EVERETT — She shops at a regular grocery store.
Which somewhat shocked her players.
A nun pushing a cart down the aisle at Safeway? You mean there aren’t “Nun-Only” grocery stores?
Then Sister Miriam James Heidland’s players thought about it. And came to a not-so-startling conclusion. Which was, “Oh, duh, of course she shops at a normal grocery store,” said sophomore Savannah Fletcher. “She’s a normal person.”
Well, not exactly.
Most people don’t dedicate their life’s work to Christ. Or take vows of poverty. Or spend much time praying. Or wear clothes that clearly define who they are.
And just who is Sister Miriam James Heidland?
Well, when she stood before the student body at Archbishop Murphy High School on the first day of the fall term, she told them who she was. A party girl in college. A person who once aspired to be a “fabulously wealthy” business woman and live a “glamorous life.” She even flirted with the idea of becoming a TV sportscaster, but soured on that after serving an internship at a TV station. (“It’s such a cut-throat business,” she said recently. “It wasn’t my thing.”)
Ah yes, and she was also a volleyball player deemed good enough that the University of Nevada-Reno gave her a full scholarship when she came out of Woodland High School in southwest Washington.
On the day she spoke to the Archbishop Murphy students as Sister Miriam James Heidland, a soon-to-be 31-year-old nun who would be an assistant volleyball coach to head coach Jim Hardy, dead silence prevailed in the gymnasium. “You could have heard a pin drop,” she recalled.
Shock and awe?
Perhaps.
From party girl to nun? That’s enough to addle any teen’s mind.
“I was really worried she was going to be really strict and make us wear long Spandex and be a really uptight kind of person,” said Megan Carlson, one of the players on Sister Miriam’s junior varsity team. “She’s not like that at all.
“She’s really fun to be around. She does everything that everybody else does. The only difference is she wears an outfit and she works for God.”
And God’s work is pretty much full-time. She’s the head of a house where sisters in training live in the Ballard area of Seattle. She also teaches religion, music and physical education to middle school students. And at 2 p.m. every weekday that there’s not a game, she drives to Archbishop Murphy for volleyball practice until 5 p.m. On game days, her hours extend into the night.
She also does a Web site and writes a blog. “There’s always something that has to be done,” she said one afternoon before practice.
Judging from what one of her former coaches says, whatever that something is that has to be done, Sister Miriam does it well. “She could absolutely pick anything in the world to do and be a success at it,” said UNLV volleyball coach Devin Scruggs, who coached this player who was then known as Sharon Heidland.
Scruggs described Heidland as smart, funny, quick-witted, and outgoing. All the makings for a radio personality (indeed, she did a gig as an overnight disk jockey in Reno). But a member of the clergy? “We had other girls in our program I would have seen becoming nuns before Sharon,” Scruggs said.
Scruggs coached Heidland for only one year “but even in that short time, she became one of my favorite players.”
“I’m still trying to get her back here for an alumni game,” the coach said. “And I’d pay for her plane ticket.”
Sit and talk with Sister Miriam for a spell and you find out that she is all of the things Scruggs says she is: smart, funny, quick-witted, outgoing.
And more.
She is honest. Willing to bare her soul. Warts and all.
Of her former life, she says, “I’ve lived a life of darkness. I’ve lived a life that the world says will make you happy and it made me miserable. My eighth graders in religion will ask me things. Everyone has to find out for themselves and I say, ‘Take my word for it. I’ve lived that life. I’ve lived it and I live on the other side now and I can tell you there are days when I wake up and I’m so thankful I don’t live the life I used to anymore.’”
Of her current life, she says, “My heart feels healed.”
Looking back on her college days, she had it all. She had the athletic scholarship. She had the football-player boyfriend. She had the grades. She had the parties. She had the freedom to do whatever she wanted. She was 800 miles from home and the parents who had pushed her to go to church.
“But when I got to college, I was like, finally, ‘Ha-ha, you can’t make me (attend mass) anymore.’”
Yes, she had it all. Or so it seemed.
It was spring, her freshman year of college. She sat looking out a window. And thinking: “What is wrong with me?”
“And I felt at that moment … like God pierced my soul. I felt at that moment that the day I die … I’m going to be held accountable for my own decisions and I know that. But opinions of other people were too important for me to do what was right. I wanted to fit in and I wanted to be everything everyone wanted me to be. That was more important to me than really doing what I knew was right.
“That was very sobering for me, like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m not living the life that’s in the light or anything that’s really edifying. I didn’t have an instantaneous conversion but that moment led me to start asking myself, ‘What is the meaning of life?’”
She would find it in the church. She started attending mass. She read her Bible. Change was coming. Slowly. “It was an intense battle between one side of me and the other side of me and the life I was living and the one I wanted to live,” she said.
The battle was settled at a New Mexico mission she was invited by a priest to visit after graduation. She stayed there for three days and found the peace that had been missing in her life. She went home, packed her bags, and returned to New Mexico.
“It was shortly after that time that I really heard Jesus calling me in my heart and I realized … what I was really looking for is something I could only find in Christ.”
That happiness she had been searching for she found in the church. The church she once found “boring.”
Funny how life works, isn’t it?
Now it has brought her to Archbishop Murphy where on a recent game night Sister Miriam — dressed in habit, veil and clunky black shoes — warmed up the varsity with sizzling, left-handed, line-drive shots.
“Oh yeah,” the opposing coach, Jan McNelly of South Whidbey, remarked, “she’s played some volleyball.”
For the most part, her players address her as Sister Miriam. Once in awhile, you’ll hear “coach.”
“She has a real good presence here,” the head coach, Jim Hardy, said. “She’s very nice, very supportive, very encouraging. She’s asserting herself more and more as a coach. She expects a lot.”
And her players are delivering a lot. Through last week, the JV was unbeaten through six matches.
They also are learning that Sister Miriam is pretty cool.
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