In the late 1990s, Claudette Monica Powell was in her early 30s, married and had a cool job at a Los Angeles ad agency that often gave her access to movie premieres and fancy parties.
“People thought I had a glamorous Hollywood life and a perfect marriage,” she says.
But she was unfulfilled. As she commuted to work, she found herself dreaming of a totally different life.
“Every time I would drive by a church, I would think, ‘I need to be there,’” she says. “Every time I’d see someone at a homeless soup kitchen, I would think, ‘I need to be doing that.’ It was a constant pull.”
It took Powell decades to finally give in to that tug. In 2012, she started the official process to become a nun. Now 51, she’s Sister Monica Clare, a nun with the Community of St. John Baptist, an Episcopal religious order based in Mendham, NJ. She’s “professed” (the last stage before final vows), and lives and works at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin near Times Square. She says she’s happier than she’s ever been. “There is so much more joy in my life,” says Sister Monica.
‘Every time I would drive by a church, I would think ‘I need to be there.’
Next spring, she will ask for “life profession” and the sisters will vote on whether to accept her into the order for eternity. “It’s like ‘Survivor,’ you get voted off the island if they don’t like you,” she says. “It’s really stressful.”
Growing up as a Southern Baptist in Georgia, Powell felt the call to a religious life at an early age, though her parents weren’t particularly devout.
“[Kathryn Hulme’s ‘The Nun’s Story’] was my favorite book,” says Sister Monica. “‘The Flying Nun’ was in reruns, ‘Sound of Music’ was always on … It made it look fun.”
The idea of a peaceful community also was alluring.
“I was attracted to the sense of family that I didn’t have,” says Sister Monica. “I grew up in a home where there was a lot of domestic violence, my [policeman] father was a drug addict [and] mentally ill.”
She often went to a Baptist church with her grandparents, but her family didn’t encourage her nun notions.
“Everybody thought it was completely crazy,” she says. “Southern Baptists at the time — I don’t know if they still are — were very anti-Roman Catholic.”
So she did her best to suppress her calling.
“I tried to be normal, I chased guys,” she says. But she didn’t have much success — or any serious boyfriends — in high school or college.
“I’ve always called myself a two-date wonder,” says Sister Monica, who is quick to make a self-deprecating joke. “I’d go out on two dates, and then they’d disappear off the face of the Earth.”
She studied theater at New York University, graduated and, in 1989, moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as an actress. “I almost immediately failed,” says Sister Monica.
She went on to try comedy, joining the Sunday Company of the prestigious Groundlings improv troupe and doing stand-up. To pay the rent, she started working as a photo editor at various advertising agencies, which is where she met her first boyfriend, whom she dated for five years and married in 1997.
She enjoyed the creativity of the job, working for movie studios on blockbuster films such as “Star Trek” and various “Batman” films, but she didn’t have the same passion for it as some of her colleagues.
“Some people love advertising, and it fuels their soul — good for them,” she says. “I’m not one of those people … I made a label for the bottom of my monitor that said ‘None of this is important.’”
With little fulfillment at work, she began going to various churches in secret. “I realized my life wasn’t working,” she says.
When she revealed her holy outings to her husband, he wasn’t pleased.
“[He] was a fanatical atheist,” she says. In 1999, after two years of marriage and no kids, their different attitudes toward religion and relationships led to a divorce, though Sister Monica says they’re still friendly.
As she was going through the divorce, she began writing various nuns for more information about their convents. But she struggled with the Catholic Church’s policies toward homosexuals and the lack of women in the priesthood.
“Working in advertising, being in theater, I would not have survived my life if it hadn’t been for my gays,” she says.
When she learned that the more liberal Episcopal Church also had nuns, Sister Monica says she knew she’d found her place. She was confirmed in the church in 2000, but becoming a nun was far more complicated.
Her therapist questioned her religious fervor, telling her that “being a nun is psychologically unhealthy. It’s bypass, avoidance, all these things people can do to avoid the hard stuff in real life.”
And there were money issues. Before a woman can join a convent, she must be debt-free, as nuns have no personal property. It took her more than a decade to work off $80,000 in credit-card debt and $30,000 in loans she had taken out to help her half-sister pay for school. Finally, in 2012, it was all cleared up, and she was ready to join the convent.
When she told her bosses, she was surprised at how supportive they were. One hugged her and cried. The other, whom she remains in touch with, joked, “You gotta pray for us on this next presentation!”
Her typical day is quite different from her Hollywood life. She shares a humble two-bedroom, fifth-floor walk-up apartment in the Mission House next to St. Mary’s with one other nun. Her work day is just four hours: She works on the church’s website and ministers to the homeless, helping to provide them with food, clothing and information about housing and legal services. In some of those she helps, she sees her late father, who lived on the street at various points in his life.
“They are broken people, they have PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] and they were abused as children,” she says. “Horrible things have happened to them.”
But her new life isn’t all good deeds; there’s still the occasional indulgence. She gets $50 a month in allowance, most of which she spends on fancy coffee beverages.
“It’s a nice break, because with the work that we do … with homeless [people], sometimes you get overloaded,” she says. “You get compassion fatigue.”
In her spare time, which also includes one full day off per week, she reads, prays, does crafts, meets friends for lunch and goes to the Met, thanks to a parishioner who gifted her a membership.
And she still has a few guilty pleasures, indulging in “church gossip” and reading the Daily Mail online. “[It’s] the trashiest,” she says. “I love it!”
She misses her old friends, though she gets to see some of them on occasion when they visit New York, but she doesn’t see her new life as one of deprivation. Rather, she says, it’s about the pleasure of living simply, like those who opt for trendy tiny houses.
“You choose this,” she says, “because it works better.”
