Young men and women in New Zealand are devoting their lives to the Church. We hear from some of them about their path ahead.
Jane Maisey spent her twenties exploring, both physically and spiritually, looking at different religions and ways of being.
But it wasn’t until the Christchurch earthquakes that she came back to the faith she had grown up in.
“I looked at our Catholic faith with new eyes and a new spirituality, and it’s home for me, it’s in my heart and how I want to live.”
The earthquakes, she says, were a time in her life that provoked dramatic changes very quickly, leading her to consider one greater still: becoming a nun.
“To be honest, it was a really hard time in my life, and a lot of us experienced a lot of grief and trauma. Through that, though, it opened my eyes.
“I felt really strongly called to live a life of service – that, you know what, I would be really suited to that. Something in my heart sort of changed. Something within me realised – wow, this is for me.”
Jane, now 35, had returned to New Zealand after working as a snowboarding instructor in Colorado and Scotland to start her own company as a designer before beginning her journey into religious life.
“For the past few years, I’d been running a graphic design business, working as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator – very corporate, very fast-paced, things were always changing, so I loved that.”
Growing up in a rural New Zealand farming town, Jane had a Catholic upbringing – her mother is Maltese – but, though she was taught by nuns at school, as a child or adolescent, religious life didn’t seem like an obvious or viable path. Continue reading
Source and Image:
- The Wireless, from an article written by Natasha Frost, an Auckland-based journalist who’s spent most of the last five years living in Oxford and Paris.
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