This weekend, Valerie Roxburgh will make her first profession of vows as a Sister of Notre Dame. At 51, she is six years older than her formation director, Sister of Notre Dame Mary Kathleen Burns, who entered the religious community at age 18.
Sister Roxburgh represents a wave of "second career" women who are making the leap to religious life. Their ages reflect an "upward trend" among religious candidates that's been going on in the archdiocese for the last 15 years, says Religious Sister of Charity Kathy Bryant, archdiocese vocations director.
Mid-life wake-up call
A lapsed Catholic for more than three decades, Roxburgh enjoyed her work as an administrative assistant but, beginning about the age of 35, experienced always having "a hole in my heart that only God could fill." Ten years later, the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001 spurred her to action.
"9/ll was my wake-up call, when I realized my security was in God," said Sister Roxburgh. She started going to Mass at Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Ventura, where she was working for a bio-medical firm. Just two months later, she started her quest to join a religious community.
After attending a discernment group and participating in several archdiocesan vocation days, she decided in the summer of 2003 to try a three-month-long, live-in experience at the Sisters of Notre Dame provincial house in Thousand Oaks. The sisters' charism of sharing God's goodness and provident care in education and parish work resonated with Sister Roxburgh's mid-life longing.
Following a year-and-a-half discernment process, she was accepted as a religious candidate and moved into the Sisters of Notre Dame formation house in Long Beach. As part of her formation, she participated in weekly inter-community novitiate classes at the Motherhouse of the Lovers of the Holy Cross in Gardena.
She found the multi-congregational, multi-cultural novitiate with its 30 male and female participants from Africa, Australia, Mexico, Vietnam and the U.S. "very affirming." According to Sister Burns, who has helped coordinate the ICN program for more than three years, the experience of sharing congregational charisms benefits participants by helping them "define" who they are and clarify in which congregation they are most suited for ministry.
Sister Roxburgh is looking forward to serving as a high school office manager at Notre Dame Academy in West L.A. and will begin taking classes toward a religious studies degree through Mount St. Mary's Weekend College. "It's a great life to be able to work for God 24-7," said Sister Roxburgh.
Ever surfacing pull
Sister Elizabeth (Lisa) Lopez, in formation preparation for her first profession with the Sisters of Social Service next May, knew from the age of seven that she was called to be a religious but "became very good at ignoring the call."
When she failed to pass the bar exam after graduating from the Western State University of Law in Fullerton, Lisa made a bargain with God that, if she didn't pass a second time, she would enter a religious order.
She took her successful second attempt at passing the bar as a sign to begin a law practice and go ahead with marriage plans. When her marriage ended after six years, one of her first thoughts was "Now is my chance to enter religious life!"
She describes her religious calling as "this ever surfacing pull. Finally, it got so strong I could not ignore it. I felt this great disinterest in my practice and the whole need to make money and participate in the rat race of success.
"I needed something else, something deeper and I knew I could no longer ignore what I had known since I was seven. I needed to do this for me or I would never find peace. I figured, hey, if this doesn't work, so be it, but I have to try," she wrote in an e-mail to The Tidings from her summer job in Washington DC working at NETWORK, a national Catholic social justice lobby group.
Though she admits it was hard closing her 15-year private law practice specializing in employment and labor in Orange County and giving up her four-bedroom house on a golf course, she says "all the challenges of letting go of that part of my life will not outweigh my joy of doing my part in making our world better."
She says she feels "like a little kid in a candy store" since she entered the Sisters of Social Service, a congregation whose charism is in the area of social and political systemic change practiced within the Benedictine spirituality. For the past two years, Sister Lopez has worked in Sacramento for Jericho, an interfaith lobby group. She has also applied and been placed on the Administrative Law Judge list for the state of California for the Unemployment Appeals Board.
"There are so many other opportunities I would love to explore like going into Immigration Law, or working at the UN. God has opened some amazing doors for me. I have met wonderful people in the process and feel that the sky is the limit for my future," said Sister Lopez.
After attending and giving numerous vocation talks, she believes that many women "long for what religious life can bring. …The women that are in discernment classes have sought out this life, but there are so many women out there that know they want something but don't know it's religious life. We need to show them," commented Sister Lopez. |