A Living Sign

“My water broke,” Kelley whispered in my ear, “the baby is coming.” Ordinarily happy news, it was anything but, three months from her due date and at a formal wedding reception. Off to the hospital we went, where beyond the initial curious stares at our attire, doctors grimly listed litanies of potential suffering  awaiting the little one. We filled the room with prayer. 

Much later, with baby Victoria and her courageous family home after a three+ month in the NICU, Kelley shared that something shifted that night when we began to pray. She said, “When you called on the name of Jesus, I knew He walked in the room. I understood your vocation better. It was like when I call Matt [her husband], and he comes.”  

I haven’t always felt the Lord walking in the room when I call His name, and I’ve had seasons of not hearing him call mine. I am, though, always and in every season, His bride, a living sign of His love for the one Bride, the Church. Ours is a deeply personal relationship of mutual vulnerability and trust. 

Kelley was right, and she reminded me of how seriously Jesus takes my love, my total gift of self to Him. Jesus listens for my voice, He responds when I call to Him. And He - God!- trusts me to take His total gift of self to me seriously. He trusts that I am listening for His voice calling to me in the needs of those around me. As I trust He will walk in the room when I call him, so He trusts that I’ll walk in the room when He calls me. This is the gift of spousal love, and the Lord surprises and delights me through it every day.

Bridal Union

Standing on the playground of the school where she was teaching, a group of us had engaged Sister in conversation. She joked that we should be better prepared the next time we versed her in volleyball as she was ready for a rematch! After sharing some of the experiences she had with children in her classroom, she gave us a few insights into convent life, the daily schedule, and a typical day for her community. Then she spoke the words that had a deep impact on my life and vocation. When she was around our age (college student), she noticed her friends and thought, Why can't I feel about Jesus the way they feel about their beloveds?

It was the first time I had heard a woman religious refer to her bridal relationship with our Lord and I was stunned. God was God and had always been important in my life. At my First Holy Communion, I felt He was calling me to be a nun, and I dreamed of the religious habit as young girls dream of their wedding dress. But then the busyness of life and the love of lesser creatures distracted me from this interior call. Meeting this Sister and hearing her word—just as the vocation re-surfaced in my heart—helped me to see that religious life, and the particular call I was feeling to the cloister, would be the fulfillment of my deepest longing for intimate, bridal union... with the One who is the Bridegroom: JESUS! 

Winning Grace

As a child, whenever I would complain to my mother about a headache or stomach ache which I was suffering, she would respond, "Offer it up." Mom's suggestion to "offer it up" was not a sarcastic response. She really meant it. I remember quite vividly the moment when my little mind grasped the import of this statement. "I can really offer up my suffering to God who will use this offering to help poor sinners who have need of grace." Winning grace for others became an almost habitual response whenever I had an ache or pain, or when I wanted to sacrifice something (like not eating the candy bar that I really wanted to eat). Long before I knew the terms "Mystical Body of Christ" and "Spiritual Motherhood," I was practicing and living in this reality. The understanding I had of helping souls in this way formed one of the bases for my contemplative vocation. 

Being a bride of Christ and practicing spiritual motherhood go hand-in-hand. Being Jesus' spouse means taking on His concerns and desires (like a woman in the world does with her husband's concerns). And what or who are Jesus' concerns? Every soul He has made. What are His desires? That all should know and love Him and be united with Him here on earth and in Heaven.

Photo courtesy of Lisa Julia Photography

“I am a Married Woman”

How many times I would walk back to my place in choir after failing miserably as the Sister who intones the hymns at the Divine Office, my face blushing with humiliation. Ah, but at those very moments, I would whisper to Jesus, "I unite myself to You." This continual uniting with Jesus greatly strengthened my sense of brideship. At other times, in the midst of a suffering, I would say to myself, "I am a married woman," meaning that I am not alone: I have my God and my Spouse, Jesus, to lean on. At still other times, whether suffering or not, I would look at my wedding ring. My Mother Abbess had confided that she does this as a way to remain lovingly united to her Spouse, and that inspired me to do the same. 

Being espoused to Jesus as a Poor Clare nun has held immeasurable graces for me. But some of those graces have come in the form of suffering. When these moments or days of suffering have come, I have always tried to unite myself with my Bridegroom whose sufferings ran the gamut of being contradicted, humiliated, rejected, of being not believed, to the excruciating sufferings of the Cross. I have found that there really is no suffering that I have had to bear that Jesus, my Spouse, hasn't suffered first. 

Desire Fulfilled

After receiving the Sacrament of Confirmation, the Holy Spirit opened my heart and my mind to a much greater awareness of and attraction to Jesus present in the Blessed Sacrament. I began visiting Him in church, after school, and attending Holy Mass daily whenever possible. With these visits, He was drawing me closer and closer to Himself. I felt sure that He was calling me to the contemplative life, but I still hesitated until one day, in church, I realized that if I were to get married, it would be very unfair to my husband because I would be spending all my time with Jesus at church! It was really Jesus with Whom I was in love. 

Not long after that, I entered a Poor Clare monastery, knowing that I would have my heart's desire fulfilled, that is, living under the same roof with the Blessed Sacrament, spending time throughout the day in Jesus' Eucharistic Presence. My relationship with Jesus grew. After a year, I became His fiancée as a novice, and nearly two years after that, I became His spouse, professing temporary vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and enclosure. The definitive wedding day, several years later, the day when I became His bride forever in Solemn Vows, was the happiest day of my life. 

She Gave God Her Heart

Since my first profession of vows, I have had the joy of being assigned as Catechist in our Catechesis of the Good Shepherd program with our daycare children. I get to see glimpses of how Our Lord speaks to their little hearts, and how deeply they love Him. The Kingdom of Heaven truly belongs to these little ones! 

Several months ago, a Mother recounted to me a conversation she had with her son, who was in the atrium with me last year. One evening, he looked at her and said, “Mom, if we have another baby, and it’s a girl, we should name her Mariana Joy because she gave God her heart.” It is in moments like these that my heart overflows with gratitude, and I was brought to tears. 

Two of the greatest gifts of being a Bride of Christ have been spiritual motherhood and the Heart of Jesus. Standing before the face of God is the essence of the Carmelite vocation. I particularly love standing before Him as a spiritual mother, interceding on behalf of the world and all my spiritual children, whom I desire to draw to the Heart of Jesus. My religious name—Sr. Mariana Joy of the Heart of Jesus—is a beautiful reminder of the gift of His Heart to me through my Consecration, and a daily invitation to return to the choice of love that I made on the day of my profession. What a grace and privilege to love souls with the heart of a mother, and lead them to the joy of His Heart, on earth as it is in heaven! 

Love Behind Bars

I never dreamed that I would spend part of my honeymoon behind bars in central Philly. 

And yet, five days after becoming Christ’s bride, that’s exactly where I found myself.       

I had heard about this well-known religious institute a few months before becoming a consecrated virgin, with hopes of visiting someday. But now, less than ten feet from where I stood, loomed the large golden gate that separated me from the cloistered Holy Spirit Adoration Sisters. Stepping forward gingerly, I approached the ornate iron bars and sucked in the gasp that threatened to escape my lungs. I offered a wordless prayer of thanks as my eyes drank in the marvelous sight: the Blessed Sacrament exposed in a sunburst-shaped monstrance; the sanctuary back-dropped by a sky-blue wall painted with the image of a cross and the Holy Spirit-Dove symbol in the center; pink and yellow rays exploding downward in a triangular pattern, bathing the altar in artificial divine light. 

And in the middle of it all, a solitary Sister in a striking, rose-colored habit kneeling in silent adoration before the Sacred Host. 

My first thought as I gazed upon this exquisite scene was, Heaven is on the other side of that gate. 

For more than a hundred years, the “Pink Sisters” have kept prayerful vigil at the Convent of Divine Love through total immersion in the Eucharistic life of Christ. At all times, a Sister can be seen in the chapel, her soul plunged into an inner bath of love and petition on behalf of the whole world. Every thirty minutes a bell rings, and another Sister quietly emerges to take her place, perpetuating this prayerful and total gift of self to the One held by love in a tiny white Host. These remarkable servants of Christ are His Brides, chosen to live in perpetual, constant fidelity to their Divine Spouse, ever adoring, ever consoling, ever loving and being loved.    

This is Heaven. 

This is honeymoon. 

Reflecting on the radiant witness of these devoted souls whose garments symbolize the glowing love for the Holy Spirit, I am struck by the sacred truth that this is the bridal identity we are all invited to embrace, no matter our state in life. As a consecrated virgin, my call is to live in the secular world, offering a subtle yet powerful witness of my mystical espousal with Christ. Yet, while my vocation doesn’t demand seclusion or around-the-clock Adoration, it is meant to be a constant, ever-deepening expression of the contemplative, Divine Love lived out behind bars. A daily outpouring of interior adoration and praise. An earthly sign mirroring the heavenly reality to come. 

And isn’t that the vocation of every human heart that has befriended the Bridegroom? 

God bless the Pink Sisters whose loving witness helped to awaken this mysterious charism of my covenantal bond with Christ, a bond in which all the baptized faithful share as we seek eternal union with the One Who awaits us on the other side of the Gate.