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The divine signs came to me through all channels and mediums. Even the girl in the ill-fitting naughty nun costume on my doorstep Halloween weekend was a message. The fact that she was trick-or-treating with a shot glass necklace did nothing to curb the impact of this divine appeal.
This was just another of the many signs barraging me throughout my senior year of college. A gut-dropping confirmation of my greatest fear and my greatest certainty — God was going to make me be a nun.
The fact that I was currently a college student in a serious relationship, that I was, at best, a cafeteria Catholic, the fact that I had never even been to a convent — far from a hindrance to my vocation — were kindling for the greatest saint comeback story yet to be told. Mental illness is complicated like that.
After graduation, while my college roommates packed their cars indiscriminately for their future graduate schools and internships, I packed modestly: running sneakers, a few photos from my former life to cry over later, the clothes with the greatest fabric-to-body ratio. I hid a couple of CDs and candy bars in the bottom of my suitcase; there would be plenty of time to grow more ascetic later. I didn’t pack deodorant or shampoo.
“What does hygiene matter in a life of interminable celibacy?” I asked my parents on the 10-hour drive from Michigan to the convent.
They veered off the road to a Casey’s General Store, where they convinced me that even nuns needed these items. Tears fell as the teller rang up the deodorant, shampoo and Oke Doke popcorn. The reality of my impetuous move was finally settling in.
Anyone who has grown up with 12 years of Catholic school education may be familiar with the annual “vocation awareness weeks,” where teachers carted around a token sister, priest or seminarian to various classrooms to give you the “I too never thought I would be a [blank] but then look at me now” talk. Their shock was always evident: “I mean, look how sexy I am,” they seemed to say.
The talks had a structure: 20 minutes were spent normalizing themselves to a couple dozen kids who were honestly still fixating on whether [blank] went commando under those “robes.”
“You know I played football, just like you guys,” they would say. “I shopped at the mall.” And then the talks would lead up to “the moment.”
“At that moment, I knew I wanted to be a priest,” they’d explain.
The “moment” is what sent a bomb exploding in my gut. Clearly, it didn’t quite matter whether one wanted to be a nun, it happened to you. Certainly “the moment” would come for me too.
The signs started appearing sometime during my senior year of college. A Mother Teresa biography in a little free library, ”The Sound of Music” playing on TV during Christmas, a billboard for a hospital run by the Sisters of St. Joseph — these were the marks of indisputable evidence that I would share with baffled friends and family.
I knew God’s arrangements couldn’t be escaped, just postponed. So as my inbox filled with messages of “thanks, but no” from the myriad writing jobs and internships I applied for in the spring before graduation, I got the message.
It wasn’t because I was an English and philosophy major seeking work on the heels of the Great Recession as the newspaper industry was floundering — no, I knew deep down in my gut that it was because I was reserved for another calling.
I finally got a response in my job search from a small Catholic newspaper in Kansas City, Missouri. They were intrigued when I offered to work for free and were eager to have the fresh perspective of someone younger than a septuagenarian. My less-than-no-money dilemma would present a problem for lodging, however, so the editor-in-chief suggested I contact the Sisters of Charity there, who were dear friends of his.
That was the final sign, the one that knocked the walls down. My attempts at normalcy, at escaping my path, all led to this moment and I couldn’t stand the mental anguish of trying to run anymore. If God held the cards at the end of the day anyway, then I might as well suck it up and get this over with.
I contacted the Sisters of Charity in Kansas City and told them I wanted to discern religious life with them, meaning determine whether theirs was the order that I would eventually join. I was willing to forgo the internship, but, as a working order, they were thrilled to hear I already had a job lined up.
I was perfectly aware I had mental health issues. As a kid, I had bouts of obsessive thinking that would flare up throughout the years: a period where I was terrified of my brothers getting abducted by kidnappers, a period where I feared the death of my family.
But it was my sophomore year of college when I was raped that these issues were exacerbated. I denied the trauma for months before finally sharing with my parents. This begat weekly therapy, which begat a post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis, which begat antidepressants and an anti-anxiety drug.
But after a couple years of this, I deluded myself into thinking I had moved on from the experience, that I was post-post-traumatic stress disorder and that these “signs” I experienced were completely unrelated.
When my therapist tried to connect those dots for me, or when friends or family would gently tell me they didn’t think religious life was a good fit for me, I dismissed them to myself as the same detractors Jesus faced in his ministry.
I routinely dropped my meds without telling my therapist or parents, as I feared they were a secular world’s attempt to drone out holy noise. I forced myself to go on a five-day silent retreat and spent hours hiding in my room with panic attacks. Very few minutes passed without my mind consumed with impending doom.
The only way to escape the signs was to surrender. So I parted with my friends and their envious futures and moved in with the Sisters of Charity in Kansas City, armed with little more knowledge about religious life than what I could gather from Sister Act.
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