 At 30 years old, Sister Danielle Gonzalez is the youngest of 19 nuns at the community of Mary Help of Christians Academy in North Haledon. |
No lightning-bolt moment brought Danielle Gonzalez to the convent at St. Joseph's Provincial Center, just a gentle and consistent call that only she could hear. Gonzalez, 30, who grew up in Pequannock, was a senior at the College of New Jersey who enjoyed wearing Jones New York suits by day and dancing at clubs with friends by night. She earned a black belt in karate before the idea of becoming a nun ever entered her mind. Going to Sunday Mass was the extent of her spiritual life, but that was enough to plant the seed of her vocation.
"Eventually, what just happened is the thought would come more and more often," she says, "and all I could think about was that maybe God was calling me to be a sister." A religious vocation, a divine call to clerical life, goes against the more common scenario of people choosing career paths and forging their own successes. But perhaps the greatest mystery about some who have followed religious vocations is their satisfaction and happiness with having followed the lesser-traveled road. After taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, they say they have more than they could ever possess had they lived any other way.
SIGHTS & SOUNDS LESLIE BARBARO / HERALD NEWS
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Nun on the run
"I think for all of us it was a sense of what the world had to offer was great and we loved it, but there was a limitation to it," says Sister Colleen Clair, director of vocations in the Eastern Province, a territory that encompasses the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. "I guess you realize the finiteness of it all." Clair, 36, who grew up in Suffern, N.Y., as the 14th of 16 children, said she often went on dates with men, loved to go bowling, spent most of her free time at the local pizza parlor and was on the path to marriage and motherhood before entering religious life. At one time, she wanted to have more children than her own mother.
Now Clair feels she has had more than 10,000 children serving as a sister in the Salesian order, a group of sisters founded by St. John Bosco and devoted to helping youth and the poor. "There was a certain point I started to think that, even if I were to have 10 or 12 kids, I felt like it was limiting," Clair says. "I just feel I've had an impact on such a bigger section of the world. Obviously, the impact is not the same as that of a parent, but it's also not relegated to just a few." Since August 2006, Clair has spent most days of a given week traveling – carrying a cell phone and a laptop with her rosary beads – and meeting with young women considering life as a nun. Lately, there have been more to meet with, Clair says. Eight women filed applications so far this year to join the order, compared with six last year and hardly any in previous years.
But Clair doesn't think of herself as a recruiter. Ultimately, she believes she's not the one calling women into the convent, nor are the women electing to join the convent. "I don't really think that idea that is within our hearts is something that's fostered by ourselves," she says. Clair also understands that vocations don't strike in an instant. They unfold like stories or relationships, and can be marked by periods of doubt and profound intimacy.
A problem like Romelida
"I wish I knew what that man was saying!" exclaims Romelida Mateo when asked if God was calling her to religious life. Her voice echoes off the plaster walls of the Passaic apartment building where she lives with her grandmother and cousins. "I'm just going along with how I feel," she says. "I feel I should be giving it a shot." Mateo, a 19-year-old liberal arts major at Passaic County Community College, has a toothy, ever-present smile and an exuberant personality when she's talking about something that excites her – like cartoons.
Japanese anime, SpongeBob SquarePants, Batman and the naughty TV series "Family Guy" populate Mateo's animated passions. "Oh man, Stewie," Mateo says, reeling over the Family Guy's infant megalomaniac. "Love that guy. Seriously." She is studying to be an art teacher. She loves children and thinks about seeing the world and being a voice actor for cartoons. "I got crazy dreams and then all this popped up," she says about the vocation she is wrestling with.
She can trace her religious life through her mother, who insisted that she and her three brothers join a youth group at a Catholic parish in Paterson. Recently, the group traveled to the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind. There, Mateo met a nun named Clair, who invited her to spend a week with the Salesian sisters in North Haledon. Mateo found the convent's picturesque surroundings a far cry from her Passaic city life. "You like that music. You like that rap and the Spanish music blaring in the middle of the night," she says. "And you come here and it's like tweet-tweet birds. You see all of this and you're like, 'OK, how can I stay here?"
Since that week, Mateo's doubts have diminished. "As time passes, the more I think about it, the nervousness starts to leave me a little bit. It's the fear of the unknown, you know," she said. "No matter how many times they explain it; it's not the same as when you're living it. I do have a lot of faith." Mateo recalls being less than a social butterfly when she attended Passaic High School. She was content seeing her friends at school and spending nights and weekends with her family. While she enjoys her daily meditation and attending Mass, she expects she would be challenging for the nuns to acclimate to convent life – rather like the situation for the nuns who sang "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" in the musical "The Sound of Music."
Although Mateo will begin living among the Salesians in August as an aspirant, it will be another 10 years before she can make a permanent commitment as a nun. She is free to leave at any time before then.
Day by day
Sister Danielle Gonzalez has had doubts in following her vocation. Initially, she wasn't thrilled about cutting her hair to fit beneath her habit, or wearing pantyhose every day. But, eventually, she confronted deeper questions. When she was on the verge of beginning her novitiate -- a two-year period she spent in Italy that involved deep prayer and seclusion – she awoke one night after dreaming she was due to have a child. The dream brought her to tears. "I remember in my dream feeling such joy," she says. "I woke up and cried and cried. What better gift is it than to have life and to give life?
"But in my prayer, I honestly heard God saying to me the greater thing is to give that up for me. I don't necessarily give it up, but I give it to God. In any of my difficulties when I think, like, 'Gee, maybe it would be nice to have a man lay next to me, I think of Christ, who gave up so much more, who gave his life." Gonzalez now sees her vocation as a commitment renewed on a daily basis. "Every morning, we have to wake up and we have to recommit ourselves to the vocation that we've chosen," she says. "You grow deeper in that relationship every day."
Gonzalez spends most days teaching pre-calculus and theology at the Mary Help of Christians Academy in North Haledon, where she has embraced her students. "They bring so much life to me," she says. "People are always saying, 'Wow, you always seem so happy. 'I don't constantly think I have to smile. I just am smiling. It's really a great life full of joy and happiness."