Itinerary towards the monastic vocation

of Mother Anna Maria Cánopi osb

Vocation is a mystery of grace: it is not easy to describe its origin and development. I recognize that my monastic vocation has its roots already in childhood, since I have always felt God's gaze on me and I have always felt a strong attraction towards the Lord, towards prayer and the sacred in general.
The nuns who then ran the orphanage in my town welcomed me to pray in their little chapel and perhaps hoped that one day I would join their religious family. The same applies to the nuns of another Institute who served in the hospitals; but I was a teenager and still busy studying; it wasn't time to think about this yet.
I was about twenty years old when my good former primary school teacher, whom I called "godmother", accompanied me to the visiting room of the diocesan seminary to introduce me to a priest who dedicated himself to the training of seminarians and the youth of Catholic Action.
«Listen, please, this young woman – he said to him – She has something inside…», and he left me alone with him. He, seeing my shyness, began to kindly ask me questions about my family, my living environment and the most intimate desires of my heart. At that time, among the various young people who were around me there was one to whom I had become fond because of his mother, a widow, whom he made suffer a lot by leading a reckless life and neglecting his university studies. I loved him, but my intent was only to make him good. Besides, he himself didn't dare make the proposals he usually made to all the girls. In fact, he kept a notebook in which he wrote the names of those he had "conquered", boasting that he had already listed a hundred! After many years, I learned of a secret he had made to a friend who was then surprised that he didn't try to seduce me: "When I thought of conquering her, a voice shouted to me: Don't touch that!". Strange things, but which certainly happen under divine direction. For this reason we can boast of nothing other than the gratuitousness of the salvation brought about by God.

The conversations I periodically had with the priest who became my spiritual Father highlighted that the hand of God was upon me and that in reality it was only Jesus who I loved. Don Aldo Del Monte told me that to express this exclusive love I could privately take a vow of chastity. I did this for a few years, while I finished my studies and worked, but it wasn't enough for me. I felt driven to a more radical choice, therefore, always with the help of my spiritual Father, I began looking for a monastery.
In Switzerland, an Eastern rite monastic community was forming, linked to Chevetogne, which proposed to go to Russia as soon as possible, to be a presence of support among that people, to help them in the hoped-for prospect of their Christian rebirth.
I made myself available, but wise advice from the bishop of Lugano held me back. In those years I made some stops for spiritual exercises at the Benedictines of Loppen (Belgium) and at the Benedictines of Beuron (Germany) where the memory of Edith Stein, spiritual daughter of Abbot P. Raphael Walzer, and for years their guest during Holy Week. Finally I got in touch with the flourishing Benedictine Abbey of Viboldone, founded during the Second World War under the paternal impulse of the Blessed Card. Ildefonso Schuster, archbishop of Milan. I immediately felt captivated by its spiritual atmosphere and after some pauses for prayer and discernment, I applied for entry which was accepted.
Once the decision was made, I was faced with the stark realism of what I was doing. It was about leaving my hills, my family, forever: my elderly parents, my brothers, my sisters, my grandchildren who were seven at the time and now thirty-six! The Lord made them grow precisely because I offered them to him.
My mother, in turn, reminded me that when I was little I said I wanted to become a mother of twenty children... And now? Giving up the children was actually the thing that cost me the most. But one night I saw in a dream an endless multitude of children, while a voice said to me: «See? They're all yours." This dream of mine had been preceded by one of my mother's. She held a bouquet of red roses in her arms, including a white one. Jesus said to her: "You must give this to me." And she gave it to him, wondering with trepidation whether it was not an omen of the premature death of one of her children. My departure for her monastery now gave her the key to interpreting her dream that had troubled her.
I'm not a... "dreamer" and I don't give excessive importance to dreams as if they were all supernatural interventions, but another, due to its symbolic clarity, has never been erased from my memory. I was in a forest clearing, tied to a tree; an angel came, untied me, and I ran across the vast prairie before me. I arrived in front of a building, the door opened and a hieratic figure handed me a small loaf of bread. I took it and ate it. The whole scene took place in silence, in an aura of mystery; and everything made me feel that God's hand was truly upon me.
The time had therefore come to leave, even if around me - at home and in Pavia - many arms wanted to hold me back. On July 9, 1960, my older brother and younger sister – not yet married, but both already engaged – took me by car to the monastery and left, hiding their tears. To those who had welcomed us at the reception I heard my brother say: "Take care of her, because she is frail...". In fact I appeared as such, and my application for entry was accepted not without some hesitation. It was my spiritual Father who intervened with a reassuring word about my “robustness”! Moreover, the doctor from whom I had requested the certificate of healthy and robust constitution, hearing what I needed it for, had looked at me a little perplexed and said: "Can I do it in good conscience?". «Yes, yes – I replied – the Lord is my strength!».
When, knocking on the door of the cloister, the Mother Abbess asked me in Latin: Where did you come from? – For what purpose did you come?, with full awareness I replied: Ad immolandum veni. Yes, I knew and wanted my life to be, moment by moment, sacrificed together with that of the Lord Jesus crucified for love, for that "greatest love" of his that burned in his heart towards all men.