Who are the most influential vocation promoters of today? YOU! That’s right, I mean you. Parents, teachers, catechists, mentors, and anyone who is in a position to encourage young people are our most treasured vocation promoters because you are in a position to mentor others and to help them see all the possibilities for their life. I would not be where I am today — educationally, spiritually, or vocationally — if it were not for the women and men in my life who expanded my horizons and helped me envision and imagine my life.

To help you help others, we pulled together the popular post How to Become a Catholic Nun into a printable format so that you can make this available to others and also to educate yourself on ways to encourage people in their attraction to religious life specifically or in their desire to discern how God is calling them. Though the post is about becoming a Catholic sister or nun, the message applies to becoming a Catholic brother or monk, and many of the suggestions are helpful for anyone discerning a calling. In the future we hope to create a similar post that is geared toward discerning a call in general.

Here is a link to How to Become a Catholic Nun PDF. (format PDF, 1.4 MB)

If there are other resources that we can provide you with, please let us know. If you are a “discerning individual” let us know the ways that mentors have encouraged you!

* * *

Join the A Nun’s Life community for prayer at 6 p.m. today (your time zone). All are welcome.

We are back after an extraordinary time home at our IHM Motherhouse in Monroe, Michigan. In the midst of congregational meetings, liturgy and prayer, and socializing (we did occasionally get sleep too!), Sister Maxine and I were podcasting live from the motherhouse! Each day we had sisters join us on the air with the finale being Saturday night with Special Podcast – IHM Sisters Unplugged! We invited four brave sisters to join us on the air for a live podcast and interaction with you our online audience. In addition, we invited sisters to be present as our very first live audience! We packed the place and were so delighted to share the experience with our nuns!

So it is fitting on this Monday to celebrate our nuns with some Nunday photos courtesy of Sister Joyce Durosko, IHM, our dear friend and ministry partner!

Sister Julie (left) explains to the live audience how podcasting live works while Sister Maxine (right) briefs Sisters Marge Polys and Susan Mahalik (Go Phillies!) on what they’ll be doing.

Just a few of the many nuns who came to be part of the live “convent studio” audience! Sisters Theresa Koernke and Anne Crane are in the audience and took part in the second part of the podcast. The warm setting is the community room of the IHM Sisters who live on second floor, A wing. We are grateful for their hospitality and encouragement!

Be sure to listen to the podcast. Here’s a recording:

We talked about life as Catholic sisters, ministry, how each sister discovered and responded to her vocation, prayer, nuns swimming, dealing with doubt in the spiritual life, anchorites and the eremitical life, IHM charism and mission, entering a religious community, and lots of other things!

Sister Maxine and I are back in our own convent studio and will join you tonight for prayer at 6 p.m. Central Time (your time zone).

And we’ll be back with more NUNDAY photos and stories coming soon!

November is a month that U.S. Americans traditionally express our gratitude through the celebration of Thanksgiving. This year is special because the month also honors Catholic sisters and nuns. For the past few months, people have been sending in letters to thankyousister.com expressing their gratitude and support of women religious. Now in the month of November, those letters are being published on the same website and also sent to various leaders in the Catholic Church.

Here’s part of one of the letters posted yesterday:

“Over the past seven years, I have had regular contact with Sisters of Mercy. Before I met them, I had never before met a Sister and I’d had almost no contact with Catholics. I’d had a lot of prejudices against Catholics, and I’d expected them to be mean, narrow, simple-minded, and incredibly rigid.

I was delighted to see all of the prejudices of my early years quickly dispelled by the Sisters of Mercy I’ve met and worked with over these many years. The women I have met have been genuinely warm, hospitable, intelligent, well-spoken, deeply religious and spiritual, and they live out the tenets of their faith in such a way that gives me great hope for Christianity. They do not ask what one’s faith is before they give healing or love; they offer their help to all who come to them, regardless of denomination or religion.”

It is a delight to read these letters and to celebrate the lives of so many women who have given their lives to the quest for God and to living the Gospel of Jesus. And it is inspiring to see how people have been transformed through their encounter with sisters — and how sisters have been transformed through their encounter with those whom they seek to serve!

Who (anyone, not just a sister!) has had a transformative influence in your life? What gift have they given you?

* * *

Join us this evening for Praying with the Sisters podcast — 6 p.m. Central Time (your time zone) at http://anunslife.org/live. We’ll pray with today’s readings from the Bible and take time for prayer requests.

Any remember, Friday is now dedicated to your questions about a nun’s life, prayer, ministry, and everything but the convent sink! Ask your questions through the week and we’ll respond to them during the Ask Sister podcast on Friday at 6 p.m. Central Time

We have a special edition of today’s Nun News Roundup podcast at http://anunslife.org/live. The whole show is devote to YOUR questions about nuns, God, faith, prayer, and religious life.

Visit ANunsLife.org/live
Today
12 p.m. Central Time / UTC-5

We’ve got a number of questions already, for example:

• What do Catholic nuns have to give up to become a nun, other then marriage or sex? Do nuns give up jewelry and music and many things like that?
• Is true forgiveness “unconditional”? Should our forgiveness of someone require the offender to be “worthy”?
• Why it is so hard to have enough courage to follow your heart?

We’ll take your questions and comments throughout today’s show. You can share them in the comment box below or join us for the live podcast today! It’s easy to listen to the podcast. Visit the link above for info. Don’t miss this show!

Post-show update: Here’s a recording of today’s podcast:

Listen to other Ask Sister podcasts.

This is the final in a series of three posts on Saint Teresa of Avila. The whole piece was originally published in VISION, the Catholic Religious Discernment Guide.

Read the first part My BFF is a 16th century nun, Teresa of Avila and the second part Teresa of Avila’s desire to give her life to God.

A leap of faith

Teresa spent a year and a half living with the nuns. Still, she resisted becoming a nun, saying, “I could not be persuaded to be one” (Life 3.2). Though obviously attracted to the life, Teresa needed time to adjust to the possibility of God calling her to religious life. Like Teresa we are often given the same challenge of imagining our life in a different way. Teresa says little about how or even if she resolved her questions, but we do know that she decided to become a nun anyway. She was able to set aside her doubts and fears and respond to God’s call.

This didn’t mean that Teresa’s life was easy once she made the decision to become a nun. Explaining her call to family and friends proved to be a challenge. Her father so loved her that he couldn’t imagine letting her leave for the convent until after he died. Nothing Teresa said or did could change his mind. But Teresa wished to remain true to the call from God. She knew herself well enough to know that if she didn’t pursue God’s call now, she might never do it. So early one morning, Teresa quietly left her father’s house for the convent: “I remember, clearly and truly, that when I left my father’s house I felt that separation so keenly that the feeling will not be greater, I think, when I die. For it seemed that every bone in my body was being sundered” (Life 4.1).

The pain which Teresa wrote about here is real. Whether it be family or friends, careers or possessions that we want to hold onto, God’s call is all-encompassing. It is a call to be open to radical change in our lives, if that’s what God asks of us.

Filled with a new joy

Teresa entered the Carmelite Monastery of the Incarnation in 1533, took the habit, and eventually professed solemn vows as a Carmelite nun. Her initial struggle gave way to a lasting joy: “[God] gave me such great happiness at being in the religious state of life that it never left me up to this day, and God changed the dryness my soul experienced into the greatest tenderness. All the things of religious life delighted me, and it is true that sometimes while sweeping, during the hours I used to spend in self-indulgence and self-adornment, I realized that I was free of all that and experienced a new joy that amazed me.” (Life 4.2)

When I first began considering religious life, I never would have imagined I’d experience this “new joy” of which Teresa wrote. But the experience of responding to God’s call and eventually professing my vows as an IHM Sister was a joy that I’d never felt before. I felt like a new person, yet more myself than ever.

Trusting in God Always

All along the way, it helped to have Teresa by my side. Today she is still very much a companion. Sometimes I turn to her writings for encouragement, other times for help in a pastoral or theological quandary. Whenever I have questions about prayer or don’t quite understand how the Spirit is moving in my life, I pray and seek guidance from Teresa. Even Teresa’s own tangles with God (once, when complaining of her suffering, Teresa heard Jesus respond, “This is how I treat my friends” to which Teresa rejoined, “No wonder you have so few!”) give me assurance that my struggles are not out of the ordinary and that there is a way through the darkness.

Although I have known Teresa for many years now, I continue to discover new things about her. Recently, I read a book of her letters. The letters reveal a woman who was deeply committed to a contemplative life but who was, of necessity, engaged in what one commentator calls “a maelstrom of activities.” Sometimes this maelstrom got the best of her. Wrote Teresa, “With so many duties and troubles … I wonder how I’m able to bear them all” (Letter 39 in The Collected Letters of St. Teresa of Avila).

As a religious I can identify with this constant balancing of prayer, ministry, and community life. It is both a joy and a challenge to live this life. Religious life calls us to our best selves and often summons strengths and gifts that we didn’t even know we had. I’m sure on more than one occasion Teresa was surprised to see how things worked out or what paths opened up that she could have hardly imagined. Perhaps some of the best advice that Teresa has ever given to me is to trust always in God, even when things are tough or unclear. She reminds me that determination is indeed a virtue and a necessity in the life of faith.

“Have great confidence,” Teresa wrote, “for it is necessary not to hold back one’s desires, but to believe in God that if we try we shall little by little, even though it may not be soon, reach the state the saints did with his help. For if they had never determined to desire and seek this state little by little in practice they would never have mounted so high.” (Life 13.2)

* * *

What struck you about Teresa’s life and her desire to trust always in God? If you could ask Teresa anything, what would it be?

* * *

Join Sister Maxine and me for prayer today at noon Central Time at http://anunslife.org/live.