Sr. Mary Aquinas

When I was about eight years old I watched The Sound of Music four times in a row in one day.  Though my family points out that Maria ends up being called to marriage, I was smitten.  I would be a nun.  Growing up in New Orleans, I didn’t really know any Sisters, but I decided I wanted to be one.

I loved reading the lives of the saints, especially the early virgin martyrs, and I even sewed a habit for my Barbie dolls.  While my friends’ dolls were getting married and attending fancy parties, my veiled Sr. Catherine Barbie was living in a convent and taking in the abandoned.  It was amazing to see how my young Christian friends, who didn’t know what “Catholic” was, instinctively understood the spiritual maternity of my fictional character.  Their more glamorous Barbies would come to the convent when they were in trouble.

I had a desire to pray and to sacrifice at that young age, though I had little instruction.  I grew up going to Mass on Sundays with my parents and brother, and we both attended CCD, but that was the extent of our religious involvement.  As I grew older, I started to have other ideas about “what I would do when I grew up.”  At about age 12, a doctor warned me that if I were a nun, it would be like being in the Army.  “They’ll tell you where to go and what to do,” he cautioned.  This prospect was not attractive to my pre-teen self so I dropped the idea. I loved foreign languages in high school, and I thought it would be exciting and noble to serve our country as a spy. I actually had a teacher who had previously done some spy work, so I felt encouraged to head in that direction.

I went to Yale University where I planned to major in Russian and Eastern European studies. Curiously, though I was dating, the fascination with religious life remained somewhere in the back of my mind. That summer I had a flash of insight that the Lord might be calling me to be a Sister.  Despite my anxiety, I managed to sign up to receive information from a staggering number of communities, but none attracted me.  Once on campus, I pushed aside those thoughts and settled down to my studies.  My freshman year marked the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.  There was not much of a pro-life response on campus, so some of the students from the Catholic Center and myself decided to form a pro-life group and started making plans for activities on campus.

In January of 2004, when I was a sophomore, I met the Sisters of Life for the first time during the March for Life in Washington, DC.  When I saw the Sisters, I was inexplicably drawn to speak with them.  I was attracted to the joy in their faces.  I now know that it was the Holy Spirit leading me, and somehow I signed up for a Come and See weekend for that spring.

After that weekend, I did not know if I would be a Sister, but I did know that God loved and created me for a great purpose and that I owed it to Him and to myself to pray and ask the Lord what that plan was.  During that retreat weekend, I had gone to my first good confession in a long time and was now ready to receive the graces that God had in store for me.  Over the next two years I visited the Sisters as I continued my studies and began meeting with a Spiritual Director.  I also started to grow more and more in the spiritual life – going to Mass almost every day, going to confession at least once a month, and making time for silent prayer and spiritual reading. Through these means, I tried to make room for the Lord to speak, or rather, to make silence, so I could hear Him.  He is always speaking.  He was gently calling even when I was 8 years old.

As my last semester came to an end, the Lord confirmed my call to the charism of life through a particularly bad ethics class I was taking.  In the midst of the confused things I was being taught, I heard Jesus inviting me to offer my life to Him in love, to Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  This call brought me great joy and hope which have only grown as I follow Him.