At an early age I learned that My Aunt Anita has lived in a Monastery in Beech Grove Indiana since she was seventeen.  She’s seventy one now and has been a sister of the Order of St. Benedict for 54 years.

I stayed at the monastery for one month.  My goal was to eat, pray, and converse with the sisters in order to better understand their lives and to put context to what I had been brought up to believe.  I used photography as a means to start these dialogues with the sisters, and to share my experiences with others.

At the start of my stay there, I noticed that for the amount of people in the building it was the quietest place I had ever been.