.

    Every vocation story involves a call and a response. And it is always God who calls. Naively, I thought I was the one taking the initiative in embracing religious life, forgetting Jesus’ own words:

    You did not choose me, no I chose you; and I commissioned you to go out and to bear fruit, fruit that will last. (John 15:16)

    This was stressed by my spiritual director, Fr. James B.. Reuter, SJ, a few days before I flew to the Novitiate in Los Angeles in 1957. It was a real consolation to know that it was the Lord who had chosen and I only had to respond to the call…

    The call came fairly early in my childhood. I must have been about ten years old when I happened to read a simplified version of the life of St. Therese of Lisieux. From that moment, I wanted to become a Carmelite, like Therese. The desire persisted through high school and college even though I had never met a Carmelite nun nor even visited the chapel of the Carmel at Gilmore.

    College days were happy and filled with activities but the desire to be a nun never left me. Then I met Fr. Reuter and he steered me to the Good Shepherd. I knew nothing of the Good Shepherd Sisters nor of their apostolate but the Lord knew and, very gently, He led me to the lovely convent on Aurora Boulevard, then known as Kilometer 13. It was 1956, I was fresh out of college and the nuns invited me to teach at St. Euphrasia’s. It became my year of aspirancy. The following year I was winging my way to Los Angeles to enter the novitiate. That was before the era of jet planes and it took almost two days before we landed in LA.

    St. Mary Euphrasia used to say that the novitiate is “the nursery of the congregation” and a “school of holiness.” We novices (Filipinos, Americans and Chinese) were certainly trained in the Spirit of St. Mary Euphrasia, learning to do things with compassionate love as she had taught. Then, all too soon, the novitiate was completed and we Filipinos returned home to plunge into the apostolate in the Philippines.
Our vocation stories are never-ending as professed religious life continues the story of call and response.
So I will conclude this story with a poem to condense the many years of discipleship; otherwise it will require many more long pages. It is the end but it is also always the beginning:

 You said, “Come”
So here I am
prostrate before you
dumb with love
deafened by thunder-beat
of your call
blinded by searing light
of your choice
and the light is a flame
bursting in my heart
into a flame-flower.
So I arise—
now with open eyes
and no longer dumb,
I say with voice love-soft
“Behold I come…
to follow You forever.”

(Sr. Mary James Wilson, RGS, is from Manila. She made her first profession of vows as a Religious of the Good Shepherd on September 8, 1959. She has been assigned in various convents in the Philippines, and was a member of the Spirituality Commission in Angers, France. At present she helps in the spiritual animation of the Philippine Province.)

  VOCATION
  THE THREE CALLS
  DO I HAVE VOCATION?
  PRAYERS FOR VOCATION
  VOCATION STORIES