I was 7 years old and had just made my First Holy Communion in April. Now, it was late August, and a hot humid cloud seemed to hang over the Queens, New York neighborhood where my grandmother lived. I stood at the bedroom window in her second-floor apartment watching the courtyard below. My father was crossing there with my aunt on the way to his car to take her to the train station. She was a Trinitarian Sister (MSBT) and heading for a new mission in Alabama. A pang of loss swirled together with a sense of excitement as I thought, “Someday I’m going too!” Some ten years later, I did just that. This was my first awareness of my religious vocation.
I was 20 years old and due to renew my vows the next morning. It was early December, and a chilly rain was pouring down over rural North Mississippi where I served in Catholic Charities. I carefully maneuvered the car down the dirt road heading for a shack where I was to make a home visit. I stopped the car when I sensed the mud was getting too soft. (I feared getting stuck in it because I had “been there, done that” enough times already!) After the visit, half-sliding and half-walking back to the car, it struck me that this time tomorrow, I would be renewing my vows in our lovely little chapel in Jackson–a world away from all this mud. As I was driving and returned to the blessed blacktop, I reached to turn on the radio. Seeing that from one knob hung a rosary and from the other a metal soda bottle opener (both useful for travel on rural roads), it occurred to me that these objects represented the contradictions in my life. I went from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again until the distinction between them blurred.
I am now 74 years old and have been in religious life for 57 years. In looking over my life I am reminded of a kaleidoscope, a favorite toy of my childhood. Looking into one end of the kaleidoscope tube and turning the opposite end of the tube that has carefully placed mirrors, an endless display of colored patterns could be viewed. There have been so many contradictory situations and circumstances turning together in my life that they have produced countless colorful patterns. The beautiful cathedrals and the poor country churches, the Latin hymns of my childhood, the guitar hymns of my adolescence and the “old-time” country Gospel hymns of an adulthood in rural North Alabama–all have made a significant contribution to my life. There have been frightened, homeless children, angry adolescents, long-suffering elders, and kindly co-workers. I have traveled dusty roads, dirty city streets, and sparkling convent corridors. And then there have been countless sickrooms visited where courage and suffering vied with each other. I am grateful for all of this and would trade none of it for anything. God has been present in every place and every experience and that has been the miracle of my vocation.
By Sister Eileen M. Gallagher, OSB
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