Sister Miriam Mendez
With the last of her three children off to college, Miriam Mendez felt change on the horizon. It was 1999 and she was about to take her first solo vacation in 26 years. She wanted to spend her time constructively by volunteering somewhere and after some research, she left her home in central California for Sacred Heart Monastery in Richardton, North Dakota where she spent 17 days praying with the community and helping to care for two cats, 14 llamas and an onion field. Each night she read about Benedictine spirituality. She returned home with “a major high, and I thought it would go away, but it didn’t.”
“I was a 53 year-old divorced mother of three with a Benedictine soul, and what do you do about that?” At the time, she was director of a small hospice and loved her job. When her Benedictine fascination continued, she thought the solution might be to make a visit to a different community; maybe she would have a wretched time and finally stop thinking about monastic life. It didn’t quite work that way. Within 12 hours of arriving at the Monastery of St. Gertrude, she knew that “whatever I was supposed to explore, it was here.”
After a few more visits to St. Gertrude’s, she sold her house in California, quit her job, and moved to Grangeville to work for nine months as a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital in Cottonwood while continuing to discern her call at the Monastery. She made First Monastic Profession in 2006 and dedicated herself through Final Monastic Profession in 2009.
As a first-year novice Sister Miriam broke her ankle and, consequently, found her current ministry. “I couldn’t even walk, so they figured I could work in the gift shop.” She discovered an outlet for her creativity, a place she could work and explore and learn. “The pressures [on me] were different in the novitiate and that’s what allowed me to explore. That’s one of the things about Formation...creativity and prayer go together.”
In addition to taking charge of the Monastery Book and Gift Shop, Sister Miriam has taught herself how to knit and crochet, makes rosaries, spends about one morning a week creating stained glass art and enjoys photography and literature. She has been key in bringing definition to the broad group of artisans of the St. Gertrude’s community and spearheading an online presence for the shop. In particular, she continues to develop the shop and the online store as a resource for books on Benedictine spirituality, creativity and prayer. Her Amazon Book Blog has been very successful in helping friends of the Monastery get the books they seek for their spiritual paths.
Community living also shapes her. “That’s the most important thing about this life; it’s about the community,” she says. “The wonderful thing about this life is living in community. The hardest thing about living in this life is community.” She keeps a pair of rocks on her windowsill: a rough rock, and a smooth rock that she made smooth by rubbing it against the rough rock. This is her model for living in community. “There are going to be the smooth rock, rough rock situations. That’s where creativity and prayer come in. One flows to the other.”
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