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Growing up in
the Carolina Smokies and attending Sacred Heart Academy for
my junior and senior years of high school, I flirted with a
succession of vocation possibilities. Maybe I'd be a doctor,
like one of my best grownup friends. As graduation
approached, I toyed with becoming a lawyer, like my cousin
Mary Reilly, who practiced in Independence, Missouri.
A novel idea
struck home as I started my senior year because Jackie
Field, who'd been in my small Latin III class though she was
a year ahead of me, appeared in chapel that fall as a
postulant of the Sisters of Mercy. We'd enjoyed each other's
company, but now I had only rare glimpses of her and no
conversations; what a change the summer had made! Jackie's
decision, along with her air of joyful peace, undoubtedly
impressed me, for one autumn night I sat straight up in bed
as the idea struck like a thunderbolt: I too could become,
would become a Sister. From that moment, I never wavered.
Acting on the
decision took time. Only after completing two years of
college did I apply for acceptance, first by a French
teaching community and later by Bismarck's Benedictines of
the Annunciation. Over the years, I have served as an
instructor, librarian, administrator and parish minister.
The last was best, for it combined the challenge of teaching
with the satisfaction of providing information others sought
rather than what I selected for them. In 1998-2000 I was
privileged to teach English at the College of the Marshall
Islands in the North Pacific and experienced community with
Maryknoll Missionaries.
I'd sum up my
many decades of monastic life in five words: God is good to
me.
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