"If I Become a Sister When I Grow Up..."

A little while ago, I showed a picture to my second graders that caught their attention. It was a drawing of a Sister in a black and white habit teaching school children. A hand goes up, “Sister, why is the Sister wearing black?”

As we, the Marian Sisters of Santa Rosa, are the only Sisters these little ones have seen, 

they wonder why the Sister pictured isn’t wearing blue. I explain, “Some Sisters wear black, some wear blue, some wear grey or brown,” then I pause for dramatic effect, “and some Sisters wear pink.” I get the reaction I wanted with wide eyes and startled gasps. Violet, bright eyed and precocious, raises her hand, and definitively declares, “If I become a Sister when I grow up, I’m going to wear pink.” She continues, “Do you always wear that, or do you have other clothes?”

The conversation continued as I explained the habit I have of wearing a habit. Afterwards, I pondered Violet’s response. I thought better of telling her in the moment that Sisters don’t have their choice of habit colors nor does one usually discern based on the style of habit. But her earnestness was as evident as her practicality was nonexistent. She truly saw that being a Sister was one of her vocational options. Such is the power of religious witness.​

Reception of the Habit

My and my Sisters’ appearance in public catches the attention of the passer-by. We are walking “question marks.” Why would a young woman in the twenty first century wear a long-sleeve, floor-length white habit? Why would she give up the possibility of a fulfilling career or loving family? ​

Pope Saint John Paul II, in his 1996 post-apostolic exhortation Vita Consecrata, wrote that the religious life is an “eschatological sign,” that is, a sign of the world to come and “a foreshadowing of the future Kingdom” (26). Religious life is a reminder to this work-a-day world that there is more to life than what the eye can see. Consecrated men and women live this life for the world hereafter. If heaven doesn’t exist, then the religious Sister is a fool for forgoing property, family, and autonomy. But if it does exist, she is “playing heaven” on earth by choosing the higher by forgoing the lower. Her life is evidence to an atheistic age of the reality of God. ​

But perhaps more importantly than questioning the assumptions of the world or even being an eschatological sign of the world to come, the Sister in habit shows little Violets, or Emilys, or Sofias that they too could possibly be Sisters. For Our Lord is still calling women to don habits… and some may even wear pink!