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Christine
Hudson
“Behold, Now is a Very
Acceptable Time” People often ask, “Why would you enter religious life? What makes you want to be a nun?” For me, the answer goes back to one childhood memory... Sister Jacinta took my small hand in hers and led me through the door of the convent into a small room. “Wait here for me, Christine.” She left me, but I was not alone. A thousand, thousand prayers that had been lifted up in that little house of God surrounded me. They lingered there, there in the air, in the silence. All the years of joy, suffering, and offerings sanctified that place, made it holy. I knew God Himself dwelled there. I could sense Him. I was not alone. It was like being in the tabernacle with Him, He was so close. I could have stayed there forever, enveloped in the fullness of that Silence, joining my own prayer to those of all the years past and those to come, making of myself a prayer and a gift to Him. Eighteen years passed and once again I found myself surrounded by a profound silence. I sat in the small bedroom of the apartment I shared with another music student. I just sat there alone, soundless. Days earlier I had been rehearsing at the college of music where I was working toward my graduate degree in voice performance. Now I had no voice at all. I couldn’t even whisper. A virus had stolen my voice away from me. I lived and breathed in a community of singers and no one wanted me around, fearful they would be attacked by the same illness. I could not attend rehearsals or classes. So, there I sat, alone. Alone and silent. I soon realized that this illness had not only taken away my voice, but my identity as well. Within the depths of that utter aloneness, that deafening quiet, I realized that through the years I had become my voice. Without my ability to sing I was nothing to anyone. I was useless. I was nonexistent. As the silence grew deeper and the stillness of those weeks of isolation settled into my roots, I began to recognize it. This silence was familiar. It stretched back through years of memory, years during which I had drowned out the silence with many voices, especially my own. Voices that sought attention. Voices that were ambitious, even jealous. Voices totally centered on self. Voices that judged. Now, as a small light shines through a dusty window, I began to see. I began to remember. That day when I was just about six years old...that day when Sr. Jacinta led me into that sacred space, that place of holiness. That place of consummate silence. I remembered that I was not alone. He was there. Still there, just waiting for me to stop the noise, stop drowning out His quiet, but firm voice. I knew I could no longer continue along the path of a performer. This path wasn’t for me. I wasn’t meant to be heard in that way, to be displayed for all to see. I longed to be hidden, to be in that quiet place, to be in the tabernacle with Him. It
has been a long journey since then, since the rediscovery of that
Silence which is the most profound Word. A journey through illness,
reconciled relationships, hard work. A journey that has taken me,
literally, into the desert. This journey has finally led me to
respond in a decisive way to that very first call so long ago. A
call to Silence, to prayer, to make a gift of myself to God as a
cloistered, contemplative nun. We are only able to make such a
response in God’s time and through His grace. Now, within the quiet
of the desert I hear that still, small voice whispering, “Behold,
now is a very acceptable time!”
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