Discerning: What Mothers and Daughters Need to Know

God isn’t Google. When we send up our prayerful search queries about discernment, He doesn’t return 15.3 million results in 0.65 seconds with the best matches listed first.

But sometimes God uses Google.

When I was a little girl, I assumed that I would grow up and get married someday. I dreamed of finding “the one.” It was the plot of every movie I watched, an implicit expectation that everyone in every age and every place eventually gets married and lives happily ever after.

I was baptized as an infant, but at some point during my early childhood, my parents drifted away from the faith and stopped going to church. My exposure to priests and religious was minimal.

Everything changed when I was in fifth grade. My parents’ marriage troubles came to a head, and my entire reality was on the brink of collapse. In God’s great mercy, however, my parents managed to reconcile and decided to return to the Church. We went to Midnight Mass for Christmas in 1995, and even at 10 years old, I had a distinct feeling that I had come home.

I was eager to learn about Catholicism, about this faith that was new and yet so intimately familiar. Perhaps it was simply the memories of going to Mass in my very early childhood, or perhaps it was the inherent desire for God, hardwired in all His creatures, being fulfilled — whatever it was, coming into the Church felt like remembering something I always knew.

As much as I learned about my faith in those first years back in the Church, I still had very little exposure to vocations other than marriage and the priesthood. There weren’t any visible religious communities in or around our parish.

I was a junior in high school before it finally struck me that I could be called to something other than marriage. I was dating someone at the time, and we had dated for more than a year. He was a wonderful, kind, funny, wholesome gentleman, and we had a great deal in common. As much as I enjoyed his company, though, I had a nagging feeling all the while we were together — an uneasy, unsettled feeling that I couldn’t name or understand.

I began to wonder if it meant that God was calling me to become a nun.

It was many more years — almost a decade — before I discovered another possibility.

I had dated, and I had gone on discernment retreats with religious communities, and God’s answer always came back the same: “Not this.” If not marriage, and if not religious life, then what? Was it possible God didn’t give me a vocation?

Enter Google.

God isn’t Google. But sometimes He uses Google to show us what He wants us to see.

I searched something along the lines of “single vocations for women in the Catholic Church.” And this is what I found:

There’s more — much more — to my discernment story that followed my initial Google search. But here’s the point of this particular post: one of the great challenges young women face in discerning a vocation is a lack of visible and easily accessible resources.

Young men see their parish priest in person every week at Mass, if not more often. A young man who has questions about a vocation will have no trouble finding someone who can give him answers or point him in the right direction.

The same, unfortunately, is not often true for young women.

For a young woman, discerning in real life might mean doing a Google search. And the answer may not appear on the first page. And after you find a reliable answer, it will probably take a lot of intense research.

Of course, searching and researching are just the beginning. The real work of discernment happens in conversation with God, in prayer — above all, in time spent before the Blessed Sacrament. If you want to know whether Jesus is calling you to be his bride, spend time with Him. Lots of time.

In the end, my girlish notions about getting married — about falling in love and being loved, about finding “the One” — were actually pretty accurate. It just turned out that my Spouse is Divine. And I couldn’t be happier.

Here are some tips I have for Mothers and Daughters about the unique path of female discernment:

Mothers:

–strive to expose your daughters to uniquely female vocations 

–get creative in finding discernment assistance for your daughters

–encourage your daughters in deepening and strengthening their relationship with God. No matter what their vocation, this should be a goal of every Christian woman. 

Daughters:

–search out strong Catholic women who live out a variety of vocations to help you better understand the unique opportunities available to you as a Catholic woman. Personal witness and conversations can have a huge impact on your discernment process. 

–ask for resources from your parish, diocese, or women’s ministry for discernment. This may help you discover an unknown resource or encourage these groups to make a commitment to providing these resources in the future!

–spend time in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament asking for direction and guidance as you search for your unique vocation. 

I allowed Ferrari Films to make a documentary about my vocational journey because I wish I had had a resource like Song of Songs when I was discerning. And since my consecration in 2016, I’ve striven to make myself available as a resource. Although resources for women discerning a vocation do exist, they are few and far between. It takes patience and determination to find them.