My Mom has taught me more than anyone about spiritual motherhood. She is a woman who has really given her life to the Lord. She (and my Dad) taught me that God is the most important person in our lives and relationship with Him is the one thing necessary. So I was genuinely surprised when I told her I was discerning religious life and she was less than happy.
How could my Mom, who worked (and lived) full-time for the Church and loved our Lord so much not be okay with the possibility of her daughter becoming a religious sister? It was as though my call from God was a wall between us, as though Christ Himself were dividing us.
During my novitiate, my Mom went on an Ignatian retreat, and when I talked with her afterward there was no longer any barrier between us. A year-and-a-half later, my Mom explained what had happened. We were chatting about some of the challenges of pastoral work and she said, “If you’re stuck on the one that the Lord is asking you to let go of, you’re going to hate the hundredfold He gives. You’ll resent them. That’s how it was when you entered community. God was offering me so much, but I wanted you. It was only when I had a major conversion that I was able to open my heart more and love the hundredfold He is giving me.”
Of course, I fell to thinking about my own hundredfold – and prayed fervently that I would not resent it. Just a week later, the Lord showed me how I was, in fact, failing to accept my hundredfold. I suddenly realized that I had a faint grudge against a group of students I was advising for a mission trip, that I did not cherish them as much as I had the group whom I had advised the previous year. This year’s group was just so different, and more difficult for me to understand. The scales fell from my eyes: I had not taken these new children into my heart because they were not last year’s students. I fell to my knees and begged for forgiveness and for a new heart.
The Lord delivered; I became overfull of sheer delight in the preciousness of these students whom I had previously dismissed. I was full of wonder: How could I have failed to see their unique goodness? How could I not have noticed and responded to their need for love and affirmation? The answer is simple. I was unable to receive my hundredfold because I hadn’t let go of the previous year’s group – I could not nurture these new students because I wanted to nurture others. With God’s grace, I needed first to make room, to expand my heart. My Mom’s openness to life, her receptivity to her own hundredfold showed me how to bring to birth those whom the Lord has entrusted to me and to cherish them as pure gift.
Sr. Agnes Therese Davis, T.O.R.
