I have a number of heroes in my life.
I have heroes that have passed on long ago, never having known me physically, but somehow reach me and walk with me through life in some way.
And I have heroes who have literally been by my side at the right moment and with their personalities, life stories, and work teach and inspire me more than they know.

Lately, in this time of transition for me, I've been thinking and praying of all my heroes.
And silently thanking them.

I've written a lot about the first type, some of those who lived in seventeenth century France, one who died just a few years before I was born.
But before St. Vincent de Paul, before Ita Ford, there was Rachel Scott.

When I was in high school, I received a copy of The Journals of Rachel Scott: A Journey of Faith at Columbine High (which, by the way, aren't really her journals but writing based on her journals). Rachel and I had lots of differences but I connected with the similarities.

We were Millennial high-school juniors, she being born in '81 and I in '85.
We were aspiring writers.
We avidly journaled our thoughts, fears, and prayers.
We struggled with the faith journey - the joy of finding Him, the grief of His silence, the confusion of not knowing His path.
We believed, against all odds, that we could somehow change the world.

With her, I felt like I had a companion on the journey. Her story pushed me to continue on as I grew deeper into figuring out life and faith and the future. It didn't matter to me whether her life ended with the "do you believe in God?" question or not. I still felt that I had a hero that taught me that people like me could change the world.

 As my life went on, Rachel and her story phased out of my mind. New heroes came in, accompanying me in new ways that I needed at the time. She didn't appear again until I saw on Facebook that a movie, I'm Not Ashamed, was being made about her life.

At first, I was just excited that a movie was being made about one of my heroes almost twenty years after her death. But now, watching I'm Not Ashamed, I realize the movie's timing, Rachel Scott's story re-entering my life, was Providential for me.

It's easy to narrow Rachel's story down to her not being ashamed of Jesus. After all, that's the thought process behind the title and I could certainly understand why. It's something to admire about her - something I admire - but I think it's just a piece of the bigger message for me (and probably a message that everyone can relate to):

Be true to who you are.
Don't pretend to be someone else just for the convenience of it.

Because it's you, the true you, that will change the world.

Or, in her own words,

"Don't let your character change color with your environment. 

Find out who you are and let it stay its true color." - Rachel Scott

It's a very appropriate message for a high school student. Peer pressure, trying to figure out who you are, discovering the depths of faith and all that.

But it's also a message for me now. Almost 20 years later after her death, 15 years after reading the book.
The truth is, when you leave a religious community, you lose an identity. You're no longer "Sister". You're just you, a face in the crowd. But if being "Sister" was an identity that you discovered never fit you anyway, there's some soul searching to do.

Who is my true self?
How do I show my faith now?
How will I change the world?

And then this question appears - is "changing the world" youthful naivety?
In a way, yes. I no longer believe that the entire world can change because of someone I did or said or wrote. I'm 31 now, not 16...
...yet I think of those heroes in my life that I mentioned earlier - the ones who have physically been at my side. They've changed my world for the better, giving me the inspiration to do the same for others. That's changing the world.

I'm still trying to figure it all out but I'm following the example of Rachel -
I'm letting myself be me, even the parts of me that may not be too popular;
I'll wrestle with the words and deeds of the faith journey;
and continue to believe that one day, I will change the world.

Advent Through the Eyes of the Virgin Mary

This past Sunday began the season of Advent, a liturgical season in the Catholic Church that's a time of waiting, of hope and of preparation for the coming of Jesus. Advent obviously brings me closer to Jesus, but it also brings me closer to the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary. While Catholics especially have a deep respect for the Blessed Mother, I think even we can easily forget just how great her example is.

The Virgin Mary in
"The Nativity Story"

C.S. Lewis once said that if you were looking for a religion to make you comfortable, he wouldn't recommend Christianity. One day, I was praying over this quote, it occurred to me that our most holy books, the New Testament, start with a challenge. And who completed that challenge? It wasn't a king, wasn't a prophet, it wasn't even a man. It was a young poor girl from Nazareth. 

She truly was the first to say "yes" to Christianity. And she easily had the biggest challenge of any other Christian to come - to bear a son in a world that could easily stone her for being unmarried and pregnant. Not only any son, but God's own Son, the chosen Messiah.

Mary was conceived without sin (that's the Immaculate Conception - Jesus' conception is "virgin birth"), but she was still human. Not only was she still human, but she was still a young teenager. Like the rest of us, she felt emotion. She had to be confused, but, perhaps most of all, she had to be scared, even with the faith that God would always be with her.

How did she explain to Joseph, the one who she was promised to marry, that she was pregnant? How Joseph's initial reaction must have hurt and how relieved she must have felt when he heard the angel in a dream. How did she explain her pregnancy to her family and friends? Those of us who are discerning religious life sometimes stress out over telling our family/friends that we might just become a Sister/priest/etc. Imagine how Mary must have felt.   This wasn't a discernment, this was a call and action that had already been completed. There was no "Well, Mom and Dad, I'm thinking about this....". No, she was already pregnant. Becoming a Sister/priest/etc is accepted in religious circles, if not in our family and friends. Being unmarried and pregnant, on the other hand....

But what is so amazing about Mary is that she stayed true to her calling. The Gospels never tell us that Mary said "No, God, I change my mind...pick someone else". And well....there were probably times when she doubted, maybe even times where she broke down and cried. But she stayed faithful through all the difficulties. She knew that God was with her - both spiritually and physically - and, through the message of Gabriel, that absolutely nothing was impossible for God.

Dorothy Day once said "don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed that easily" I believe that it is a big temptation for us to dismiss Mary with flowery language and images, especially in the Catholic world. While those can be nice, it is essential for us to know her as a real person who made a very radical choice to accept God's call through carrying Christ. By saying "yes", she made the first footstep on the road we all long to follow. 

This Advent, let us remember her faithful example as the "first Christian", the first one to accept the challenge of Christianity and the first one to wait for the coming of Christ. 

Let us put ourselves in her place as we wait, as we prepare and as we hope as she did.

And when Christmas finally arrives, let us welcome Him as Mary did, with absolute inexplicable joy.

"Sisters, We Have to Be Courageous": The Story of Sister Josefa

Her name was Sister Josefa Martinez Perez. She seemed like any other Spanish Daughter of Charity in the 1930s, donned in a low white cornette and blue dress, walking the hallways of the hospital. Spain was at the height of its civil war but the Daughters continued their work, as they always had in the past during times of turmoil. Yet, as times got worse, Sister Josefa warned her fellow Sisters "Don't be afraid. We have to be courageous. Sisters, let us prepare ourselves because martyrdom will touch some of us" She was right. On October 15, 1936, she was taken away in a truck to be executed.

Her story begins in Alberique (Valencia), Spain where she was born in 1898. At the age of 27, she entered the Daughters of Charity Seminary, inspired by her membership in the Association of the Children of Mary, a co-fraternity for young women run by the Daughters of Charity. After Seminary, she was sent to her first (and what would be also her last) mission - the Provincial Hospital of Valencia. There she would stay for ten years, working in a ward for abandoned children and then one for women with infectious diseases.

In 1936, the Marxists took over the hospital and expelled the Daughters of Charity. It wasn't simply a matter of asking the 100 Sisters in the hospital to move somewhere else, but rather as a way to expel the community of the Daughters of Charity as a whole. So, for their own safety, the Sisters split up - a repeat of what the Daughters had done years ago during the French Revolution - hoping to one day be reunited and live once again as a normal religious community.

Sister Josefa stripped herself of the cornette and dress she had worn for over ten years and headed to her family's house in her hometown of Alberique. Things there were relatively calm, unlike what some of her companions were experiencing wherever they were hiding. But one day, in September, her brother-in-law was taken away for being a Catholic and doing charitable works. When they arrived, Sister Josefa pleaded "let him go and kill me! He has three small children and expecting a fourth". But they wouldn't accept her offer and he was arrested and executed anyway.

She probably had an idea that they would return. And they did, less than a month later on October 14th. However, probably to her surprise, they took away not only her but also her pregnant sister. Her sister Natalia, now a widow after her husband's execution, left behind three small children in the house when the two of them were taken away. When they arrived in the prison, Sister Josefa spent all her time in prayer, pleading to God and the militants that she would sacrifice herself for her sister's life.

Some hours later, in darkness, the prisoners were thrown into a truck. As Sister Josefa stepped into the bed of the truck, she once again pleaded for them to free her sister. Probably tired of her insistence and maybe even inspired by her sacrifice, they let Natalia go. The last memory Natalia would have of her sister Josefa is a hug they shared, in which Sister Josefa whispered "see you in eternity". With that, the truck left, leaving Natalia behind.

The truck drove to the outskirts of Alberique at El Puente de los Perros, where every prisoner in the truck were executed, including Sister Josefa, who had sacrificed her own life for her sister.

Some Daughters of Charity and Vincentian priests martyred
during the Spanish Civil War

It turned out that Sister Josefa wouldn't be alone in her martyrdom. Dozens of her companions, fellow Daughters of Charity, would also be martyred during that war, many in groups but some alone as Sister Josefa. This coming October, twelve of those martyrs, including Sister Josefa, will become Blessed by being beatified by Pope Benedict XVI.



Sister Josefa Perez Martinez, pray for us!

(More stories of these courageous Daughters of Charity to come!!)

Sources (for those interested):

• "Daughters of Charity, Martyrs (Valencia, 1936)". Vincentian Online Library Trans. Charles T. lock. <http://famvin.org/wiki/Daughters_of_Charity,_Martyrs_(Valencia,_1936)>
• Infante Barrera, Sor Angeles. "Hermanas Mártires De Valencia, Perfil Biográfico." FAMVIN Noticias. <http://famvin.org/es/2011/06/28/hermanas-martires-de-valencia-perfil-biografico/>.
• "Un Arzobispo De Valencia, 12 Hijas De La Caridad Y Una Seglar Asesinadas En 1936 Rumbo a Los Altares" Religión En Libertad, 28 June 2011.
• "Spanish Civil War (35)." Hagiography Circle. <http://newsaints.faithweb.com/martyrs/MSPC35.htm>.
• Chento, Javier F. "Hacia La Beatificación De Un Grupo De Mártires De La Familia Vicenciana En España." FAMVIN Noticias.http://famvin.org/es/2012/11/10/hacia-la-beatificacion-de-un-grupo-de-martires-de-la-familia-vicenciana-en-espana
• my research buddy, Fr John Freund CM from FAMVIN!

The Contradiction of Vocation: Choosing to Stay

Tomorrow, a young woman is about to step into a plane, heading back to Bolivia. She'll return to the orphaned, abused, or abandoned girls she loves, to the little town of cows and cobblestone streets, to a language of indigenous vocabulary, to a city of snow-capped mountains, and to a climate of sweatshirts and scarves in mid-August.

Amber with some of the girls of
Hogar Maria Auxiliadora, July 2010

Her name is Amber (here is her blog). She arrived in Bolivia soon after I left and she's returning to spend yet another year there - her fourth year, to be exact. I don't know Amber extremely well. As I said before, we just missed each other when it comes to arrivals and departures. I met her when I came to visit a year after I left and we've communicated occasionally through Facebook, letters and Skype. But I know her well enough to admire her. Recently, during her time helping out with the orientation of the Salesian Lay Missioners this summer, we were able to have a conversation over Skype.


She said something that I immediately wrote down and knew that I had to write a blog entry about it.

"It's definitely a hard thing for people to understand. Mission work or religious life. We have extremely low and challenging moments, but it's something we freely choose anyway and then have the audacity to claim it's our source of joy and fulfillment. That's something that only God's wisdom can explain."

Mission life is not without its difficulties, and neither is religious life. Ask any missioner, ask any Sister, ask any priest or brother.

The mystery is that we stay. Not only that we stay, but that we choose to stay.
We, in religious life, stay despite the fact that the majority are older than us.
They, in mission life, stay despite the stress of new language, of new culture, and sometimes the stress of more work than can possibly be handled.

As everything within us begins to run away, it is God pulling our sleeve, and pulling us back to stay. And every time we encounter a difficulty - whether it be loneliness or overwork - if it is His will, He pulls us back even more.

The mystery is that as the pull becomes stronger, somehow we become happier. We find that He is not actually pulling us to stay, rather He is pulling us closer to Him. We find that it is in the life we live, frustrations and all, that we are most fulfilled. It is contradictory to those that don't understand. It may even seem contradictory to ourselves, yet we know this is what makes our soul come alive, this is what sets our hearts on fire and, most importantly, this is where we most experience God...despite the times we feel lonely, despite the times we yearn for a little time to ourselves, despite the times we are frustrated with our work, despite the misunderstandings, despite the times we look at our suitcases and wonder.

Amber is right. Only God's wisdom can explain it. But it is vocation - it is that same pull that led Moses to keep going on the way to the Promised Land, that led Joseph to stay with Mary despite her pregnancy, that led Simon Peter to not run away during Jesus' trial (despite the denials), that led Paul to continue his work despite the persecutions. It is a pull that has spanned the centuries...yet also a pull that is unique to each and every one of us.

The Sister and the Pelican: Loving the World as Jesus Did

A statue at the Colon Cemetery in Havana, Cuba
Monument to firefighters who perished
in the great fire of 1890

Sitting in a Communist country on top of a monument to fallen firefighters, is a Daughter of Charity immortalized in stone. Her face is somber, clutching a cross to her chest, and she sits with a mother pelican and her two babies.

The image struck me when I came across it browsing the St Vincent de Paul Image Archive at DePaul University (one thing a Vincentian dork such as myself loves to do). I recently discovered, thanks to a friend from Louisana, that there is a legend that mother pelicans stab themselves to give blood to their young when no other food is available and that eventually the pelican evolved into a Christian symbol. As for the Sister, is that Daughter based on a real person or rather a representation of the Daughters of Charity as a whole? I may never know, but there is some reason for her to be sitting next to the pelican. 


But this blog post isn't about the Daughters of Charity. Nor is it about pelicans.

It's about my assumption of why she and the pelicans sit on that monument to firefighters - that is, they represent self-sacrifice. As Christians, self-sacrifice is our whole reason for being. It's the reason we attend church services every Sunday, it's the reason we pray, it's the reason we believe with deep conviction that God loves us and it's the reason we've been persecuted and martyred.

To us, Jesus is more than just a companion, more than just a moral leader, more than just a miracle worker, more than just an advocate for the poor. He is the Son of God, God incarnate sent from above. But most important, he is God who sacrificed Himself for us - not out of pure obligation, but rather out of deep love. He is that mother pelican who wounds or even kills herself to feed her young. By His death two thousand years ago, he fed us. Somehow, through such a sorrowful event, He changed the world entirely. When He died, the veil of the temple tore into two, the earth shook, and rocks split. It was only a physical representation of what changed within us ourselves. When we accept His self-sacrifice as a Savior, something within us changes. Our lives become dedicated to him - our hearts catch fire.

We admire those who practice self-sacrifice - people like Saint Maximilan Kolbe who, upon hearing a family man picked out of a crowd in Auschwitz to be starved to death in a bunker, volunteered himself to go instead (the father died 53 years after this incident, in 1995). We admire those that throw themselves in front of a bullet or train or car, pushing another out of the way, whether they be mother, father, friend, priest or nun.


But self-sacrifice is more than an event. It's a life. And that's actually the hardest, and probably most frightful, part. Jesus gave us the ultimate example - He gave His life to save it. Will we die to save someone else? Probably not. Yet, there is a reason the Gospels are more than just about Jesus' death (and resurrection). Jesus preached self sacrifice - "greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). He lived a life of a nomad, sacrificing a life at home with a family he loved, in order to preach the Good News to all who will hear. He faced great temptations - temptations that would certainly make his life easier - yet he rejected them all in favor of being a Messiah of love, not power. Even apart from His death, Jesus sacrificed so much for us during His life. If our hearts are truly set on fire by conversion, by accepting the sacrifice of His death, we know that Jesus becomes our one desire and that includes imitating Him in all, including self-sacrifice, not just to gain eternal life but to love the whole world as Jesus did.
Henri Nouwen wrote "I know that I have to move from speaking about Jesus to letting him speak within me, from thinking about Jesus to letting him think within me, from acting for and with Jesus to letting him act through me. I know the only way for me to see the world is to see it through his eyes."

Let us see the world through Jesus' eyes. Let us allow Him to speak through us and to act through us.

And by doing so, as hard as it may be, as much as all of us struggle with it, let us be examples of self-sacrifice - as those pelicans, as that Daughter of Charity, as those firefighters to whom that monument is dedicated, as many who live among us and have gone before us - truly given to living our lives for others rather than ourselves, truly loving the world as Jesus did.

Hearts on Fire: Quiet Heroines of World War II

It was tomorrow seventy-two years ago that the capital of France, Paris, fell into German hands. Suddenly, Nazi flags began to fly, road signs were put up in German, soldiers roamed the streets. The war had now become real, as if it weren't before.

And there, in the middle of Paris, sat 140 rue du Bac - the motherhouse of the Daughters of Charity, a religious community that had celebrated its 300th anniversary not too long before, and home to the chapel where the Blessed Mother appeared to St Catherine Laboure the century before. The Daughters, by this time, had already spread throughout the world. There were Sisters in countries under Axis and Allied occupation. And now, the city of their motherhouse, the home of the community, their whole history was now under the Germans.

Sister Helene Studler

Meanwhile, a French Daughter of Charity by the name of Sister Helene Studler, had already prepared for the Axis occupation. Sister Helene had already been carrying out her work for a year by the time France officially fell. She had been to the border various times, assisting those who had been evacuated. A few days after the occupation, prisoners arrived, having marched there. Taken by surprise, Sister Helene cleaned and bound their wounds. It was this event that would change everything. Just a month after the Axis occupation, Sister Helene set up an escape system to save French soldiers from the Gestapo. Almost 2,000 Frenchmen escaped under her direction. She was arrested in 1941 but released before her year sentence was up because of poor health. She went straight back to her work, though she quickly escaped to Lyons when she discovered the Gestapo were after her again. Frustrated by their inability to find Sister Helene, the Gestapo arrested the Superioress General of the Daughters of Charity and grew even more frustrated when she refused to release any information about Sister Helene's whereabouts.

Sister Agnes Walsh

As Sister Helene hid in Lyons, seven hours away in Dordogne, France, lived another Daughter of Charity - Sister Agnes Walsh. Sister Agnes was actually British, an Allied citizen living in an Axis-occupied country. She had to lay low, for the danger of the Nazis finding out she was British was simply too great. She had accidentally received an Irish passport earlier, which bought her some leeway, yet her accent quickly gave away her English heritage. And she had already seen the way the Gestapo went after the French Jews. Yet one day, a man named Pierre Cremieux knocked on the door of the convent asking the Sisters to hide him, his wife and three children. Hiding them would mean even extra danger for the Sisters - after all, they were already hiding the fact one of them was British - but Sister Agnes pleaded their case to the superior and the family of five remained with them, hidden in the convent.

Sister Marejanna Reszko
Yad Vashem Photo Archive 

But Sister Agnes was not the only one hiding Jews. Countries away, in Poland, the Daughters of Charity were hiding Jews at St Anthony's Orphanage, under the direction of Sister Marejanna Reszko.Not too far away, Sister Bronisława Wilemska, along with Bishop Małysiak, hid Jews in their institution for the eldery and disabled. In fact, hiding Jews started to become the unofficial ministry of the Daughters of Charity in Poland. All in all, Yad Vashem has recognized five different Daughters of Charity from three different Polish cities.

In nearby Hungary, Daughters of Charity hid Jews in an all-girls school. The Sisters there were crafty, making the school a fake military workshop until that city was liberated and the hidden Jews were saved. The provincial house in Hungary, under the leadership of Sister Klara Rath, also served as a hiding place. The Nazis constantly appeared wanting to search the house, yet miraculously went away every time because of Sister Klara's doings - whether it be distracting them with drinks, claiming the children there were all baptized Christians, or quoting a dangerous line of the Hungarian anthem. All the Jews there were also saved.

The war was trying for the Daughters of Charity, yet it seemed that it only set their heart even more afire for love of the poor, the persecuted, the abandoned. Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944 and the war would end within the year. Sister Helene, that brave non-violent woman of the French Resistance, wouldn't live to see the end of the war. In December, just a few months after the liberation of France, Sister Helene died of a painful cancer. Sister Agnes, however, did survive the war as did the Jewish family she hid. She lived to the age of 97 and was posthumously honored as one of the British Heroes of the Holocaust. Sister Klara of Hungary also survived the war. She died in 1991 and now has the title "Righteous Among the Nations".

These women, although their history now dates back seventy years or so, still remain alive to me. Their stories still resonate with me. Their bravery inspires me. I thank them for their service, I thank them for their dedication to our mission as Daughters of Charity, I thank them for the example they give to me and all the Daughters of Charity now and to come and pray that they will never be forgotten.

My Biggest Sacrifice: The Family of My Soul

Today was a day where half of me wasn't there. Sure, I worked in the Hispanic Ministry office, typed up bulletins and did everything that needed to be done....but part of me was somewhere else. Why? Because I knew, thousands of miles to the South, two of these goofballs on the right were making their perpetual profession, the goofball on the far left being one of my closest friends during my two years in Bolivia. I imagined them laying prostrate, flowers being thrown around them, the huge smiles on both their faces. But instead of being there, I was here in middle Georgia doing office work.

I miss them. A lot.

Only recently have I truly discovered my biggest sacrifice entering religious life. I knew it coming in but its reality has slowly taken root - leaving behind the girls of the orphanage and the Sisters I lived and worked with for two years (the same community I entered). They aren't family, but for two years, they were my family. And while it's been almost three years since I moved back to the United States, they've continued to feel like family.

And now I am a postulant with the Daughters of Charity, a community that puts a heavy emphasis on the belief that your family becomes our family and has regular family visits. Yet I know those Sisters in Bolivia, those girls, are not my family. They grew up in a different culture, a different country, even sometimes a language I don't even know. But there is something deeper than blood that makes them family to me, as if it was the utter being of my soul that picked them out to more than just former co-workers/housemates to me.

But the truth is I don't know when I'll see them again, I don't know if I'll see them again. (Saying that, thank God for modern technology....for the use of Skype today to hear their voices, for chats over Gtalk)

They are, by far, the biggest sacrifice I've ever had to make to be a Daughter of Charity. The strangest thing is, though, I somehow know this is where God wants me....which is where the conflicting feelings of the joy of true vocation and the sorrow of unwanted sacrifice clash. Where the sting of loss mixes with a somehow-authentic sense of "it's all worth it"I'm sure those two Sisters who made their perpetual profession today would tell you the same thing. They each had to sacrifice something to reach where they are today, to dedicate their lives entirely to God. They both entered the community in high school but there are sacrifices even for high school girls and even more as they continued on in community life. Those two women that made their perpetual vows today...women that I have seen chase loose chickens around the convent, twist their faces in all sorts of funny ways to make others laugh, hold my hand as they used an escalator for the first time, beautifully demonstrate the dances of their Aymara ancestors.....are truly examples for me. They inspire me. I am so proud of them and I am so blessed to know them. Perhaps that is why God brought them in my life, so that they be sisters of mine, inspiring lights for me to follow, even from a thousand of miles away.

That doesn't make missing them any easier though.