Sister Mara Rutten made the decision to join the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic at the peak of her career in federal law enforcement.
A Roman Catholic since childhood, Rutten, 43, had always pondered entering a religious community but never made the commitment. She owned a house and a car and found her work as an analyst generally satisfying.
But success brought sacrifice.
“I had been volunteering at a homeless shelter, and I had to quit because of the schedule. And I realized that while I was at the top of my professional game, I would have rather been at the shelter,” she says. “I was sorry I had to give that up, and it nudged me that it was time.”
On Aug. 23, Rutten, surrounded by family and friends, took her first vows with the Maryknoll Sisters. A month later, she received her mission assignment. After Christmas, she will leave for Cambodia, the place where she spent six weeks in 2012 during the sisters’ application process. For this, she has happily given up the trappings of traditional life.
In the meantime, she is working at the Maryknoll Sisters’ community in Ossining, New York. It took years to get here, and she has no regrets.
“I have never thought, ‘Gee, I wish I had my life back,’” she says.
in martyrs’ footsteps
Rutten says she has always had an “overdeveloped sense of injustice.”
She lived in Tucson for seven years, finding a spiritual home at Most Holy Trinity Parish, 1300 N. Greasewood Road. That’s where she fine-tuned her passion for social justice through a yearlong program called JustFaith.
The class solidified Rutten’s perspective on Catholic social teaching. Later, she and others who went through the class took a 10-day pilgrimage to El Salvador.
There, she met a Maryknoll sister living in the same country where four churchwomen, including two other Maryknoll sisters, were raped and killed by Salvadoran National Guardsmen in 1980. Rutten remembered hearing about those murders as a young girl.
She was already considering religious life at the time, and then to walk where “all these martyrs had walked with the poor and stood up with the poor and died with the poor. You think, how can you not? How can you really look at what these people did and what these people gave and walk away from it?”
That was in 2011.
“It should have been challenging, but it wasn’t,” she says of joining the Maryknoll Sisters. “When the decision was made, it was full steam ahead.”
GIVING IT ALL UP
Before joining the sisters, Rutten had to pay off student loans and sell her home.
“It was the worst time to sell your home,” she says. “It was disgusting how much money I lost.”
She swapped the home she thought she would live in forever for a “cruddy little apartment,” holding rummage sales and selling bundles of clothes hangers for 50 cents.
She anticipated that parting with her books would cause the most heartache, but even that did not deter her.
With student loans and debt from her house, she got creative in her fundraising, hosting a spaghetti dinner and soliciting pledges from church members for her to run a marathon.
“They were investing in whatever I was going to do later,” she says of the parishioners at Most Holy Trinity. “Somewhere down the line, if I’m inoculating children, they are, too.”
She continued working her law enforcement job as she went through the admissions process. In July 2013, she went to Chicago to begin formation — two years of prayer and study. In June of this year, she joined the Maryknoll Sisters in New York.
No one was surprised.
“My boss at one point said to me, ‘Every day, I’m worried I’m going to come in and you’re going to have run off to Bolivia and started an orphanage,’” Rutten says. “I was shocked because that was exactly what I intended to do, and I didn’t think anyone knew that.”
ALWAYS A THOUGHT
Teree Nesvold, Rutten’s younger sister, says the only surprise about her sister’s decision to enter a religious community is that it didn’t happen sooner.
As a child growing up in Minnesota, Rutten played organ at her childhood church. As a college student at the University of Minnesota-Morris, she lived at the school’s Newman Center, running the activities. She remained involved in Newman Centers at other campuses as she continued her studies in history, earning a master’s degree from Southern Illinois University and a doctorate from Arizona State University.
She also lived in Washington, D.C., for a time.
Working on her doctorate in Tempe, Rutten met Tracy Randolph about 15 years ago. The friends bonded at a church function over their shared faith and their love for the television show “The X-Files.”
“She talked about the fact that she probably wouldn’t get married because she heard the call” to join religious life, says Randolph, who now teaches at St. Matthew Catholic School in Phoenix.
When Rutten finally made the leap, the application process took her to Cambodia in 2012 to work with the Maryknoll sisters there. It was the kind of life she wanted.
“There is a point in the Mass where we have these prayers of petition, when you pray for specific things, and people from the congregation can say what they want you to pray for,” she says. “They would pray for specific things like, ‘The well has dried up, and we need another source of water,’ and, ‘The rice shipment is delayed and we need rice.’ ... Everywhere I had been, you prayed for the poor and prayed for the sick, and here were the people actually doing it, working with the poor and working with the sick.”
“A BIT OF A CRUSADER”
Sister Vicky Larson, a nursing professor with the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, has known Rutten since their teen years, but never recommended her own religious community.
“I knew my community didn’t have the right fit for Mara’s sense of adventure,” says Larson, who entered religious life in 1999 in South Dakota. “We have global connections, but we didn’t have the network that I knew it would take for Mara to be really happy. She is the kind of person who has been running marathons ... and has raised the bar so high ... because she is a go-getter.”
The Maryknoll Sisters, founded in 1912, have members from around the world serving in about two dozen countries.
For Rutten, it was the right fit.
“I’ve always kind of a bit of a crusader,” she says. “When I went to a high school reunion one time, some of the girls said the thing they remembered about me was that I got everyone in the class to stop using aerosol hairspray during the whole ozone layer thing.”
Rutten went into law enforcement to help people, but ultimately found her time with the homeless more rewarding.
“You work an investigation, and it takes a long time, and sometimes justice is served, and sometimes it isn’t,” she says. “You wish you could do more, but you can only do what the law allows you to do. But going onto the streets with the homeless ... you could feel it in the moment, not upon reflection.”
Her life is different now — she has no money and she lives in community with other sisters. Social justice is no longer her hobby. It’s her life.
“When you make a commitment to follow Jesus, you really have no idea where it’s going to take you,” Larson says. If you are called to religious life, “you become most fully who God created you to be when you answer that call. You blossom no matter what the challenges are, and you work through them at the end of the day because you are part of something bigger than yourself.”
