For young Quebec nun, path to sisterhood began with knock on monastery door
At 35, Sister Sarah MacDonald is order's youngest nun in Quebec
When Sarah MacDonald first arrived in Quebec City nine years ago, she was simply looking for a place to live.
She went knocking on the door of the Augustinian monastery in Old Quebec.
Today, she is the order's youngest nun in the province – by decades.
"I guess the easiest way to describe it is that I fell in love," Sister Sarah MacDonald said.
Like searching for soul mate
MacDonald likens the period before finding the Augustinians to years spent searching for a soul mate.
"I was looking for the place God was calling me to," she said. "A bit like a woman who wants to get married, who says to herself, 'I want to get married, but I can't find the guy.'"
MacDonald grew up in Sudbury, Ont., in what she describes as a loving but not particularly religious family.
She was baptized Catholic but rarely went to church, beyond occasionally attending mass with her grandparents.
But when she was 16, a friend's father died, and she went searching for ways to console her friend.
"I cried out to God, the God that I knew, the tiny bit that I knew, to say, 'Help me,'" she said.
That was the beginning.
MacDonald took religious studies at McMaster University, where she had her first chance to get to know women who had dedicated themselves to religious life.
The idea of becoming a nun herself started to germinate in the back of her mind.
However, when she finished her degree, she took a job with Revenue Canada – a career choice she laughs about now.
"I was a tax collector. For any biblical scholars out there, they will understand the irony," she said.
She was still searching for something more to give her life meaning.
She went to work in a Calcutta orphanage run by the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by Mother Teresa. She travelled to religious communities in Ontario and the U.S.
But nothing she witnessed clicked.
Just looking for bed
She came to Quebec City in 2007 to work for the 49th International Eucharistic Congress – a gathering that attracted thousands of Catholics, held in conjunction with the city's 400th anniversary celebrations in 2008.
The first apartment she moved into turned out to be too long a commute to and from work. That's how she found herself on the doorstep of the Augustinian monastery, simply looking for a place to stay.
"Once I got here, God had other plans," she said.
Eight years later, in 2015, she would make her final profession, publicly professing the solemn vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and — because she was joining the Augustinian order — committing to spend her life serving the poor and the sick.
MacDonald now has a taxing schedule: acting as a tour guide within Quebec City's Augustinian monastery, working as a licensed practical nurse in a seniors' care home and maintaining a daily regimen of morning and evening prayers and mass, as well spending an hour in personal prayer.
'I do stand out'
While her lifestyle might seem unusual, MacDonald realizes she is also different simply by virtue of her age.
Before she came to live in the Augustinian monastery, the youngest nun living there was 73.
"You do certainly have to accept that, that, yes, I do stand out," she said.
But the community accepts her. And she still has hope that other women will join the order.
"If God's calling me to live in community, there will be others," she said.
"I will never be alone, because I will always be with Him."
With files from Radio-Canada's Nicole Germain