Describing her adolescent years, Martin noted that having been ridiculed by classmates in childhood, she was only too eager to fit in with the “in crowd” during high school. “The popular crowd is, I think, the first temptation to listen to Satan’s lies,” she said, noting that what actually first started her on the right path was being able to attend college, the first in her family to do so.

    It was at Pepperdine University she got to know Protestant “brothers and sisters in Christ” who were passionate in their faith and who challenged her to live a life transformed by the message of Jesus, which she realized she was not doing. Though she had attended Catholic schools growing up, she had not been well-grounded in her faith and, following Protestant Bible studies and discussions at college, came to no longer consider herself a Catholic.

    She also realized that she was not living according to the way Jesus wanted her to live and, at a low point in her life, found herself drawn back to the church through the Blessed Mother. Thinking she had made so many mistakes it might have been better had she never been born, she one day pulled out a rosary given her by her grandmother at her first Communion.

    “And it was,” she said, “as if I heard Our Blessed Mother call out to me and say, ‘Come back. Come back to my son.’” Remembering the one place she had always felt true peace and comfort was within a Catholic church building itself, she drove to a nearby Catholic church and began to go there daily, sitting in a pew.
Eventually the priest there approached her to ask if he could help and she poured out her spiritual confusion. For the first time she found answers to her questions regarding the church and returned to it, wholeheartedly saying “yes” to God’s call.

    “That’s why I have this passion to be with you here today,” she said, relating that same passion led her and her husband (who had been through a similar experience) to begin FOCUS, through which young men and women share and encourage others in the Catholic faith on college campuses nationwide. (They recently started their first FOCUS team in Texas at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.)

    As “cradle Catholics,” she noted we sometimes think if we do the right things — attend Mass, participate in the sacraments, etc., that that is enough to get to heaven, but God is not a God of fear, she said. He wants us to “do the right thing because we’re madly involved with him and that love spurs on our devotion.”

    She challenged those present to think about the awesome gifts of our femininity that are given to us through baptism. Not only are we cleansed from original sin and become children of God through it, but we are stamped with the role of priest, prophet and king — to bring God to people as a priest does, share God’s wisdom as a prophet and to learn, through Mary’s example, to accept our role as “royal” daughters and ambassadors for our faith.

    Martin went on to explain that God created man and woman in his image and likeness and created us for relationship, something evident in the symbolism of Eve being created from Adam’s rib. “It wasn’t as if God chose bone from a foot so that man could walk on woman,” she said. “Or bone from the skull so that he could rule over woman intellectually.” Instead there was a complementary plan in his design of the two sexes.

    “We need to be able to embrace our femininity, our dignity, with this understanding that we are different,” she said, adding this is not a deficit. “Once we begin to think about these things, we can actually have a lot of fun, a lot of joy, in being women and not trying to be so much like men.” She related that women are called to live their “feminine genius” in the world in a way that men cannot do. Being more relational and sensitive, they are designed to be “the heart of the home, the heart of society.”

    She observed that a recent UCLA study determined that when women get together and share with other women, their oxytocin (an endorphin that produces strong positive feelings) rises tremendously. This endorphin is also produced in nursing mothers, helping bond them with their children, as well as in the marital act, bonding the couple. However, for men, oxytocin is only produced during the marital act, she noted.

    Another physical difference between the sexes is observable in the corpus callosum that connects the two sides of the brain, she pointed out. In women, this is a very wide area, meaning women are more easily able to go back and forth from the logical to the emotional side and are better able to multi-task, whereas in men this is a much smaller area of the brain, making the jump from one side of the brain to the other a more difficult task. “To be emotional is almost tortuous for them,” she said, eliciting a wave of laughter from the feminine audience.

    Noting that men are much more visual than women, Martin challenged women to “veil the tabernacle,” observing modest dress. This is something she especially counsels younger women about in a culture that tells women their bodies are more a “gymnasium” than a “temple.”

    Citing Mary as the model for the dignity and vocation of all women, Martin related that, as Mary, we discover who we are by living the sincere gift of self. “All of us possess this distinctively feminine response to life, to our faith,” she said, “and if we embrace that, if we live that, think of what we could do for the church!” Examples of this, she noted, can be found in the Scriptures.

    She encouraged women searching for direction in their life to make choices for Jesus, who is always reaching out to them, and to make use of the sacraments to spiritually fortify themselves with the graces they bestow.

    “God has these gifts and he continues to want to give them to us,” she said. “And so I want to just awaken your hearts to embrace all of the gifts we’ve been given — that we’ve been changed through our baptism, that it’s a gift to be a woman, and it’s a gift to be Catholic.”

    She added, “Don’t squander that. Really spend some time with Our Lord. Allow Our Lady to bring you closer to Jesus, because that’s what she wants to do.”