VISION SPOTLIGHT
Vocation takes cultivation
by Sister Elizabeth Wagner
Sister Elizabeth Wagner is a diocesan hermit and the founder of Transfiguration Hermitage in Maine, a semieremitical (hermit) community following the Rule of Saint Benedict. Her book Seasons in My Garden was recently published by Ave Maria Press.
SISTER ELIZABETH Wagner works in the garden at Transfiguration Hermitage, a monastic community in Windsor, Maine.
Like plants, people, too, need to germinate in the right environment before they bloom. One monastic sister learned this lesson from tending her garden. Other religious learn similar lessons by their nurture of nature.
I
GREW UP ON A SMALL FARM in Connecticut, so I guess gardening is encoded in my DNA. My paternal grandmother, my namesake, had a reputation as a miraculous gardener and a whiz at grafting fruit trees. She also entered a monastery as a young woman, although she then left to bring up younger siblings after her parents died. So perhaps monastic life is also encoded in my DNA. But as a child, I didn’t see gardening or religious life in my future. I was raised Protestant, nominally—church on Christmas and Easter and occasional attendance at Sunday school, which I liked, most of the time. In my last year of high school, knowing I was headed for college but with my future a blank after that, I discovered Catholicism and contemplative life, both at the same time. In one fell swoop, I fell in love. Yet it took several years before I was ready to embrace my faith and become Catholic. Once in, I knew right away that a monastery was for me. And so I entered one, but eventually it became clear that I hadn’t gone about it the right way. I still needed and longed for contemplative life, but somehow I had misunderstood what it was about.
64 | VISION 2017 | VocationNetwork.org
