Moira

it was on my mind off and on ever since high school when the Lord clearly asked me to give Him my life. At that time I had looked into the Sisters of Life all the while saying, “I will give you my life, Lord, but I really want a family, please make that your will for me!” That feeling of a call seemed to disappear after the Sisters told me I was too young and should contact them after a year or two of college. Here I was four years later sitting in the pews at Walburga’s observing the nuns and asking the Lord, rather halfheartedly, if He wanted me to consider that vocation again. My conclusion was decidedly in the negative. In fact, even considering the cloistered contemplative life made me feel stir-crazy and slightly claustrophobic. However, that visit was to have an unexpected and, at the time, unrelated impact on me.

Holy Thursday night there was adoration with the Lord in Gethsemane. We stayed till about mid-night with the sisters and the whole time I felt compelled to remain with Him but in a mysterious and uncommunicative way. I kept praying over and over, “Light me on fire with Your love.” I felt like my own ability to love in recent friendships and relationships was not only feeble but defective and broken. I was aware of a deep aching need for His heart to engulf mine. As we walked back I was moved to the most intense reflective prayer I have experienced; the image of Jesus being forced from Gethsemane to the house of Caiaphas was before my heart.

My classmate interrupted this prayer with different comments which I, with some petty annoyance, ignored. Suddenly she caught my attention when she mentioned a verse of a song which had been floating around her head during adoration. The line was, “light me on fire with Your love.” Surprised at the exact similitude to my own prayer, I wanted to hear whatever she would say next. In that moment I could feel the Lord’s presence like a spotlight which illuminates and transfixes, and as my classmate spoke, that feeling permeated her words. She said, “Jesus’s love consumes. It consumes like the whips with which He was scourged.” I felt the Lord asking me, as she spoke, if I realized this about His love, if I knew what I was asking for. And then He said in my heart, “Can you drink the chalice I am about to drink?”

The moments following that were ones of intense fear. I felt the presence of the enemy and was overwhelmed with the thought that if I drank the chalice I would be crucified with Him. That night before Good Friday was spent in fear. The profound feeling of His presence did not return in the last days of my visit, even though Easter was a joyful one. I returned to school and after a year and a half realized that the question that lay heavily on my heart was, “Why? Why must His love consume like whips? Why is the sign of true and Godly love, suffering?” I went on to write my senior thesis on the topic delving into this idea. The image of the crucified Christ with arms outstretched to all humanity, and particularly to me, imprinted on my heart in a new way. It was a fruitful journey full of insights and joys but most of all…more questions.

As a graduate a year later in the summer of 2024, I was on a private retreat at the abbey, and on the last day, one of the sisters off-handedly mentioned that young women were able to do a “live-in” of three months with the sisters. She briefly mentioned how beneficial it was for her and she would recommend it to anyone even if they didn’t necessarily see themselves as discerning. My first thought, I will admit, was, “that sounds like a terrible idea.” I had my dreams: becoming a paragliding pilot, traveling the world, working in New Zealand and Ireland, and most of all, ultimately having a large crazy family like my own some day. But over the course of a few weeks the idea grew on me and I decided a three month “retreat” was exactly what I needed before starting this new chapter of my life. Somehow I was under the impression that I could show up and live life with the nuns without being in danger of actually discerning.

By the time I arrived in January 2025 to start my live-in I was a little less delusional, after a preliminary week-long discernment. Although I wasn’t less freaked out; I was more open. Most importantly I was convinced that the Lord wanted me to do the three months and I was given the grace to say, “you lead, I follow.”

The first three weeks of my discernment were not so pretty, however. If you can imagine a small child gripping her favorite toy relentlessly and refusing to give it up, you’ll have an idea of what it was like. I fought the Lord, I begged with Him, I bargained with Him, I intentionally misinterpreted Him. I wanted a vocation to married life, a family, and the freedom to build my own dream. Cloistered contemplative life seemed pretty much the closest thing to the opposite of that.

But the Lord was working in my heart, thankfully for me He is a patient and persistent lover. As the weeks went by I was falling in love with a life of prayer, with the silence of contemplative daily living, and the undivided way the sisters were able to give it all to Him. As it says in Psalm 127, “If the Lord does not build the house, in vain do the builders labor.” I was beginning to relinquish my death grip on “my house.” Well that’s where the pedal hit the metal and before I knew it I was asking the Mother Abbess to join her Abbey. I realized that the Lord wasn’t going to ask me to do something I didn’t want to and then have me grit my teeth and “do His will.” He showed me that He knew my heart better than I did, and I know that He will continue to reveal it to me. Most remarkably I saw that the life He was calling me to was most definitely “drinking the chalice”, but this time instead of fear I was filled with hope, awe, and excitement. He had brought me back to the place where my journey with Him had deepened and was now asking me to dive in all the way.