She left central Pennsylvania and went to Nashville with her guitar to chase her calling, one that has nothing to do with country music and everything to do with commitment to God through the patron saint of music.
“When I first made vows, it wasn’t so much me vowing myself to the Lord. It was He vowing Himself to me,” said Sister Lily Anne Camaioni, OP, formerly Nina Camaioni. The former college volleyball player, singer-songwriter and campus minister now lives her commitment to Christ with the Dominican Sisters of Saint Cecilia in the town nicknamed Music City.
She is about a year and a half from professing final vows, and seven years removed from her last ministry as a lay person serving as assistant director of Catholic Campus Ministry at Bloomsburg University.
“You sometimes think, ‘I’m laying it all down,’” she said. “But in reality, He was giving Himself to me in a new way, and I’m still growing in the journey.”
That journey began in Warminster, Pennsylvania, just north of Philadelphia in a Catholic family that moved to Williamstown, New Jersey, a few years after she was born.
Her hands were often traversing the strings of a guitar or slapping volleyballs across a net, earning New Jersey state player of the year and All-America honors at Williamstown High School.
Her mind occasionally drifted to the idea of religious life, but not often.
“I might have asked the question when I started getting into my faith, when I was in high school, when I was 18, 19, but not seriously discerning,” she said.
Sister Lily Anne was focusing on the grind of NCAA Division I volleyball at Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, but God kept knocking on the door for a deeper relationship.
“It just became more intentional. The Lord was real, and He was somebody that I wanted to know and love,” she said. “I started going to daily Mass, starting to pray the Rosary. He just really captured me.”
Her life brought her back north, playing coffeehouse gigs with her guitar along with competing in volleyball tournaments until a major knee injury during a tournament in New Jersey ended that part of her life.
“My prayer two weeks before that all happened (was) ‘Lord, please remove anything that’s preventing me from following You,’” she said.
“I tore both of my meniscuses and my ACL. That was like a huge grieving process, even up until the surgery and then afterwards, because the recovery was very abnormal in many ways, (but) it really was a big rupture that allowed the Lord to break in and to offer me a place to maybe hear His invitation and be able to respond to it.”
That place was where she had already begun serving, having moved west from a job at Rowan University, New Jersey to Bloomsburg where she played mentorship roles in both campus ministry and on the women’s volleyball team.
“Such a good, good, good place. The students are just so remarkable. My last year there, we had such a wonderful leadership team. Some of my fondest memories aren’t really big events or anything. It was really just sitting in the living room, talking with these students, having them come in and just share their day and just the community that develops kind of naturally,” she shared.
“Those informal times where they would just come into the building, find a place of refuge, you know. One young girl came in her freshman year, terrified, in tears. She didn’t know where else to go. Father (Richard Mowery) and I just happened to be there. We were able to bring her into the chapel and pray with her. She’d end up becoming one of our leaders. Those moments are so invaluable.”
It was at that good place, through Father Mowery of St. Columba Church, Bloomsburg, where the ultimate calling came in dying to self and the calling she thought she had toward marriage, and she received so much more in God’s calling for her in the religious life.
“It was a little hard to hear when Father first brought that up, but then a couple other priests confirmed that they thought that I had a religious vocation. I just thought, ‘The Lord is saying something here.’ He speaks often through others,” she said.
“There was also fear. I really had this desire and the beautiful, good, holy desire for marriage and hopes for it, so I wasn’t quite ready to go all in. But over the next year when I was ready, the Lord invited me to take the next step.”
The step led her south to discern the Dominicans in Nashville where she knew something would happen.
“That first night, we did a procession for the Salve Regina, very beautiful, solemn, unique to the Dominicans. Right when I saw them from sitting all the way in the back watching this, I don’t know what came over me – the Holy Spirit – but I just started crying. This was so beautiful, and this is what I want,” she said.
“We went up to our little rooms where we were staying. And then I started to cry again, because it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to leave everything. I have to leave Bloomsburg, the work that I love, the people that I love, even my family.’ There was a sorrow, a sadness, but I wouldn’t say fear because, what was really unique about that visit was, there was a great peace.”
The peace came to her in abandonment and in discovering so much more was coming for her than what she gave away.
“He was saying, ‘Why are you holding back from Me? You know that you do not lose anything when you give it all to Me, when you give Me everything.’ You don’t lose anything. It’s almost like what St. John Paul II said, ‘Do not be afraid.’ We give everything to the Lord. He gives everything a hundredfold back. Do not be afraid of the greatness of His plans for you, the greatness of His love, the greatness of what you’ve been called to.”
Sister Lily Anne gives plenty of her talents in giving everything of herself with the Dominicans, including original songwriting and guitar-playing for students whom she teaches and in service to her fellow Sisters which reflects that gift she’s received because of her surrender.
“Before I played and the Lord used me as an instrument. When I entered the convent, I gave the gift to Him, and it became a real charism, a real gift that He’s given back to me,” she said.
“I play in Adoration, and I do it for the Sisters and for the students. I love playing in Adoration, and the Holy Spirit really does move. I still write music now that I’m part of their community, sharing it. It belongs to the community.”
Whether on her Pennsylvania-made Martin guitar or in countless other profound ways, Sister Lily Anne is living her total commitment to God with the strength of a vow she sees the Lord made with her, and the confidence of surrender to someone who will never abandon her in the journey.
“I’m just never alone,” she shared.
“He’s always with me. He’s always there.”
(Jay Sorgi is a freelance reporter for The Witness. Profession photo courtesy of the Dominican Sisters of Saint Cecilia; guitar photos by Kari A. Janisse, Catholic Campus Minister at Bloomsburg University; all others from Bloomsburg’s Catholic Campus Ministry.)
By Jay Sorgi, The Catholic Witness
