Kathleen McMullin first began thinking about religious life while she was a student at St. Joseph Catholic School in Madison, but she wanted to go to college and pursue a career in medicine. She graduated from Mississippi State and became a certified Occupational Therapist, but she says that Jesus kept calling for something more: “He is patient, but he is persistent.”

McMullin says that as a professional she had begun to struggle with her faith, “it reached a point where I realized that my relationship with the Lord was not where it had been, my faith was not growing, and that I was lost.”

That’s when I met Kathleen. She told me while recording an interview for The Discerning Catholic Podcast that her mother encouraged her to set a meeting with me. At that point I was the parochial vicar at St. Richard in Jackson. Kathleen says that at that point in her life she had seen her brothers get married and start families, and she says, “I wanted [marriage] as well…really religious life was off the table.”

We spoke over Zoom about how I encouraged her to pray and invited her to come on a “nun run” with some parish youth group members as a chaperone. Kathleen says that after these events she “started getting up earlier in the morning and praying with scripture and got to the point where I was craving that time in the morning.”

“Slowly over time the Lord revealed how he made my heart and made me pursue him and the fact that he was pursuing my heart as well. I became more open to at least going down that road of religious life.”

Kathleen started to look at different orders. She enjoyed a visit to the Nashville Dominicans, a rapidly growing order whose primary apostolate is teaching, and she says she benefitted greatly from going on a visit during a designated weekend at their mother house.

“A big thing is just interacting with sisters and getting to see their joy and what drew them to this life.”

But she says that through prayer she was drawn to share her professional gifts with the church, she explains, “I knew I wanted to explore an order that had a medical apostolate — that’s the word for their work.”

Through a friend she met in Nashville, Kathleen was pointed toward The Sisters of St. Francis of the Martyr St. George, a Franciscan order with a house in Alton, Illinois.

“Their charism — it’s kind of like their mission statement — is to make the merciful love of Christ visible…and there was a little flicker in my heart that was like, ooo, I like that.”

Kathleen contacted the vocation director for the order and says they had a great discussion. She made two separate visits over several months and made the decision to enter postulancy for the community.

Kathleen will enter the community this September, and I will have more from her interview later this summer. Her journey to this point has inspired me to be more confident in the Lord’s plan for myself and those that I serve. And she is not alone in seeking out the Lord’s will through religious life. Sister Kelly Moline, a Springfield Dominican working in our diocese at St. Dominic Hospital, will take her final vows with the community in Springfield, Illinois on the Feast of St. Dominic, Aug. 8. And elsewhere in this issue of Mississippi Catholic you can read about the priestly ordination of Father James Martin Nobles, O.P., a native of McComb and newly ordained for the Southern Province of Dominican Friars.

The church is one big family, and we rejoice that there are those in our midst who are giving themselves over to the Lord with vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. This gift speaks to all of us of the need to have greater confidence in the Lord’s power than our own abilities, and their joy tells us that it is worth it to give everything we have up to the Lord.

If you are interested in learning more about religious orders or vocations to the priesthood and religious life, please email Fr. Nick Adam at nick.adam@jacksondiocese.org

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Often when listening to someone singing live or on television, I close my eyes to try to hear the song so as not to let the singer’s performance get in the way of the song. A song can be lost in its performance; indeed, the performance can take over so that the song is replaced by the singer.
When anyone is performing live, be it on a stage, in a classroom, at a podium, or in a pulpit, there will always be some combination of three things. The speaker will be trying to impress others with his talent; he will be trying to get a message across; and (consciously or unconsciously) he will be trying to channel something true, good, and beautiful for its own sake. Metaphorically, he will be making love to himself, making love to the audience, and making love to the song.
It is the third component, making love to the song, which makes for great art, great rhetoric, great teaching, and great preaching. Greatness sets itself apart here because what comes through is “the song” rather than the singer, the message rather than the messenger, and the performer’s empathy rather than his ego. The audience then is drawn to the song rather than to the singer. Good singers draw people to the music rather than to themselves; good teachers draw students to truth and learning rather than to themselves; good artists draw people to beauty rather than to adulation, and good preachers draw their congregations to God rather than to praise of themselves.

Admittedly, this isn’t easy to do. We are all human, so is our audience. No audience respects you unless you do show some talent, creativity, and intelligence. There’s always an unspoken pressure on the singer, the speaker, the teacher, and the preacher, both from within and from without. From within: I don’t want to disappoint! I don’t want to look bad! I need to stand out! I need to show them something special! From without, from the audience: What have you got? Show us something! Are you worth my attention? Are you bright? Are you boring? Only the most mature person can be free of these pressures. Thus, the song easily gets lost in the singer, the message in the messenger, the teaching in the teacher, and the message of God in the personality of the preacher.
As a teacher, preacher, and writer, I admit my own long struggle with this. When you first start teaching, you had better impress your students or you won’t have their attention or respect for long. The same with preaching. The congregation is always sizing you up, and you had better measure up or no one will be listening to you. Moreover, unless you have an exceptionally strong self-image, you will be a perennial prisoner of your own insecurities. Nobody wants to look bad, stupid, uninformed, or come across as talentless. Everyone wants to look good.
Moreover, not least, there is still your ego (and its power can never be underestimated). It wants to draw the attention and the admiration to itself rather than to what is true, good, and beautiful. There is always the temptation for the messenger to be more concerned about impressing others than about having the message come through in purity and truth. The subtle, but powerful, temptation inside every singer, teacher, speaker, preacher, or writer is to draw people to themselves rather than to the truth and beauty they are trying to channel.
I struggle with this in every class I teach, every article or book I write, and every time I preside at liturgy. Nevertheless, I make no apologies for this. It is the innate struggle in all creative effort. Are we trying to draw people to ourselves, or are we trying to draw them to truth, to beauty, to God?
When I teach a class, how much of my preparation and energy is motivated by a genuine concern for the students and how much is motivated by my need to look good, to impress, to have a reputation as a good teacher? When I write an article or a book, am I really trying to bring insight and understanding to others or am I thinking of my status as a writer? When I preside at Mass and preach is my real motivation to channel a sacred ritual in a manner that my own personality doesn’t get in the way? Is it to lead people into community with each other and to decrease myself so Christ can increase?
There is no simple answer to those questions because there can’t be. Our motivation is always less than fully pure. Moreover, we are not meant to be univocal robots without personalities. Our unique personalities and talents were given by God precisely as gifts to be used for others. Still, there’s a clear warning sign. When the focus of the audience is more on our personalities than on the song, we are probably making love more to ourselves and our admirers than to the song.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher and award-winning author. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

SPIRIT AND TRUTH
By Father Aaron Williams
The last segment of our study of the liturgies of Holy Week is the Mass of Easter Day. As I mentioned in an earlier column, historically there was no special Mass for Easter Day, per se. The Vigil was originally envisioned as lasting all-night and then ending shortly before dawn, making the Vigil Mass the Mass of the day as well. However, as time went on and the Vigil grew more and more complicated, it became more common to celebrate a separate Mass on Easter morning with its own proper prayer texts and readings.
This is why apart from the presence of the sequence (Victimæ Paschale Laudes), the Easter Mass is no different from any normal Sunday Mass — having no special rites or particular rubrics as we see in the liturgies during the week. As a side-effect, this serves to underscore the Paschal character of every Sunday celebration. Each Sunday, we revisit the mystery of Our Lord’s Resurrection. It is fitting that when we arrive for Mass on Easter Morning that we feel as if everything is once again as it should be. The Resurrection, after all, is a divine recapitulation — Christ restores creation to its state before the fall, which is why the Resurrection happened in a garden. Humanity fell from grace within a garden, so it is fitting that our restoration to grace would likewise occur in a garden.
If we compared the celebration of Easter Day from the traditional rite of Mass to our modern celebration, we would find very little textual differences. The prayers and readings are virtually unchanged. The modern rite, however, does give the interesting option to use the Gospel of the Road to Emmaus at Easter Masses which occur in the evening, which gives this well-loved passage its own proper place in the lectionary.

The sequence of Easter Day is a beautiful work of Christian poetry. The text contains a curious passage where the singer asks Mary Magdalene to retell us the story of the Resurrection, making this the only time in any liturgical text where we address someone other than God. Even on feast days of the Blessed Mother, liturgical texts never address Mary directly, but always speak to God regarding the mystery being celebrated. The Easter sequence is the one exception. This, perhaps, can underscore the unique role Mary Magdalene played in the early church as the ‘Apostle to the Apostles’ — announcing to all of the Apostles the news of the Resurrection.
Though our modern celebration of Easter is not particularly unique from any other Mass, there are a few examples from history of some local churches having their own customary rites associated with Easter Day. Perhaps the most significant of these comes from the Medieval English liturgy. The missals of Salisbury and York explain a rite which preceded the Easter Sunday Mass where the priest and ministers first process to the altar which served as the Altar of Repose during the Paschal Triduum. Unlike our modern celebration where the Blessed Sacrament is restored to the normal tabernacle after communion at the Easter Vigil, in the English custom the Blessed Sacrament remained secure at the Altar of Repose until the Mass of Easter Day.
Once the priest reaches the altar, the choir would begin singing the traditional hymn of thanksgiving (Te Deum) while the priest slowly raised the ciborium up from the altar and over his head, as if Christ was literally rising up from the tomb. For this reason, the English traditionally called this altar the ‘sepulcher’ instead of the ‘altar of repose.’
After the elevation of the ciborium, the priest would carry the Blessed Sacrament in procession back to the normal tabernacle — traditionally with the procession proceeded by a banner or image depicting the Risen Christ. We find a similar custom in Medieval Spain, except there it was more common for a single Host to be used rather than a full ciborium.
Some medieval parishes were even equipped with a special tabernacle or pyx which was suspended over the altar by a pulley system. In this case, the ‘elevation’ rite occurred by placing the Blessed Sacrament inside this tabernacle and then slowly winding the pulley until the tabernacle reached its normal height. An example of a tabernacle of this sort can be found in the oratory chapel of the Dominican parish in New York City: St. Vincent Ferrer. This was such a common ritual in European tradition that by the time of the renaissance it became common for churches to have a golden dove suspended over the altar with a small opening to serve as a pyx.
Suffice it to say by the time of the 19th century Enlightenment, this rite was no longer seen as effective as it was on Medieval Christians and most local churches began to drop it from their liturgical texts until by the dawn of the 20th century it essentially disappeared.

(Father Aaron Williams is the administrator at St. Joseph Parish in Greenville.)