Vocational Journeys

After graduate school, I moved to California to work as a medical artist. While walking home from Mass that first week, I was unexpectedly encountered by a young woman on a fluorescent green bicycle. She had attended the same service, and after welcoming me, she invited me to a prayer group at another woman’s house in San Francisco. Little did I know, this simple invitation was the beginning of my heart’s greatest adventure. When I arrived, I was confused. “Why does her house look like a church?” I thought as I rang the bell. “Hello!” a young woman said as she opened the door. “Where am I and who are you?” I said in my bewilderment. “Well, I’m Alyssa and I’m a Verbum Dei sister,” she said.

“A Verbum…what?” I blurted out. “Don’t worry! Not many people have heard of us before! Our community was only founded fifty years ago. You’ve come to our House of Prayer!” she said. Prayer that first evening was simple-lectio divina, a form of prayer that engages the imagination through scripture. As an artist, I had fallen in love with this form of meditative prayer during my experience of St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises for laypeople. During prayer that first evening, I felt like I had come home.

I continued returning to their House of Prayer, and while listening to one of the sisters give a talk, an unexpected desire swept across my heart: “I want to be their sister.” Not knowing where this came from, I quickly dismissed it as a ridiculous thought. But in prayer the next day, my heart burned. As I wondered which way the wildfire might spread, I acknowledged being uncontrollably drawn to the community week after week. I verbalized to God the hidden question arising from my depths, “Am I called to join the Verbum Dei community as a missionary?”

I thought I was called to the Bay Area to work as an artist. I felt so loved by God, but I was utterly confused.

That summer, I went on a trip to El Salvador with some of the sisters. We pondered the lives of the Salvadoran martyrs, the beauty of the Salvadoran people, and what it means to taste the Resurrection in the midst of suffering. While in the hospitalito, the chapel where Oscar Romero was martyred, an intense desire moved me to approach the altar. I felt a quiet invitation from within to remove my sandals for the place where I was standing was indeed holy ground. As I kneeled on the altar, forehead touching the place where life had been given and was still being poured out for God’s people, I thanked Romero for his love. I prayed for his intercession to help me live out my deepest identity and vocation, and I too placed my life on the altar before God.

Upon returning from El Salvador, I desired to walk my truth and intentionally explore the possibility of a vocation to religious life. I moved into Verbum Dei’s discernment house to live the question. I desire now to make my home in God’s Word and live Jesus’ invitation, “Remain in me, as I remain in you.” (Jn 15:4)