‘I felt a tug on my heart for something more’
Born Katie Lewis, she is the daughter of Kathleen and Craig Lewis, parishioners of St. Ann Church in Charlotte.(Photos provided by Craig Lewis and the Dominican Sisters of Mary Facebook page)DAVIDSON — Katie Lewis felt the first inkling of a religious vocation when she was a sophomore in high school. She had a restlessness of heart, but at 15, she was not yet able to appreciate what it meant.
“This was God trying to speak to me,” explains Katie, who now goes by the religious name Sister Marie Jeannette. “I felt a tug on my heart for something more. There was something more God was asking me to do with my life.”
A parishioner of St. Ann Church in Charlotte, she was homeschooled and was also active in the high school LifeTeen ministry at St. Mark Church near her family’s home in Davidson. She prayed about pursuing a degree in biomed or possibly enlisting in the military, and she thought about the idea of married life. But none of those “clicked.”
One day she came across a TV show featuring the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist. That encounter changed her life.
“I was in awe. Hearing the sisters tell their stories – the joy, the sincerity! It was true, good, beautiful; they knew who they were and whose they were,” she recalls. “That struck me as a high school student. For the first time I could point to that joy and sincerity the sisters had – I could point to something.
“I didn’t know what that was, but I wanted it.”
When Dominican Sister Joseph Andrew came to Belmont Abbey College to give a presentation on St. John Paul II’s “Letter to Women,” she jumped at the chance to meet a Dominican sister in person.
“I wanted to meet one of those sisters, to see if they were really who I thought they were. I spent time with Sister Joseph Andrew. I relayed to her the restlessness I had. Sister said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, but you might have a religious vocation.’
After hearing that, she says, “it was like this overwhelming wave of peace.”
Their conversation started her on the path to a religious vocation. She traveled to the sisters’ motherhouse in Ann Arbor, Mich., twice for discernment retreats during her junior and senior years of high school.
“Each time I went there were 100-plus young women there from all over country,” she says. “All bright, beautiful, intelligent young women looking for God’s will wherever it was. Some excited for marriage, some called to religious life somewhere else. Some with me on the retreats ended up professing final vows with me. It was wonderful to be in that environment with others who were in same boat, open to what God was telling us at that time.”
Sister Marie Jeannette Lewis, OP, (front row, third from right) made her final vows with the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist on July 24. Confident in God’s will, Katie entered the Dominican Sisters of Mary after graduating from high school in 2011, eventually receiving the name Sister Marie Jeannette.
She knew this was the order she was being called to, she explains, because “I loved the Dominican charism of preaching the truth. I also recognized that there is a reason why God put this community in my life at this time. It would be foolish for me to push that aside.”
Over the course of the next eight years, both she and the community discerned if this was where God was calling her.
On July 24, she professed her final vows during Mass at Christ the King Church in Ann Arbor. There to witness and support her were her parents, Kathleen and Craig Lewis, her siblings, friends and several priests of the Diocese of Charlotte who have guided her in her discernment.
The first member of her community to complete a special education degree, Sister Marie Jeannette now teaches kindergarten through eighth grade special education at a Catholic school in Sacramento, Calif., where she lives in community with four other Dominican sisters.
She cherishes her vocation. “I just love it! It’s my life! All of the ups and downs, knowing that it is in Our Lord’s hands. Through whatever is going to happen to me in the course of my life, I know that He is the one ultimately in control,” she says.
What advice does she have for someone who may be feeling restless at heart, just as she once did?
“Ultimately, I would say trust God. Trust Him. There is a lot you won’t know. We live in a culture of fear in some ways: What if I make the wrong choice? What if they get to know the real me?
“Instead of the fear, trust Him. If He’s put this desire in your heart, don’t be afraid to take that first step.”
— SueAnn Howell, senior reporter