Posted on 12/28/2002 12:27:01 PM PST by Happygal
A NIGHTCLUB dancer has exchanged the strobe lights of Milan's trendiest discos for the illumination of God and become a nun.
Anna Nobili (30) is now Sister Anna of the Holy Family Order of Nazareth in Rome. She is the latest in a growing number of Italian women to abandon the trappings of materialism for the serenity of a convent.
Having taken her vows, she will go into a cloister for six months to separate her from her old world, during which time she will see no one. She will then begin her new mission, helping the poor, the elderly and the sick.
Sr Anna said after taking her vows that she wanted to change "as a warning to other young women."
She took her decision after eight years of dancing and dissolute living created an emptiness inside, causing her, in her own words, to "hit rock bottom."
Early one morning she returned home, as usual, to find her mother in tears at the way her daughter was leading her life and heard an inner-voice telling her to mend her ways.
On her mother's advice, she consulted her parish priest, who suggested she enter a spiritual retreat. There she spent hours in prayer and slowly began to feel purified. Later, travelling home by train after a pilgrimage to Assisi, she received her vocation.
"Sex, music and alcohol were my drugs and I was reeling," she said.
"I was unhappy, I was not fulfilled. Something was missing, a desire that was inside me, in my heart, which I could not succeed in bringing out and to which I was unable to give either a name or an explanation."
Elsewhere, a book by Antonella Moccia, a supermodel who had abandoned the catwalk for the convent, also became a best-seller in Italy.
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.-- Gerard Manley Hopkins.
From 'That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire'
Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is |, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
As the Hymn goes "Was blind but now I see..."
Concepts like "Log Off and "Log On" are just so difficult to grasp after a few drinks...8^)
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