Letter to College Women in their 20’s

Dear Sister:

You are unfinished. The woman you are today pales in comparison to the woman you will become tomorrow. There is nothing more beautiful than the slow metamorphosis from conception, to infant, to toddler, to adolescent, to teenager, and finally to you, the woman you are today. But you are not done. Nor is the depth of your beauty. You’ve not become your full self. Your identity is still in question. It is in question because your faith is being questioned. You are being asked, “What do you believe?” and “Why do you believe it?” You have been surrounded by others, parents, priests, and professors, who have answered this question for you in the past. But now you have stepped outside of the familial nest into unfamiliar territory. You must put into your own words who you think you are and who you think you are not.

To do so accurately, you must ask yourself, “Am I a follower of Christ?” The infallible Jesus Christ is the one perfect person who objectively incarnates beauty and models a beautiful life. Christ is the ideal human, a model by which to measure your treatment of others and treatment of yourself. Measuring our words, thoughts, and actions to the words, thoughts, and actions of Christ, informs our identity because we, like Jesus, are sculpted in the divine image of God. For this reason, only in Christ may we learn our true selves. To deny God, is to deny His omniscient design for our lives. Denying Genesis and our biblical creation story betrays divine reason regarding natural law and disregards the eternal nature of our souls. Denial of God’s innate goodness leads us adrift into the bottomless pit of indifference. Do you prefer a life of indifference or mediocrity? Or do you choose a life of glory? This is just the beginning of our conversation. You are wandering at a crossroads with Christ. Let the wonder begin.

Do not be afraid. Be joyful. Be curious. You can be nothing that God does not already know or feel because you are His being. Fear can be overcome by prayer because prayer is our direct line to God. Full disclosure, this open dialogue will have a hand in revealing your identity. What you pray for reveals to you the desires of your heart, which unveils your known and previously unknown virtues and vices. As for myself, I was surprised to realize how prayer is a two-way conversation between me and my Creator. By opening myself up to the Lord, I opened myself up to listen and be receptive to change. Prayer is simple. Change is hard. Change is hard because your brain and your heart are still getting to know each other. Your brain and heart are bending and testing each other’s malleability to face hard things with grace or avoid hard things for complacency. You have seen proof of this in your own life. Ask yourself, “How have I grown? How do I cope with change? Am I flexible or controlling?”

The woman you are now is different than the young girl you were ten years ago. Think of your younger self and ask yourself this question, “Am I making her proud?” The woman you are now was a faint dream to that young girl. Are you what you dreamt you’d become? I have been in your shoes. Knowing life as I have lived it, I know the woman you are today is not the woman you dreamt of becoming ten years ago. You are something more for good or for ill.  

Right now, your faith is being tested. By now you’ve already made choices and said words to others that you are not proud of. Stained by regret or recovering from grief, you are tempted to think that age or aging is a disease and that growing up sucks. But growing up is a gift and aging is beautiful. Aging is blossoming into the woman God created you to be, a process only possible by the genius of God’s objective. God generously extends His will towards us by entrusting us to be co-heirs in His will for our lives. We are conceived and born with this inherent authority and trust because our body and soul are distinctly made. You are unique on purpose, purposefully free to make choices with the freedom to learn the consequences of those choices, good or bad.

Discernment begets wisdom. Wisdom is harnessed in prayer. Prayer is time taken out of your day to be in communion with Christ. I know the issue of time makes you anxious. We all say to ourselves, “If only we had more hours in the day.” Often you are anxious because you are impatient. Impatience makes you irritable and sometimes angry. You are angry because you are not in control. When you feel not in control, you are fearful. You are fearful because you let fear overrule your curiosity. But you are curious, nonetheless, because there is something within you, written within the fabric of your being, that is hungry for more than what you have and hungrier for more than what you already know.

“Where does this hunger come from?” you ask. Every day we begin anew and must feed our temporal bodies with the nutrients of this earth. Aside from our bodies, however, our souls also hunger. The hunger comes from longing because human beings are homesick. Ultimate satisfaction in this life is not a reality that will be achieved until we return to our eternal home to God in heaven. But God did not abandon His soulful creation to starvation. God did not create children to desert them to deprivation. Instead, God sent us His only son and Jesus Christ gave us communion. For Catholic Christians, the Eucharist is our gift from God that reunites and realigns our union with Christ. The body and blood of Jesus Christ gives us our daily bread and wine for the journey of life. The journey to know thyself should bring you joy for joy is God’s desire for our lives. You need only receive it. Receive God fully into your life and you will be able to give His abounding joy to everyone around you. Master this and your plate and cup of life will always be full.

You may look at yourself in the mirror and ask, “What am I?” or “Who am I?” I have an answer. You are a mystery. You are a mystery because you are unable to foresee your future. As a result, both in small and big ways, you will always be a mystery to yourself. I’m going to tell you something that you do not want to hear but need to hear. You don’t have to accept the words that come next for your resignation does not deter Truth. We, women, are going through a process that makes us divine. We are fallen and forgiven. We are the second covenant generation. Mary, Mother of God, sealed the second covenant for us. And our future is delineated by where we place God in our lives. Some of you may attempt to leave God out of the picture of your life. Some of you may determine for yourself your own creeds and definitions for good and evil and rebelliously claim yourself to be the God of your own life. Or you may trust and obey God’s law of good and evil with willful participation as His partner in creation. The former will lead us astray into a poisonous prison of deception, defeat, and depression. The latter will deliver us peace, hope, and love. A love that will transform us to be what God created us to be - BEAUTIFUL.  

You are so beautiful that the devil is jealous of you. Jealous! “Why is he jealous?” you ask? Because the devil did not create you. The devil did not and does not create life or beauty. The devil is impotent. He is powerless to create, stripped of his beauty and fain to destruction. Don’t you see? God has already given you more power, more power to women, than the devil possesses. Here on God’s green earth, women and only women are the vessels of life, vessels of heaven’s souls. Women’s bodies are sacred temples. Our gift to grow humankind is supernatural. A miracle. A mystery. A woman’s joyful mystery.

Further, we women, too, are ladies of royal status. We’ve been given the responsibility by God to lord over and share dominion over the earth as part of Man. We are mothers of souls and mothers of nature. Biologically, motherhood is part of our corporal design and is not a mistake. You, dear sister, are not a mistake! Inside and out, the Almighty Artist, the first sculptor, imagined you. The Almighty Artist molded our womanhood and fashioned every intricate contour of our bodies. Think of how your unique fingerprint is unlike any female that was ever created or ever will be. Your signature DNA is purposefully specific. The oneness of your immortal soul is the only one to exist for all eternity. You are rarer than the rarest diamond, beautiful and precious.

You are the rarest treasure in the universe and no price can claim you. That is why the devil cannot have you. Not unless you choose him. Not unless you give yourself to him. Not unless you deny God. We are in the middle of a longstanding war. And you, fair maiden, are the prize. The battlefield is all around us. We must not be blind to it. Or we will be kidnapped and lost. Human-trafficked in a worldly hell. Maybe not for forever, but long enough to torture our own selves for our poor choices. Long enough to not want to forgive ourselves and feeling underserving of forgiveness even though our ever-loving Father already forgives us. The devil was an angel born in heaven and then became a demon stricken from heaven. He knows Beauty intimately. He knows, more than you know yourself, how much God loves you.

One day you will understand a glimpse of that love. For good parents love their children more than the children love themselves. As a prodigal son separate from his father and distant from his home, the devil is angry about sharing his Father’s love with you. You are a being he feels inferior to His Father’s love. Burning in envy, the devil seeks to torture his Father by tormenting His beautiful creation – you. However, the devil is subject to rules. He cannot touch you directly or physically. Yet indirectly he can toy and tempt you. Just as the devil toyed and tested Jesus with many temptations in the desert. For forty days and forty nights Jesus resisted the devil, and so can we because Jesus shows us the way.

You have learned, as I have learned, how tempting is the path of least resistance. Evil is easy. Mediocrity is comfortable. But you, my dear sister, are not born for mediocrity. Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth are the path of least resistance, easy sins leading us to lose the best version of ourselves. Deadly sins killing our original innocence. Manipulating sins attacking our purity and obstructing our covenant in Christ. The devil is a patient predator. He is waiting. When you are in your darkest hour, weak from weariness, guard broken down, the devil swoops in with an attractive offer. He offers you the appearance of the thing you desire most. He presents you with an alluring lie wrapped in relief that is giving you a semblance of hope. However, this guise of hope is founded in the material, not the spiritual. Remember, the devil promised Jesus kingship over all the earth. But God, our Father, promised Jesus the Kingdom of Heaven.

The devil promised to end Jesus’ suffering. God promised to end the suffering of all mankind through Jesus. After all, the devil has limitations. He will offer you a temporary remedy for your ill-will and in exchange he will ask for your soul. Your soul is the only thing you have to give and the only thing that matters. Caught in a moment of sorrow, drowning in the spirit of desolation, you will be tempted to surrender your identity in Christ. This is a great seduction. The devil wants to be your king. To steal you from the freedom of God and make you his slave. Somehow, deceitfully, the devil’s solution will disguise the devil as a healer who can mend your scars. Let’s recall, the only way the devil can expand his dead kingdom is by collecting souls. Your soul, my soul, all our souls are the closest thing to heaven the devil can touch and will always attempt to attain. This is a great sadness. At the genesis of creation, you were blessed as an instrument of peace. Harmonious instruments of heaven are not meant for an eternity of disharmony in hell. The devil wants to replace your peace with his pain. But he cannot have you. First and foremost, you are a child of God.

Evil does not rest. There is no rest for the foul and no rest for the offended. Rest only comes in the form of peace and peace is only found in the redemptive love of Jesus Christ. Evil is ugly; therefore, the enemy of evil is beauty. Jesus transformed the Crucifix, once known as a symbol of fear, a symbol of mankind’s ugly immorality, into a symbol of hope and beauty. The Crucifix is beautiful because it represents the ultimate sacrifice of God’s unconditional love for mankind. The Crucifix is a reminder and daily invitation to carry our cross with Christ. God is always with us, and I seek and see God in you now. When I look upon you and you smile back at me, it feels like a God wink. It feels as if Jesus is smiling back at me. Do you see what I see? Do you see God in you?

What is beauty? Beauty is virtue, humility, charity, chastity, gratitude, temperance, patience, and diligence. I pray, dear sister, that you see yourself as I see you. I see you as a beautiful living temple of Christ.

Totus Tuus,

Apolonia Davalos