Just a short walk from M-A along Oak Grove Avenue stands an elegant white chapel complete with stained glass windows and a neo-Gothic bell tower. The building, hidden behind trees and shrubs, is part of Corpus Christi Monastery and is home to Menlo Park’s Dominican nuns.
“I guess you could say we’re professional prayers,” Sister André Marie said. “Our monastery was founded for the purpose of having adoration and enduring Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. So our whole life is ordered towards that.”
The Menlo Park monastery was built in 1921, but the Dominican nuns’ history dates back to 1206 when Saint Dominic founded a monastery in Prouille, France. Today, over 25,000 Dominican friars, nuns, priests, and laypeople dedicate their lives to preaching, simplicity, and community.
“As Dominican nuns of the Order of Preachers, we participate in the preaching missions of the friars,” Sister André Marie explained. The nuns hold public mass at eight in the morning. There, they sing hymns, listen to a sermon, and receive the Eucharist. Also known as the Blessed Sacrament, the Eucharist honors Jesus’s blood and body. “Corpus Christi” itself means “body of Christ” in Latin.
The nuns also pray before the Blessed Sacrament. “What drew me to the monastery is that they have the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament,” Sister André Marie said. “I wasn’t thinking of becoming a nun, but I went to a conference one weekend, and when I went home, I just felt the Lord’s presence very strong and powerfully in the Blessed Sacrament. When I’m before our Lord there, I feel a lot of peace and joy that cannot be fulfilled anywhere else.”
“We all have a mission in life. I went to school and got a degree to go work, but then I felt like there was something still missing in my life,” Sister Joseph Marie said. “When I found the monastery, it just spoke to me. Praising God filled that emptiness—you know how you’re hungry but you don’t know, and once you eat the right food you feel happy? God gave me that joy.”
“God wants to give us so much, and a lot of times we are not aware, or we just don’t pay attention, or we just don’t think about, like, how the air that we breathe every day is from God,” she said. “It’s God who gives us that source of life, and so our life is to thank God, to praise God for that gift that He gives to all society.”
The nuns maintain a strict prayer schedule that begins at 5:35 in the morning and ends at 7:30 in the evening. In total, they spend at least two hours a day on personal prayer. “First we pray for ourselves, then we pray for our sisters that we live with, the community, the neighborhood around us, the young people, and the whole world, essentially,” Sister André Marie explained. “We also receive prayer requests from all over the place, all over the world sometimes, from Christians and non-Christians too.”
“We pray a lot for our family—if the family is not strong enough, then society will break down, so we pray for family and the people we know,” Sister Joseph Marie said. “We pray for the people we don’t know and all the young people. When you start a school year, we pray for all the young people, because you are the future.”
“It’s been said that we are the heart of the church,” she added. “Christian life is compared to a body. A body has all different functions. The legs just walk, the arms do things, and the heart pumps blood. If the heart is weak, then the whole body fades away and dies. So our life is like that heart that pumps blood, which is the grace of God.”
Between prayer, the nuns have time for exercise, meals, work, and periods of profound silence. They occasionally have recreation days where they watch a movie or do crafts together.
“People say, ‘Oh, nuns do exercise too? Really?’ Of course! We have to keep our bodies healthy. Some people say, ‘Do you eat pizza?’ Yeah, I love pizza!” Sister Joseph Marie said. “We have to have a balanced life.”
“It’s kind of like we run a little city here,” Sister André Marie said. “We have a sister who cooks and someone who helps with sewing habits. There’s the garden—we have a good amount of land, so we do gardening—and there’s a lot of cleaning. We do everything you would do at home and at a business, all in one place.”
To support their way of life, the nuns accept donations. They also sell altar breads to parishes across the bay. “They support our lives. They could buy anywhere, but they support us,” Sister Joseph Marie said.
Despite their deep commitment to tradition, the nuns use modern technology and have everything from email addresses to a website. “We keep the values, but we do move with technology to contemporary time,” Sister Joseph Marie said. “Like our altar bread department—we have to ship to people and we can’t possibly say, ‘Well, where’s the horse?’ I don’t know where you hire a pony. So we have US Mail and UPS, which require technology, and we connect to certain sites to ship out. It’s saved us a lot of time. Everything is a gift from God.”
“Everything that God created is good. The internet is beautiful, social media is beautiful,” Sister André Marie said. “We give glory and praise to God for the gifts that he has given. But our life is not just here. There’s something beyond that.”
“I think when people see us, it reminds them there’s something more out there,” she continued. “Our life, our poverty, simplicity, and the vows that we take are contrary to society. Society thinks, ‘I’m free because I can choose from a list of options,’ but we’re only truly free when we’re doing what the Lord wants of us.”
Though the cloistered lifestyle may seem unusual to outsiders, at its core, the monastery is a community like any other. “Our life is kind of similar to a marriage or a friendship with anybody,” Sister Joseph Marie said. “So just like you have your relationship with your parents or your relationship with your friends, there are challenges and there are also very positive aspects.”
“When we are experiencing something difficult, that joy and that sorrow is also shared,” Sister André Marie added. “So it’s not like we are alone or isolated.”
“People are often surprised to see how joyful we are, or that we have a sense of humor,” Sister André Marie said. “Perhaps a lot of the time they think that the sisters are very—and, I mean, we are—serious, but they don’t understand the joyful, human aspect of our life.”
I would love to meet you!
I attended mass a few years ago!
Thank you for praying for everybody!
I speak Spanish!
but what about the bikes?
What a fascinating article, Ella! I’ve passed the monastery a million times and wondered about the nuns who live there. Thank you so much for illuminating their experience! Your article is a well-written masterpiece of journalism!
a nice reflection. thank you for writing!