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I grew up with a small family. For years, it was just my mom, my two paternal aunts, my older cousin and half brother.My father had left my mother while she was in the hospital and left my 15 year old, one-legged brother home alone to break the news when he returned.We had lived in St. Croix, Virgin Islands (U.S.) at the time, but within 10 months of my birth, my mother and aunt decided it was too rough a place to raise their families and decided to move from out tropical home.They were all originally from New York and knew escaping the poverty and violence of the island to return to the concrete jungle would be like a crab screaming to jump out of the pot only to land in the licking flames of the fire below. So, while they knew they wouldn’t be returning to the five boroughs, they didn’t have a plan for where to go.They knew of places like Georgia and Florida, but had heard tales of the pervasive racism in the South and couldn’t decide what would be the best fit for their families. So, they solved this by buying a map of the United States, closing their eyes, and pointing to their destination…Which bought us to the lovely state of Indiana! Speedway, more specifically.You might be wondering how moving to a state to avoid systematic and overt racism and violence worked out for a black family, who moved into a state which literally founded the KKK and a small town within a city known for Nascar—but that’s a story for another time…To offer a little piece of mind to the abject worriers, though, I’ll let you know, overall, it worked just fine!The point of this story isn’t about abandonment or leaving things behind. Those were just landmarks in the journey. My life story has always been about finding out what makes a family and this story in particular is about the invaluable people who did something outside the norm for us.Now, I left off earlier where my father had left us. What I forgot to mention was my paternal grandmother, who loved her youngest son, so much so she ignored her oldest daughter and her friend, decided if he could leave the child must not be his and disowned me.My mother, who’ been abandoned by her parents at the age of 3 and raised a ward of the state, was worried—bless her heart—how I would be affected by not having these figures in my life knew she wanted to do something. She wasn’t going to date again and had no idea how to find her own parents, but she had an idea!She had met a woman who later became a close friend on the bus one afternoon. The woman and her family were Baha’is, a religion my mother who had been raised by Catholic nuns had never heard of. They exchanged information, my mother went to a fireside gathering her friend was hosting and overtime my mother fell in love with the warmth, energy and community of the the Baha’i Faith and she eventually converted.The Baha’is had a newsletter they sent each other that kept the community connected, spread the teaching and had a calendar for their proposed meetings. In the help wanted section, my mother put out a small ad:“In search of Grandmother,” it said.The request went on to explain how her baby son was abandoned and disowned and she wanted me to experience a grandmother’s unconditional love.Then, something amazing happened!It wasn’t just one woman who responded… a group of women did—from all walks of life. A middle class woman who already raised three children into adulthood, an older widow, who was at the heart of the community for years, a young persian mother who had a daughter about a year older than me and more. Over five women, who all thought this child needs love that they could provide!And what’s more important than them answering is that the did. For years, they took me to doctors appointments, school events and even baked me cookies and hosted sleepovers. When I was seventeen and my first car broke down, one of my grandmothers even sent me $500 to get it repaired and never asked for the money to be returned.I am turning 31 tomorrow and now a single parent to a 2 year old daughter and I just realized while writing this that they never asked anything from me. There were no conditions at all.Even after my brother and much later my mother passed away and I grew distant, they never asked anything of me. When we saw each other I was greeted with the same loving intensity as if we had just spoken the night before. I haven’t always deserved it, but I will always remember it.These women helped save my family and thought me how to love.I can never thank them enough for it!

I believe this was asked during my Taking Questions session on 2 June 2017 as a follow-up to At what age did you decide to become a nun?I was fascinated by nuns from childhood, when St. John Eudes parish came into the neighborhood and opened a school in 1966. It was very near our home and I used to stand around and stare at the sisters who taught there. That was my first encounter with nuns.A few years after that, I read The Nun’s Story[1] by Kathryn Hulme. It started “The short black cape hooked at the neck and dropped without flare to the middle of the forearms.” From that very sentence I was entranced by the world it described. A child’s fantasy: yesterday a princess, today a nun, tomorrow an archaeologist. (I was an unusual child.) {*}In 1972, when I was 17, I saw Zeffirelli’s Brother Son, Sister Moon, a much-dramatized, somewhat fanciful retelling of the life of Francis of Assisi. It had beautiful visuals and told an exciting story, even though some of the dialogue is painfully sweet. I was hooked on Francis and his way of life.The next stop on this quick trip through my vocation story is graduate school. Starting purely from my childhood fascination, but later fueled by interview results, I wrote seminar papers on female religious. My master’s thesis was on an aspect of the writings of Francis of Assisi (remember the Zeffirelli film?). For my doctorate I studied women religious as their lives changed after Vatican II. {**}After a family tragedy I settled in Jerusalem. This is not the place to discuss my spiritual history; that's a very private voyage, after all. However, a series of events, people, thought processes and much prayer led to a consolidation of the what I learned in my earlier life and I felt a strong pull to the Catholic Church, which I realized after a few years. Shortly after that I took my first steps in contemplative prayer.I would spend one weekend a month at a convent or Christian guesthouse to get away and pray. I began to talk to sisters and nuns, and these conversations evolved into vocational discernment, which soon gave way to action: I entered Monastère Ste Claire as a postulant.{*} I think it was also that sentence that introduced me to the music of prose. From the staccato drum taps at the beginning (the short black cape) followed by the TA ta-ta TA fanfare (hooked at the neck), through the swooping legato (and dropped without flare to) that resolved into a workaday common time (the middle of the forearms). Hulme wasn't a great writer, but she was a good one with several books to her credit. This one did not only introduce me to a version of the world that would become mine. It shaped how I read prose to this day. Words permeate my physical being; I feel them in my bones.{**} My work is not online (PhD in 1983), and a lot has happened since then, anyway. Here is a link to an interesting NPR piece[2].Footnotes[1] The Nun's Story[2] Sisters And Vatican II: A Generational Tug Of War

Any American school child can tell you that the first Europeans to settle on the east coast of the U.S. were the English. In 1607 they settled in Jamestown in the Tidewater area of Virginia, while in 1620, persecuted Pilgrims and Puritans aboard the Mayflower, most of whom were originally from England, started the Plymouth colony south of what’s now Boston. Of course, like most history, the real story is far more complicated.In 1541, 66 years before Jamestown, the French tried to establish a settlement with 400 settlers in Quebec but abandoned it one year later. In 1598 they tried again with convicts on Sable Island, Nova Scotia. It too failed. In 1599, the French tried to establish a small trading post near Quebec and failed again. Finally, in 1605, two years before the establishment of Jamestown, a settlement that had begun the year before on St. Croix Island on the coast of what’s now northern-most Maine, was moved to Port Royal, Nova Scotia where it remained. This, and the finally successful attempt to establish Quebec City in 1608, are the two oldest French settlements in North America. So depending on how you define the American coast, the French might claim that their successful settlement at Port Royal was the first.And then there’s the Spanish perspective. In 1562, Protestant Huguenots fleeing religious oppression in Catholic France, settled in Parris Island, South Carolina. However, they left a year later and resettled in Fort Caroline in the area of Jacksonville, Florida. But the Spanish, whose explorers had previously claimed the region, overran the colony in 1565 and wiped out all the inhabitants. The fort at Saint Augustine, which the Spanish established nearby, in 1565, holds the claim as the oldest, continually inhabited, European settlement in the continental United States.A decade after the Spanish established Saint Augustine, the English tried to start a colony on a barrier island off the Carolina coast in 1587. However, when a ship bringing more supplies and people returned to Roanoke Island in 1590, they found the colony abandoned. No one has ever solved the riddle of what happened to those colonists.In addition to the English, French and Spanish, the Dutch and Swedes also established settlements in those early days which did survive. In 1615, the Dutch built a trading post called Fort Nassau near present day Albany. It was abandoned in 1617 but in 1626 they successfully built Fort Orange nearby and maintained a presence ever since in what became Albany. Far more famous was the Dutch establishment of Fort Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan, which soon grew into the successful colony of New Amsterdam, the centerpiece of the growing New Netherlands colony. When the Swedes in 1638 succeeding in establishing Nya Sverige along South River in what’s now Delaware, the Dutch saw this as an encroachment on their territory and overran the colony in 1655.Many excellent books have been written about the early days of European settlement. My favorite is The Sotweed Factor, which captures the very difficult social, economic and political environment of the early Maryland settlement and the morally ambiguous decisions made by many of the settlers.So why are Jamestown and the Pilgrims from the Mayflower heralded as the founding settlements? To the victors go the spoils. While the French only established a handful of small settlements along the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River and the Spanish focused on Mexico and their much wealthier colonies in Central and South America, the English navy soon forced the surrender of New Netherlands, while the humble English farmers established farms, plantations and prosperous towns all over the east coast. The victors get to write history. So today, the Spanish, and French, while they all have reasonable claims to being the first, are barely a footnote in American history books.