Sister Assunta rejoiced over the anomaly of a single egg laid in the heat of the afternoon.

“Look! It’s a miracle! One straggler just for you!”

The 33-year-old North Face cap and rubber-boot wearing Benedictine nun was a “success” story in another life. The Baylor graduate was once on a traditional path with a steady boyfriend and a promising career as a program coordinator for an Austin, Texas nonprofit.

But when her boyfriend proposed, she did a stunning about face and committed to a cloistered life as a Benedictine sister.

“I had a mysterious longing in my heart to be a nun,” she explained.

Sister Assunta declined to divulge her former name as if that person never existed.

For their first interviews since before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Abbess of St. Walburga allowed The Denver Gazette into their bubble for a day.

The prayerful life

Colorado’s 23 cloistered Benedictine nuns are different from the nuns who run hospitals or schools. To choose a monastic life meant leaving the security of their family and possessions to live and work in isolation, contemplation and prayer for the salvation of the world.

They live on a 250-acre ranch three-miles south of the Wyoming border, surrounded by rolling hills and red rocks the Utes and Arapahos called home.

Settlers later claimed the land and named the area Virginia Dale after a rancher’s wife. The area is part of the Overland Trail, where pioneers carved their initials into the rocks of the Colorado Territory as their wagon trains traveled from Missouri to California.

God is much more interesting than the internet

Today, the Abbey of St. Walburga is protected by a fence and a warning notice: “This is God’s country. Please don’t drive through it like hell.”

Beyond the persnickety electronic gate, the sisters of St. Walburga raise livestock, grow vegetables and greet the occasional visitor seeking retreat from the rat race in one of the property’s cabins.

Dozens of animals on monastery grounds include a bull calf named Uriah, two runaway Pyrenees dogs, and Shakespeare the barn cat.

“God never created a better cat,” said Sister Maria-Gertrude, who runs the farm.

Besides headlines like the war in Ukraine and national elections, the sisters are unaware of the more peripheral news from the outside world.

In other words, they pray for the people of Syria but not for the success of Casa Bonita or Taylor Swift.

Most of them will never again go to a concert, eat at a restaurant, or visit Hawaii — which makes it tough to recruit Gen Zers who never knew life without instant connection.

“Not everyone could live this life,” Mother Maria-Michael said. “Everyone sacrifices something whether it’s marriage, having children, or travel. But you know, God is much more interesting than the internet.”

Except for the occasional doctor’s appointment and weekly shopping run, which is assigned to one Sister, the women are content to eat, pray, love and work from sunup to sundown immersed in the sounds of silence.

“It’s not an awkward thing for us,” said Sister Therese, an abbey bell-ringer who is a tomboyish 45 with a spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose. “Our purpose is to speak with God and be in His presence. It’s like if you’re dating someone and you want to get to know them. As Brides of Christ, the way to be close to him is through silence.”

It’s not like the women are forbidden speak at all, said Clare Schmidt, 23, the youngest member of the order.

“We’re allowed to talk about cutting a carrot but not that your brother broke up with his girlfriend,” she explained.

The sisters are allowed one hour of nighttime conversation. On Sundays, they play games like Monopoly and Scrabble.

Schmidt grew up “in a podunk town” near Tulsa. She has not earned the title of “sister” because she is a postulate, which means she’s still deciding whether to take the monastic plunge.

Miracle vs. science

Five years ago, the family of a Littleton boy who was severely ill and suffering from cancer asked the nuns for a healing prayer.

Today, the child is 10-years-old, his cancer is in remission, and he often makes the two-hour trip to the monastery to visit his friends — human and animal.

“He was pretty sick. It could have gone either way, but it tipped the whole way,” confided Mother Maria-Michael, St. Walburga’s spiritual leader. It was the sisters’ idea to sell the boy a cow for $10 “so that he had a chance to buy something for the good of his family.”

The boy’s calf, Bella, is now mother to Blueberry and Bo.

“If you want to find a miracle, look out the window!,” said Sister Maria-Christi. “Let’s say you think of an eagle soaring and you want to be soaring with God. All-of-a-sudden you look up and you see an eagle. Or a storm comes roaring in just when you need it. It’s the things that don’t happen. Not getting crushed by a tractor. The cow which could have lost that calf and she didn’t.”

One of the most miraculous events for the sisters was their path to Virginia Dale.

A storied history

The Abbey of St. Walburga was started in 1935 in Boulder by three German nuns who needed refuge from the Nazi regime. They bought land 2 miles east of town from the monks who owned it.

In 1997, Boulder had grown too big and noisy for monastic life, so the sisters started looking around for a quieter home. The dirt road, which ran past the monastery, had become a four-lane highway, and, as Sister Hildegard Dubnick told The New York Times back then, “We also don’t want our own exit off the expressway.”

Behold, a Denver businessman and his wife anonymously offered the land near Virginia Dale as a gift.

“Nobody knows who the couple is,” said Marcie Wells, a historian and the executive assistant to the president of the Virginia Dale Community Club. “Things like that happen up there. Secret little deals.”

Father George Constantine, a monk who is visiting the monastery to lead mass, was around when the nuns first visited the Virginia Dale property.

“Their eyes got wide,” he said over a cup of tea. “God revealed himself in nature.”

The problem with Boulder wasn’t just the big city noise, but also the big city ideas. Boulder had become “anti-Christian” and didn’t understand the role of a monastery, he said.

So, the 22 nuns rounded up their 60 head of cattle and a pair of llamas and headed north.

“A monastery doesn’t move so simply. You have to pack up all your stuff and all your people and go,” said the self-described “ornery” Sister Maria-Magdalena. “We were 60 years in Boulder. So, we had 60 years of stuff.”

Part of the packing involved the bodies of several nuns who were exhumed from the Boulder graveyard. They’re now buried in a quiet cemetery beneath a flank of red rock, flanked by a simple wrought iron gate.

It’s rumored that there is a Cavalry soldier also buried somewhere on the St. Walburga property. A little girl who died on the Overland Trail also rests on the acreage, her grave marked by stones for head and feet.

During the late 1990s, Marcie Wells would visit the abbey to give home health care to “a little German nun,” who was one of the original three.

“I expected the nuns to be gloomy.”

Instead, Wells found they were some of the happiest people she’d ever known.

“They’re joyful and peaceful,” she said.

In a delightful twist, St. Walburga is sister abbey to Nonnberg Abbey, the very Benedictine order portrayed in the 1965 classic musical “The Sound of Music” — a point not lost on the order’s youngest member.

“I am Maria Von Trapp except I’m not going to marry a captain,” proclaimed Clare Schmidt.

Light-hearted and bubbly, the former teacher often laughs. During morning prayer, a key dangles from a chain on her voluminous black skirt and her veil is often askew. It comes loose exposing her hair, just like Julie Andrews’ character. One can just imagine Schmidt stealing away to twirl on the property, her apron strings flying.

Another young woman, a Californian named Rain, is also living in the community for a few months as she determines whether this extreme way of life could be her vocation.

‘Some of us get here in crooked ways’

A child of the 1940s, Sister Maria-Magdalena’s journey to St. Walburga began in first grade, when she carefully placed a handwritten promise in a back compartment of her Lone Ranger badge.

“I wrote ‘I give myself to God,’” said Sister Maria-Magdalena.

Like her Ranger Badge note, she also has a special place for her Bible, which she keeps in a handy basket attached to her walker.

Since Sister Maria-Magdalena’s mother asked her not to be a nun, she waited until her parents died to enter the order. By that time, she was 50 years old.

“Some of us get here in crooked ways,” she said.

Each of St. Walburga’s 23 nuns has her own sparsely-decorated apartment. They range in age and disposition from Clare, the 23-year-old who joined the abbey in December, to Mother Maria-Thomas, the former Abbess who is 91.

Each woman who commits to the order is followed and applauded by the Catholic Archdiocese.

There’s no fast food, no television and no email. Only two of the sisters grew up with cell phones, but they do watch G-rated movies (documentaries and “All Creatures Great and Small”).

One early May morning at mass, the nuns sang one of their seven daily prayers. Outside, dozens of resident sparrows zig-zagged around the building.

Ft. Collins — 25 miles away to the southeast — is the nearest city, or, in nun miles, “a rosary and two decades,” Mother Maria-Michael Newe said.

A decade is a set of ten beads on a rosary.

As St. Walburga’s Abbess, Mother Maria-Michael, aka “M-and-M,” is one of only two nuns with a cellphone “to have contact with the outside world.” The Abbess texts just like the rest of us, but never with immediacy.

Sister Assunta has waited seven years for her wedding day. This month, she will trade her white veil for one that is black and white, receive her prayer robe, or coculla, and a Bishop will espouse her to Jesus Christ in solemn profession, gold band and all.

It’s a moment Sister Maria-Immaculata remembers “blew her away.”

Life on the outside of the abbey with a man who is not Jesus doesn’t cut it. The middle of nowhere is exactly where the the nuns want to be.

“I thought when I got here I would want to leave and thought I would muscle through it. But, really, my generation doesn’t get to experience stability,” said Schmidt, who has up to nine years to decide whether she can live this way forever. “I feel like, ‘Oh I don’t have to leave. I can stay.’”

Colorado’s Benedictine nuns, one of only eight such orders in the United States, appear content in quiet, prayerful isolation as serene as a snow globe unshaken.