My life was perfect

Scott...

In the fall of 2000, I left my hometown of Jerseyville, IL and my reputation as a nerd and went off to the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign to study bioengineering. For the entire first semester my new life was perfect: great girlfriend, red sports car, lots of new friends in my fraternity, good grades. I had great hope for the future. When the first semester ended, I was talking with my girlfriend about our New Year’s resolution. I was so ridiculously in love with her that I had already decided that I would do whatever she did for the New Year, so I asked her, and she told me: “I want to go to Mass every day.” My heart and mind raced to understand what this all meant, and in the shock of the moment I lied and said, “Yeeaahh, I also thought about going to Mass every day.”

One day at Mass, I heard a homily on spiritual direction “for anyone who has doubts, questions, or difficulties about the faith.” I had a question: “Why would a normal girl want to get up early to go to Mass every day and hear some boring priest talk?” Anyway, I was so in love with her that I signed up that day for spiritual direction. At my first appointment, I met this young woman who introduced herself as Sr. Celestina, and we began to talk. After telling her about my family, my past, and my hopes for the future, she asked me a very simple question: “What is the goal of your life?” “I have no idea” was my exasperated reply. “To be happy!” she answered. And then she continued, “And this is the secret of life: You will be as happy as you are holy.” “Give me a break,” I said. “I went to Catholic school for six years, and if there’s one thing I learned, the saints are all weird. There’s Padre Pio who bleeds all the time, St. Francis who talks to animals. I’m a normal guy. I can’t be holy.” Again she answered, “Being a saint doesn’t mean being weird. Being a saint means being the person God made you to be.” “Oh, I could do that. But there’s just one more problem. In 19 years this God has never talked to me. How am I supposed to know what he wants from me?” That is when she told me about mental prayer, where we listen to God’s Word and apply it to our daily lives. She suggested using In Conversation with God. “All you have to do is take about 30 minutes every day to read this book and ask yourself questions, ‘Do I really believe this? Do I live this out or do the opposite? Am I willing to put God to the test to see if His Way will make me happier?’ always concluding with a concrete resolution.” And so the next day I prayed my first meditation with my brand-new In Conversation. After a few months, I was with my girlfriend when I spontaneously began doing a meditation: The goal of my life is to be happy. This isn’t making me happy. Uh oh… I knew I had to break up with her, but I did not know why. I told her, but for six hours I could not explain why. She got mad and cried. I also cried more than once. In the end, we were broken up.

The following school year, Sr. Susan invited me to join the sisters on a parish mission. At first I said “No way” because I felt unworthy of talking about a God and a Jesus that I hardly knew, but she persisted in asking until I said yes. That mission opened my eyes to a whole new world, a whole new way of life. Right away I wanted to give up bioengineering to be a youth minister, but Susan suggested that I wait to see if it wasn’t just youthful emotions. That spring I went on a second parish mission during which I confessed to Susan, “I’m thinking about joining your community.” Again she told me to wait and see if it wasn’t just an emotional high. That summer I came to visit the community, and when I got back on the plane to the States I wondered why I was leaving home. My junior year I moved out of the fraternity and into the rectory. Besides daily Mass and meditation, I began to pray the breviary and Adoration… and the rosary in Italian. The peace and happiness I experienced in this new lifestyle convinced me that in June I would be leaving my studies and my homeland to come to Rome with my new brothers.