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My Vocation
“How did you end up here?” people sometimes ask me. It’s a good question, I guess. I mean, how many semi-Protestants from California end up becoming Catholic, joining Madonna House, and spending the rest of their lives in prayer houses in Ottawa?
However, it has always seemed somehow inevitable to me. And in any case, how many people really want to hear, “It all started when I was three”?
It did though. As I see it, the curtain rises on the drama of God’s call to a soul. It reveals a girl of 3½ dressed in sensible red coveralls, her hair cropped short. Her mother has her dressed and equipped for her mission in life, which is to play.
We lived at that time in a neighborhood, and life for me consisted of a fast dash out the door and onto the swing set with my friends. We played long and we played hard.
One little girl was going to take dance lessons—ballet was the word. I wanted to do that, too. Another was going to study piano. I wanted to do that as well.
I wanted to do everything. I was one of those little trucker-type kids, always climbing over fences, investigating, objecting to going inside to get ready for bed.
And then we moved to my grandparents’ farm. Suddenly there was no swing set. There were no little kids in the neighborhood. In fact, there was no neighborhood. There was no potential for dance lessons or music lessons.
At the age of not-quite-four, my horizons had been suddenly and severely limited. Spiritually, this is a very good thing, but I didn’t know it at the time.
I was bored, lonely, and displaced. The grownups were actually heroically patient, but I didn’t know that at the time either. It seemed to me that one or the other of them was always saying that they had had enough. It seemed I was all too often being told to “go play by yourself.”
I didn’t know how to play by myself. And besides, it didn’t sound like much fun.
I remember stomping out of the house and sitting miserably on the front steps, glaring in angry boredom at the world.
But as I did, I noticed the pattern of cracks in the cement walk and began to trace them. I noticed there were black and red ants running across the walk and into the dirt. They came and went from piles of sand that looked like small volcanoes.
When I stuck a stick in them, they erupted with a swarm of ants. I experimented and discovered that the black ants didn’t bite. The red ants did. The red ants also had an acrid, bitter smell. There were other bugs, too; these were gray and would roll into little balls if you touched them.
By this time, I’d forgotten to be angry. I looked up and noticed that on one side of me were pink, fluffy flowers, with petals like the crepe paper I made pictures with, and with yellow fuzzy threads in their centers:
“Rock roses,” my grandmother said, when I made a quick trip inside to ask.
On the other side of the steps were what looked like a mountain of blue flowers. This was the Blue Plumbago. I liked the sound of that and went around for days saying, “Blue Plumbago.”
Eventually my exploration took me off the steps and across the yard to investigate the multi-colored lantana. Small, jewel-like flowers, they were, dotted with big green grasshoppers and lots of butterflies—orange monarchs and yellow swallowtails.
I learned that grasshoppers are tough. You could catch them and feel them leaping against the inside of your fist. You could put them in jars and listen to them pinging against the glass. You could have races with them.
But butterflies were delicate. You should never, never catch a butterfly. Its wings are covered in fine powder and if that powder is even touched, the butterfly won’t be able to fly and will die.
But if you stood very still with your hand out, a butterfly would come and land on you. Then you could feel their hair fine legs tickling softly.
I learned to play with the flowers and the bugs, the grasshoppers and the butterflies. I never did learn to play alone.
I discovered that the dirt on the road outside the yard was silky on bare feet and that the large boxes of raisins made a hot sweet-smelling tunnel, exciting to run or ride through.
My explorations took me to the vineyard, where one day I found huge tracks and went racing back to the house to ask, “Could there be bears out there?”
My grandmother taught me a prayer, the words of which became a sing-song chant when I was alone in the orange grove or vineyard.
As I understood and chanted it, it went, “Our Father, who art in heaven . . . Hello.”
Perhaps because I had no children to play with, I became accustomed to God’s company. He was just there, a given, like the bugs, the trees, the dirt road. God was the atmosphere we lived in. He was with me as I explored his world.
At night when they put me to bed, I’d look out the window. Sometimes I’d see a red light blinking way off in the distance. I didn’t always see it, but I always looked. There was something mysterious and beckoning in that light, and in the sound of the freight train going by in the dark.
Life, they seemed to say, is bigger than you know. God is beyond where you are. So a yearning for beyond was born in me.
Psychologists agree that personality is formed before we are six. We stayed on the farm until I was seven, so it was not surprising that it formed my idea of normal.
To this day, normal is what I learned then. Normal is a world which contains many limitations, where you cannot have or do what you want. Normal is a life which is largely solitary and sometimes lonely, but which is engaged in exploration.
Normal is a world which opens up more and more the longer I gaze at it, a world that yields ongoing layers of beauty the deeper it is explored. It is a world which beckons beyond itself, speaking of the God who created it, whose nature is subtly reflected in his creation.
Normal is the presence of God within all surrounding all, accompanying me, lending a shimmer to the day, an edge of excitement to each discovery.
God is the atmosphere, the climate. It is normal to think of him as my Father in heaven. It is normal to say hello. In other words, before the age of six, I learned that a life of prayer is normal.
This qualifies as beginner’s luck.
If this was all I learned, I might be a saint. Unfortunately, it was not all I learned, and so, although I found my way to life in a prayer house, I’ve had to spend much of my adult life in this house, un-learning concepts of “normal,” misunderstandings far less helpful than my misunderstanding of the word “hallowed.”
This unlearning is hard and painful work. It is not easy to unlearn the patterns of dealing with pain, of getting my own way, and all the other bad habits that block life.
But as the unlearning continues, it is sometimes as though the shell of existence breaks open. A word is revealed which shimmers with the presence of God, where every bug and bird holds mystery, where the amazing waits on the other side of every minute.
Then, as I go through my ordinary, adult day, there seems to be an echo of a child singing her song in the orchard.
Martha, who spent her entire time as a member of MH in Ottawa, died of cancer in 2012 at age 61. This article was found among her papers.
