Sometimes the Lord intervenes when we need it most, and when He does it can be a gift of hope.
Elizabeth was running errands near her home in Englewood, Colo., on a late summer Friday morning when she felt a pull to attend Adoration. New to the area, she had scoped out local parishes but not yet joined one. That morning, she decided to go to Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Littleton.
Elizabeth was divorced two-and-a-half years prior after twenty years of marriage and her life had been challenging across the board, including in the area of faith.
She had recently moved from out of state to Colorado to be near her middle daughter who is attending college locally. Her oldest daughter is in the Marines and the youngest is at home in high school. She’d signed a rental agreement earlier in the month, got a job, and set about establishing her family’s new life.
“I woke up with it pressing on my heart to say the Rosary,” Elizabeth explained, conceding, “I don’t say the rosary very often.”
After listening to a podcast on the daily readings she prepared to take her daughter to school.
“So, I got dressed, did that and was going to head off and do some other errands, and I felt my heart pressed – you need to go to Adoration,” Elizabeth said.
She thought she had seen that Our Lady of Mount Carmel had perpetual Adoration.
“When I got there, I was a little confused why the parking lot was full, curious, and also determined to go to Adoration,” she recounted.
Elizabeth parked and approached some women staffing a table outside the church.
She had stumbled upon the Return to Tradition women’s conference. Hosted by Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a parish of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, the event offers presentations and workshops on living life authentically as a Catholic woman and gathers hundreds of women from across the U.S. and at times internationally. The year’s theme was Restoration of the Family.
One of the women at the table told Elizabeth about the conference, sliding the brochure across the table to her. It was the first of two days, and did she want to join in?
Two of the speakers, Mother Miriam of the Lamb of God, O.S.B., and Jesse Romero, caught her eye.
A convert to Catholicism, Elizabeth had been into New Age spirituality. She was baptized and confirmed in her mid-twenties, but it took another ten years before she embraced the faith.
Mother Miriam and Jesse Romero were among a handful of people whom she listened to on Catholic radio during those ten years.
“Those two were voices that brought me into the Church deeper and deeper and helped me come to love my faith,” she said.
She and the woman at the table decided this was meant to be and with some room left in the conference she should register.
“I had other plans for the day, things I needed to get done,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t do them.”
She likewise changed her plans the following day so she could attend.
“It’s been amazing,” she said at the end of the second day. “Just what I needed to hear in more ways than I think that I can understand just yet.”
“Emotional,” was how Elizabeth described how she felt at the close of the conference, because with the theme on restoring the family, it also covered marriage, and men’s and women’s roles.
“As I’ve been listening, my heart is so convicted, like, why didn’t I hear this twenty years ago?” she said. “Why did I never hear this?”
Elizabeth’s parents divorced when she was three and her father died when she was nine. She said she was raised by a “hippy” mother who was three times divorced and led the family strongly.
Elizabeth had wanted children her whole life, but as her friends noted to her, she talked only about wanting kids and not about being married. Her primary role model growing up had been that of a single mother.
“Listening to this today about what a Catholic marriage and family is supposed to be … I had no model,” she said. “My mother was searching too.”
Elizabeth worked to raise her children Catholic, but her husband was “vehemently anti-religion” she said, toward the end of their marriage ceasing to even pretend to be nice about it. He would ridicule her in front of the children, she said, and even bought a Baphomet head and placed it on the mantle next to her image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The children joined in, and she found herself alone in trying to defend and pass on the faith.
She ended up taking three kids under three to Mass alone from early on.
“This didn’t mean the most positive experience for them,” Elizabeth said.
Her girls are now 19, 18, and 17. Elizabeth remains hopeful about her children and the Catholic faith.
The women hosting the conference were gracious, welcomed Elizabeth as though she were a long-lost friend.
With her divorce and her children getting older, her life no longer looked like it once did, and she had been feeling alone, as though she had nothing.
“I need a place to land,” Elizabeth said. And it appeared that the conference and Our Lady of Mount Carmel could be it.
Elizabeth battled breast cancer ten years earlier and prayed to God to survive if nothing else so she could be there for her children. She has been cancer free for years.
“It was hard won for me to come into the Church,” Eliabeth explained about her path back to Catholicism.
She had been sure the Church was wrong and that she would never be in the Church. This was dismantled over time, she said, while hearing Catholic voices like Mother Miriam and Jesse Romero with their love for the Church.
“And then to stumble upon this at a time when my heart is really broken …” she said of the women’s conference.
“They surrounded me with such joy for being here, and this conference speaking about what it is to be a woman and a Catholic woman and a mother,” Elizabeth said. “It’s like everything I needed to hear right now.”
While Elizabeth was sad to only now be learning about how the family should function, she was also encouraged by the conference.
“I’ve already learned so many times that life is on God’s timeline,” Elizabeth said. “I try not to rush that (but) it’s hard not to.”
After being in a dark place when she happened upon the traditional women’s conference, she left with hope.
“God is so good, He is so gracious,” Elizabeth said. “He can find a way to give us what we need, what He wants us to have.”
You can bargain with God, she said, but He’s going to pat you on the head and laugh, not at you, but with you.
“What I came in with was a grieving loneliness, that maybe I can’t see what the future is going to be, I don’t know what that’s going to look like and I don’t have a lot of hope about it,” Elizabeth said. “And what I’m walking away from the conference with is, you’re not done until God says you’re done. And that if there’s something that you’re being called to it’s on His time, not my time.”
“I guess there is a little glimmer of expectant hope that maybe there is something more I can do in my life that may be worthwhile,” she said.
