Who I am

My name is Cherise Klekar. In the spring of 2014 I decided to start a blog, mostly in order to take my family and friends along with me on my study abroad trip in Italy. By the time I had returned, I was hooked on blogging and now here I am years later still at it! In 2015 I graduated from Texas A&M University with a bachelor's degree in International Studies and two minors in History and Italian. I immediately entered into a community of consecrated women called the Apostles of the Interior Life who I had met as a college student. (Below you can find a brief account of what compelled me to decide to give my life completely to Jesus!) In June of 2016 I moved to Rome to live in the House of Formation and study Philosophy and Theology as preparation for our mission (learn more about that here). Three and a half years and lots of growth later I returned to College Station where I promised to live Chastity, Poverty, and Obedience forever as an Apostle of the Interior Life on December 7, 2019. As of August 2022, I live in our house in College Station, TX and serve college students at St. Mary's Catholic Center. 

--------------------------------------------------------

It was a Thursday in December 2012 when I took this exact question to prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. Who am I? Scribbling like crazy a list of "identities", I succumbed to frustration in my seemingly failed attempt at finding an answer. I felt as if this question was burning in my heart. What have You created me for Lord? What should I do with my life? Am I not more than just a student, a daughter...even more than a face in Your Church? Receiving no satisfying inspiration and tired from racking my brain for options, I noticed that ten minutes remained of my holy hour. Transferring to my knees, I looked up at the Eucharist and allowed my life to be changed forever. I say allowed because it was in that moment that I surrendered and almost tauntingly told the Lord to do it because I wasn't getting anywhere on my own. St. Augustine said, “the God Who made you without your consent will not save you without it”. It was as if time stood still. An indescribable joy entered my heart and all worry of my identity crisis vanished. I experienced a moment of true reality in a way that I had never done previously or since. It truly was a gift of the Lord. And in that gift He offered the truth that there is nothing more real than that which is supernatural, than that which is Him. He told me in those precious moments that before all else, I am loved. And not just a humanly love but I am loved by Love Himself. By Him who gives me everything every time in the Eucharist. This was the moment I realized that the all powerful King of the Universe is also the intimate Lover of my soul. Those ten minutes were both the longest and shortest of my life. Certainly they are the most cherished. Going back to it over and over in my mind in these years I can't get those feelings back but they were of lesser importance. What I do remember is being looked upon by the Lord.

What was in that look? Love.

So who am I? I am loved.

As if its not evident enough already, my Catholic faith plays a huge role in my life. I choose to not let a day go by without attending mass and saying my prayers. Why you ask? I think St. Teresa of Avila says it best: "Imagine a person so enamored of another that she could not spend an instant away from the presence of the person she loves." As my spiritual life grows here in the fertile land of St. Mary's Catholic Center, I can live without Him less and less. And to only confirm this endeavor further, the more time I spend in prayer, the more fruitful my day seems to become. When we carve out time for God, He makes sure all that needs to get done gets done.

Jesus has remained within the Eucharist for love... of you. He has remained, knowing how men would treat him... and how you would treat him. He has remained so that you could eat him, so that you could visit him and tell him what's happening to you; and so that you could talk to him as you pray beside the Tabernacle, and as you receive him sacramentally; and so that you could fall in love more and more each day, and make other souls, many souls, follow the same path..
St. Josemaria Escriva (The Forge, 887)

The best way to economize time is to 'lose' half an hour each day attending Holy Mass.

Frederic Ozanam

The original version of this was written in the Spring of 2014.