7 GUERINCATHOLIC.ORG A vocation is always God’s initiative. Our part is to answer, but often we do not hear it. For me, hearing the call happened during my 40-minute commute while living in Boston. As much as I enjoyed listening to Brad Paisley and Willie Nelson, I came to a point in my life when I realized there really must be something more ennobling than these ridiculous songs. And so I turned off the radio and drove in silence. In that silence, week after week, I slowly became attuned to the movements of my own heart. And would you know that the God who gives us so much through grace has already given us great things in our very nature? It was my own heart that told me, echoing the sentiments of the psalmist: “Of you my heart has spoken, seek His face” (Psalm 27). I desired God above all else; I just needed silence to awaken the desire. John Paul the Great tells us that we must never decide our future for ourselves alone and that we are never alone in deciding our future. After being with the Nashville Dominicans for a year, I started to feel the real sacrifices of leaving behind my family and home, my own schedule and my own desires. My family had eagerly wanted me to marry, yet upon entering the convent they supported this way of loving. At a critical moment, the support I needed — the never-deciding-alone — came from my father. It was a simple question: “Did you enter the convent to have an easy life?” No. Not an easy life. I want a life of heroism and valor, self-sacrifice and joy, purpose and depth. Following Christ is not easy, but it is a great life, a high life, a deep life. My heart desires to see Christ’s face far more now than it did on my Boston commute. Our God is a good God — for this infinite desire is already being fulfilled with infinite love, simply by answering His call. Vocation … home … I think that for myself, the clarity of my specific vocation, or path, to Christian holiness came as a direct result of experiencing a sense of supernatural “home.” As human beings, our first experience of growing up in the home with our family is intended to teach us what it means to live in a communion of love with others amid the ups and downs of daily life. We learn the “place” in the world that the unconditional acceptance of others gives us, we experience the freedom of truly being ourselves, and we then give ourselves to others in love. When God calls us “further up and further in” to the specific life path of holiness, one clear marker of its authentic correspondence to our heart is that fundamental sense of “home.” We find this sense of supernatural “home” in the profound experience of God’s personal love and in our own self-gift of love to others along the pathway of our vocation. I was blessed to find that sense of supernatural “place” in which to make a joyful home with the Lord hidden in the chapel behind the gates of St. Cecilia’s in Nashville, Tennessee. For each of us, this sense of “place” in our life vocation is in itself only a small foretaste of the infinitely fulfilling home that God has made for us in His own heart for eternal life. SisterJosemariaPence, O.P. SisterGiannaJunker, O.P. Faculty Spotlight
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