Hi I don’t post because I distract myself a lot through the Internet, not intentionally I think, and because I am reluctant to share my whole life story ( smiles) with regards to religious life. It doesn’t help that from 1991 to about 1998 I was dealing with ( as I found out later,) life-organizational issues, stemming from the fact that someone with a brain injury can develop. Some would say that it mimics those of ADHD, with/out the hpyeractivity. Motivation, from my “layperson’s” readings here and there, skimming I should say, seems to be neruologically based too. And this has been a major “issue”, invisible, to tellthe truth, in my life. Eeks, sorry if I rambled a bit. I entered the cloistered Carmelites when I was 24. I did my postulancy and novitiate in a convent in the Basque country in northern Spain. I’m American by birth and grew up in southern Spain. And a convert too, smiles. “Decided” is not my favorite choice of word, as normal as it is, but I “decided” that it “might” be better for me, ( I had turned 25 in there) to leave, hoping hoping hoping that I was making the “best” decision, and thinking, at the time, that “perhaps” I needed some “maturity”?? Of course, it’s very challenging to really understand that when and if you’re feeling dry as a doorbell and thinking or undergoing a dark night. Since in a cloistered environment your senses are literally “stripped” of their food, it can happen quite often I guess. Looking back I believe, to the best of my ability, that a) I did my best at the time to follow my conscience, understanding, hoping that it was close to God’s will and/or that it was all for the best. It’s easier to say this after seeing the benefits that biofeedback and something called behavioral optometry did for me. Before, and something which my former Mother Superior commented on when I was struggling as to whether to leave or not, my community noticed a "slight " anxiousness, which hasn’t been there since 2002. I now know that this was a sublte by-product of the head injury, incurrerd in a family car accident in 1979, when I was 13, in Spain.
Even as I was dealing with unexpected issues, once my father’s mother died, my American Jewish grandmother, and no, please I was not raised in the Jewish faith, though my mother, originally Catholic, had every intention to do that once in southern Spain, I would question God as to when I would enter religious life again, because I still felt/thought that I perhaps had a calling. This would be bolstered, occasionally, from what, for lack of a better word, I would call prayer word, from a catholic charismatic prayer friend of mine, with whom I have prayed frequently in person and over the phone, once i moved to IL, since 1990.
I sense that maybe I’m taking longer than may be wanted for an answer in this forum,but sorry this kind of spilt out. Sometimes I don’t know anymore if the Lord is really calling me or if I’m just in an extra dry spell learning to trust Him to call me in His time, not mine. Recently, like in the last month and a half I’ve started to see a Jesuit priest who said he could be available for talking to him, spiritual guidance I guess. We shall see how things go. I just pray to God to be open to His will and to be able to let go, if this is what He wants of the desire, uncertainty, hurt, mixed up “bunch” of feelings, that twinge, that can still come when I think of having left. We shall see. I just know that things would/could be different. So seeing the posts on “older” vocations, given that I will very soon be 43, was quite encouraging. Of course I would prefer, at least the Spanish half of me would prefer living in Spain and the English speaking part of me would want to have some access to English, but, again, we shall see. Thanks for your patience and God bless everyone in their search for their vocation in life.
