People Of All Walks Of Life Grateful They Answered God’s Call To A Higher Purpose

PRISCILLA GREEAR, Staff Writer

Published: November 4, 2004

ATLANTA—While in college, Elisa Nutt was considering medical school and dating a man whom she hoped to marry one day. Then she received a totally unexpected proposal: God was calling her to religious life.

“I was going to take the MCATs and was thinking of medical school. I was praying and felt what people call a call to religious life,” she said. “The idea of religious life was not something we (in my family) even thought about. I really thought all my life I’d have children and be married. It was a difficult decision and in a way it still is, but it doesn’t get rid of the vocation. It’s a spousal vocation.”

Now this young woman is Sister Mary Krista, RSM. She is one young Catholic woman from the archdiocese who has found the courage to follow her faith and make a counter-cultural vocational choice.

Then there’s Father Jack Durkin, who left a rewarding career in teaching to more fully live out his vocation through the priesthood.

Others have deepened their spiritual lives through mission work.

Daphne Nordone, of St. Brigid Church in Alpharetta, has enriched her family and spiritual life by participating in mission work for an orphanage of Mustard Seed Communities in Nicaragua and living daily with missionary spirit; her family even adopted a boy from the community. Emory professor Brian Mahan has enriched his prayer life and unleashed new energy for his writing through communal living.

A special year of perpetual adoration devoted to all vocations began on Sunday, Oct. 31, in eight archdiocesan parishes with perpetual adoration chapels. Sponsored by the archdiocesan Office of Vocations, the intent of the program is to pray for vocations, especially for priests, deacons and Religious, but also for the single and married. Adoration will be devoted to prayer that all people will find their own special calling through which to use their talents and gifts—their vocation to the life that God wants them to lead.

Sister Off To Rome For Religious Formation

Sister Mary Krista, 24, reflected on her journey toward formation with the Religious Sisters of Mercy of Alma, Mich., in a phone interview. She had just participated in a five-day silent retreat and was preparing to leave the next day, Sept. 1, to move to Rome for formation—not knowing at that point what she’d be assigned to do there. She has just completed her second canonical year and is in her third year of an eight-year formation program.

“It’s a gift I didn’t find anywhere else to this degree … It has brought me joy and fulfillment,” she said of religious life. “(Although) I don’t think any time you follow your vocation it’s easy.”

This sister, who is slender and 5-foot-11 with long blond hair, was not a “religious kid” growing up but was from a faithful Catholic family who now live in Demorest. She did pray and ponder existential questions before going off to Villanova University. There she became involved in many activities, serving as president of her dorm, majoring in history with a minor in English, before finishing at Piedmont College after her family moved to Georgia.

She found herself increasingly drawn to the Catholic campus ministry but nevertheless was very surprised to have thoughts of religious life, as she’d hardly ever been around women Religious. She spoke with a friend who entered seminary after college and went to study at the North American College in Rome, where the Religious Sisters of Mercy worked. At his suggestion, she gave them a call and later went for a month-long summer visit to the motherhouse in Alma, Mich. She clicked with them. “I knew I wanted to find sisters who were happy and wore habits.”

Ironic coming from a young woman who has always liked clothes and being fashionable; she still admires a sharp outfit from a distance.

Her family was very surprised and concerned about the sacrifices involved when she told them, and many didn’t understand, but she committed herself wholeheartedly to trying religious life to discern if it was really her calling and found peace in the process.

“I was really afraid to make this decision, and I didn’t know I didn’t have anything to fear. It’s just different in our culture. Even with marriage, people don’t think they want to commit to something that has sacrifice. You sacrifice in some ways, but you gain in so much more,” she said. “You don’t have a lot of free time or control over how your time is spent, but you learn freedom can be its highest form in obedience. Real freedom is being able to serve the Lord without impediment. I think for one of the things, in general, people confuse freedom (with) doing whatever you want.”

Her mother, Mary-Ann Nutt, said that it’s difficult for the close family not to have her home for Christmas and Easter. But she’s been working very hard and “I’m proud of her—it takes a tremendous amount of courage … She’s at tremendous peace.”

She added that the order has women working in such professions as law, medicine and education and they run a health clinic and psychiatric services for Religious near the motherhouse. Hosting three young women entering the order at her home, she found them to be “unbelievably bright, well-adjusted ladies.”

Emory Professor Has Epiphany Of Recruitment To Communal Life

In his book “Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose,” Brian Mahan, a theology professor at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, writes about the challenge of making authentic vocational choices that yield the deepest fulfillment and personal growth rather than those that lead to dissatisfaction and preoccupation with seeking approval and admiration of others and meeting external standards of success. Some may also make poor choices because of a lack of self-esteem or sense of any higher purpose for their life.

“What I see over and over again is that it’s precisely in those moments when people feel a clear sense of call, which may go against the grain of the expectations of the culture or of their parents or even their own (expectations), there are really profound inhibitions to taking that step.”

Mahan, a Catholic, tells stories like that of the woman who was accepted to a prestigious law school and instead followed her heart and chose to join the Peace Corps; that of a student who was afraid to change from a pre-med program to become an English major out of fear others would perceive she had failed out of the program when she was actually doing very well; and that of the woman who returned from overseas humanitarian work and struggled to maintain that passion for social justice right at home.

Illustrating the quest for power and glory one must avoid, the professor recalled how, as a child, a cardinal once came to his Catholic school where he told him he also wanted to be a cardinal. The clergyman told the lad he had to be a priest first.

“I said I didn’t want to be a priest, I wanted to be a cardinal. I wanted to dress up in red and have all these people drag me around in a limousine.”

He believes the Holy Spirit is active in discernment and calls it “blessed wounded-ness” when one has some sort of painful experience through which one has an “epiphany of recruitment” to a life with deeper meaning.

“Sometimes what really wounds you moves you at the same time. We know that Jesus was preoccupied with the joy of building the kingdom of God and at the same time was preoccupied with the suffering of others, ‘the least of mine.’ I think the Holy Spirit somehow recruits us both to the joy of the kingdom of God and sensitivity to the suffering of others.”

It’s important to have close friends or family members to help one make good vocational choices.

“Who do you find that supports you and believes in you” to provide help in making tough decisions, Mahan encourages people to ask.

He refers to “self-serving procrastination” which says, “I’ll do that thing I know I’m called to do, but I’ll do it in five years.”

He struggled with a vocational decision when he and his wife, Kim Boykin, who also teaches at Emory, decided, after seeing some Tibetan monks doing sand sculpture, to try out communal living in a Methodist retreat center three hours south of Atlanta in Scott, Ga. They first went down there on sabbatical and eventually cut back their hours at Emory so they could spend half of every week down there, participating in communal prayer three times daily. They are renting at the center for two years and then will “probably make some kind of permanent arrangement.”

“Something said, ‘Gee, I want to live more like this.’ It’s not at all rational, but it’s the kind of little insight you get every once in awhile. It’s something about pursuing a life given over to creativity and writing, in my case; it just seemed to really be beckoning and it happened … Luckily the dean was very sympathetic and allowed me to go half-time and keep my benefits. I love the retreat center, but I like my insurance, too,” Mahan said. “I knew I wanted to do this, but it didn’t shut up the voices in my head about being misinterpreted. I kept thinking, ‘Are they thinking I’m failing at this? Am I not really a good scholar?’ In fact, after we made that decision I couldn’t get the voices out, but we did make the decision … I needed a more structured prayer life, absolutely needed it. I really realized that.”

It has had a “quite liberating” effect on what and how he writes.

“I enjoy my things up here more since we moved down there,” he said, adding that they drive 20 miles for Mass at a Catholic church.

A good sign that one has taken the right path is if it evokes a sense of both passion and peace. “As one Jesuit said to me, ‘What makes you feel both excited and at peace at the same time?’” Mahan continued.

The problem with ambition is projecting oneself into the future without paying attention to being in the moment. “I think in terms of professional success, you just go for it and be very careful to be watching for something else as you go for it … The problem is not attending to the signals about vocation as they emerge in the present moment. By underestimating themselves or by projecting despair into the future, we don’t see what’s right in front of us and by the same token the people who are projecting (success) into the future also aren’t attending,” he said.

He would question whether a seminarian who wants to serve at the most prestigious church in town has prayed and fully discerned God’s will, and conversely, would question if one always wanting a very small parish were underestimating himself. The professor noted that discernment doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing deal or radical decision.

“You can make a lot of small decisions and find yourself in a very different place,” he said. “Things that start with one step, like a little volunteer work, can open up an entirely new world ... I think God is really gracious that way. If we make a little move, we’re likely to receive some real insights.”

Alpharetta Mom Receives Call To Nicaraguan Mission Work

Daphne Nordone, a parishioner at St. Brigid Church, Alpharetta, was volunteering at her children’s school but began to feel she had “laminated, Xeroxed and stapled enough papers at the school as far as volunteering there. I wanted to find something bigger to do … I was straining my ear to hear what I was supposed to be doing with my time” to serve God when one day she got a call from a parishioner at St. Brigid’s, who invited her on a mission trip. “I said, ‘Oh my God, God is on the phone.’”

She felt guilty for leaving her young kids with her husband, but decided to go where she “really felt I saw the face of God” as she cared for the severely disabled children in a Nicaraguan Mustard Seed orphanage and “their eyes would just light up.”

“I really felt totally alive when I was doing this, like I was really doing God’s work.”

So she and others decided to form a group that meets monthly at St. Brigid’s to focus on fund-raising and trip planning and helping to arrange for children to receive needed medical treatment. While she never saw herself as the take-charge type, she is now on the Mustard Seed Nicaragua board, has been on four trips to Hogar Belén orphanage—leading two and bringing her husband on three of those—and will lead another in February. She has met many Nicaraguans and other people in the archdiocese and in Central America that she wouldn’t otherwise get to, and prays more, with so much need at the orphanage.

“I think it’s really encouraged me to share my faith and cross boundaries I’d never cross. We have non-Catholics going with us, and we make them feel comfortable.”

Among their projects, she helped arrange for a baby named Angelo to undergo needed brain surgery in Atlanta for hydrocephalus. He was staying at their home during the trip when her three children “fell in love with him.”

“My kids were like ‘mom, you can’t find him another family.’”

While unsure whether Angelo would have brain damage, they decided to adopt him and prayed for his total recovery. At 2, he’s now “doing great,” and everybody at school and in the neighborhood loves him.

“We just wouldn’t know what to do without him. He’s such a blessing, so friendly and happy. He makes our day every day…We didn’t know if he’d be disabled. We were praying he’d be OK, but at that period he was so little and a baby. We feel very blessed that his surgery went so well.”

Priest Went From Teaching English To Preaching Christ

It was while suffering from a mild depression following the break-up with his girlfriend that Jack Durkin, then 35, began to pray more, go to daily Mass and seek a new path. Looking back now, the pastor of Christ Our Hope Church in Lithonia, who has a wiry frame and wears dark-rimmed glasses, reflected on his journey, pausing to pray before the interview.

He said he always looked upon the church as a place of comfort with beautiful morals and teachings but had not been active beyond attending Mass. He also found comfort in the job he had as a middle school English teacher and cross-country coach.

“I was determined to be a teacher ‘til the day I died. I loved that profession, and I liked to coach.”

In his spiritual search he read the pope’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor and the story about the rich young man who wanted to follow God but couldn’t give up everything, and he realized that he, too, couldn’t be obedient in everything. He questioned what he needed to surrender and felt God was saying, “If you can’t break away from sin, then you can’t live in truth and you can’t offer yourself to anybody.”

“(Then) this crazy idea popped in my head to become a priest. But being a priest wasn’t anything that appealed to me—you’re not married, a bishop tells you what you need to do. I liked to sit around and read books, liked my summers off, Christmas and Easter off. I liked the independence. But somehow I knew if the Lord wanted me to do that I guess I’d have to do it,” he recalled. “I knew I was not going to be able to sit in the back of the church on a Saturday evening and fulfill my obligation.”

So he gave it a try. During a pastoral year, he was still thinking about going back to teaching when a policeman brought a suicidal man to the parish. As the only person available, he started to listen to the man and tell him Jesus loved him and that he had a reason to live, letting God just work through him. That event stirred him to carry on with seminary.

Father Durkin, who talks with depth and conviction, spoke frankly about the “crucifixion” of priesthood. He said that a priest often feels like he has “a bull’s-eye on one’s back.” He is always identified as one who is supposed to be like Christ and administers grace through the sacraments. He added that while he has a natural desire for the completion of marriage, which he offers as a sacrifice to the Lord, “God gives you something supernatural.”

It also means loss of control over his schedule. “I like a very simple life with activities that are structured. Living as a priest is an un-simple life with a structure that is constantly destroyed.”

But as it’s easy for a single man to live selfishly without the responsibilities of family, Father Durkin knows priesthood is what God requires of him to be able to give himself totally to Christ.

“The Lord made me a priest because I was too weak to make that sacrifice without being a priest. He doesn’t choose the strongest. He chooses the weakest,” he said. “My life is (now) more meaningful and intense.”

He believes that in priesthood and in marriage one realizes the limitations of the mind, heart and body and comes to accept them, saying he wishes he had a better memory for parishioners’ names, but God provides.

He encouraged men to consider not whether they have the ability to become priests but rather if God is calling them. “If you’re thinking about the power of God and it seems as if He’s calling you, if you think reasonably it’s a crazy idea, very likely it’s God’s idea—if you know it’s not because you’re dissatisfied with something and trying to escape,” Father Durkin said. “For me it’s kind of fun, a whole bunch of impossible situations that happen each day. All I have to do is say to God, ‘It wasn’t my idea to put me in this situation. You put me here, and I’m just giving myself of what you asked me to do, and you’re gonna have to work through me even though I’m a weak person and a sinner’ … The Holy Spirit works very powerfully when you get out of the way.”

He continued, “If the Lord opens up a door, you should go through it. If it’s an idea of God’s head, he’ll get you through it. Let the work the Lord has done in you come to completion.”

Sister Encourages Exploration Of Religious Life

Sister Mary Krista also encourages women to pass through that open door, as she sees many who are afraid to take that step. She understands the stereotype about women Religious.

“I understand the stereotype because I had it: Nuns are people who can’t get married. That’s what I thought about nuns. It’s nothing like that. Most of the fear came from what I thought I knew, but didn’t know,” she said.

She believes being a sister is a very honorable role that is “not any less important” than that of being a priest, and noted how holy nuns can have a powerful influence over priests citing how cardinals deferred to Mother Teresa. She’s saddened by the decline in religious vocations but is hopeful with bright young women signing up. “In God’s providence he’s been guiding the church through 2,000 years, and he’s going to continue to guide it. Sure it would be nice to have a few more, so pray.”

While living at the motherhouse in Alma, she, after rising some days for prayer at 5:45 a.m., assisted in administrative work and participated daily in Mass, adoration and the Liturgy of the Hours. Now in Rome she is assisting a cardinal, studying theology and Italian and giving tours of St. Peter’s Basilica. She’s interested in teaching, and the order encourages women to get the highest level of education possible. Marriage is still very attractive to her, but religious life “has given me a happiness I wouldn’t feel in a marriage relationship. I think God puts in your heart to have a certain relationship with him. People called to marriage have a different call to relationship with him with their spouse … I have a desire for a very direct relationship with him, to be His spouse.”

She, too, testifies to the grace God has brought to her and others around her. “You see the fruits of the choice you make not just in your own life but in the lives of family and friends and people you meet. You see it in graces he gives you in choosing him.”