Helen Blain (’20) to Enter Poor Clare Cloister

“The Lord has given me so much grace,” says Helen Blain (’20), as she prepares to enter the Poor Clare Monastery of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Roswell, New Mexico. “If He can make a cloistered, contemplative nun out of me, what can’t He do?”

In high school, Miss Blain struggled to choose between attending Thomas Aquinas College, where three of her siblings had gone, and larger schools, where she could play competitive soccer. Inspired by her reading of Pascal’s Wager while a student on the College’s High School Summer Program, she entrusted the decision to Our Lady of Guadalupe and used chance to decide. “I flipped a coin about it,” she laughs. “It came up heads, so off I went to TAC.”

After a successful four years at the College, Miss Blain graduated in 2020 and undertook graduate studies at the Augustine Institute immediately after. She took a class on the spiritual life and found her prayer life completely rejuvenated. “That class set me on fire in a new way, and I really started to live many of the things I learned,” she says. “I began to give myself over to mental prayer and mortification in a serious way and began to experience the presence of God in a powerful way.”

In her discernment process, Miss Blain visited an active community of nuns, but felt God was not calling her to join them. A year and a half later, though, she found herself visiting the Poor Clare Monastery of Our Lady of Guadalupe at the recommendation of Sister Maris Stella, a friend from her time at the Augustine Institute. “I went in thinking, ‘There is no way the Lord is calling me to this,’ but I figured it would give me some insight into cloistered religious life.”

During her visit, Miss Blain was awed by the life of poverty and emphasis on Franciscan spirituality. “I have always been drawn to poverty and simplicity,” she says. “Although I have always very much liked having nice things, from a young age, I was aware of how insignificant it all was in view of eternity.”

The final piece of the puzzle was the book A Right to Be Merry by Mother Mary Francis, who offers a delightful look into the cloistered life in the same New Mexico community that Miss Blain had visited. “In the book, Mother Mary Francis lays out three requirements for a woman who wants to live the contemplative life: a love of prayer, a love of silence, and a sense of humor. When I thought about it, I fit all the criteria!”

Now, after a year of ample prayer, Miss Blain will be entering the community of Poor Clares on September 17, the 800^th anniversary of St. Francis’s reception of the Stigmata.

“A vocation is both a call and a choice,” she says. “It is a gift to be received, should you choose to accept it freely out of love for Our Lord. Knowing that, I could decide today not to enter, and the Lord would bless my life, and that would not be a wrong choice. But I do think He has given me the grace to choose, and I want to take Him up on His gift.”

Please keep her in your prayers!