A profile of the river rafting, four-letter word blurting nun on Shaw Island

Before my trip to Our Lady of the Rock, the Shaw Island monastery where seven Benedictine nuns pray and farm on 300 acres of land, I had never met a nun before. Unless watching “Sister Act” counts.

I was curious about why someone decides to become a nun, to lead a very different life than most of us do. Our Lady of the Rock’s Mother Hildegard shares her story.

“I was pretty much raised by nuns in Catholic schools growing up,” Mother Hildegard said. “I mean, I had it from kindergarten through high school and then Jesuits in college. I think every girl, in my generation anyway, when you had the nuns, especially when you had great ones, you wanted to be like them.”

“So I kind of thought about it at 14, but then I went off to college,” she said. “Then I was engaged to a medical student and he kind of knew, I think, that I had a vocation. He wanted to go off to South America for a year &#8212 they call it the papal volunteers &#8212 kind of like the Peace Corps but for Catholics. I went off to Europe, I lived two years in Germany, and I just knew that, really, that was it. It was kind of good, I was 26 and a half and had pretty much sewed my oats, so to speak.”

Mother Hildegard wears the long, traditional black and white habit. She prays eight times a day in the chapel, and like the other nuns she lives with, she’s highly educated. Benedictines are all about prayer and work and Mother Hildegard has a doctorate in child psychology, and specializes in using animals in therapy. She moved to Shaw Island from her Connecticut abbey in 1987.

“Here I have this degree and suddenly I’m on an island,” Mother Hildegard said. “So I started 4-H clubs. I had a 4-H llama/alpaca club. I did that for almost 15 years. That was fun, I loved that.”

“Then when I kind of retired about five years ago, I started a birding club,” she said. “I used to teach the master livestock course, for sheep and llamas, for WSU.”

A lively character, with a huge personality and a love for the “Iron Chef” TV show, volunteers I met at the monastery say Mother Hildegard defies all stereotypes of what a nun is imagined to be like.

Marijke Brasse is a few months into her yearlong stay on the island.

“Uhh, they’re a lot less holy than people expect,” laughs Marijke Brasse, who came over from the Netherlands to spend a year volunteering. “They’re just human beings, you know? They have a temper just like we do. They’re not very different from regular people.”

“When I was young I went to Catholic school and the nuns there are very strict, they never say anything out of line,” said Snohomish’s Janet Satko, a volunteer and 25 year friend of Mother Hildegard’s. “And then when I came here and met Mother Hildegard, she’s just like the rest of us.

“The first time we were working with the sheep, a sheep stepped on her foot and she came out with a word and I,” Satko said making a shocked face and waves her hands in the air. “A nun says something like that! The s-word! And I was in shock. Then I realized they’re just as human like the rest of us. She’s fun to go out with.”

Satko and Mother Hildegard have had many fun adventures over the years.

“She wanted to go river rafting,” Satko said. “So I took Mother. We went over to Leavenworth, and she had a ball. It was just fun. [She wore her habit on the raft] with the rain gear, the whole bit.”

The average age of the nuns at Our Lady of the Rock is 70 and there are no new prospects in sight.

“The northwest is really the least church part of the country,” says Mother Hildegard. “It’s really hard to draw young people. I don’t know what the church did for so many years here. It’s been hard. We didn’t have a Catholic on the island for 15 years, except us and the three Franciscans.”

But it’s not just the northwest.

A report by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, released in October 2014, shows a consistent national drop in Catholic membership. There were 181,421 sisters in America in 1966, a particularly good year for nuns. Now there are only about 50,000. Only 1 percent of nuns are under 40, and most are between 70 and 79 years old.