Returning from a three-year blogging hiatus after rerouting.

Rerouting!

Previously when I wrote in this blog, I felt certain that I was called to the religious life and that I would enter a convent soon. After visiting several communities, I settled on one in Ohio and began repeatedly visiting. This was a community with both men and women, each living in different dormitories on the property. They spent more than half of the day gathered together in the chapel for prayer, a good amount of time gathered together for meals--often eating in silence or listening to spiritual readings, and a small amount of time each day completing chores. Twice per week, they would visit residents at local nursing homes. This was their main ministry.

They lived in a remote location and I felt very peaceful there. Sister Teresa was the community's superior at the time that I started visiting, although a new superior was selected by vote every two years. Sister Teresa was one of the founding members and had spent about ten years in the community by herself until other men and women decided to enter. When I first visited, there were four men and two women in the community.

I remember feeling really comfortable with the community members even during my first visit. Their prayer routine was so similar to mine that I was able to make the transition from my regular life into the convent life almost seamlessly. During one visit, one of the Sisters burnt her finger and the other Sister brought her to Urgent Care. I was the only woman but was able to lead the Sisters' section of the prayers on my own. Being there seemed natural. At the same time, I was anxious about the idea of entering the convent, worrying about my family, and wanting to make the right decision. I didn't feel the excited joy that some Sisters described feeling after deciding to enter. However, Sister Teresa said that peace was the most reliable indicator of making the right decision. She said that feelings of joy would come after. I believed her then and I still do. I remembered choosing a college and feeling at peace with the decision even though I was very nervous. Soon after entering college, I felt excitement and joy. I prayed with my spiritual director and decided that God must have called me to enter this community.

On my next visit, I talked with the superior about submitting an application to become a postulant in the community. She agreed that I seemed to be called to the community and they were willing to expedite my application. I felt nervous but at peace. However, things aren't always so simple. God has other ways to communicate His plans.

I had been helping some family members to work through some situations and I had thought that the situations were resolved, freeing me to enter the convent at any time. But it turned out that I had miscalculated and that the situation would probably not be resolved for at least another year. I promptly informed the superior that I would not be able to apply for at least another year but that I was still interested and would like to keep visiting. She was very accommodating.

Over the next few months, I started to wonder if God was not just testing my resolve. I began to think that He was actually rerouting me. I informed the superior that I wanted to visit a different community with a more active ministry to see if God was calling me in a different direction and that I would get back to her. Again, she was very accommodating.

And so I visited another fabulous community where each Sister had a full-time job in order to support their collective financial needs. Again, I felt comfortable with the Sisters from day one and was able to more-or-less seamlessly transition into their way of life. My first visit was lovely and they wanted me to come back soon. They tentatively planned that, if I were to enter, I could teach science at the Catholic high school. They invited me back a few months later to the clothing ceremony of their postulant who was becoming a novice. I was extremely excited to attend.

This community was in New Hampshire so I was flying into Logan Airport and then taking a bus to meet one of the Sisters. I ended up having to call her because my flight was delayed and I missed the bus and would be an hour late. I decided to spend the extra hour in prayer.

I had recently begun to believe that I would enter this community instead of the one in Ohio. I spent a lot of time imagining how I would teach my high school classes, standing in front of the class in my religious habit, and starting things off with a prayer. I started to feel excited about the unique spirituality of the community, which was more charismatic than any of the other groups I had visited.

In prayer, I brought this to God, asking if this community was the right place for me. To my shock and amazement, I suddenly felt to the core of my being that God was saying that I was not called to enter this community. In fact, I just knew that I was not called to the religious life at all. This is what St. Ignatius called the first mode of discernment. In this case, the individual simply knows what to do without any doubt and the realization comes quickly, almost like being struck by lightning, and that certainty never leaves them.

All at once, I was relieved, disappointed, and miffed. I was relieved that after spending three years visiting religious communities I finally felt certain of what to do about it--i.e., not enter the convent. However, I was disappointed because I had genuinely felt at peace in the lifestyle and didn't want to walk away from that. To some degree, I felt like I was starting all over again. I knew what not to do with my life. But I wasn't sure what I should do. Also, I felt like God's timing was pretty darn inconvenient. In two hours, Sister would be picking me up for a weekend visit. What was I supposed to tell them? How awkward!

Three years later, looking back on the situation, I think the answer was obvious. I simply should have told them what happened while I was praying at the airport. But at the time, I think I was self-conscious and a little embarrassed, feeling like I had gotten everything completely wrong by thinking that I was called to the convent. Because of that, I chickened out and told the Sisters that I still wasn't sure and needed to take some time off to pray.

I ended up having a very lovely visit, just like all of my other visits. It was such a blessing to be there for the clothing ceremony which was just as beautiful as a wedding and something that most people will never have the chance to attend. The Sister receiving her habit was so radiantly happy and, as I prayed for her, I hoped that I would experience that myself someday.

In the months following my last visit to the convents, I was able to integrate those three years with the rest of my life so far. Looking back, I believe that God was calling me to the convent for a period of discernment rather than for my whole life. I was not wrong in my discernment, but had over-interpreted and presumed that I would enter permanently. Nonetheless, the experiences I had with the Sisters were crucial to my spiritual growth and development and, even now, I often remember their examples, advice, and encouragement. Even in the midst of the chaos of secular life, I still try to live with a sense of monasticism and peace.

Since that day at Logan Airport, I have never lost the certainty that I am not meant to enter the convent. That said, I would often think back to the community in Ohio, the one that I had almost entered, and daydream about what it would be like and wonder how the members were doing. I felt like it would still be ok if I never found the right path for myself. I could always make visits to the community and help to support their calling. It was like a spiritual backup plan to console me when I felt afraid that I would never find my purpose. However, this would not continue for long.

About one year after the airport, I met and had a conversation with someone who had been a postulant at a monastery in Ohio--small world! I told him that I had been discerning with a community in Ohio and he said that he used to make retreats at their facility and is friends with the members--even smaller world! Then he shared some shocking and sad news. In the two years since my last visit, two of the members of the already small community had discerned that they were not called to permanent vows and went back to the secular life. This heavy blow, combined with growing financial struggles, caused the remaining members to make the heartbreaking decision to shut down. The members who had already made final vows had since relocated to other communities.

Now I not only felt certain that I am not called to the religious life but felt extremely grateful that God, having seen in advance that the community would not make it, had spared me the experience of leaving everything to join a community only to have it shut down one year later. This is one of the known risks of joining a small community but, nevertheless, I was happy not to have to be there for it.

I learned this news during one of my last conversations with this acquaintance and marveled at the fact that, in God's plan, we had crossed paths primarily so that I would have that information. I received this as a message from God that I ought to move on from thoughts of the religious life. Although that period is a beautiful part of my past, it is not my future. This also instilled in me a greater sense of urgency. If God was telling me to look forward, perhaps there was another path ready to explore.

Failure is an option and joy is worth fighting for.

Below is the transcript of the commencement speech that I gave last year at my cousin's high school graduation ceremony.

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Hello everyone! Of course the first thing I want to say is Congratulations to all of the graduates, all of your hard work has paid off! I'm so excited to be here with you and remember the days that I was here at PHS. Thank you, Class of 2018, for inviting me to come and talk with you, it's a really humbling experience. I wish I could tell you exactly what to do to have the perfect life, but I haven't quite figured that out yet. But, for the next 17ish minutes, I can share some of the things that I do know.

After I agreed to come and talk to you all I started thinking, wait a minute! What useful things do I have to say? So I started asking people for advice. My mom suggested that I watch Arnold Schwarzenegger's commencement speech on YouTube and just memorize that and recite it here tonight. Not terrible advice. Probably not legal but, it was a pretty good speech. Overall though, I thought it would be too awkward to tell you about all of the hours that I spent in the gym preparing for the Mister Universe competition. But I do like what the Terminator did in sharing some tips he learned during his journey. When it comes to achieving goals in life, I can't make that happen for you, but I can share some of the things that I've learned. And I encourage you to seek out this kind of advice from lots of people, not just me and Arnold… especially if you see someone who has been successful in doing the same type of thing that you want to do. Don't be shy, most people are surprisingly approachable when you're interested in something they know a lot about.

I work at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland where I'm a research scientist in the Heliophysics Division. Has anyone heard the word Heliophysics before? One? That's pretty good. I had never heard that word until I started working at NASA. Where I worked before we called it Space Physics. But basically it's the study of the Sun's effects on the Earth and the Sun's effects everywhere else in the solar system.

And I remember that NASA hadn't really been on my radar growing up. The first time I remember really noticing NASA was during my last year of high school, around the time when you all were born. In fact, I was visiting my naked baby cousin in the hospital on the day he was born. And don't judge!--you were all naked babies on the day you were born. I was in a waiting room with my family watching news coverage of the Mars Climate Orbiter (super exciting stuff). And they were talking about how there had been a miscalculation and the orbiter had gotten too close to Mars and burned up in the atmosphere. And my grandmother, whom some of you knew, had a little bit of a strange sense of humor and, in fairness to her, it was one of those situations where either you laugh or you cry because the satellite had been destroyed, but she started laughing uncontrollably for like, several minutes, which, of course, basically burned this event into my memory. I'll never forget that NASA failure. And NASA actually has an extremely high success rate. But sometimes the most inspiring stories are actually stories about successful failures. I think one of the most important lessons I've learned in my career is to learn from failures so that even those experiences which could be discouraging end up being stepping stones to future successes.

One of the most successful failures was NASA's Apollo 13 mission. Has anyone seen that movie? If not, you should watch it because the Apollo 13 mission was one of the most amazing moments in American history and I'm so glad they made a movie about it, long before any of you were born, so that we could all be inspired by it. The Apollo program is the program that sent Neil Armstrong to the moon. That was Apollo 11. Apollo 13 was a later mission that would also put astronauts onto the moon, except that it never made it there. An oxygen tank exploded two days after launch and put the astronauts in a crisis situation which could have killed them. It's called NASA's most successful failure because it took heroic efforts and a lot of good fortune to get the astronauts back safely. Jim Lovell, who was the commander of Apollo 13, called the mission "a great success in the ability of people to take an almost certain catastrophe and turn it into a successful recovery." It is such an awesome and inspiring movie, I highly recommend it.

My brother also gave me some advice. He thought I should spend 4 of my 17 minutes playing the Chewbacca Mom video--has anybody seen that? Well, for the few of you who haven't, it's this lady trying on a Chewbacca mask that was her birthday present to herself and she spends basically a full two minutes scream laughing and saying things like "I'm such a happy Chewbacca!" Now, I'm not going to play that clip for you, you've probably already seen it--it's in the Guinness Book of World Records in 2016 for more than 159 million views--and you can look it up later if you want to. But I really like that theme: I'm such a happy Chewbacca. Because isn't that what we all want? I can stand here and tell you all of the things that you need to do if you want to get a job at NASA some day and maybe that would be useful for some of you. But I'm sure that you're not all planning on ending up at NASA, nor should you. We all have different gifts and talents. But one thing that we all have in common is that we want to live a happy fulfilled life.

Candace Payne, the woman from the Chewbacca mom video, has a book out now called Defiant Joy*, which I'm not plugging because I haven't even read it, but I really like that term, defiant joy. Because joy isn't something that just happens to us if we have the right job and the right family and everything is working out well for us. I'm sure you've seen the news lately about famous people who have taken their lives. They seem like they're living a dream life but they're not happy. Happiness is something internal and not necessarily dependent on external circumstances. Some people seem to have everything they could need to be happy but they still don't feel happy. And there are a small number of people who are still happy even in the most horrible circumstances. That doesn't mean they don't want their situation to improve. It just means that they are able to maintain that interior happiness even when everything is a mess around them. And that's good news for us! It means that no matter what is going on in my life, no matter how difficult my situation is, it is possible to achieve happiness right now. It doesn't have to be something that's always on the horizon, that's always about to happen but never actually does.

Etty Hillesum was a young Jewish woman living in the Netherlands during WWII. She was eventually imprisoned and died in 1943 at Auschwitz concentration camp. During this time of intense persecution she kept a journal where she talks about interior peace and happiness and how it can be maintained even under the worst circumstances, but that it needs to be fought for. I'd like to read you a passage from her journal. She wrote:

This morning I cycled along the Station Quay enjoying the broad sweep of the sky at the edge of the city, breathing in the fresh, unrationed air. And everywhere signs barring Jews from the paths and the open country. But above the one narrow path still left to us stretches the sky, intact.

They can’t do anything to us, they really can’t. They can harass us, they can rob us of our material goods, of our freedom of movement, but we ourselves forfeit our greatest assets by our misguided compliance. By our feelings of being persecuted, humiliated, oppressed. By our own hatred. By our swagger, which hides our fear.

We may of course be sad and depressed by what has been done to us; that is only human and understandable. However, our greatest injury is one we inflict upon ourselves.

I find life beautiful, and I feel free. The sky within me is as wide as the one stretching above my head. I believe in God and I believe in man, and I say so without embarrassment.

Life is hard, but that is no bad thing. If one starts by taking one’s own importance seriously, the rest follows.

It is not morbid individualism to work on oneself. True peace will come only when every individual finds peace within himself; when we have all vanquished and transformed our hatred for our fellow human beings of whatever race—even into love one day, although perhaps that is asking too much.

It is, however, the only solution. I am a happy person and I hold life dear indeed, in this year of Our Lord 1942, the umpteenth year of the war.

Please remember: "It is not morbid individualism to work on oneself."

There's a really funny blog called Hyperbole and a Half by a woman named Allie Brosh who is pretty open about her struggles with depression. She says that personally she has never thought about ending her life but lots of times she feels like she doesn't want to live anymore. And she talks about when she first started sharing that with her family and friends. One of the things that really surprised her is that rather than her being comforted by them, she ended up being the one doing the comforting. Because they basically started freaking out. And I think this is because, unfortunately, people tend to think of mental and emotional health as either "I guess I'm ok" or "oh my gosh! something is horribly horribly wrong!!" without much in between. And this is the wrong attitude.

I was having some stomach pains recently whenever I ate and so I went to the doctor and she figured out that I needed to start taking a supplement that would help me digest my food properly. Since then, I haven't felt perfect but the situation has gotten a lot better. And nobody freaked out about it. In fact, my family and friends all agreed that it was obvious that I should go to a doctor and see about getting myself treated so that I could feel better. Thankfully, people are starting to develop this attitude toward mental and emotional health. If your car isn't running smoothly then you bring it to the mechanic. If you break your arm then you go to the hospital. My advice to you is that if you think something might not be right with your mental and emotional health, in that case too, you go to someone who could help fix it. Sometimes this means going to a professional, like a therapist, other times you might be helped by talking with an older adult that you know and trust. And don't feel like once you've confided in one person then you're stuck with them. Several of my coworkers regularly meet with a therapist and some of them have met with several different people before settling on someone they felt really comfortable with.

So if it seems like something isn't quite right with your interior state, see about getting helped with that and don't worry about what other people say or think. It's just the smart thing to do. And this is part of defiant joy, right? We need to be a little bit stubborn here and refuse to settle for "ok". We don't want to just be getting by in life. We want to have joy in our life. And it's something worth fighting for.

When it comes to caring for our physical health, it doesn't stop at fixing whatever is wrong with my body. To have the best physical health, I need to eat well and exercise and make it a priority to actually increase my overall level of health. And I would say that, just like we more-or-less know how to eat well and exercise, we all know a lot of things that we can and should do to foster emotional health. Just like with exercise, I need to come up with a routine that works for me, I need to be consistent with it, and sometimes I need to mix things up a little bit so that my routine is still effective. I can't come up with a routine for you but I'm hoping to get you thinking about it--what am I going to do to promote my emotional happiness and fight for joy in my life?

We know some of the things that destroy peace and joy in our lives and we need less of those. Sometimes we have to withdraw a little bit from friends who create drama for us and situations that are continually stressing us out. We also need to avoid substances and behaviors that cause unhealthy stress to our bodies. We also know a lot of things that we can do to promote emotional wellbeing.

Some of the things that we can do are actually so well known that they have become cliche. For example, it really does help to have an attitude of gratitude. But it's something that needs to be practiced regularly. Studies in Japan show that simply having someone sit in an empty room each day and list things that they are genuinely thankful for, one after another, as many as they can think of for 15 minutes or so, dramatically increases the person's joy and peace. This has become an extremely successful type of therapy in Japan and even here in the West some people are keeping gratitude journals.

Journaling in general is well known to help people emotionally. There is something about putting our feelings down on paper that can be even more powerful than talking about them.

Mindfulness meditation is another thing that is growing in popularity. Sometimes we get so busy, we're rushing around all the time and we don't notice beauty around us. Or we're eating our favorite kind of food but we don't even notice what it tastes like because we're scarfing it down in order to move on to the next thing we have to do. Just taking a regular period of time each day to slow WAY down and notice little details, especially going out in nature and really looking at what is around me and noticing the smells and the sounds--this is another way to increase peace and joy.

I even read an article recently that said that cuteness affects our brain in a way that not only makes us happier in the moment but can have a lasting effect. The article says "cuteness may be one of the strongest forces that shapes our behavior – potentially making us more compassionate." Studies have shown that when we see something cute, it causes fast brain activity in regions that are linked to emotion and pleasure. So literally, watching a couple of baby animal videos in the middle of a stressful day can improve our emotional state. And of course there are tons of other things you can do to bring joy and peace into your life and I'm sure you can find things that work for you, but remember, we have to make it a priority and we have to be consistent.

All of this boils down to a process of feeding our hope and feeding our joy. The darker the world seems around us, the more effort we have to put in to feeding our joy. And it's worth fighting for.

So I want to leave you with these two messages. Number 1: Don't be afraid of failure. See it as an opportunity to learn and as a stepping stone to future success. Number 2: Take your emotional health seriously. Strive for happiness now and don't settle for anything less. In short, be a happy Chewbacca. So good luck with the next step of your amazing journey and thank you again for having me here.

*Note that Defiant Joy by Candace Payne is an interactive Bible study program rather than a book.

7QT: Waterfalls, monasticism and coffee with Jesus.

Now here's an eclectic mix of quick takes!

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Last weekend mom and I went to Great Falls (Maryland side), which is a collection of rapids and waterfalls on the border of VA and MD. The water level was low but the falls were still pretty impressive. Lately we've been having some balmy early spring type weather, we even saw some trees with buds.

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I mentioned before that I'm reading the book In Sinu Jesu: When Heart Speaks to Heart. For those of us who are trying to spend more time in prayer during Lent I thought I would share this bit of encouragement from Jesus to the author:

Your fatigue and your distractions in adoration are no impediment to My action in the depths of your soul. I have assured you of this before. Come before Me and remain before Me even when you feel that your adoration is no more than a struggle and a failure to remain attentive in love and focused on My Eucharistic Face. Here, your feelings are of no importance. What matters in My sight is your humility and your willingness to endure distractions, fatigue, and even sleepiness while adoring Me from the heart of your heart. Know that even when you feel that your adoration has been a waste of time, in My plan it is something fruitful and it is very pleasing to Me. I do not see things as you see them nor do I measure their value as you measure it.

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Recently I came across a post entitled When I prayed for vocations, I didn’t mean God could have MY daughter! where a father shares his initial struggle to accept his daughter's religious vocation with the Passionists, a fully cloistered community (i.e. they never leave the convent). Through his experience he learned to:

Pray for courage and love and generosity. You will need all of it. As our parish priest reminded us, we’re not giving up a daughter; we’re learning to hold her in a new way.

He also wrote a follow up article entitled So, your loved one has become a religious… now what? about the many blessing that have come through her vocation.

So often the witness of the saints tells us that what initially seems like a burden will, through age, and grace, and wisdom, become a most valuable gift. A loved one’s calling to the consecrated life can seem like that; there is pain of separation, but in fairly short order the gift becomes apparent, and then the privilege, which is paradoxically humbling.

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Here is another great article entitled I quivered in fear of the God who was going to “make me” a nun about a poor girl who had convinced herself that God would make her become a nun against her will. Spoiler alert: she eventually learned that God never makes someone become a nun.

Upon graduating from college I took my “discernment” to the next level, moving into a convent with religious sisters, motivated entirely by my “I might as well get this over with” attitude. I remember the mystified expression of the sister who first welcomed me into their home and heard me explain, “Well God is making me be a nun so I figured I might as well bite the bullet.”

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This article called How Monasticism Testifies to God’s Reality explains some of the ways that the religious cloister implies the existence of God.

I begin with a very simple proposition: man inherently desires pleasure. If this is correct, then the fact that so many men and women have throughout the centuries spent their cloistered lives shunning earthly pleasures points, in itself, to the reality of a superior, otherworldly pleasure capable of satisfying this intrinsic desire. “To be a monk,” wrote St. John of the Ladder, “is to know ecstasy without end.” The institution of monasticism would not likely last very long otherwise.

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Lesson learned from interacting with other scientists: Never fear social awkwardness. It is better to have an awkward conversation that conveys awkward love than to hang back and risk implying a lack of love. I heard a priest once say at the Shrine of St. Anthony, "your love might be awkward at first but keep loving and over time it will become more natural." Everything takes practice, I guess!

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Today I discovered the comic strip Coffee with Jesus by RadioFreeBabylon. Admittedly, I don't know anything about the group, but the comic is pretty awesome.

For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain't the Lyceum!

The role of signs in discernment.

I don't have a GPS, and in some places it won't work anyway, so I always print driving directions when I'm going to a new place. Unfortunately, sometimes the directions refer to a road that doesn't exist anymore or a road that is closed and I have to take a different route. Then I get lost and need to call someone for directions. When this happened in Montreal on my way to a science conference, Allison was gracious enough to search a map to figure out where I was and guide me to the hotel.

I don't know if everyone has had the experience of driving while someone tries to explain directions by cell phone, but it usually goes something like this: "Do you see a 7 Eleven up ahead? Drive to the 7 Eleven. If you pass the cow made out of hay bales then you're going in the right direction." Am I suppose to stop at the hay bales? No, they're just a sign that I'm going in the right direction. Am I suppose to stop at the 7 Eleven? No, it's just the farthest landmark that I am able to see from here.

This seems to be how God encourages me in the spiritual life, but I tend to over-interpret and think "He must want me to stop at the hay bales!" or "I made it to the 7 Eleven, I should apply for a job and work here for the rest of my life!" This is because I'm impatient to reach the destination, wanting to skip over that journeying part. Instead of asking "Are we there yet?", I impulsively assume that we must be there. This has been especially obvious during my discernment process.

For example, as soon as I started discerning with the Sisters of Life, they started showing up everywhere! When I went to the Defending the Faith conference in Steubenville, Scott Hahn mentioned that Cardinal O'Connor (their founder) had once visited their memorial to the unborn. Then, all of a sudden, one of the volunteers at our prison ministry brought in a newspaper article about this fantastic group of Sisters, which happened to be the Sisters of Life. And just a little while later, I was volunteering at the Missionaries of Charity with a friend who was asking about my discernment. A nice couple had shown up earlier wondering if the Sisters needed help with anything. They overheard our conversation and the wife said to me, "I saw you come in and thought, she looks like a Sister of Life." And she told me that her and her husband used to live in Stamford CT near the Sisters of Life retreat house before moving to Baltimore a couple of years ago. That's one heck of a coincidence! All of this made me think, "Wow God, you must be calling me to enter this community!" Then I finally visited the Sisters of Life and loved so many things about their community. But if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then something wasn't quite right. It didn't seem like the right flavor for me.

So then I was very confused. I've listened to so many vocation stories that sound just like this. God calls and then provides a bunch of confirmations and it ends happily ever after. If this wasn't the right community for me, then why did God provide all those confirmations? But as Ravi Zacharias points out in his book The Grand Weaver, a calling can only been seen clearly in retrospect. I was blessed in so many ways through my visits to the Sisters of Life and I'm sure that God wanted to encourage me to continue along that path until it was time to turn off, and not a moment sooner. Lots of times, the final destination is not clear until you've already gotten there.

Similarly, once I started discerning with the Daughters of Mary of Nazareth, it seemed certain that this community must be for me. It seemed like God had been preparing me for this all along. By some strange coincidence, most of the Daughters daily prayers matched my daily prayers for the LMCs, including the prayer of abandonment by Bl. Charles de Foucauld. Their charism is to mirror the Holy Family of Nazareth, which is essentially the same as the LMC charism. In fact, the LMC movement was originally called the Nazareth Family Movement. But I was especially amazed to find out that the foundress of the community had traveled to St. Joseph's Oratory to ask Sts. Joseph and Andre to intercede for the community just prior to its foundation. She had promised to bring the Sisters on pilgrimage to the Oratory at the time of their profession. Meanwhile, it just so happened that I had been at St. Joseph's Oratory, praying in front of the incorrupt heart of Brother Andre and asking for God's direction for my life, just three weeks before hearing God's call during my silent retreat. This would be the perfect vocation story! Surely I had found the right place. And yet after visiting, I wasn't quite sure anymore. It seemed like God wanted me to keep seeking.

Looking back, it was such a wonderful gift to discern with these communities, and I'm so grateful that the Lord allowed me to rest with them along the way. In the meantime, I have learned not to rely on signs and wonders in my discernment, as though I can just read the tea leaves and know the answer. I really do have to try to follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit, abandon myself and see where I end up. In the short term, these signs can encourage me that I am following the right path without necessarily indicating where I will end up. When I do end up in the right place, I will be able to look back and see more clearly how each landmark guided me to the final destination.

Discerning God's Call: Part 6

After hearing God's call during my silent retreat, it was a growing love for sitting in silence with God that led me to consider primarily contemplative communities. At the time, I didn't know about many religious communities so I started surfing the internet. I must have read about hundreds of communities from cloistered contemplatives to active communities. I needed to narrow down the options somehow, so I just picked the communities that seemed the most attractive to me and trusted the Holy Spirit to guide. With every community I contacted the Lord blessed me tremendously! One of the great gifts of this process is that once you've contacted a community they will start praying for you.

Both in the time leading up to and the month following my first come-and-see retreat (with the Sisters of Life), I received dramatic inner healing and spiritual growth. God also used the Sisters to bring about my total consecration to Jesus through Mary, something the Lord had recently begun asking me to do. I even saw growth in my family relations, resulting in deeper spiritual conversations following my time with the second community (Children of Mary). On my third trip (to the Daughters of Mary of Nazareth), I felt even more convicted of God's call after talking with a Sister who left a career in aerospace engineering to pursue her vocation. However, when it comes to entering a particular community, Blessed Mother Teresa of Kolkata said: "We must love all religious orders but we must fall in love with our own." After meeting with these communities I felt as though I loved them all, but had no greater attraction to one than another.

I knew from the discernment experience of a friend that I would have to rely more on the guidance of the Holy Spirit than on my own reason. This friend had been certain that she was called to the Missionaries of Charity. After getting as far as submitting an application and beginning her preparation for entrance into their community, her application was declined due to concerns about her condition of prosopagnosia (face blindness) which was seen as an obstacle to the MC ministries. But several months later she announced that she had been accepted into a fully cloistered Benedictine convent and, although she had been excited about an MC vocation, she was now beaming with supernatural joy. She thought she was called to the MCs, but God knew her better. ("For the Lord sees not as man sees [,,,] but the Lord looks on the heart." 1 Sam 16:7)

I would say that my discernment has looked less like a process of human reasoning than a step forward in the dark followed by a pause to consider whether I should take another tentative step in the same direction or return and start along a new trajectory (perhaps later to change my mind and return to the initial trajectory!). Sometimes the Holy Spirit gives no additional information and leaves me to my own devices. I then make a decision based on what is hopefully spiritual intuition, and maybe a little bit of human reason. Other times the Holy Spirit reveals things about me and the discernment process that make the path a little bit clearer. Of course, the Holy Spirit also leads through external circumstances by closing some doors and opening others. Ultimately this has been a process of getting to know myself better and growing in discernment of spirits.

7QT: Ideas for Lent

Time to prepare for Lent, Ash Wednesday is in four days! Here are seven good resources. Here's hoping everyone has a happy and transformative Lent!

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OsBk8Xe5Wo

I'm always looking for ways to force myself to exercise. It has been a huge failure lately. But Lent starts on Wednesday and I'm going to commit to 20 minutes of cardio at least 3 times a week. Mom and I have a great new apartment in a complex that has a pretty nice gym for cardio and strength training. Unfortunately, I don't ever go there. In an effort to remove any remaining excuses I have for not exercising regularly, I'm considering trying running in place. Supposedly this is pretty much as beneficial as running outside or on a treadmill, and costs a whole lot less than a home gym.

--- 2 ---

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud_a7CzG_JI

Live the Fast is a great resource for Lent. Their fasting breads are nutrient dense and taste pretty good and the bread is fermented so it can survive shipping. Supposedly, the main reason that I can't live off of water and crusts of bread like St. Philip Neri did for most of his adult life is that the bread was a lot more nutritious back in his day. (Well... I'm not sure Live the Fast would recommend fasting on their bread every day, but it is a great apostolate.) The Live the Fast multigrain rolls need to bake for six minutes so, in the morning of a fasting day, I would bake all of the bread I needed for the day and bring it to work with me. That said, I'm probably going to start buying bread locally because it's hard to fit a bag of 36 rolls in my freezer.

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I've come across some great reading for Lent. I LOVE the book What Jesus Saw from the Cross, by Fr. Sertillanges, which talks about Jesus' interactions with all of the different groups of people present during his crucifixion. But I usually just skim through the first chapter which is a description of what he actually would have seen in terms of architectural structures and natural landmarks. Maybe I'm not good with spatial reasoning or I'm too unimaginative but it reminded me of reading the blueprints for the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament. Anyway, the book has endorsements from Fr. Benedict Groeschel, Cardinal O'Connor and St. Teresa of Kolkata, so you know the rest has to be good!

 

Regarding Judas' inability to repent and accept God's forgiveness:

"From the Cross, since here all is forgiveness and redemptive suffering, Jesus does not curse the disciple who has gone astray. He has no anger in His heart; but He leaves him 'in his own place,' according to those terrible words of the Acts [Acts 1:25], for he had made his choice between that place and Calvary. [...] With sorrowful majesty He withdraws His gaze from one who fled Him with an everlasting flight. He has no glance for the 'son of perdition'." In other words, God doesn't send souls to hell, they choose it.

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The book Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week always knocks my socks off. It is packed full of amazing insights and I always wish I had a photographic memory so I could retain more. Because I don't, I could probably read this book 100 times and still learn something new every time. Pope Benedict XVI presents Jesus' journey through the Passion to the Resurrection in simple and straightforward language that I think would be accessible to most people in small bits.

Regarding Jesus' large group of disciples:
"Jesus' followers are absent from the place of judgment, absent through fear. But they are also absent in the sense that they fail to step forward en masse. Their voice will make itself heard on the day of Pentecost in Peter's preaching, which cuts 'to the heart' the very people who had earlier supported Barabbas. In answer to the question 'Brethen, what shall we do?' they receive the answer: 'Repent'--renew and transform your thinking, your being. This is the summons which, in view of the Barabbas scene and its many recurrences throughout history, should tear open our hearts and change our lives." How often do we fail to defend Jesus out of fear even when our silence makes it seem like we agree with those who attack the faith?

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For my birthday, a friend gave me the book 33 Days to Merciful Love by Fr. Michael Gaitley. The book is a 33 day long, do-it-youself retreat to consecrate oneself to God's merciful love. I learned today that because March 19 is a Sunday, St Joseph's feast day is moved to March 20 which is the day to start the retreat in order for it to end on Divine Mercy Sunday. Isn't that cool? So I will be making this retreat in addition to re-reading Rediscover Jesus by Matthew Kelly, a practical yet challenging do-it-yourself retreat specifically for Lent.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak6G8kfIpTU

 

It's always good during Lent to get back to learning the Word of God. Sometimes I commit to listening to the Audio New Testament whenever I'm driving. One can also commit to learning a scripture song each day, for example, Sing Through the Bible, based on the One Year Bible. This year I'm thinking about listening to the audio version of The Bible in 90 Days by Zondervan, which I will obviously not finish by the end of Lent. But I've already started this method of memorizing scripture which essentially consists of reading the same passage each day for 50 days and then rote memorizing. The memorization part is suppose to go much faster and be retained much longer.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4e26ouzyIU 

 

And, of course, Stations of the Cross! Little Lamb Music recorded Liam Neeson reading St. Alphonsus Liguori's version, which is available on YouTube. Opus Bono Sacerdotii, one of my favorite charities, offers the Divine Mercy Stations of the Cross for the intentions of priests. Fr. Zulsdorf has recorded several versions that are available on his blog, including Cardinal Ratzinger, Bl. John Henry Newman and the Franciscan stations. I'm sure there are other fantastic versions out there so feel free to share! Or share your own ideas for a transformative Lent. :-)

For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain't the Lyceum!

Discerning God's Call: Part 5

Sr. Juana Teresa @ 7:35

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHD0Q2wH4xI

For a while I had a difficult time understanding exactly why I would not feel called to enter a teaching community. Finally I listened to Sr. Juana Teresa's vocation story about finding the Disciples of Our Lord Jesus Christ and something she said resonated with me. Essentially, if I'm teaching a math class then I can try to work in references to God by, for example, promising to pray for the students and maybe taking five minutes at the beginning of class to read from Pascal's theological texts, pointing out that he was both a Catholic and a Physicist. But for the most part I need to be talking about math and helping the students to learn it. The school, the parents and the students are entitled to that. They have a right to expect me to spend most of the time discussing math. If I were to spend significant amounts of time talking about other things, even God, then I would not be fulfilling the duties of my state in life. In fact, it is extremely important to have math teachers who are able to integrate their spiritual lives with their work lives and fulfill the duties of this state, for example, through the spirituality of Opus Dei (the Work of God).

The same is true of my current job as a research scientist. I can share with my coworkers my latest spiritual endeavors and offer to pray for their intentions, but my employer has a right to expect me to spend most of my time and mental power on problems of atmospheric composition, satellites and instrumentation, solar flares, etc. To spend significant amounts of time either actively sharing my faith or directing my thoughts toward God is not within the scope of the duties of my state in life. My employer provided me with a job description which I accepted and I am getting paid to deliver on that. Realizing this, I have tried to incorporate the teachings of St Josemaria Escriva and St Therese (The Little Way) into my work in order to spiritualize the secular tasks that are required by my state. This is a beautiful spirituality for those in secular life and I fully believe in the universal call to holiness, realizing that my job is in no way incompatible with the spiritual life. However, at times I feel a persistent, strong desire to pray continually and preach the gospel at all times which, as though the very walls around me are crying out.

That said, it is amazing how many opportunities the Lord has given me to share my faith, for example, explaining Papal Infallibility to senior scientists at lunch and debating religious liberty and conscience violation while riding with a coworker to a team meeting. It comes up quite often considering every conversation is brief and somewhat isolated. Sometimes I feel discouraged that most of our short conversations focus on trivialities, but I think this is a consequence of the environment. It is difficult to connect with people and be fully present to them amidst the frenetic activity. An emotional connection is so necessary in order to communicate at a deeper level. Of course I have tried, and I think this has born fruit in situations such as those mentioned above.

Recently I finished reading The Heavenly Man: The Remarkable True Story of Chinese Christian Brother Yun, about a Chinese Christian who has been imprisoned several times for the faith. I was struck by Yun's observation: "In a way, even though I was now free, I found it difficult to leave the prison. Inside, the spiritual fellowship with my fellow Christians had been very deep and sweet. The bonds we made were very strong. We served one another in love, and shared our whole lives with each other. In the outside world people are busy and have many things to do. Most of our relationships are little more than skin-deep." Often, the skin deep nature of relationships makes it difficult to share the faith.

But the difficulties of my present circumstances have little bearing on the course my life will take. As we know, we are all called to take up our cross and follow Jesus. In terms of vocational discernment, the only important question is: what is God calling me to do? If God desires for me to stay in my current job then I need to be abandoned to Divine Providence and accept that as my calling. I will pray and trust that the Lord will open my spiritual eyes to see Him present everywhere. However, I do believe that God enkindled in me a desire for Religious Life and spoke directly to my heart at Holy Cross Abbey. So for now, I'm continuing along this discernment path.

Discerning God's Call: Part 4

retreat house chapel at Holy Cross Abbey

I've been reading the book, In Sinu Jesu: When Heart Speaks to Heart. It's basically the spiritual journal of an anonymous Benedictine monk who, during Eucharistic adoration, was inspired to record certain messages from God. He writes:

"The vocabulary and the style are mine, but the substance of what I wrote came during prayer, without any effort or prior reflection on my part. There would be an inner movement to write, and I would write until the inspiration stopped. After writing, there would be a grace of quiet union with Our Lord or with Our Lady."

Once, on a silent retreat at the Trappists' Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville VA, I had a similar experience. It was the Vigil of the Feast of the Holy Trinity in 2015. After spending a good amount of time praying in front of the tabernacle in the austere chapel at the retreat house, I was relaxing in my room. Then, all of a sudden, I felt compelled to write. Words flowed onto the page followed by a deep sense of peace. After a short period of time had passed, I slowly read through the words I had written.

"I am the bridegroom and my spouse is the Church. Every member of the Church, my body, will be espoused to me in a chaste consummation of love. I love you. I have taken away your sins. You were washed clean in Baptism and set free to love me without shame. Do not be afraid to love me because of your past sins. In Heaven we will be espoused but my love is impatient, why must we hold back? Why must we wait to give ourselves, to abandon ourselves to each other? I am ready. I am the maiden in the Song of Songs waiting for you to come to me, to meet me in the chamber. You think that you are the one searching for me, but I am the one searching for you with my infinite, as yet unrequited, love. Receive my love and return what I have given you. Your wedding gift is the pearl of great price."

Praying and meditating on these words, it began to seem to me that the Lord was calling me to religious life and that I was hindered by feelings of inadequacy due to sins committed before my baptism. Within the next two days the Lord made it clear that such stains, which have been washed white as wool by the blood of the lamb, present no obstacle.

As Fr. William Doyle, SJ wrote in his fantastic document called Vocations: "Often that invitation is extended to those whom we would least expect. Magdalene, steeped to the lips in iniquity, became the spouse of the Immaculate; Matthew, surrounded by his ill-gotten gains; Saul, 'breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the Christians,' each heard that summons, for a sinful life in the past, St. Thomas teaches, is no impediment to a vocation."

"The first duty of the consecrated life is to make visible the marvels wrought by God in the frail humanity of those who are called. They bear witness to these marvels not so much in words as by the eloquent language of a transfigured life, capable of amazing the world." (Vita Consecrata)

Discerning God's Call: Part 3

Through my frequent spiritual reading I began to learn more about God's love and the path to contemplative union with God which, as St. John of the Cross and many others taught, is the end goal of every spiritual journey. It is the path to perfection. I began to spend a lot of time in acquired contemplation, practicing the necessary disposition for receiving God's gift of infused contemplation. I spent a lot of time in the desert, spiritually speaking. But occasionally God would bless me with a more intimate experience of his love.

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A Meditation on the Sacred Heart of Jesus

True love is love that causes us pain, that hurts, and yet brings us joy. That is why we must pray to God and ask Him to give us the courage to love.

--St. Teresa of Kolkata--

He came to live in me and suffer in my body. "See me. Recognize me. Know me. Burn with love for me." The kiss of Christ crucified is a sword through the heart. Yet honey itself is not sweeter. "When you burn with love for me, you will burn with love for all souls." O Holy Spirit, Fire of Love, immolate me as a burnt offering to our Heavenly Father!

Our Lord Jesus holds his Sacred Heart in his outstretched hand, offering it to me as he does every day in Holy Communion, that I may drink of the blood and water flowing from his Divine Heart. He comes to me in this way, that I may receive him physically in a chaste consummation of love. That I may be in him and he in me.

The widest land doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine with pulses that beat double. What I do and what I dream include Thee, as the wine must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue God for myself, He hears that name of Thine, and sees within my eyes the tears of two.

--Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, 6--

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The Lord greatly increased my desire for union with Him and I began to pray a prayer of abandonment shared by Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange in his book Three Ages of the Interior Life. "My God, make me know the obstacles which I more or less consciously place to the working of grace in my soul. Show these obstacles to me at the moment when I am about to place them. Give me the strength to remove them, and if I am negligent in doing so, do thou deign to remove them, though I should suffer greatly. I wish only thee, Lord, who alone art necessary. Grant that my life here on earth may be like eternal life begun."

Later I would be led by the writings of Fr. Sebastian, the founder of the Lay Missionaries of Charity, to a Post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation by Pope St. John Paul II called Vita Consecrata (Consecrated Life). There I read: "In the countenance of Jesus, the 'image of the invisible God' (Col 1:15) and the reflection of the Father's glory (cf. Heb 1:3), we glimpse the depths of an eternal and infinite love which is at the very root of our being. Those who let themselves be seized by this love cannot help abandoning everything to follow him (cf. Mk 1:16-20; 2:14; 10:21, 28). Like Saint Paul, they consider all else as loss 'because of the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ', by comparison with which they do not hesitate to count all things as 'refuse', in order that they 'may gain Christ' (Phil 3:8)." (Vita Consecrata)

The Lord has given me tastes of his Divine Love that have left me longing and thirsting for God, pining for Him like a dry, weary land without water (Psalm 63). I had lived joyfully and easily the gift of celibacy, and now I cannot conceive of any human relationship satisfying this longing for divine love. The Lord Jesus thirsts for each of us individually. Mother Teresa heard his words "I thirst" as an expression of his yearning for union with each one of us, a yearning symbolized in the Song of Songs. Pope Benedict XVI explained in the encyclical Deus Caritas Est that God's love for his people is both passionate and selfless. "God is the absolute and ultimate source of all being; but this universal principle of creation—the Logos, primordial reason—is at the same time a lover with all the passion of a true love. Eros is thus supremely ennobled, yet at the same time it is so purified as to become one with agape." Indeed, how could one help abandoning everything to follow him?

At this point, I still had not discerned a call to the Religious Life, but I believe that God was steadily preparing my heart.

"It is the Spirit who awakens the desire to respond fully; it is he who guides the growth of this desire, helping it to mature into a positive response and sustaining it as it is faithfully translated into action." (Vita Consecrata)

Musings on the Religious Life

Carmelite Nuns explain their vocation.

The vocation to Religious Life is truly a calling, a free gift of God, to enter into the inner circle of Jesus' companions. "Soon afterwards, he began going around from one city and village to another, proclaiming and preaching the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and sicknesses." (Luke 8:1-3) 

 

All Catholics are called to Holiness, but those in religious life (monks, nuns, friars, religious sisters) are called to a more literal following of the historical life of Christ. It is a call to live the Gospel: "The consecrated life truly constitutes a living memorial of Jesus' way of living and acting as the Incarnate Word in relation to the Father and in relation to the brethren." (VC)* All are called to live a certain poverty, chastity and obedience but the Religious is called to manifest the extreme poverty, chastity and obedience of Jesus. For example, the rich young man kept all the commandments, but when asked to relinquish all of his belongings and follow Jesus he went away sad. The vocation to religious life is essentially the same call.

The Desert Fathers (hermits) can be considered the first to enter religious life. Some say they did so because Christianity had gained greater acceptance and it was no longer likely that a person would suffer martyrdom in the literal sense. Therefore, they chose to leave the world and 'crucify' their own desires in order to die to self in a spiritual martyrdom. The religious life is a white martyrdom, through which the individual is emptied of self and filled with Christ. This can also be seen as the path of contemplative union with God.

St. Bernard and St. Thomas Aquinas referred to Religious Life as a second baptism. As in the first baptism we die to our previous life of sin, in professing perpetual vows we die to our life in the world. We are consecrated, or set apart, for the service of God. (This is one of the reasons why the Religious Sister receives a new name, because she has died to her previous life. It also indicates a new kind of relationship with God, like when Abram was renamed Abraham.) This requires a complete giving of self, a pouring out, that is modeled by Jesus' death on the cross and the outpouring of blood and water from his sacred side. "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." In this way, the religious life is a life of sacrifice for love of neighbor and, ultimately, for the salvation of souls.

*Post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Vita Consecrata (Consecrated Life) by Pope St. John Paul I

7QT: March for Life and more

In which mom and I get tricked again by the March for Life. We thought we had seen the whole March and it hadn't even officially started. Doh!

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Somehow I always have trouble finding the hundreds of thousands of people gathered for the March for Life. You would expect it to be easy! But I have a true gift for not finding things.

This year I went to the March for Life with mom and it was AWESOME as usual. It's like a great big Catholic family reunion, including some family friends like the Lutherans for Life and the Eastern Orthodox.

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It wasn't too cold this year but it was really windy. Mom and I walked about a quarter of the way and prayed part of the rosary with a group of seminarians. Mom paused for a while with a group of people who had been conceived by rape and were giving an interview. It turned out to be Rebecca Kiessling's group. She was featured in Mike Huckabee's documentary "The Gift of Life" and her story thoroughly convinced me that, even in cases of rape, abortion is not acceptable.

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And it turns out that a lot of fantastic people were conceived through rape:
http://tinseltownmom.com/10-celebrities-who-were-conceived-by-rape-or-bore-a-child-out-of-rape/

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 Time lapsed video of March for Life

Anyway, for a while mom and I stood on the steps of a building to watch everyone pass. After maybe 100,000 people passed by there was a huge break and we could see police cars in the distance. We figured it was over and almost went home. But after loitering for a while we could see the big March for Life banner and flags (at about 0:42 in the time lapsed video). We realized that we hadn't even seen the main part of the March! We were probably there for about an hour more, watching the rest of the people walk by. Then we joined some teenagers toward the back and finished the March to the Supreme Court building.

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I've mentioned the secular Pro-Life groups in the past but wanted to share an excerpt from a great blog post. Of course, I don't think that there is any compelling reason for abortion but I agree with the rest.

The act of abortion itself, if done without compelling reason, is unjust treatment of the unborn. In a society that condones injustice, everyone in the society is diminished – men and women. That act is particularly harmful to the woman. It treats a fundamental female function as a disease that has to be cured surgically in order for the woman to be more like a man. When pregnant women feel they must resort to abortion for the sake of career goals, pregnant women’s genuine contributions to society are deemed insufficient to win society’s rewards, without their first employing violence against the weak. Abortion pits the woman against her child in an unequal contest. Either she must willfully deny the humanity of her child—an increasingly difficult fiction to maintain in the era of modern technology—or consciously recognize that her child is human and alive just like her, and settle their conflicting interests through might makes right. Both possibilities place a psychological burden on the woman alone.

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On a brighter note, Andy came to visit me and mom at the end of January and we went up to Noxen PA to visit Grampa and Flo for a couple of days. He just got accepted to nursing school and we're all pretty excited about that. Back in Maryland, Andy and I tried the Fractured Prune but we were a little overwhelmed by all of the flavors, kind of like the make-your-own ice cream sundays we had as kids. We decided that the french toast (or was it pancake?), which sounded the most boring, was the best. I think it had maple glaze and cinnamon and sugar.

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FYI, I did make the french onion dip and it was fantastically awesome with our Terra's Taro chips. For my birthday, we made some more dip and had some friends over for pizza! We used zucchini flatbread for crust, nightshade free red sauce, vegan cheese and turkey pepperoni. For a birthday cake, mom made me a yummy chocolate microwave mug cake.

Dairy Free French Onion Dip -- sans bacon, sub dill for rosemary, see vegan mayonnaise recipe below
Homemade Vegan Mayonnaise -- sans mustard and sweetened with two drops of stevia
Paleo Zucchini Flatbread --  squeeze out as much water as possible
Microwave Mug Cake --  with Lilly's chocolate chips

For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain't the Lyceum!