throw me out.”

Khrais:  Well, it's like coming into a new job and telling your co-workers that their work culture and how they're doing things is wrong.

Sister Monica Clare: Yeah, and I would never have done that in my work life because I know one of the best ways to get people to dislike you is to come in and start criticizing the way the company is run. But it was so important to me. I just thought, you can’t go on like this. 

Khrais: So when you left that room, how were you feeling?

Sister Monica Clare: I thought, “Okay, I blew it. I need to start packing my stuff.” 

Khrais: About thirty minutes later, Claudette’s novice director came by with a message.

Sister Monica Clare: “I just want to let you know that they agreed for you to be made a novice.” 

Khrais: Despite her tearful speech and insistence on talking about feelings… Claudette had made it to novice, level three out of five. She’d have another six months in the convent until her next evaluation. It was a relief, but it also reset the clock - like reaching the first checkpoint on your climb up Everest. 

This approval also meant she would get more information about the convent’s finances. Turns out they weren’t as stable as she was expecting.

Sister Monica Clare: The wolf is always at the door, you know… it's a miracle we pay our bills every month.

Khrais:  When you learned the financial inner workings of the convent as a novice, did it give you anxiety about how much security the convent really gave you? 

Sister Monica Clare: It really did because, um, even when I was working at advertising, I would always consider the financial health of the community. Like how long am I in this? And the same thing here, because there's this misconception that we're supported by the church, but we're not. We're totally self-supporting, and that becomes very difficult sometimes because non-profits are always struggling to break even. 

Khrais: Yeah! (chuckling)

Sister Monica Clare: It's really, as you know, it's very difficult.

Khrais: The convent relies entirely on donations and grants. There’s an endowment set aside for the sisters' health care, which goes toward all expenses not covered by insurance. Which– this is America– is a lot of money. Sometimes if one sister has a big medical bill, like going into assisted living, they have to appeal to donors to make ends meet. It was a gut punch to realize that even if she was personally no longer in a precarious financial position, the organization supporting her was. 

It brought her back to this moment she often had as a kid– when her mom would say, “Check my purse for your lunch money.” 

Sister Monica Clare: And we learned over time that if you went to look in the purse, there was never any money in the purse. So after a while we stopped asking and we would go to school with no lunch money, no supplies. 

Khrais: What if the people who were supposed to be in charge didn’t actually have everything handled? Could she really focus on her relationship with God while being so anxious about financial security? 

Other communities might allow nuns to have jobs, but at Claudette’s convent that doesn't happen. 

Sister Monica Clare:  We have to be in chapel praying six times a day, and that doesn't lend itself to a job.  We are so committed to prayer. That's, that's our number one job. It's our number one work.

Khrais: Claudette was learning that even in a place that’s meant to rise above the material world, she was still at the mercy of very earthly systems

But now that she was a novice, Claudette got an allowance of $50 a month…and… she also became eligible for the convent’s health insurance. 

Sister Monica Clare: That meant I could at least start going to the doctor.

Khrais: Finally, she could take hormones for her menopause, the brain fog and migraines began to go away.

Money aside, becoming a novice also meant Claudette would become more embedded in the community culture. That happens in two ways. First, she’d change her name, a practice that signifies dedication to God. She chose the name Sister Monica Clare. 

And instead of wearing a white shirt, black skirt and tights Claudette, now Sister Monica, would be clothed in a habit, a black robe with a white collar. A local seamstress came and did a fitting. 

Sister Monica Clare:  She looked at me and said, “Oh, I think that's good.” And I thought, “No, it's not! It doesn't fit very well.” The shoulders were sort of way too wide and drooping down my shoulders, and the neck was cut too high, so it was choking me.

Khrais: The metaphor is almost too obvious, right? Her childhood dreams had come true and instead of feeling like Audrey Hepburn in “The Nun’s Story,” she felt constricted, uncomfortable. 

The months passed and then a year into her stay, she realized something. She’d been so anxious about whether the sisters wanted to keep her around. But all this tension made her wonder if she wanted to stay at the convent. 

Sister Monica Clare: One thing about being raised by very chaotic parents is that you don't learn good decision-making. They’re not good at it. They can’t model it.  So, I'm, I was constantly flipping and flopping it over in my head: Should I stay? Should I go to a different community? That was the big question on my mind. It was turmoil in my stomach, you know. I need to decide this, because I'm not going to do what I did in my advertising jobs where I just stayed because I was trapped by financial reasons.  

Khrais: That’s kind of a big deal– Sister Monica, who had spent most of her life terrified of being jobless and homeless, started putting her emotional and spiritual wellbeing above security.

She was driving to Walmart– yes, even nuns shop at Walmart sometimes– with those thoughts turning over in her mind: “Can I be happy here, should I go back into the secular world, bear the costs of that, and start from scratch at a new community?”

Sister Monica Clare: So I think I was just there looking for a $5 pair of headphones, and  I was wandering through the, the um, the sort of computer section of Walmart, where it seems nobody ever works there.

Khrais: While she was looking for help, Sister Monica was mentally running through back up plans. The next big vote would be for first profession. If Sister Monica passed that vote, she’d be in deeper than ever before– signing over the title to her car, closing her bank accounts. If she was going to pick up and leave, now would be the time. 

The fluorescent lights gave the store a surreal air– the colors around her– hot pink headphones, bright yellow chargers, felt intense. Looking around, Sister Monica forgot what she was shopping for in the first place. Her head was spinning, she felt far away from Wal-Mart.

And then suddenly a new thought entered her mind: 

Sister Monica Clare: “ If they set me on fire and if they beat me with phone books, I am staying. It's not ever going to be my choice to leave.” And I, it was just like a commitment really deep in my soul that said, “I'm here to stay.”

Khrais: Why do you think you felt that? 

Sister Monica Clare: I think it came from God. I really do, because my personal instinct is always to run when things get bad, to avoid, to run away. And I think that was the first time in my life I thought, I'm going to make a stand. 

Khrais: Sister Monica felt like she was back in her body. She tossed the pair of headphones into her cart and marched down the aisles to pick up some hand cream and shampoo. Nothing– not the fear of financial ruin, or the criticisms from her sisters, or the reality that she was imperfect– was going to keep her from a lifetime at this convent. She drove back, headphones in hand, with a new certainty in her soul. 

After her “Wal-Mart revelation,” Sister Monica was fitting in more at the convent, letting go of her anxiety a little and building deeper friendships with her sisters. Six years into her time at the convent, Sister Monica was nearing the final vote– the one that would decide whether she became a permanent member of the community. 

Sister Monica Clare:  At that point, I had nothing left. I had turned over my car to the community. I had no more savings. Closed my savings account, my checking account. Shut down my cards. And, um, that's really scary.  Because even when you're married, you know, you keep your own stuff. So that you can have some, some independence in case you have to start over.

Khrais: Despite all the conflict and corrections, Sister Monica loved her simple, purposeful life at the convent. The rhythm of her days: singing and praying and eating with her sisters, it gave her the stability she’d craved as a child. And she was able to make a difference, distributing clothes to the homeless, counseling parishioners during times of trouble. 

Sister Monica Clare:  This was something I absolutely loved and did not want taken away from me. And I kept, you know, as a religious person, I kept thinking, “I got to put it in God's hands. If they throw me out, that is God's will. It means He has something different for me, something better. So I have to just trust the process.”  And then I would get into like anxious ruminations.

Khrais: For the final time, Sister Monica entered the library and took a seat with the Board of Approval. Once again she answered their questions, explained why she wanted to be there and what she thought she had to learn. And then, shaking with nerves, she returned to her room.

She was so sure she wouldn’t make the cut that she’d packed all her belongings. 

Sister Monica Clare: I had, I had them all stacked up and everything. And we're not supposed to visit each other in our bedrooms – that's supposed to be our one sanctuary where we can be alone – but Barbara Jean, who was never a follower of rules, Sister Barbara Jean came and knocked on my door and she was all flustered and said, “I couldn't find you, I didn't know where you were,” and then she said, “Oh, the vote! We voted you for life profession.” And I almost fell on the floor. I couldn't believe it. 

Khrais: Oh my gosh, really? You couldn't believe it?

Sister Monica Clare: I just couldn't believe it because I thought, I am so bad at this. How generous of them to, to vote life profession, cause that's a big commitment. 

Khrais: It was official: Sister Monica was in for life. There was a ceremony to match. Her family and old friends from LA flew in and sat in the pews as the priest slipped a gold ring on her left hand. She was married to the church now. 

I’m still a little surprised by just how nervous Sister Monica felt throughout this process. Some of her sisters told her they never thought twice if they’d be accepted. But maybe that’s because she never assumed that belonging was the default. She didn’t grow up thinking systems were built to hold her. She watched people in charge forget, dismiss and lash out. At work, her worth was conditional, something she earned by staying useful. And at a convent, as sacred as it is, it’s still a system with fallible people and shaky finances. 

Even now, Sister Monica told me that despite knowing the church will care for her until the end of her life, she still sometimes worries that she’ll be left without a support system, forced to live under a bridge. It reminded me that some fears, as irrational as they seem to others, come from very rational places. 

Since becoming life-professed, Sister Monica was elected sister superior…which basically means that she’s the leader of the convent. She’s learned not to run from conflict or to hide behind her humor. And, like any relationship, the sisters were also shaped by her. 

These days, she’ll overhear sisters complimenting each other, like “That apple pie you made was really great.” There are more hugs, more people saying I love you. 

At some point in our conversation, Sister Monica compared the process of becoming a nun to being thrown into a rock tumbler. 

Sister Monica Clare: We all start out with pointy edges that don’t fit each other. And the more you live together, those pointy edges go away, and you fit together as smooth stones.

Khrais: But even smooth stones carry marks from where they’ve been. What changed for Sister Monica wasn’t just that she fit in—it’s that she stopped assuming those marks of imperfection meant she didn’t belong.

Alright, that is all for our show this week. If you want to learn more about Sister Monica, be sure to check out her new memoir. It’s called A Change of Habit. It’s out now from Penguin Random House Books. 

You can also catch Sister Monica in Marketplace’s newsletter this week. She told us, even with their vow of poverty, nun just like the rest of us will treat themselves. Read about her splurge and sign up at Marketplace.org/subscribe 

And, if you want to reach out with any thoughts about this episode, or you just want to shoot us a note and say hi, you can always email me and the team over at uncomfortable@marketplace.org 

This episode was produced by Alice Wilder, and it was hosted by me, Reema Khrais. Our intern is Zoha Malik, and Katie Reuther is Marketplace’s Podcast Production Fellow. Zoë Saunders is our senior producer. Our editor is Jasmine Romero. Sound design and audio engineering by Drew Jostad. Bridget Bodnar is Marketplace’s Director of Podcasts. Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital. Neal Scarborough is Vice President and general manager of Marketplace. And our theme music is by Wonderly.

Alright, we’ll see y’all next week.

Sister Monica Clare:  Some of the sisters here watch “Call the Midwife” on PBS. Oh, they love it and they talk about it all the time. But other ones are competitive in that way where they'll say, “I never watch TV. I don't watch that trash!”

Khrais: Right, right. But then who, but then who pays for that? I guess the community?

Sister Monica Clare: They, um, a couple of them have a friend who pays for PBS, like, Passport. [laugh]

Khrais: That's funny. They're like asking people for passwords.

Sister Monica Clare: Exactly!