But for all that, my sister and I grew up as Americans, in  the southern part of that country in the pine woods, swamps and sugar cane fields of Louisiana where people drink iced tea.  It was another place where mystery and manners were important, and where religion was part of everyday life.  Statues  of Our Lady often appear on country roads and in people’s front gardens.  My early life was very ordinary, apart from the fact of a powerful sense of God’s presence which accompanied me. I remember once emptying the dishwasher and having  this overwhelming  and intense  experience of the love of God, and a piercing  joy.  I felt I could have died at that moment and my life would have been complete.  From then on God was like a prism through which everything passed, enriching and intensifying life and filling it with wonder.  There was no sense of discontinuity between my faith and life. 

I plunged myself into studies, sport, especially tennis and skiing, student government,  running successfully as first female president of the student council in high school.  Friendship, like family, was a manifestation of God in my life.  In the summers, together with  my parents, my sister and I were  exposed to both the wild beauties of America and the ancient riches of Europe and the Middle East, with their  multiplicity of churches, fountains and squares. The highpoint for me was visiting Jerusalem where we witnessed the ordination of my father’s first cousin and crowding together for his first Mass in the crypt of the Church of the Nativity;  and seeing, among the many relations, two of my father’s sisters who are active religious sisters working in the Middle East.  All this led eventually to the decision, after graduating from university, to pursue graduate studies  abroad, in England.

It was difficult to explain my choice “You don’t seem  really the type,” one friend noted.  “How can you give up so much?”  “Think of all the good you could be doing.” Can you really bear giving up travel?”  “You’ll never see penguins in the wild!”  All these questions and more were brought up by well-meaning relatives and friends.  Behind all these questions was lurking the real issue: “Why aren’t you satisfied, what more do you want?” The why is ultimately God’s secret.  I only knew that  I could not rest until I had given myself totally.   “Can’t you find God in the world?” Well, yes, that was precisely why I was doing this.  I had found God in the world, and I wanted to live in that Presence.  In trying to answer their questions, I felt very like engaged couples who are asked why they have fallen in love. “

The heart has its reasons that reason does not know” (Pascal), My family were especially shocked and grieved by my decision. When I told my  mother that a friend’s mother had said how beautiful it was to have a vocation, she replied, “It easy for her to say that.  I wonder how she would feel if it were her daughter.”  The cross is part  of every vocation, and mine was the pain I caused my family.  “The greatness of her love was cause of the greatness of her pain,”  as Julian of Norwich wrote of Our Lady, at the foot of the cross.  But Dame Julian went on to note that “before miracles come sorrow and anguish and trouble.”  And the miracle came.  Now they cannot do enough for the community, usually expressed in true Middle Eastern style: feeding us!