Successful and devoted women

Successful and Devoted Women
Walking by the inhospitable and dry regions of Castilla, I found two crystal like water lakes. This is the region where Domingo de Guzmán was born, in the “clarisas de Lerma”. There, I felt God’s grip while contemplating about more than one hundred young women with a professional and promising future, who had given it up for devotion to God. They chose to live in convents for the rest of their lives to pray to God.

The journey began when Marijose Berzosa shut the convent’s door. She was only 18-years-old that summer day. She was part of a well standing class of Lerma. Behind, she left her Medicine career and an entire future abandoned in order to perceive Christ’s call.

This convent, that which would become her new home, was resided by twenty nuns. The youngest out of them had just turned 49-years-old. It had been twenty-three years that a young intern had not entered the convent.
Candace, obedience, and indigence. A contemplative life; nothing more. Marijose changed her name to Sister Veronica, and her clothing for a long dress tied on the waist by a white rope and sandals throughout an entire year. Her bedroom was a cell where she began to pray as soon as the day light rose. She practiced penitence, discipline, peace, awareness, and farming on the path towards finding Christ. She found Him, isolated from the external world while enclosed within walls and iron gates. A senior sister, before passing away, told her that she would see many great things.
Today, the convent welcomes young girls that wish to take part in this type of oratory retirement. These devoted women pray, sing, and dance without ever erasing big smiles from their faces. They raise their arms towards eternity and sing “I am Christ” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u2ZtKuOJng&feature=geosearch).

The happy nuns come from urban areas and are former university students. The convent is full of graduates in law, economics, physics, chemistry, engineering, education, aeronautics, pharmacy, biology, philosophy and pedagogy.
Sister Veronica pierces through my eyes with a clear stare coming from her sobby eyes. She nods her head with humility and grabs my hands with her skinny and brittle hands. She tells me that we are doing something great for the love of Christ. It is a service that needs time. She walks away flinging her long and humble wear, from which a wooden rosary hangs.
When Marijose arrived at the Lerma monastery in 1984, there were twenty-three nuns. In 1994, under her supervision, twenty-seven sisters would join the convent. In 2002, there were 72; in 2005, the number was 105, and, 134 during September of last year.

The piety of Sister Veronica shares that with a strong pull, weak health, slanted yet firm shoulders – like those carrying 134 daughters – she still continues her great labor and service: the planting of Christ’s love.

She is not even aware of the mystery that resides at the convent of Lerma . It just simply belongs to Christ, she asserts. (Translated by Gianna A. Sanchez-Moretti)


Au ente Ferrer has led a distinguished career in Spain in the fields of
publicity and press relations. He is currently President of the European Institute of Marketing.
clementeferrer3@gmail.com
thor and journalist Clem