CONVENT LIFE AT TWILIGHT / The younger sisters of Mission San Jose seek ways to modernize their message for a changed world

The convent chapel is empty except for two women. One is in a white coffin, the other in a wheelchair.

Sister Hosanna Almaguer is 103 and sits tall and straight. She wears the black veil, loose white shift and thick-soled black shoes she has worn every day for most of her life. Her chin is out, as if she is listening. But the chapel is silent and still. Even the high midday sun keeps its distance, casting no shadows on the wood floors or outsize crucifix on the far wall.

Then the slightest stirring, like the flutter of a bird's wings: Sister Hosanna's hands begin to move beneath the white crocheted blanket on her lap. A strand of red rosary beads slips below the side hem of the blanket. Sister Hosanna gathers it back with thick, red hands, a worker's hands. Her eyes are open, fixed in the distance. She prays in silence.

Sister Hosanna has said many rosaries in front of many white coffins. Sister Bernice last week. Sister Mercia today. The sisters at the Dominican convent in Fremont had taken turns at Sister Mercia's bedside, keeping a 24-hour vigil so she would not die alone. Sister Hosanna knows when the time comes the same will be done for her. She knows, too, she will be buried not far from where she sits now, out beyond the olive trees, in a cemetery where the rows of graves now reach almost to the far hedgerow. Last year, the convent had to begin doubling up, burying two sisters in each plot.

Each new gravestone means another vacant room at the sprawling motherhouse of the Dominican Sisters of Mission San Jose. The convent, like convents across the country, has been slowly emptying for years. In the 1960s, there were 180,000 Catholic nuns in the United States. Today there are 65,000. Young women no longer are answering the call to religious life as they once did, when, for example, the all-girls Immaculate Conception Academy in San Francisco saw six consecutive student-body presidents join convents.

As the numbers of nuns dwindle, their ages climb. The average age of an American sister is 69. Some are still in classrooms and hospital corridors. Many still work in homeless shelters and migrant camps, African AIDS clinics and Guatemalan villages.

Many more, however, are living back at the motherhouses, like this one in Fremont. Each sister from Mission San Jose who still works supports two and a half who don't. In recent years, the convent sold off 13 acres to developers to cover the burgeoning costs of elder care and help fund the $10.8 million renovation to the convalescent center (which included closed-circuit television so infirm sisters can watch from their rooms). Now the 116-year-old convent, with its antique olive presses and wild turkeys, is nearly encircled by new luxury homes.

A casket in the convent's chapel might seem an apt metaphor, then, for Catholic sisters in the 21st century. And it is -- but only in that death exists side by side with resurrection. This duality is the cornerstone of their faith.

For the sisters, resurrection is not just about the hereafter. It is about committing themselves fully to the here and now, about giving shape and voice to what is holy in ordinary life, searching through the rubble of poverty and disease and despair and finding God.

As the hours unfold at Sister Mercia's funeral Mass and burial, the plain outer layer of conformity and ritual of convent life gives way to something defiant and joyful. There is 103-year-old Sister Hosanna still managing a jig during exercise class at the senior center. There is the electric-guitar-playing, MySpace-blogging Sister Rebecca Shinas. There is 22-year-old Dulce Aguilar Rodriguez, who wants to join this community of women even if it means she is the last one to close the door and turn out the lights.

The sisters with lined faces and orthopedic shoes are not in denial about the future of their vocation. They know they are living as if inside the final crescendo of a musical score. They could let the notes pelt them like stones, bracing for the inevitable denouement.

Instead, they choose to dance.

Sister Hosanna finishes her rosary and clutches the beads with hands that have peeled a million vegetables and washed a million dinner plates. For 77 years she cooked at the congregation's various small convents scattered from Oregon to Mexico; the sisters once staffed 32 different schools on the West Coast. When Sister Hosanna became too old to work, she grappled, alongside other aging sisters, with how she still would serve God. If the sisters no longer could be social workers and teachers, nurses and administrators, what could they contribute? As the women at Mission San Jose and at convents across the country searched for answers, examining who they had become over the years, they began to see age not as a deficit but as the gift they had to offer. They had wisdom. They had honed their ability to see the sacred in a chaotic world. Their faith had deepened into a palpable, powerful force, capable of healing.

They knew, in the way they knew God had called them to become sisters, something new was being born within each of them, a new purpose rising from what was still a muscular, well-honed spirituality inside their slowing, softening bodies. Even now, they can't put a name on this new thing. But it looks like the green shoots that push through the ashes of a forest fire. That's how one sister put it.

Sister Hosanna decided her new job would be praying. She begins every day at 2 a.m., sitting in the chair by her bed, under pictures of Jesus and of Our Lady of Guadalupe. She prays all morning and throughout the day, working from a handwritten list of names, approaching the job with the unfussy practicality she learned as one of eight children in a family of Mexican farmers. When Sister Hosanna -- whose name was Maria then -- asked about a young cousin who had become a nun, she was told that she lived in the house of God. That sounded lovely to her. But her father had no money to send her. She prayed for God to find a way. Then one day her cousin came through town to collect alms for the convent. Maria thanked God and packed her bags.

"You're not going back without me," she told her cousin.

Whenever Sister Hosanna tells this part of her story, she pauses to make sure her point is clear.

"One kind of little light God shows you," she says, "and you follow it."

The chapel is beginning to fill for Sister Mercia's funeral Mass. Dozens of sisters have driven in from the smaller convents around the Bay Area where they still live and work. The sisters hug and kiss, making jokey comments about this one's driving and that one's latest attempt to learn salsa. The women are as comfortable and familiar as childhood friends or cousins, asking about a mother's arthritis, a niece's new job, a brother's retirement.

They settle into padded armchairs that face inward, toward the center aisle -- and each other -- rather than the altar. Yards of sheer fabric in lavender and pale pink drape the crucifix on the front wall; this is a women's chapel. Two sisters with guitars and another with a tambourine launch into Hymn No. 162, "Behold the Glory of God," shuffling and tapping their feet. The rest of the women join in, belting out the words, swaying to the music, their hands slapping their legs to the beat, holding nothing back.

Attendants from Chapel of Angels funeral home wheel Sister Mercia's coffin up the aisle, stopping a few feet from the altar. The congregation hears during the eulogy about the sister's devout Catholic family of six girls, all named Mary -- Mary Catherine, Mary Mercia, Mary Frances, Mary Alice, Mary Louise and Mary Cecilia -- and that three joined the convent. The eulogist recalls how Sister Mercia would never tell anyone her age and how, once she retired to the motherhouse after 65 years as a librarian and principal, "she could be, well, demanding at times."

The women in the chapel laugh and nod. Sister Mercia was a tough old bird. Well into her 90s, they remember, she broke her shoulder for the second time and still refused to take to her bed.

Midway through the mass, as the sisters offered each other the Sign of Peace, a tall, smiling, athletic-looking sister walks across the aisle to Sister Hosanna. Her name is Sister Rebecca Shinas. Her bangs are tousled and her veil and habit are ill-fitting, like a pinafore on a knee-scraped tomboy.

She bends to take Sister Hosanna's hand and to wish her the Lord's peace. The old woman lights up, gazing like a mother into Sister Rebecca's face. Their heads are nearly touching. Sister Hosanna kisses the tip of the younger woman's nose.

Sister Rebecca is 54, one of the youngest sisters in the congregation. She created a profile on Myspace.com when she found out the site had 78 million participants, most under the age of 18. "We have to go where the people are," she told her fellow sisters. "We need to be more visible in the world."

Her online name is Rockin' Sister because she plays electric guitar in a Christian rock band. She lists "Napoleon Dynamite" as one of her favorite movies. On a separate blog (kidsgodquestions.blogspot.com), she answers kids' questions about God.

"If God is all powerful and never gets tired," one child wrote to Sister Rebecca, "why rest on the seventh day of constructing the earth?"

"I think after God constructed the earth," she wrote back, "He just wanted to sit back and take it all in! ... I can just see God after creating the sky, sun, stars, clouds and grass, just lying back with his hands behind his head and looking up with a big smile on his face!"

Sister Rebecca lives with four other Mission San Jose sisters at St. Simon's Convent in Los Altos. She is something of a spiritual cruise director at the parish there, pulling everyone into one activity or another, forming groups whenever she sees an opening. St. Simon's might be the only parish in America to address, through support groups, the separate spiritual needs of menopausal women, teens and homosexuals.

When Sister Rebecca heard the call to religious life as a young woman, she wondered if she could still be herself in the convent, especially one in which the sisters still wore habits and veils. She was loud and exuberant by nature. She had her own ideas about just about everything. But she decided to follow the example of Jesus: "Walk their steps first. They'll be willing to learn some of yours."

Rebecca was a postulant in her late 20s when she began what she calls her street ministry. She asked the prioress general if she could play guitar outside the Mission Bell Tavern up the street from the convent. She wanted to sing about God, be a presence for those who might be looking for something more in their lives.

"OK," the prioress general said after Sister Rebecca's impassioned pitch. "Once a month."

"How about twice a month?"

"Rebecca, don't push it."

She sang outside the tavern every month for more than two years, getting to know many of the Hell's Angels by first name, enjoying the bluegrass music she heard on the other side of the door. When anyone asked why a nun in an old-fashioned habit was strumming a guitar outside a biker bar, she'd say the sacred is everywhere, not just inside churches and convents, and she hoped her presence reminded people of that. She'd say true Christianity isn't about preparing for some distant afterlife but about living with purpose and divinity right here, right now.

When the funeral Mass ends, the sisters walk out the chapel doors, down the curved ramps and through the iron gates that lead to the convent's grounds. They pass the tiny Romanesque chapel built in 1922 by the eccentric artist Sister Justina Niemierski, who spent most of her days at the convent covered in dust and paint, rarely uttering a word. At the front of the procession, one sister sprinkles holy water, another holds aloft a crucifix and two more carry golden votive candles, following the metal trestle cart bearing Sister Mercia's coffin. The sisters sing from yellow booklets.

"May angels lead you into paradise. May the martyrs await your coming ..."

A young woman in civilian clothes stands out in the procession of nuns.

She wears black slacks and a white blouse. She has a wide mouth, a black ponytail and Emporio Armani glasses. She has been living at the convent, and visiting the congregation's satellite convents, for two weeks, shadowing sisters who are teachers and social workers and spiritual counselors. She is 22. Her name is Dulce Aguilar Rodriguez.

She wants to be a nun.

This is her second try at it. She had spent two years at Mission San Jose's convent near her hometown of Chihuahua, Mexico. From the beginning, her sister had tried to talk her out of it. She had told Dulce she would find her a boyfriend and said they could go to school together to the University of Texas-El Paso. But Dulce felt pulled toward the sisters and moved into the Mexican convent.

The sisters there had none of the artifice she found in most other people. Dulce saw what most outsiders never did -- that the sisters, in their stiff black veils and dowdy shifts, were the freest women she knew. They weren't preoccupied with makeup or clothes, with how they measured up against other women. Dulce had never seen women laugh or dance as much as the sisters, or drop everything to sit through the night with a grieving family. Dulce found herself, as she spent time at the Mexican convent, thinking like a sister, feeling that her relationship with God was like a romance, a marriage, and that she could give life not through childbirth but through her works with the poor and oppressed.

Still, after two years, she decided to leave, unsure if she was ready to make the commitment. She moved in with her brother and sister in El Paso and lived with them for more than a year. She found there was a space that could not be filled by parties and boyfriends, but only by religious life. So she asked the Dominicans in Fremont if she could try again at their convent.

"I know I always had the call," she told them, "but sometimes I resisted hearing it."

The "call" is difficult to explain to those who have not felt it. Some compare it to the pull that artists and writers feel: They do what they do because nothing else makes sense. "It's mysterious," one Mission San Jose sister said. "Like falling in love. There's no rational reason why we do what we do. It's faith, not science."

During her year in El Paso, Dulce considered the consequences of answering the call. She knew it meant a lonelier life for her than for the sisters who came before her. She might be alone in the convent's chapel some day, the last survivor of an anachronistic profession. On a recent day, while she was shadowing a sister who taught at St. Anthony's School in San Francisco, she watched the principal -- a 54-year-old sister named Carolyn Marie Monahan -- playing kickball on the blacktop with the children. Her veil flapped behind her as she ran to first base. Sisters once filled nearly every teaching and administrative job at St. Anthony's. Now the school has just four.

"I have to just trust in God," Dulce said later that day, sitting in the back of a fifth-grade classroom. "If I worry, worry, worry, I can't do anything. If I give an example through God, maybe that will get more people interested."

Seven women are working toward taking their final vows to become sisters at Mission San Jose. All are in their 40s but were in their 30s when they began the eight-year process. The convent does not accept women after age 40 because adapting to the rigorous, communal lifestyle is too difficult. One woman preparing for her final vows is a former naval officer. Another was a real estate agent in the East Bay.

Dulce is by far the youngest woman at the motherhouse, but she believes, as her elders do, that if the convent is meant to survive and grow, it will. Christianity itself began with just 12 apostles, the sisters point out, and their own congregation grew from three young Dominican nuns who traveled from New York in 1876 to set up a school for German immigrants at St. Boniface Church in San Francisco. Dulce's faith -- and the sisters' faith -- allows them the freedom, they say, to trust that if sisters disappear, God must be making way for a different kind of religious life for women, something reconfigured and updated for modern times.

During the lunch break, as the fifth-graders ate school-bought pizza or Ziploc-bagged sandwiches, Dulce played her guitar and sang in the back of the classroom. Sister Carolyn Marie, the principal, watched from the doorway. She had spent 32 years at inner-city schools in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where the children counted on the sisters to be there when everyone else in their lives came and went. She was retiring at year's end, and no one was waiting in the wings to fill her job. The Mission San Jose sisters are likely to pull out of the schools altogether, Sister Carolyn Marie said. Suddenly, she choked back tears.

"Schools," she said, "are such a profound way to touch lives."

Two girls in plaid uniforms and maroon sweaters stood close to Dulce, singing "Padre Nuestro" from song sheets. They looked at her the same way, perhaps, Dulce once looked at the sisters at her school in Mexico. But they are almost sure to outgrow the yearning to become a nun. Soon, if they speak of Dulce at all, they are likely to wonder how she could give up kissing and baby clothes and a home of her own. They don't see what Dulce does: the wholeness to the sisters' lives, how their spirituality and day-to-day work flow into one. Dulce knows what people think, that joining the convent promises a sparse, lonely life.

But for her, it is the only way to a complete one.

The wheels of the casket's metal trestle clack on the stone walkway as it passes the olive trees, the royal palms, the statuary depicting the Stations of the Cross. At the cemetery's entrance, beyond the 5-foot-high hedgerow, stands a monument to Mother Pia, who founded the congregation when she was 24 years old. The sisters continue past the rows of small headstones, each bearing a name, the dates of birth and death, and, simply, "RIP."

Gathered around Sister Mercia's open grave, the sisters mourn her passing but also celebrate her new life with God. With every death, their faith tells them, comes resurrection.

"Our Sister Mercia has gone to her rest in the peace of Christ," the sisters pray. "May the Lord now welcome her to the table of God's children in heaven."

It is still light when they walk from the cemetery to the dining hall for dinner. The long tables are fuller than usual, accommodating the sisters who have come in for the funeral. The chatter grows as the sisters set down their trays and chat about Sister Florence's tai chi classes at DeAnza Community College, Sister Mary Paul's Scrabble games in Latin, Sister Soledad's work with immigrant laborers in the back barns of Santa Anita Racetrack.

One group is laughing at the memory of Sister Mercia's driving -- how, in her 90s, she mapped out routes that required only right turns. Another group is inviting everyone to one of the residence halls to celebrate a sister's 83rd birthday. There might be root beer floats.

If the cemetery were visible from the dining hall, the sisters would see the convent's groundskeepers rolling a rectangle of fresh green sod over the new grave. But the funeral and burial seem to have been left on the steps outside like a pair of heavy boots. Coffee and cake replace the dinner plates.

Suddenly a table of sisters erupts in applause. Sister Rebecca is standing before them, in the front of the dining hall, flinging a yo-yo through the air. She whirls it over her head in a perfectly executed 'Round the World. The edges of the yo-yo, flickering with tiny lights, reflect in the darkening front window. They look like shooting stars.

Out the door and past the covered breezeway that runs along the courtyard, the oldest sisters are finishing dessert in a separate dining room, inside the convent's convalescent wing. Sister Hosanna, her white crocheted blanket on her lap, makes her way in her wheelchair back to her room and her rosary. She passes through her door on which hangs a small sign, a daily reminder.

"Look at the simple things in life," it says. "God is there."