Surprising Grace

(This post is continued from How to Discern a Vocation to Religious Life: Part I ) Of course, we aren’t always in touch with what our deep desires are in the first place. What often preoccupy us are the shrill and incessant voices of what I will call our “surface” desires (for chips and chocolates). One of the things that helped me in my process of discernment, then, was cultivating my awareness of what was going on inside me. (I’ve written about this before in a blog post on getting in touch with the daily “movements” of our hearts .) To continue the story then: once the two-month period I had given myself had passed, besides gathering information about various congregations of religious sisters, I also started a practice known in Catholic circles as “spiritual direction”, in which I talked to someone regularly about my spiritual life, and this person helped me to notice and become more aware of how I was experiencing God’s action in my daily life. In addition, I went to retrea...

I chatted with a friend a while ago who had recently moved abroad and was struggling to settle into her new surroundings. She talked about the disorientation she experienced - both in the physical environment, and a more interior confusion. She described in a rather amusing way her efforts to blend in with colleagues in her new workplace who came from different cultures and walks of life than she did (who loved eating fried chicken feet and talking about the birth weights of babies, both of which she was not familiar with!). She ended off saying with a sigh, "I'm not as good as I thought in communicating with different sorts of people." I was actually quite amazed by her account - by her efforts to 'insert' herself into an entirely different social, economic and cultural environment - and told her that. Actually, I don't know too many people who would have such openness and courage to go outside their comfort zones like that. On another level, her s...

A while ago I had the opportunity to spend some time with my family in Cambodia, where we explored the ancient temples of Siem Reap, of which Angkor Wat is perhaps the most famous. Those amazing stone edifices were built around a millennium ago, when the Khmer people were practising the Hindu religion, and later became Buddhist temples as the people's beliefs evolved. Wandering around those stone hallways, admiring the intricate carvings in the walls and arches, awestruck at the magnificent towers that lifted one's heart to worship, I felt a great curiosity about the ancient people who had built these shrines to the divine. Who were they? What were the stories that they had etched into the stone, and how had those stories influenced their lives and identity? At the same time, I felt an unexpected oneness with them in their yearning for the transcendent, their search for meaning in the mysterious universe they found themselves in, in the inexplicable joys and sorrows of...