Trappestine Abbess Mother Martha Driscoll

From the Peace Corps to Indonesia...via love.

(Mother Martha Driscoll is the abbess of a Cistercian monastery in Gedono, Indonesia. She holds degrees from Georgetown University and Brandeis University. Her book, Reading Between the Lines: The Hidden Wisdom of Women in the Gospels, was published in 2006.)

Kristen: Where did you grow up?

Mother Martha: I was born and grew up in Staten Island, New York in a very Irish Catholic family. My parents scrimped and saved to send my sister and me to a Catholic girls’ academy. My only childhood tantrum was caused by the fact I had to leave the public school and all my friends. I never found the freedom I had had there with the nuns. The genuine love of my parents for each other and for the three of us is the real basis of my religious experience. God is Love.

Kristen: What was your college experience like?

Mother Martha: I transferred to Georgetown University after two years at an all girls’ college where philosophy teachers had begun to widen my views and my questions. As an off-campus transfer student, I experienced real solitude in the first few months and that was a deep religious experience that made me know my littleness, emptiness and need of God. I began to go to daily mass at Trinity Church, where I made some lasting friendships, including several Jesuits. We were in the thick of the Civil Rights Movement and were all very marked by the assassination of Kennedy that year. A very large percent of our graduating class (FS’65) joined the Peace Corps.

Kristen: What happened after you returned from your Peace Corps stint?

Mother Martha: When I came back from Ethiopia, I couldn’t accept the values of materialistic consumerism and realized that with all that I had learned with my head at GU, I really hadn’t learned how to face the real problems of life and had to find out by myself.

After two years of theater in New York City, I got a fellowship for an MFA in Theater at Brandeis. It was a very countercultural environment, with lots of confusion. I gradually left the Church as part of the ‘Western establishment’ that I saw as having produced very little except war and materialism. I experienced failure and loneliness and a very deep identity crisis that opened me to search even further.

Then my mother became ill with cancer only a year and a half after my father’s sudden death in 1968. It nearly destroyed me, but I found that there was a nameless hope in the bottom of my soul that kept me going. Later I knew that that hope was the grace of baptism that never disappears even when we get lost. My mother died very beautifully and the next day I was filled with love. Then I went to fulfill a commitment to direct a play at Brandeis. There I experienced the creative power of the love that inhabited me. After the play was a big success, I went off by myself for three months to figure out where this love was coming from.

Kristen: You were seeking?

Mother Martha: I was doing yoga and reading Eastern philosophies and religions. But through grace I realized that even if the truth was in Asia, I was Western and had to go back to the roots of my own culture before I could pass over to another. So I just read the Bible. There one evening, in the gospel of John, I found the source of the love I had received: Jesus. Then in a book of Thomas Merton, I read that a Cistercian monastery was a school of love. That was a description of the Church that I could identify with, so I set off to find a Cistercian monastery and, in so doing, go back to the Church.

Kristen: You picked an interesting time to become a nun, right after the Second Vatican Council! Where did you make your profession?

Mother Martha: I entered the monastery in Italy, after a six month pilgrimage in Israel. Mother Cristiana Piccardo was the abbess. Her charismatic teaching led the community with great wisdom, so that we received the wealth of the living Tradition of our Cistercian Order while following the Vatican Council’s lead to renewal in a rediscovery of monastic life as communion, not an individualistic struggle for perfection. The insights I received from her teaching are still the core of my life.

Kristen: Had you been to Indonesia prior to being named the prioress in Gedono?

Mother Martha: No. I thought I would spend the rest of my life in Italy. We make a vow of stability. But our community was asked to receive candidates from Indonesia in view of opening a new monastery in Indonesia. Seven Indonesians, two Italians and I lived through that adventure of death and new life and the community was born. We experienced our poverty together very acutely and when everyone had touched rock bottom, suddenly there was Life which we knew wasn’t our own. The Church is born from the experience of the resurrection together. That was twenty years ago and we are now thirty-four members. The Italians and I have become Indonesian citizens!