Every Morning I See a Nun

I find comfort in the routines in life, especially when so much of life seems so uncertain and capricious. Every weekday morning I run the same route and encounter many of the same people and situations. I encounter the campus shuttle bus at almost the same location every day. The dog walkers are the most faithful of the group, as are the people who need their early morning caffeine fix. Like the movie Groundhog Day, an eerily identical scene and cast of characters are a part of my morning routine.

Almost every morning I see a nun. She is there to greet the children who attend the parochial school attached to our neighborhood Catholic church. In my line of work, I am accustomed to seeing nuns, monks, priests, bishops, rabbis, imans, and every variation of religious leader one can imagine. But I see this particular woman every day, and she always returns my friendly wave of greeting. Her care and her smile greeting tired, grumpy, and sleepy children always inspires me.

I have no romantic notions about the lives of women religious. "The Sound of Music" and "The Flying Nun" are Hollywood fantasies. Perhaps as an "insider," I know too much to think that these are ideal lives or callings, for but the very few. I know that I would chafe at the restrictions, the hierarchies, and the insistence on obedience, even as I would relish the routines and structures of a more contemplative life.

But every morning I see a nun and I am reminded of my own vocational calling. It is a vocational calling that is inextricably bound to my identity, whether I am in running shoes and yoga pants, or when I am in clerical garb in the pulpit. I am reminded that I have a calling, a purpose...that I have been set aside and marked by a religious vocation, even as much as the habit or the hijab or the collar marks the wearer.

It is not a vocation that I have always embraced. As a child of poverty, the idea of making a lot of money was important to me. I wanted the financial security in my adulthood that I never experienced in my childhood. My rational mind wanted "things," but my heart longed for God. And no matter how much I have emulated Jonah, and run from this life of service, God has lovingly called me back to myself. I am not called to the academy, although that is where I am located. I am not called to the ministry, although that is part of what I do. I am called simply to love God, love myself, and love my neighbors by serving them with my whole heart. The work is not the vocation - the love of God is the vocation. Perhaps Thomas Merton says it best:

"Vocation does not come from a voice out there calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice in here calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.”

© Yolanda Pierce