The surprising gift of knowing my vocation
How I became the kind of person who wants to do the work to which she’s called.
During times of turbulence in politics, culture, and religious life, it’s tempting to hold tightly to current convictions. Allowing a change of one’s mind or heart can be difficult work. With this in mind, we have resumed a Century series published at intervals since 1939, in which we ask leading thinkers to reflect on their own struggles, disappointments, and hopes as they address the topic, “How my mind has changed.” This essay is the seventh in the new series.
It was a midsummer afternoon in 1982 when I was first introduced to the person I was called to become. I was ending a year of graduate study in Oxford with a farewell visit to Sister Mary Kathleen at Fairacres (formally known as the Convent of the Incarnation), who had spent the better part of that year teaching me how to pray, an activity I found less familiar and more taxing of my energy than theological study. “So what are you going to do?” she asked, looking toward my return to the States.
I was not expecting the question, since for months she had repeatedly instructed me to focus on the immediate, an instruction I found easy to obey. The protracted pain of a marriage that floundered and failed when I was in my twenties had excised the delusion that the most important elements of my future were under my control. But now Sister pressed me to think ahead: “It wasn’t time before, but now it’s time. What are you going to do with this education of yours?”
