Answering the Call: My Spiritual Journey

What am I meant to do for God? Those were the words I exclaimed to my mother as I grabbed her shoulders and shook her in the kitchen of our Waltham, MA home.

Two months earlier I had returned from a year’s service as a Catholic lay missionary in Jamaica, W.I. That year, I had thought, would satisfy my long-term sense of having a spiritual calling. It didn’t and now, about to leave my parents’ home for New York City, I was feeling desperate.

In New York I would begin a two-year masters’ program in psychiatric nursing at Columbia University’s Teachers College. I would unexpectedly begin a year long course of psychotherapy that proved strengthening and liberating. In New York I would serendipitously meet my future husband.

And in New York, moving beyond my deep-seated Catholicism, I would meet and embrace the teachings of Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han Moon.

Through a divine confluence of these events and others, I mysteriously began to discover what it was that I had to do for God.

This memoir is a record of the unusual unfolding of that calling.

As I write it more than fifty years after shaking my mother’s shoulders, I realize that there were many things I had to do for God, most of which are described herein.

On the other hand, I think there was primarily only one thing I had to do: to love others - my family and beyond my family - with as deep a heart as I could muster. This volume is also a record of the challenge and sacrifice associated with that, of my faltering steps the path, and of the Grace that always underlaid everything.