ONE
Healed and Called
PENTECOST HAS ALWAYS BEEN a special day for me. Before I was born, my mother prayed for a girl; on Pentecost I was born.
On Christmas Day, 1959, when I was only thirteen years old my mother died suddenly. As I cried that night, I heard a voice say, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.” I didn’t really understand that it was the Lord, but I felt peace. The next morning I knew I wanted to be a nun.
About a year and a half after my mother died, I went to the motherhouse of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Clare in Newry, my home town in Ireland.
The sister who came to the door asked, “What can I do for you?”
“I want to see the Mother Abbess General,” I said.
So she took me to see Mother Agnes O’Brien.
“Child, what is it?” the old nun asked.
“I want to be a nun,” I said.
At that moment, in came the Abbess. “How old are you, child?”
“I’m fourteen and a bit,” I said.
Mother Agnes, a very saintly nun, said to me, “We can’t take you now. Canon law won’t allow it. Come back later.”
After some time, Mother Agnes asked me to come and stay with the woman who worked in the motherhouse, although I could not yet enter the novitiate. My father had to give permission for me to move to the convent. I still had not mentioned a word about this to him.
I went to ask him on a day in early June, as he was plowing in the field. He came over to the side of the field to sit with me. We chatted for a while and then I told him, “Daddy, I want to be a nun.”
He said, “Well, if that’s what
