I was born and raised in Minnesota: a land of great lakes and great dreams. I’ve always had the intuition that a great love was waiting for me. In the different phases of my life, the Lord safeguarded and helped mature this secret conviction and, through the faces and the concreteness of life, He kept watch over me and called me to Himself.
From the time I was little, I would watch my mother in our home as she served the family with joy and the way she would open herself to reality with wonder and positivity. My father taught us to reason and to ask questions before the world. My parents gave me, along with my brother and my sister, the greatest gift, which is baptism in the Church. They taught me to turn to God with the trust of one who knows He loves us and wants to give us everything that we need.
At the end of middle school, my desire for “something more,” which had so many times been disappointed by the ways that the world offered fulfillment (interesting friendships, scholastic excellence, etc…), finally found a home thanks to the invitation of two friends to participate in Gioventù Studentesca (Student Youth), the high school group of Communion and Liberation. At the first meeting, in which we sang, we looked at one another intentionally, we ate and joked, I thought: “These people have found what I have always desired. I don’t know what it is but I never want to leave it.” Life became a great adventure and my search, which was no longer solitary but now shared with others, was transformed into a concrete road to follow, with the patience to persevere even if I did not understand everything, with openness and gratitude for what was proposed to me: the weekly encounters, charitable work, the new friendships, the Mass, the Liturgy of the hours, etc. From the outside, we were living a completely ordinary life but Jesus Christ was with us, He who only gives meaning and fullness to all things, He who truly can unite us.
I was recognizing within me, with wonder and fear, that Jesus was calling me
During my years in college, two very strong desires emerged within me in a very clear way. The first was that of an ever greater intimacy with Jesus: He allowed me to experience His personal love for me and I wanted to respond. The other desire was to live out this intimate and profound relationship with others and before all. In the years spent in CLU (the university students of Communion and Liberation), the Christian proposal that I had begun to experience in high school matured and was imbued with a missionary spirit. I went to the large state school of Minnesota and I studied English and American Literature. While I enjoyed my studies, I noticed that many of my classmates were oppressed by extreme solitude. As I looked at them, my heart was pained: already then I had an intuition that the gift that I had received must, in some way, be for them as well.
During this time in my life, a friendship was born with a priest of the Fraternity of St. Charles, Fr. Pietro Rossotti, who led the community of CLU. In him, I saw someone who lived what I too desired to live in a free and joyful way: a life given entirely to Christ, in a house with others, open to the entire world. I was recognizing within me, with wonder and fear, the intuition that I too was made for such a story as his and that Jesus was calling me.
It was the Virgin Mary who confirmed this intuition. At the end of my time in college, in fact, I went on pilgrimage to Our Lady of Champion Wisconsin, the only place in the United States where Mary has appeared. In a profound encounter with her, I understood that I was before the most beautiful woman in the world but not because she had a perfect life or had never suffered; on the contrary! It was, instead, because she always chose and preferred what the Lord wanted for her. She taught me that the road towards happiness, beauty and fullness lies in saying to the Lord: “I want what you want for me, because it is always better than what I could imagine!”. This moment of abandon to Him freed in me the concrete desire for a form of life that I discovered already existed among the Missionary Sisters of St. Charles. In these years, with them, I have discovered, more and more, my place in the house that was prepared for me from eternity. My sisters are the living love of God for me: a love that overflows and wants to spread to all of the world.
