When God Called Herman Sisters Listened

Five Siblings Devote Themselves To Religious Life With A Combined 250 Plus Years of  Service to Church

This family picture, taken in the 1940s in Yates Center, Kansas, shows the five Herman sisters in religious dress:
from left, Sisters Nicolette, Mary, Helen, Joan and  Emeliana. The rest of their family included
(from left) Tony, Maggie, Bill, mother Mary, Al and John, their father John, and Martha.

By Candace Krebs
For the Sooner Catholic

ENID —  When Nicolette Herman felt the unmistakable call to join a convent as a teenager, she probably could not have dreamed that she and four sisters would end up spending more than two and half centuries between them serving in religious life.

At the time, her decision was “a little bit of a drastic thing,” she admits now, more than 60 years later.

In fact, her sister Emeliana, the eldest in the family, had some hard words: “Do you know what you’re doing? You are breaking up this family,” she told her sister.

Today, both are members in the Adorers of the Blood of Christ and share an apartment in Enid just a block away from St. Mary’s Hospital, where they’ve invested nearly a century of their lives in work, charity and volunteer service. They and three other sisters (two of whom have passed away and one who has been moved into full-time nursing care) have spent 259 years as members of the Wichita-based Adorers.

Nicolette’s twin sister Helen and another sister Mary had joined the community by the time Emeliana made vows with another sister Joan in 1945.

“I wasn’t just going to follow,” Emiliana recalls of her own spiritual journey. “I helped dad for a long time on the farm. Then I went to work at St. Francis Hospital in Wichita. I saw enough of what the outside world was going to be, and I knew that wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

Looking back, she says her desire for belonging was fulfilled by joining a religious order. “I never had one day of regret,” she says. “In the outside world, you were just an isolated person. I knew I didn’t want to live like that. I needed companionship. Here you are in a community. You can always find somebody to share with.”

Emeliana says vowed religious life had the opposite effect on the family than what she initially expected. “It drew us closer together,” she says now.

In addition to the five girls who joined the convent between 1937 and 1945, the hard-working Kansas farm family included two more girls, Maggie and Martha, and four boys, Bill, Tony, Al and John.

Nicolette recalls that when she shared her vocational leanings with her father John, he took her out to the lumber wagon for a private discussion and told her that when God calls it’s best to listen. To this day, she thinks it was the early example set by her parents that laid the groundwork for a life of religious service.

“Father always prayed with us, said the rosary every night, and we went to Mass together,” she says. “I wanted to keep that life. Mother was a hard-working person too. She canned and took care of chickens. We did all the butchering at home. She taught me a lot about sewing. We quilted five quilts together one winter.”

Life in the religious community also focused on work. In the early days, you got your assignments on a little piece of paper and “you didn’t ask why,” the sisters say. But they spent many joyful years fulfilling the missions they were each given.

Nicolette became an institutional housekeeper. “At that time, housekeepers were paid 50 cents an hour, and the sisters worked seven days a week,” she recalls. “It was a long time until I got a day off.” Later in her career she went through an executive management training program, obtained professional certification and wrote five instructional manuals.

Her biggest challenge came when two girls arrived from the nearby Enid State School, the local mental health residential facility, and it was her responsibility to teach them housekeeping jobs, with tasks that they followed to the letter. “That was my biggest challenge and also my biggest satisfaction,” she says. “They are both still working there now.”

At Emiliana’s first mission appointment, she was told she was “in charge of the trays.” That led to a career in food service that culminated in her designation as a certified dietary manager. “After you get into it, you see what you can do with food to cheer people up,” she says. “It’s not just drab. When I took courses, we had book work to do but I learned more from just doing it.”

With Emiliana now 87 and Nicolette 85, the sisters have both retired from full-time work, but they continue to stay busy with volunteer service. Emiliana is a hospital escort. “It’s mostly helping people get in and out of wheelchairs when they can’t walk. When I see these others, I am so thankful for the way I can still get around,” she says. Both are Eucharistic ministers who take communion to patients and each volunteers a day a week at Our Daily Bread, the local soup kitchen. In addition, Nicolette helps out at the Oklahoma Blood Institute. They crochet and embroider gifts for the hospital gift shop.

“One of the privileges that God gave us is that we love people,” Nicolette says.

Though traditional religious dress is now voluntary, both sisters still choose to don their habits. Nicolette confides that she promised sister Helen on her deathbed that she would never stop wearing her veil. “I want people to know that I’m set aside from the world,” she says. “I belong to something greater. I think I have a security that the world doesn’t have.”

Sister Joan - who shared their six-room apartment up until a year and a half ago when she was disabled by illness - was a registered nurse who delivered over 1,000 babies during her career at St. Mary’s. For practical reasons, she gave up wearing the veil.

“Everyone is made just a little bit different,” Nicolette says.

The times are different too. Adorers of the Blood of Christ have far fewer vocations today than when the sisters joined in the 1940s, and the size of community has dwindled from three provinces down to one. The two sisters worry about this trend and think often about ways to encourage more vocations in an age when it seems like a way of life more needed than ever.

Sister Nicolette says she always felt “vowed to God” and never felt the desire to marry and have a family of her own. In fact, as she witnessed the hardships of others, she says she would often say to herself, “Dear Lord, you’ve spared me from a lot!”

“Once I said forever to God, I didn’t ever look back, no matter what the conditions were,” she adds. “But I always found something to make me happy. It’s a beautiful life, but you have to have a calling for it.”                                         Sisters Joan, Nicolette and Emeliana today.