Five years ago, she was Ann Russell Miller: a dynamic San Francisco socialite with season tickets to the opera, a propensity for silk parasols and a knack for raising money for charity.
Now, she is Sister Mary Joseph of the Trinity. She prays in silence behind a lattice of black iron bars that will keep her in seclusion and poverty for the rest of her life - away from her 10 children, 19 grandchildren, an inherited fortune and the man who wanted to marry her.No more cooks, no more maids, no more shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue, no more black tie balls. No more weekends at the family's Palm Springs getaway, no more cruises on private yachts in the Mediterranean.
She sleeps on a wooden plank bed covered by a thin mattress in a small, barren cell. She is allowed to talk with her fellow nuns during two designated hours a day. She is permitted one visitor a month - but even then, she must sit behind the double set of bars.
No touching, no hugging, no kissing - no matter who.
And by all accounts, she is happy.
How did this happen? Why did this vivacious woman turn her life upside down, giving away material riches for poverty? Her friends and family wonder, and wonder some more.
The answer, it seems, is a mystery of faith.
Ann Russell Miller grew up in luxury and privilege as the only child of the former chairman of Southern Pacific Railroad, himself a devout Catholic.
She had dreams since childhood of being a nun, but she fell in love
instead. At 19, she married Richard Miller, who became vice president of Pacific Gas & Electric, a utility company that once was a family business.
Together, they made a vow: The person who survived the other would dedicate his or her life to God.
Ann and Richard had it all - old money, celebrity friends and a nine-bedroom mansion overlooking the San Francisco Bay. He was chairman of the San Francisco Opera Association; she raised money for gifted college students, the homeless and the Catholic Church. At one point, she was a member of 22
boards. Petite and impeccably dressed, she had her hair done at Elizabeth Arden and bought her datebooks at Tiffany's. She called her friends
"darling." Full of warmth and energy, she attracted friends both rich and poor. She invited her pals on trips around the world, including cruises and archaeological digs.
"Whenever Ann called and said, `Guess what we're doing this weekend?' we said, `Fine, count us in,' and it was always a gas," said one friend, Jean McClatchy Bricker. "That's why the thought of seclusion was so amazing to her friends, because it was such a contrast."
When her husband died of cancer in 1984, Ann began making plans to fulfill her pledge to her husband and to God.
Three years later, she announced she would join the Carmelite Monastery in Des Plaines, Ill.
"I've stopped trying to figure it out," Bricker said. "She just enjoyed worldly things so much that I wouldn't have thought of it, except I knew the other side of Ann."
The other side was the deeply religious side. The side that drew her to Mass every morning and to Lourdes with her husband who used a wheelchair, praying for a cancer cure.
She nailed Stations of the Cross, a series of 14 crosses representing the stages of Jesus' final suffering and his death and burial, in the redwood grove at the family's weekend compound in the coastal hills near San
Francisco. She attended annual religious retreats, including one at the home of comedian Bob Hope and his wife, Delores. In tribute to her personality, at a dinner party at the Hopes' one night, Bob lamented that Ann was getting more laughs than he was.
But her dedication to the principles of the Catholic Church also alienated some of her children at times. Friends say she didn't accept the second marriage of a son who had been divorced and disapproved of another child who lived with someone out of wedlock.
It's hard for some of those friends not to think her selfish for shutting herself away from her family.
"I just couldn't leave my children and go devote myself to what I think is nice. I'd always be worrying about them," said friend Patricia Fay Woods. "I liked her very much, but I'm not sure it's right for her to leave her family and her mother and go into the convent because she enjoys it."
Another person left behind was Corky Bowles, a childhood friend who wanted to marry her. Friends say he proposed on a private yacht in the Mediterranean a year before she entered the convent but that she turned him down in favor of the monastery.
Ann's decision was not surprising to Mother Catherine, who heads the monastery, or Father Val McInnes of New Orleans, a good friend. Both say she was destined for a life as a cloistered nun.
"She had a calling, a true vocation," said Mother Catherine, who opened the heavy black drapes behind the iron bars to talk to a reporter in the convent's "speak room."
In fact, Mother Catherine said, during a 1984 visit to the monastery for the dedication of a new wing, Ann wrote in a guest book, "Save a cell for
me." "I think she had a call to the contemplative life, as hard as that is to understand," said McInnes, a Dominican priest who visited her recently. "She was almost like a whirling dervish in many ways, but always part of her life was a contemplative element."
In the two years before she entered the monastery in 1989, Ann began putting her affairs in order to become a bride of Christ.
With the zeal and enthusiasm of planning a wedding, she divvied up her fortune. Her children picked through the Pacific Heights mansion choosing candlesticks, photo albums and furniture. She arranged a giant garage sale for the leftovers and donated the proceeds to charity.
She revved up her jetset lifestyle and visited friends in Europe, the Far East and South America.
She invited her close friends to a luncheon where she distributed her collection of parasols covered in silk Hermes scarves. She also parceled out her 16 pairs of designer glasses - along with a free visit to an optometrist to change the prescription.
In October 1989, on the eve of her induction into the monastery, she invited hundreds of friends to a Mass at St. Mary's Cathedral, where the archbishop of San Francisco officiated.
Afterward, she threw a black tie gala in the grand ballroom of the Hilton Hotel, inviting 800 guests. It was her 61st birthday.
"The first two-thirds of my life were devoted to the world. The last third will be devoted to my soul," she told her teary-eyed friends that night.
"I can do more for you by praying than any other way," she told one
friend. Besides, she told McInnes, "I've done everything. I might as well prepare myself for the Lord."
Ann Russell Miller underwent a five-year trial with her fellow nuns before being allowed to take her final vows in May.
Normally, the Carmelites don't accept widows because of the complications and distractions of children and their past lives, Mother Catherine said. But they made an exception for Ann because they knew she was sincere, emotionally stable and devoted to God and a life of prayer.
Many of her friends thought she wouldn't survive the silence and solitude and would "flunk out of nun school," as one friend put it.
But she hasn't. Despite missing two daughters' wedding and the births of five grandchildren over the past five years, she has remained resolute.
Like the other 17 nuns in the monastery, Sister Mary Joseph wears a long brown habit, black veil and sandals. She spends her days making rosary beads out of crushed rose petals, weeding the vegetable garden, scrubbing the refectory floor and pushing the gas-fired lawnmower across the convent's spacious grounds.
Her friends write to her often, and visit occasionally. She is allowed a limited number of responses - many of them screened by Mother Catherine.
She was not allowed to meet with a reporter, however. Mother Catherine said it would be a distraction to her life of meditation.