Photos courtesy of Sister Celeste Cabral

Sister Celeste Cabral as a high school athlete, counter girl, flight attendant, and on the day of her first vows.

She is Benedictine Sister Celeste Mahealani Lucille Cabral. But call her Sister “CC.” Everyone else does.

On March 25, at the Benedictine Monastery in Waialua, wearing a haku lei and a pink floral Princess Kaiulani muumuu, Sister CC will profess her final vows, her permanent commitment to God to a life of poverty, chastity and obedience as a religious sister.

They don’t make nuns the way they used to.

Actually, they do. Sister CC has come through the traditional preparatory years of prayer, study and discernment. She has survived novitiate and temporary vows. She’s lived in the monastery community since 2000.

Nevertheless, she is a religious of the new millennium. She did not cross the convent threshold as the idealistic adolescent of a couple of generations ago. Nor are her vows a retreat from the wild, wild world.

She is joyfully embracing religious life at age 45, the product of a past filled with both turmoil and grace, happily anticipating God’s unfolding plan.

“I know in my heart God is preparing me for something mighty,” she said.

If Sister CC looks familiar it may be because she possesses that classic hapa-Hawaiian-Portuguese-haole local girl loveliness.

You may have seen her behind the camera and film counter at Kailua Longs, or serving coffee on a Continental Airlines flight, or as the woman on the Leavitt, Yamane and Solder commercial. She’s done all three.

Celeste was raised in Kailua, Oahu, with brothers Brian and Jeff, and sisters Jeannine, Michele and Kimberly.

An athlete from a family of athletes — her late father Walter Kaipo Cabral was the first Hawaiian to play on the University of Notre Dame football team, her brother Brian has a Superbowl ring — Celeste lettered in basketball, volleyball and softball at Kalaheo High School.

She enrolled at the University of Hawaii on a full basketball scholarship but was injured in her freshman year.

She spent much of her 20s working for Longs Drugs and as a Continental Airlines flight attendant.

An accident 13 years ago changed everything.

A car struck Celeste while she was walking on a Honolulu sidewalk in 1993, almost killing her. Injuries to her neck, back, knee and foot put her in traction for four and a half months.

She spent the next two years “paralyzed” by depression, fear and attacks of anxiety.

In May 1997, she made a Cursillo retreat where she was “convicted by the Holy Spirit in a powerful way.” It was the beginning of her road to recovery.

Two months later, at a Basic Christian Community retreat, she met the Benedictines. For the next two years, a relationship between her and the Waialua religious community developed as she spent more and more time with them.

By August of 1999, she realized God wanted her to join them. The Benedictines, by vote, agreed, but on the condition that she leave them for a few months.

“They told me to go back into the world to see if this was where God was really calling me,” she said.

She did. In the process, she got rid of all her material possessions, including a brand new fully-loaded Toyota 4-Runner.

On March 23, 2000, she was back, with her Bible, some spiritual books and her clothes.

The following September, she began her novitiate — a year of study, prayer and seclusion — in preparation for her temporary vows which she professed on Sept 8, 2002.

She took the religious name Lucille, after her grandmother Lucille Wegner who died in 2001 at age 90. Her grandfather Joseph Wegner died four days after she made her vows.

If she has a dominant religious gene, it’s inherited from her mother’s side of the family where her uncle is a Franciscan priest and an aunt spent a year in the convent. It had been her Polish, South Bend, Ind., grandparents’ lifelong prayer that one of their grandchildren enter the religious life.

“They just never expected it to be me,” Sister CC said. “When I told them, they both cried.”

Sister CC said she is “getting excited” about the big event. She completed a private week-long retreat at the Sisters of St. Francis’ place in Manoa earlier this month.

And she expects a flood of family at the celebration.

Her mother Clarisse and sister Michelle Cabral-Thron — who bought her the Princess Kaiulani muumuu — are arriving from Naples, Fla.

Her sisters Jeannine Laboy of San Francisco and Kimberly Abraham of Seattle will fly in. Brother Jeff will make the drive from Kaneohe; however, work is preventing brother Brian from making the trip from Colorado.

Six of seven aunties and one uncle will make the trip from the mainland — Mary Jo Krisor, Jeanette Grohowski, Gretchen Mehall and Geri Oppenheim, and Franciscan Father Gene Wegner from South Bend, and Terry Halgren from Mesa, Ariz.

Because of limited space, attendance at the profession itself is by invitation only. But anyone can come to the reception afterward from 1:30 to 5:30 p.m. at St. Michael Church in Waialua.

Good friends are providing good music, good food and lovely decorations.

Sister CC likens her profession to a wedding; but it’s not a casual comparison.

“This is my wedding and my marriage and commitment to Jesus,” she said.

In addition to the three standard vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, she will make the two additional Benedictine vows of “stability” and “conversion of life.”

The vow of stability, she explained, means being solid in the choice that you made — “not being flaky or wishy-washy.”

Conversion of life is the promise to leave the old life for a new one of “living with the community in the Lord.”

Afterward, she will wear a gold Hawaiian wedding band with the name Jesus engraved on it in raised lettering.

She will be a permanent member of the Benedictine Monastery of Hawaii’s community of five sisters, three priests and one brother.

Some have wondered why she would give up the chance of a normal married life and a husband.

“I hear it quite a bit,” she said, and offered a remark by a friend in response.

“He said, ‘Sister, you have so much love and aloha to share that it’s awesome that you are not just with one person,’” she said.

“Not too many young local girls are giving their life to the Lord in this way,” Sister CC said.