24-year-old Zoe Stapleton an only child who grew up loving tennis and drawing recently joined a young community of Franciscan sisters in Ohio she’s not yet a sister but is on her way to join the 1% of nuns in the US who are under 30 less than 200 young women enter into a religious vocation each year in the US and not all will complete the almost 10year process to become a sister but for those who do they are giving up many trappings of Modern Life dating material wealth and sometimes even cell phones and fashionable clothes in exchange they lead an immersive religious life often an intergenerational communities like sister sarum who worked as a nurse before entering the sisters of the Holy Family at a time when the average age of an American nun is 80 I enjoy sitting with them talking with them easing their achs and pains so even as the overall number of religious sisters in the US declines a small group continues to take the ultimate leap into faith