Story by Meaghan Morawski
Photos by Alex Stoltze
Kevin Gore and Sister Marietta Schindler both agree that God has a sense of humor, though Gore’s God is Episcopalian and Schindler’s is of the Catholic persuasion.
Gore, a 28-year-old southern Oregon native, spent the better part of his life as a Baptist. But by the time he came to the University of Oregon in 2001, he felt largely disenchanted not only with the Baptist church but with all Christian religions. Gore says that when he was in high school he began to notice the “hypocrisy and self-righteousness” of the religious path he was following.
“To have people who are so bent on saying, ‘You’re bad and this is what’s bad about you, and if you don’t fix it you’re doomed,’ in my opinion doesn’t fit with the idea of a loving God,” says Gore of his early religious experiences.
While pursuing a degree in musical education, Gore realized he was innately drawn to religious studies. After dabbling in the divinities of various world religions, Gore discovered Episcopalianism, a branch of Christianity—exactly what he thought he wanted nothing to do with. Now, almost ten years later, Gore is studying to become a monk in the Anamchara Fellowship, a Celtic order within the Episcopalian religion.
“I always had people saying, ‘Oh you’re getting a religions degree. Are you going to be a pastor?’ and I would get very indignant and say, ‘No! This is an academic degree! This is not a theological degree,’” Gore says. “I think that was one of those sense of humor moments because then I started having this pull toward priesthood and I kind of went, ‘Oh, okay. We’ll see how this works.’”
As a member of the Anamchara Fellowship, Gore takes vows but is not required to be celibate, give up worldly possessions, or live in a monastery. It was this level of structured freedom that initially drew him to the Episcopalian religion.
“What the Episcopal Church does that I didn’t see as a Baptist and I don’t really see in a lot of other groups is, for example, they take a passage of the Bible and say, ‘Okay, now let’s think about who wrote this, when they wrote it, and who they were addressing when they wrote it,’” Gore says. “They put a lot of context around everything they view and try to understand it from a [deeper perspective].”
Two hours north of Eugene live the Benedictine Sisters of Mount Angel, where Sister Marietta Schindler resides. It was back in third grade that her teacher at Catholic school approached Schindler and asked if she had ever considered becoming a sister.
“She said, ‘You’re going to be a sister someday…You think about it and pray about it,’” recalls Schindler, now 68.
At the time, Schindler wasn’t sure that becoming a sister was truly her calling. But in that same humorous way Gore found his path, the call just kept on returning. Every couple of years someone new would approach Schindler and ask if she had thought about becoming a sister. Her reply was always the same—“No.” By the time Schindler hit 18, however, she felt God telling her that there was no other route to take. Now she can’t imagine living differently. Monasticism, to Schindler, is just the way she chooses to live her life, not some sort of solitary confinement.
“[Becoming a sister] was just a logical progression of something that needed to be,” Schindler says.
In today’s culture a monastic life, which includes the lifestyles of monks, nuns, and any others who take religious vows, may seem an uncommon choice, but people continue to heed the call. Indeed, as the vocation director and volunteer coordinator of the Benedictine Sisters of Mount Angel, Schindler says that she has actually seen an increase in young women seeking to become a sister.
“Over the last 20 years there have been more and more wanting information about [life as a sister],” Schindler says. “I think maybe that’s because society and the world is in upheaval. That they’re saying that there has got to be something more than all this junk that’s going on in the world.”
What exactly calls an individual to monasticism? According to Brother Phillip Wertman of the Trappist Abbey in Carlton, Oregon, taking monastic vows isn’t something that you sell people on. It has to come to you.
“It can’t be the food and it can’t be my 7.5- by 10- foot room [that calls me to monasticism],” Wertman says. “But what is preferable is that one can focus his entire energy on seeking God [in this setting].
“There’s a golden string running through your life,” he adds. “Somehow you manage to follow it, then you wind up where you’re supposed to be.”
While there are people like Gore, Schindler, and Wertman who seem to have found that “golden string” and followed it through to the end, there are others who fall from faith the further along they travel.
Twenty-year-old Samuel Garner was raised Mormon in Pocatello, Idaho. Within the Mormon religion, it is not only typical, but expected that after graduating high school young people will go on a mission to spread the Word of God as told in the Book of Mormon. It was thus only natural that Garner would make such a commitment.
“At that point, I was dating a girl who told me that if I didn’t go on a mission she wouldn’t want to get married,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to go on a mission, preach the gospel, save a whole bunch of people, and just become more and more religious by going out and preaching the Word.’”
In preparation for his mission, Garner went to a religious training center where aspiring Mormon missionaries spend anywhere from three weeks to three months learning different languages and methods of sharing their faith. While at the center, Garner says he started to go “crazy.”
“In the mission training center you’re not allowed to have much contact with the outside world,” he says. “The problem with that is none of us knew when anything happened. Like some of the tsunamis that happened—we didn’t know about that for like a week. We didn’t know about any earthquakes that happened. We didn’t know about any world events. We had no idea what was going on in the outside world. It’s like the Auschwitz of religion.”
Garner says being so cooped up triggered an underlying family history of mental illness and, consequently, he began having intense bouts of rage. Once, he almost threw a chair out of a window; at another point he nearly broke his hand. Garner was developing what he now describes as a “religious mania.” He knew he had to take time away from the training center.
The original plan was for Garner to return to Pocatello for a few months, sort things out, then return to the center. But soon after arriving home he realized he never wanted to go back. Now he is largely disassociated with all aspects of the Mormon religion, and has no intention of returning.
Though choosing a religious lifestyle may seem permanent to most, there is typically an option to leave like Garner did. Various religions often have some degree of a trial period, during which individuals can decide whether or not the particular path at hand is the right fit.
For the Anamchara Fellowship a person interested in joining is deemed an “aspirant” for six months to a year. After learning the ways and history of the order and of the religion, an aspirant can be clothed as a novice, receiving the habit, the traditional robes of monks. Life as a novice lasts anywhere from 18 months to three years. Then when the other professed members believe the novice is ready, the individual can take vows of simplicity, obedience, and fidelity, thus also becoming a “professed” member. These vows are taken and renewed every three years.
A similar process occurs in the Catholic Church; however, though temporary vows are taken, solemn vows are viewed as the final affirmation of a novice’s devotion to God, their life in the Church, and the monastic way of life.
Even with a trial period, however, the golden string of monasticism sometimes snarls. Brother Basil Lawrence of Mount Angel Abbey believes that monasticism is not necessarily for everyone. For as much as a person can read and study, the 27-year-old says it is absolutely impossible to know what a religious lifestyle will be like until one actually visits the place where he or she plans to begin this new life.
“Some people end up leaving because they want to leave; some people leave because they’ve been asked to leave,” he says. “Maybe they’re unable to observe silence. Maybe they have a hard time dealing with certain people in the community. Maybe they were unwilling to give up control of their own lives and their own desires, and that’s absolutely essential for what we do here.”
Another aspect that often deters a person from spending an entire lifetime within the realm of a religious life is the vast amount of rules. In Mormonism, for example, it’s expected that members of the Church don’t drink caffeinated beverages or alcohol, don’t smoke, don’t do drugs, and don’t have any sexual relationships outside of marriage—a marriage that must take place within a Mormon Temple.
For many Catholic monastic orders—those of both monks and nuns—there are the typical vows of poverty, obedience, and stability. This means that no one owns anything and that everything is a possession of the community, that everyone must always obey his or her religious superiors and the Word of God, and that everyone generally lives and dies in the monastery or convent they originally entered.
But out of all these vows there’s one in particular that, Wertman says, often trips up newcomers: chastity. In the Catholic Church this includes no marriage, no sex, and no masturbation for all monks and nuns.
“It’s a little hard to sell a celibate lifestyle to people you’ve never met. And to live in one place for the rest of your life—you can’t sell that. It has to come from God somehow,” Wertman says.
Despite the rules, however, those living monastically are hardly cut off from the world of literature, movies, television, and the Internet. Monks and nuns still have access to the same secular material as the general population. Thus their temptation is just as real.
“Part of what you have to learn is what are your temptations, what sets off those temptations?” says Lawrence of Mount Angel Abbey. “Is it the Internet? Is it movies? Is it spending too much time alone with a woman?
“Sometimes I have those desires, but the more experience I have of the hypersexuality of our culture today, the more I see how important it is for there to be a sign and a witness against that. There needs to be someone to say, ‘Sexuality is a gift from God, but there is more to life than simply our sexuality.’”
A handful of Schindler’s fellow sisters at Mount Angel have been married in the past, and although she says she wouldn’t want any other lifestyle, at times Schindler does feel a desire to be married.
“Sometimes when I go to a wedding in my family everybody is going home with their spouses and I go home with myself [there’s] sort of a longing,” she says. “I don’t doubt it very long though. That’s just not what I committed myself to.”
Lifelong commitment is what also drew Gore to his time with the Anamchara Fellowship. Furthering a relationship with whoever one’s god or gods happen to be is, Gore says, what a monastic life is all about.
“Religion is a vehicle for relationships,” he explains. “Everyone needs to find their own method of furthering their relationship with the Divine. I’m sure I would be burned at the stake for saying this, but I think that every religion has a little bit of truth in it and every religion is a way for someone to find a relationship with God, or whatever you choose to call it. This is my form of crazy.”

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Following the Golden String