Thy Kingdom Come!
After two and a half decades of being a consecrated member of the Regnum Christi Movement, Joan Kingsland’s heart is packed with distinct, fond memories.
One memory, however, stands out.
It was an encounter Joan had with a Polish girl and serves as a golden example of what Joan, who celebrated 25 years as a consecrated woman Jan. 25, loves most about Regnum Christi.
“We Consecrated Women typically bring a lot of young people to World Youth Day. Out of the two million young people who attended the World Youth Day in Rome 2000, I was with a group of young Polish women,” she said. “One of the things St. John Paul II requested for World Youth Day was that the buses not take the pilgrims all the way to the site of the big encounter. He deliberately required that the buses leave the pilgrims a significant walking distance from the site.”
When Joan boarded the bus that would take her and others to the drop off point, the Polish girl she had sat beside immediately demanded of her: “Are you really happy?”
“She knew that I was a Consecrated Woman. So we spent the entire time of the bus ride and the walk into the Youth Day Site talking about the meaning of life and true happiness,” Joan said. “I think that’s just what St. John Paul II wanted!”
There are many things Joan loves about the Regnum Christi movement, but at the top of the list is the common yearning its members possess. “I love the enthusiasm and ardent desire amongst Regnum Christi members to make the goodness and love of Jesus Christ known to others, and that people do experience His love and fall in love with Him through our example and apostolic work,” she said. “It gives me joy to be a reminder of the life to come by the very fact of my consecration to Christ! It gives me joy that we encounter and accompany people along that pathway home to heaven.”
In her Regnum Christi community of nine, Joan in known for putting what she loves about Regnum Christi into practice. “Joan is a person who loves life, relishes being with people and is very generous,” said Yvonne Nuxoll the Ohio Valley Local Director of Regnum Christi. “If she is cooking, there is always plenty of food. There is never a dull moment, if Joan is present. She is also a great story teller.”
Joan grew up with five brothers. She was the fourth child of Peter and Margaret Kingsland. The five boys had some influence. “I would have been deeply insulted if you’d called me a tomboy when I was growing up, but that’s what I was,” Joan said. “I can remember bringing home a girlfriend from school in third grade, shutting the front door and then announcing: “Okay, let’s fight!”
Joan then grabbed her young friend, wrestled her to the ground and made her say, “Uncle!”
“That to me was how you play,” she said.
Joan’s mother quietly took her aside and recommended that she play dolls instead of wrestling.
At 51, Joan admits she still loves to play board games “like a guy,” but has added some watercolor and flower arranging to her hobbies through the years.
Joan’s Regnum Christi duties include serving as a council member for the territorial director of the consecrated women in the United States. She also teaches at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and works at Ruah Woods as a Training and Development Specialist and Curriculum Advisor.
She is one of four council members who meet with the territorial director of the Consecrated Women, Nancy Nohrden, once a month in Atlanta. “She (Nohrden) asks for our input and collaboration on matters to do with the ten communities of Consecrated Women in our territory. Some of the themes involve finances, housing, formation, vocational work, and personal apostolic placements for individuals and strategic short and long-term plans. Right now, we are working as a territory at developing focused missions for each community,” she explained.
Joan teaches a catechetics course to the seminarians and a course on current moral issues to students in the Lay Pastoral Ministry Program at Mount Saint Mary’s. At Ruah Woods, she trains teachers to teach Theology of the Body to their students. Two more assignments Kingsland loves. “It’s an opportunity to bring the beauty of the truths of TOB to the teachers themselves for their own lives and to equip them so they can make TOB accessible to the students they teach,” she said.
Joan is not afraid to enlist technology to assist her. “So far I’ve produced (with the help of others of course) 20 podcasts for teachers that can be found though this link: http://tob20.podbean.com and I’m currently working on the production of 3 separate films of a teacher teaching Theology of the Body to students in grades 1-3 so teachers can see what it looks like to teach TOB at those grade levels. I also offer courses on TOB for teachers,” she said.
In her youth, when Joan wasn’t wrestling her brothers, she quietly admired a family member. “From when I was a little girl I can remember wanting to be a “nun-teacher”, like my Aunt Maureen, who was an Ursuline Sister,” Kingsland said. “That desire and the conviction that God was calling me never went away although I tried to ignore it during my high school years.”
But Joan repeatedly told God to wait. “I told him I would do anything he wants but just to wait until I was older,” she said. “The call to follow Him came rushing back when I attended Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California. But I told Our Lord to wait, because I had to finish college first. When I finished college, I told Our Lord to wait, because I had a hefty student loan to pay off first.”
Joan acquired three high-paying jobs at the same time and paid off her student loans in one year. But, she asked God to wait again, this time until she finished her Master’s degree at the University of Toronto. “At the end of my year of getting a Master degree, I told Our Lord to wait because I wanted to travel to Europe first,” she said. “I went that summer. During a quiet moment while I was walking alone in a rose garden in Madrid, I recalled how many times I had asked Our Lord to wait, and then I began to think of all the places in the world I wanted to see before answering my vocation. A gentle voice from within my heart told me that my asking Him to wait could go on endlessly.”
Joan then decided to take real steps towards answering her call. She took a train trip across the United States “convent hopping” and searching for peace. “Soon afterwards I asked to be consecrated in Regnum Christi. I had checked out a number of orders but what captured my heart was Regnum Christi: the spirit of joy and enthusiasm in bringing Christ to others.”
On her silver anniversary, Joan has been reflecting on the times she first heard God’s call. “I’ve been reflecting on the trials and joys along the way, his accompaniment, my unworthiness, his love and fidelity and more,” she said.
For 9 years of her 25 years, Kingsland taught theology at Mater Ecclesiae College in Rhode Island, where women discerning the consecrated life in the Regnum Christi Movement earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Religious and Pastoral Studies.
“I taught a number of morality courses to women discerning the consecrated life. One thing I strived to transmit to them was that the Church’s teachings about the moral life come within the context of a covenant of love between God and us,” she said. “God is not a capricious bully who is waiting to take vengeance on us if we don’t obey his commands. Rather, our desire for what is truly good is written into our very nature. We cannot help but desire what is good. We get mistaken in our choices about what is truly good and what will bring us happiness. God wants true happiness for us and he shows us the pathway of happiness out of love for us.”
Joan also led the young women to be pastoral in their approach. “What we want to do is guide others along the pathway of happiness. We want to manifest to others how good it is to follow the way of the Lord and how attractive He and his ways are. We want to motivate, council, console, empathize, and accompany “she said
“It’s kind of like the difference between trying to hand someone a piece of raw meat versus inviting someone to sit down to a meal, where the meat has been cooked in a savory sauce. It’s not about diminishing the truth at all, but about making it palatable to others by the way we present it.”
“We don’t just want people thinking the truth, we want them loving and embracing the truth. After all, Jesus Christ says he is the Way the Truth and the Life: all three in one,” Joan said.
The teacher’s desire was to instill a fire in her students to transmit the message to others.
Kingsland has learned a few lessons on her 25-year-journey in Regnum Christi, which she tries to practice. They are: