On a Sunday night during Lent, a circle of Episcopal nuns sat in their lamp-lit library, chatting, knitting and gazing upon an unlikely altar: An orthopedic dog bed cradling their venerable mutt, Jennie, who was recovering from ACL surgery.
Vespers was over. So was supper, featuring spring rolls, liverwurst and potato chips. It was almost time for the Great Silence, a nightly 12-hour hush that amplifies sounds of wind and wildlife around the convent on a hill in Mendham, N.J.
But first came the final prayer of the day, and everyone took turns reading lines. “Blessed be the air” sounded like an understatement in the golden glow of the room. At “Teach us to be at peace with what we have,” Jennie sighed and repositioned herself on the plush gray cot, the rare modern furnishing in the century-old convent. It was a gift from a follower of Sister Monica Clare’s TikTok account.
Imagine Maria von Trapp as a successful nun, and you have a sense of the 59-year-old mother superior who launched @NunsenseForthePeople in 2020 and now has a memoir, “A Change of Habit,” coming out on April 29.
She started her TikTok as a way to raise awareness about progressive orders like the Community of St. John Baptist and, perhaps, to attract new members. After all, she worked in Hollywood before becoming a nun; she knows the power of social media.
“If you want to reach young people, they’re all there,” Sister Monica Clare said. “They’re not at the roller rink or the bowling alley.”
Her pandemic videos of a troublemaking wild turkey made way for ones about living in isolation and, by popular demand, her skin care routine. As the account gathered steam — it now has more than 200,000 followers — strangers wondered: Who was this charismatic nun with a Southern twang and an eye for lighting? Why did she leave her marriage, a fledgling comedy career and a stable job for a life of prayer? And, let’s be honest, who knew there were Episcopal nuns?
To understand what led Sister Monica Clare to the convent, it helps to know her sisters.
Old-fashioned surroundings notwithstanding — think dumbwaiters, a sewing room and doors requiring a strong shoulder to open — the nuns’ sensible sneakers are squarely planted in the modern world. They support progressive causes. They livestream Thursday prayer group. They share Priuses and Subarus. They have a treadmill and iPhones. During my visit, one nun wore a hoodie over her habit; another wore Crocs. Four members of the community were married before joining.
Sister Monica Clare’s call to sisterhood was complicated. And baffling. And completely out of step with her fame-adjacent life in Los Angeles.
“I tried to cure it in therapy,” she said. “I tried to ignore it. I learned to be secretive about it. I kept asking people, ‘What do you think of me becoming a nun?’ I always got negative responses.”
Claudette Powell, as she was then known, grew up Southern Baptist in Rome, Ga., with an abusive con-man father and minimal stability. Church was an escape from the chaos. Nuns were another species, Roman Catholics who were, according to her grandmother, going straight to hell. But in that post-Vatican-II era, as ruler-wielding nuns made way for guitar-toting ones, young Claudette found herself transfixed by “The Nun’s Story,” “The Flying Nun” and “The Sound of Music.” She quietly fantasized about sisterhood.
She studied acting at New York University, where she realized she’d always be the sidekick, never the ingénue. She joined an improv group called Sterile Yak — Mo Willems was a member — and worked as a nanny for a family with whom she moved to Los Angeles. There she took comedy classes with the Groundlings and was selected for their entry-level troupe along with Cheri Oteri and Jennifer Coolidge.
“I thought, I’m going to get into the main company, I’m going to get on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” Sister Monica Clare said. “That was the trajectory.”
In an interview, Oteri recalled her friend as a kind, calm person, “an amazing straight man.” She said, “A lot of actors have neuroses that are very close to the surface. Claudette did not.”
But Sister Monica Clare never made it to the main company, in part because she became entangled with the man she’d later marry. “I was putting a lot of energy into trying to fix my relationship,” she said. “It was terrible from the very beginning.”
She recalled an epiphany after attending Jimmy Fallon’s birthday party at the Château Marmont. (Yes, it was strange hearing these words from a woman wearing a habit.)
“I stumbled out the door, burst into tears and thought, I can’t hack it,” Sister Monica Clare said. “I can’t fit in. People think I’m weird. Why am I trying to do this? That was the turning point.”
She went to work at IMAX, then for a boutique firm that handled publicity for the Berlin Film Festival, among other clients. Her marriage ended after “two long, arduous years.” She said, “I’ll never forget the day I was in bed and a line of scripture came to me: Get up and put your house in order.”
Sister Monica Clare joined All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills and immediately felt welcome. Disillusioned by Hollywood, she started to contemplate religious life. She ruled out seminary — “I needed a full-time job” — and decided, at long last, to to become a nun.
But there was a catch: Sister Monica Clare had to pay off $150,000 of debt in order to join a convent. (There was no work-study program; she asked.)The process took a decade.
Suffice it to say, joining the sisterhood is not a sign-on-the-dotted line transaction. You have to choose a community, and the community has to choose you. You have to take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. These are not goals for most people.
The Community of St. John Baptist sprawls over 85 acres in Mendham, including a former orphanage turned retreat house (put into service last month when Steven Spielberg filmed scenes for an upcoming movie at the convent), plus outbuildings, gardens and a labyrinth. Upon arrival, I was dazzled by the place, then struck by the disparity between the website and reality. These were old buildings surrounded by naked trees. The stucco on the convent looked weary. There was a loneliness to the empty parking lot, but also a sense of tranquillity.
Ten sisters now live in the convent, down from 33 a few decades ago. They range in age from 32 to 89, with the majority on the older side. Episcopal nuns aren’t underwritten by the church; the community supports itself with bequests, donations, real estate deals and a retreat ministry catering to over 2,000 visitors each year, from different faiths and interest groups.
The sisters take care of one another, which would be impossible without new seekers.
Niambi Mercado is the youngest resident. (She’ll take on a new name later in the discernment process.) Before she arrived last year, she worked a mélange of jobs — dog groomer, Walgreens clerk, parish secretary, activities coordinator at an assisted living facility. Then Mercado realized she just wanted to “do good work for people and have a roof over my head.”
After wrangling with her own debt, breaking the news to her parents and giving up her cat, Trinket, she made her way to Mendham. Her friends were supportive; Sister Monica Clare’s TikToks helped them understand what convent life would look like.
Mercado, an only child, is unfazed by the age gap between sisters and the responsibilities that come with it. “I’m a 70-year-old trapped in a 30-year-old body,” she said. “I’ve always felt more comfortable with older people.”
Sister Pamela, a 50-year veteran, likened religious life to her experience playing violin in an orchestra. “I felt as though I were doing something with others and making a joyful noise that was pleasing to God,” she said. “I get that feeling now.”
A typical day includes more than five hours of worship. Of course, as mother superior, Sister Monica Clare has additional obligations.
“Keeping the doors open and the electricity on, it’s a lot,” she said, while a crew took down nearby trees infested with emerald ash borer. “Every year we fall short of our budget. We have to make up for it somehow. There’s always this tension of having to keep everything going and protect the sisters.”
When an agent proposed writing a memoir, Sister Monica Clare turned to the community for guidance: “I said, I would never portray any of you in a bad light because I love you all. You’re my family.”
Some sisters were fine with the idea; others requested to be identified by pseudonym.
“A Change of Habit” follows the arc of Sister Monica Clare’s career with irreverence and sincerity. She writes about cosmetic surgery at the hands of Robert Kotler, “Beverly Hills Nose Job Guy”; then, 200 pages later, describes the view inside a church where she ministered to homeless people: “I was looking at the men sleeping in the pews, and for a brief moment I saw them all quite vividly as the little boys that they had been.” She goes on, “My heart burst open, showering them all with God’s love.”
It was hard for Sister Monica Clare to stare down the ghosts of her own childhood on paper. “If my father was alive, I don’t know if I would have been able to write the book because I’d be afraid he’d kill me,” she said, only half joking. “I thought, wow, all these years later, it still affects me. It lives in your body.”
Her collaborator on the book, Alexis Gargagliano, described working with Sister Monica Clare as “a master class in learning to listen to yourself.”
All proceeds from “A Change of Habit” will go to the Community of St. John Baptist. As of late March, only a few sisters had read the book. Some are nervous about the spotlight it will bring to their world, suspended just beyond the bounds of suburbia.
“I don’t think they fully realize the benefit that could come from raising awareness that we exist,” Sister Monica Clare said. “For people who are lost and seeking, this way of life is available.”
