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Each month, a new vocation story will be published here, recounting the adventures of one of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Our featured Handmaid for October is Sister Ruth Held. Sister Ruth discovered the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart through her love of
Spanish. "As a young adult," she relates, "I was struck with the desire to
learn Spanish. Now, that's kind of unusual, because my family is
originally German.
Why on earth would I want to learn Spanish?" "Now I see God's hand in that desire, but at the time, I just thought to myself, 'I'll really be the cat's meow if I learn Spanish!' One day I was sharing this idea with a friend of mine. We were both young working girls, and we would occasionally run into each other at business classes. Now, this young lady didn't know anything about Spanish, but it just so happens that another person who overheard the conversation did. She interrupted, saying, 'Excuse me, but I overheard you saying you want to learn Spanish. Well, there's a group of nuns that teaches Spanish down on 34th Street. They do evening classes. Maybe you should contact them.'" Sister Ruth smiles when she describes her unlikely introduction to her future religious family. "This woman wasn't even Catholic, she was Jewish, and she couldn't remember the name of the nuns or their exact address. But I looked in the telephone directory, and sure enough, there was a convent that was in the approximate area my friend described. What were they called?" With a twinkle in her eye she demonstrates running her finger down the page and squinting to slowly read the name. "The Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus." Sister Ruth indeed started learning Spanish, and although she felt some nudges toward religious life, she didn't dare mention them to the nuns. She laughs and imitates a rope-throwing cowboy, twirling an imaginary lasso. "I didn't want to get the 'lasso,' so I kept my lips zipped. But one day, trying to be casual, I remarked to one of the Sisters, 'you know, as a child, I used to think I might have a vocation.' Well, wouldn't you know, I found out later that this Sister told the other nuns, 'One of our students has a vocation to religious life!'" Sister Ruth not only got her wish to learn Spanish, she even had an opportunity to practice it abroad because of the Handmaids. "When I entered, there wasn't a formation house in the United States," she explains. "The first American Handmaids had gone to Italy for formation. Later, Americans went to England. But by the time I entered, the war was on, and the English novitiate was closed. So I got to go to Cuba!" The aspiring Handmaid might have been elated, but her mother didn't share her glee. "I don't think I realized how hard it was on my mother. I was doing what I wanted to, so it didn't seem hard at all for me to go to Cuba... it was more like an adventure. But my mother simply couldn't understand why I wanted to enter with these foreign Sisters, when there were American congregations all around me. I just told her that somehow I knew God was calling me to be a Handmaid." Soon, mom came around. "At times, the parents of the women in formation would come together to socialize and be with the Sisters. My mother was reassuring the parents of a new postulant, and she told them, 'you are lucky to have a daughter in the Handmaids.'" Sister Ruth finds herself lucky, as well, to be part of the Handmaid family... a family she met through the intervention of a friend who thought she was only passing on an academic tip.
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