Bailey Call Collect

Bailey Gallagher played with dollies, jumped rope, had tea parties, got good grades, dreamed of princes, driving a car, a boyfriend, prom dresses, a husband and motherhood. 

She played soccer, was a cheerleader, in drama club, Spanish club, and somewhere along her path of her Irish-Catholic upbringing, specifically high school, she encountered a nun and a priest she liked and to whom she could relate. They taught a couple of her religion requirements, and their passion for and presentation of their classes awakened the unexpected in Bailey. She spoke nary a word of it to another soul. 

The girl was popular, dated alot, but was never considered as 'easy' or 'slutty.' Bailey had  intercourse only a few times with her senior year's boyfriend. To Bailey, sex was in context of a balanced life, normalcy, not a burdensome obsession. She would often revisit whether sleeping with him had been a good decision, and left it with her father confessor. 

She graduated from high school and accepted a scholarship to attend Franciscan University with hopes of getting a degree in education and teaching high school. 

Three years later, she was in front of her academic adviser, confessing she felt called to a spiritual life. The adviser guided her to prayerful and academic/research approaches of discerning answers to, "Me, really?," "Why me?," "Okay, but there are hundreds of  communities of nuns so how do you pick one?."

Four years following, Bailey was was before a bishop, with tears of joy falling along with her hair from tonsure's sacred rite, followed by her profession of solemn vows. 

Thirty-one years, five months and nineteen days later, Sister Mary Bailey was on her lumpy cot in candlelight, under a corrugated roof's rain pounding. She lay there reflecting on a life spent in the Congo, nursing and teaching children. Just four years of those nearly thirty-one and a half  years were spent Stateside, required restorative time to spend among her sisters at the order's 'mother house.' 

Her career's reflection wasn't in wonder of having spent or misspent her life. She was thanking God for all the disease and hardships and deaths encountered in her assignment, grateful that hers was the caring heart, helping hand and available ear chosen for the less fortunate. She knew that few would ever understand, even from the beginning. 

To her, it mattered to the one who mattered --the one who had called her--the one who told her she mattered. 

A gust from the African savannah's storm extinguished the candle, leaving Sister Mary Bailey in darkness but for an instant. In the same instant, her hands quickly found the cruicifix on her chest, and she clutched it tightly, one hand over the other. 

Her death arrived silently, leaving  life with a smile for the hand she saw reaching out to her through her last living thought, and the light, that beautiful light.
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