Catholics On Call Participant Profile—Megan Sherrier

Megan Sherrier hails from Mechanicsville, Virginia currently living in Richmond, Virginia home to the University of Richmond. Megan attended a Catholics on Call conference in August 2007.

If you did not have to worry about finances, what would your life’s work be? How would you spend your time?

I would be a street drummer. I would spend my time learning about the lives of those around me on the city streets and helping to spread the optimism, hope, and cheer found within percussion to the passersby through my music. I’d have the opportunity to befriend those with a wide variety of life experience and wisdom. I think it would be a great lesson from the most vulnerable members of the human community about the resilience of the human spirit.

What makes a good friend?

A good friend is someone who takes the time to be present with you, without telling you all of the other things that they could be doing at that very moment. This person is someone that can read your feelings without you explicitly sharing them. They can challenge you to always be better, but support you through your inevitable failures and setbacks. They can chastise you, and then laugh with you about it an hour later.

Complete the sentence: My one and only desire is to…be able to surrender control and allow God to use me to my fullest extent.

Describe what joy is.

Joy is the awareness that you are where you are supposed to be, and giving your all; it’s the accomplishment you feel when you know you are using your whole self and your true talents at whatever it is you are doing…whether it be little tasks like being present with a friend, or fulfilling your life’s work. It’s a rare and beautiful emotion based not on ignorance of the bad, but knowledge of having surpassed that bad to taste the good of life.

How did you find CoC?

Like most of the things I have found worth doing in life, I fell into CoC. My campus minister handed me a pamphlet and “suggested I try it out” with that look that does not accept no for an answer. The next thing I knew, I was on a plane to Chicago.

What book has offered you kernels of wisdom that you now cannot live without? What is the book and what is the kernel?

How to Be Like Mike: Life Lessons About Basketball’s Best by Pat Williams

The kernel:
“Perhaps we know people like this. Perhaps we are people like this—devoid of the passion and energy that carries us from one moment to the next, unable to combat the intangible force that sets roadblocks in our mind. And then one lonesome afternoon in a corner office, it floods us; the pain, the anguish, the irreversible regret for what we should have done and never did, because we followed the path to comfort instead of the path to our yearnings.”

Nothing scares me more than underachieving. Whenever I fear taking a risk, I look back to this quote and know what I must do next.

If you had the option of being able to fly or knowing what people are thinking, which quality would you choose and why?

If I knew what people were thinking, I would be overwhelmed. There is beauty in the mystery and privacy of human thought, and in the process in which we allow privileged access to our closest friends and loved ones. Instead, I’d choose to fly. As a skydiver, I can say that there is nothing as breathtaking as seeing the world through freefall.

Compiled by Katie Cranor, Bernardin Scholar.