In God’s time, a Ragin’ Cajun enters the convent

    Demi Varuso didn’t know the rules.
    Growing up in Metairie as one of eight kids, Demi attended four public schools by the time she was in the fifth grade, experiencing what life is like when the goalposts keep moving. Demi was always a bit shy, and she learned quickly that it is much better to keep to yourself rather than to ask a silly question.
    So when Demi entered the Boys Hope Girls Hope program in 2004 as a “scholar” – someone with a challenging family background who lives in a tightly organized community with other girls and boys while attending Catholic elementary and high schools on scholarship – the goalposts had moved again.
    Demi was in the sixth grade now – this time at Holy Name of Jesus Elementary School – and she walked single file into cavernous Holy Name of Jesus Church for the weekly school Mass.
    She’s not sure, but it might have been the first time she ever had set foot in a Catholic church.
    “I just remember everybody kneeling, and then I kind of nested back on the pew behind me,” Demi recalled. “One of the teachers came over and fussed at me, and I was like, ‘Why is she fussing at me?’ She asked me, ‘Are you sick or something?’ I just kind of shook my head, and she just walked away. I don’t really remember too much about it. It was the morning, and I wasn’t a big morning person.”
    At Communion time, Demi decided not to make waves. She followed her new classmates up the main aisle.
    “I didn’t know I was supposed to cross my arms over my chest,” Demi said.
    Instead, Demi followed the girl in front of her and stuck out her hands to accept the host. Two years later, when she officially joined the church through the RCIA program at Holy Name of Jesus, Demi’s “first” Communion actually might have been her third or fourth.
    “I felt so terrible when I learned in RCIA what I should have done,” Demi said.
    As they say, a loving God doesn’t keep score. That same loving God must be laughing now.
    Demi, who just turned 21, is a health and physical education major at the University of Louisiana Lafayette. The girl whose family “did not talk about religion very much at all” and who didn’t even realize she had been baptized as an infant – and then who was unchurched for 11 years – has made the decision to enter formation with the Sisters of Our Lady of Sorrows.
    “I’m just looking forward to living in a community life with the sisters and being on the formation team and trying to bring other people closer to God,” Demi said.
    Demi said when she attended St. Mary’s Dominican High School, she loved the structured way each class began with a prayer. When she was a senior, a Dominican sister gave a talk in her class about what it was like to serve in religious life.
    Demi’s friend, sitting at the next desk, was an avowed atheist. “How could somebody do something horrible like that?” her friend insisted. “I’m sure they’re miserable.”
    “But I understood and tried to explain that it was a call, and a wonderful one at that,” Demi said. “You give up everything for the one you love.”
    Demi had seen that joy before, particularly in the faces of nuns at Holy Name and Dominican.
    When Demi got to ULL – a campus with activities a bit more Ragin’ Cajun than an Amish quilting bee – she admits she lost her bearings temporarily. But the strong Catholic presence at Our Lady of Wisdom Catholic Center kept calling her back, and a retreat she made that was financed by the mother of another student got her thinking.
    One day, she demanded of God, “You’d better tell me what’s going on right now.” On cue, her Bible opened to Isaiah 55: “All you who are thirsty, come to the water! You who have no money, come, buy grain and eat; Come, buy grain without money, wine and milk without cost! Why spend your money for what is not bread; your wages for what does not satisfy? Only listen to me, and you shall eat well, you shall delight in rich fare.”
    Demi told only one close friend what she was considering doing. She didn’t dare tell her mother. In January, she began serious discernment about her vocation. Demi found out later that her mother, who had been away from the church, had begun going back to Mass  – in January.
    Still, Demi was too “chicken” to tell her mom about her plans. Then, the Saturday before Mardi Gras, Demi’s ride from Lafayette to New Orleans “bailed” on her, leaving her marooned. She got up the courage to call her mother to ask for a ride home.
    “She had never picked me up from Lafayette before, but she said she would pick me up,” Demi said. Her mother drove there immediately because she wanted to go to Mass in New Orleans on Sunday.
    A few weeks later, Demi’s mother dropped her off at the Girls Hope house. Demi asked her to help bring her clothes inside. “That was kind of like a decoy,” Demi said.
    Then they sat at a table, and Demi pulled out some papers. It was a multi-page application to enter the convent.
    “All my mom said was that when she was little, she was thinking about being a sister,” Demi said.
    And then her mother helped her fill out the application.
    One question – the place of her baptism – left Demi stumped. Her mother remembered. On May 24, 1992, Demi Angelle Varuso was baptized at Our Lady of Divine Providence in Metairie, beginning a life of unexpected grace and promise in the Catholic Church.
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected]