“Final Vows,” a 2024 documentary directed by Victoria Westover, follows the cloistered Cistercian nuns of Santa Rita Abbey in Sonoita, Arizona.
Westover filmed the nuns over a period of four years. There is no voiceover, nor are the nuns identified by name. We imbibe the gentle rhythm of their day by seeing them in the chapel, in the kitchen, in the garden, walking the grounds.
Mother Vicky, nearing 75, was first elected in 2018, then reelected when her six-year term was up: “They’re gluttons for punishment,” she laughs.
As such, the buck stops with her. She is responsible for the sisters’ spiritual, physical, and temporal concerns. In her spare moments — in habit, veil, and parka against the chilly desert air — she calls to the resident deer who roam the hills and come and eat from her hand.
“The contemplative life is a way of being such that you seem to open out to the experience of God everywhere,” she observes. “It plunges you into an awareness that we’re all one, that everything and everyone is connected in love.”
The nuns follow the Rule of St. Benedict, laid down in the sixth century. They are vowed to continual conversion of life, stability, and obedience. The call is to grow, ever wider, ever deeper.
Slowly, we learn some of their names by seeing them interact with one another and describing their experiences.
One of the sisters plays the piano and sculpts simple figures of Jesus, Mary, and the Holy Family. Another, younger nun, comes from Kenya. At first, the desert repelled her, but she prayed hard, acceptance came, and she now does a joyful little dance beneath the trees.
Sister Sharon, wry, realistic, and also relatively young, is a postulant, still discerning her vocation with the community near the beginning of the film; fully committed by the end.
Sister Pam is both a black-and-white photographer and the abbey’s “cellarer.” She maintains the property, which might involve climbing high up in a bell tower, repairing windows, or taking one of the many prayer requests that come in over the phone.
You begin to realize that another reason Mother Vicky may have been reelected is that the pool of able-bodied candidates is so small. Many of the 10 or so nuns are elderly and have been at the abbey for decades. This is the life they chose, and they speak of it with reverence and love. There are trials and challenges, hard patches and even doubts, but everything passes.
The sisters make altar bread to earn money, sending the communion wafers to more than 360 customers throughout the country.
The decreasing numbers are a shadow hanging over the abbey. Another is the proposed Rosemont Mine, owned by Hudbay Minerals, which would mean open pit mining in the beautiful Santa Rita Mountains only five miles away. The operation would drain the aquifer, foul the remaining water, create noise pollution, and ruin the view. The nuns pray fervently for an injunction.
Still: Whatever happens, happens.
“I gave myself to God to use me in whatever way he wanted — for the good of the people,” says one sister, and you sense she could just as well be speaking for all of them.
I watched the film with particular interest because I have made private retreats over the years at Santa Rita. The abbey is worlds away from, say, our own St. Andrew’s in Valyermo, California, a Benedictine monastery where silence is encouraged but with their full program of guided retreats, marked with hospitality, liveliness, and conversation.
At Santa Rita, you’re left to your own devices — which, to my mind, is heaven. You’ll stay in a modest room overlooking the desert scrub and equipped with bed, desk, chair, and ample shelf space. There is no Wi-Fi. Cell reception is spotty.
Sonoita is 10 degrees cooler than Tucson or Phoenix. Retreatants stay in a low, mission-style building with rooms along a courtyard and the communal kitchen and library at one end. You can bring your own food if you like, or you can eat the basic provisions that fill the fridge and cupboards — peanut butter, eggs, bread, oatmeal, orange juice, apples, frozen lasagna.
Silence abounds: Last time I went, in May of last year, I was one of only three retreatants. Best of all, the guest quarters boast their own Blessed Sacrament chapel, open 24/7, with comfortable benches, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the desert, and the red candle burning by the tabernacle.
You can walk five minutes to the church and join the sisters for morning prayer, followed by Mass, and for vespers. Other than that, you won’t see or hear from them unless you ask to.
There’s plenty of room to roam with walking trails branching out in various directions. The landscape soothes rather than overwhelms, all the better for a contemplative experience. At night, the stars stand out in gleaming, startlingly visible clusters.
“Final Vows” is a quiet film, filled with meditative activity, that overlays a hard-as-rock core. To commit yourself to the Lord, to mold as he wills, is a call with the highest possible stakes.
It’s easy to mouth the platitude that prayer matters. But to believe it absolutely, to devote your life day in, day out, to prayer’s hidden, austere discipline is not for the faint of heart.
May the abbey receive many more vocations — or even one — from this worthy documentary.
As for Mother Vicky: “I wouldn’t walk the planet any other way.”
