How I Met the Home
Sr. Sara Jiménez Murcia
Our Lord, in His merciful love, permitted me to meet the Home when I was 13 years old. It was through my sister Ana. She went to study social work at the university of Cuenca since she could not study this in the city where we are from, Ciudad Real. There, providentially, she ran into two candidates of the Servant Sisters of the Home of the Mother who invited her to have lunch at their house one day, to go to a retreat, etc. To make a long story short, she fell in love with the Home, so much that, when she came home on the weekends, she couldn’t stop speaking about this Home which she had met. When she did so, the word home reminded me of the retired people’s home that was located close to my house where the “grannies” would go to play pool and have a good time.
Around that time I had heard my mother and my sisters say that it would be good for me to go to a summer camp or other similar activity. It happened that in those days my sister came home with a pamphlet in her hand and said to me, “This is for you!! I took it and saw that the front page had a picture of a tent with a sentence that said, “Sign up for the Home of the Mother’s Summer Camps!” It didn’t seem to be a very bad idea. The only thing I didn’t like was to be away from my mother and my friends for so long; but the idea of this new adventure pleased me.
The last thing I could have imagined was that the so-called “adventure” would make my life take a 180º degree turn. Let me explain what I mean. I could not have imagined that this activity would be so religious. I thought that being religious simply meant to pray an Our Father before bed, if something went bad, to get something I wanted, or to do well in the games. I must say that the religious formation which I had received was very poor. I had made my First Communion and a few years later stopped going to Mass on Sundays. Nothing in my life or around me spoke to me about God directly, even though my conscience was very alive.
The summer camp was very good for me. The words which reached my ears entered my soul with an amazing strength. They were like a beam of light that illumined my interior darkness. I constantly experienced these words, “I do not know why, nor do I understand it very well, but this is undoubtedly the
truth.” The light made me clearly see the filth that there was in my soul. They suggested that I go to confession, but I didn’t dare. I thought that the priests wouldn’t understand me and I didn’t know how to express what I was living. All this was mixed with a good amount of cowardliness and to put it short, I said I wouldn’t go to confession. However, this attitude didn’t last very long because I kept feeling more and more the need to go to confession… until I finally said I would. I felt that a great burden was taken from me.
The people I met there were great. At first the camp was very hard, because I was shy and wasn’t used to people being so open and welcoming without knowing them at all. Even though my interior attitude was closed and very serious (I had to show that I was “tough”), interiorly I knew that there was something special which I had never seen before: the joy, the simplicity, the sincerity, the authenticity, the true, unselfish, and self-giving love…
Even so, I didn’t make the commitment with the Home until two years later. I had some up and down moments and the idea of committing myself to something wasn’t very attractive. I preferred to live the commitments, the spiritual life, without committing myself to it in an official way. Evidently, this was an absurd idea since it was like leaving the door open to the foolish thought, “Well, if one day I don’t do the commitment, it doesn’t matter.” When I finally entered the Home, I was sorry that I hadn’t done so earlier because I realized that this was my place, the place where Our Mother had brought me to be forever. And so it is, now by the grace of God I am a novice in the Servant Sisters of the Home of the Mother.
I feel completely identified with the definition of the Home. Each member is the gift which the Lord wishes to make to His Mother. I feel that Our Lord has taken His Mother to a garden full of all types of beautiful flowers and said, “Look at them, all of them, which one do you want?” And She pointed to one that was drowning in a muddy puddle and said, “I want that one.” That’s me. She has not spurned my poverty. On the contrary, She has chosen it in order to enrich it. She is the one who gives me the gift with her choice. I am in the Home because She has so desired. That is the only reason.
Truly, meeting the Home is the best thing that has happened to me in my life, because Our Lord has used it as an instrument of His Mercy. He used the Home to carry out the restoration that my soul so greatly needed and so that I could do the same for all men. Faced with this reality, the only word that comes from my heart is “thank you.” Thank you also to all those whom Our Lord in His providence has placed in my path to take me to Him, who have helped me in my personal and spiritual formation, and who have been docile to Our Lord and a reflection of His Goodness and His Mercy.
Therefore, after remembering and sharing all these graces with you, I can only say with the psalmist, “How can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me?”
©HM Magazine No.129 - March/April 2006
