Sister Mary Grace of the Sisters of Life, still remembers when she, as a novice, trained with Navy SEALs.

“We were invited to Long Island on a beach just to kind of get some insight and inspiration from … Navy SEALs,” she recently revealed during a new season of the “Let Love” podcast by the Sisters of Life, a community of religious women dedicated to promoting the inherent dignity and worth of every human person.

While opening the podcast’s 13th season, Sister Mary Grace and another sister, Sister Ann Immaculée, remembered participating in Navy SEAL drills with more than a dozen other Sisters of Life. One exercise in particular, she said, reminded her of the meaning of Lent.

“I think it was clearly obvious that push-ups and sit-ups weren’t our speciality,” Sister Mary Grace began. “But we tried.”

The New York-based Sisters of Life, founded by the late Cardinal John O’Connor in 1991, profess four vows: poverty, chastity, obedience, and “to protect and enhance the sacredness of human life.”

Among other things, they dedicate their lives to God by serving women vulnerable to abortion, providing life-affirming support to pregnant and parenting women in need, hosting retreats and holy hours, evangelizing, performing college-student outreach, and offering help to women who suffer after abortion.

In addition to the New York City-area, they also serve in Denver, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Washington, D.C., Toronto, and Catskill, New York.

A special SEAL challenge

In preparation for their ministry, the sisters underwent training with Navy SEALs around 2018, Sister Mary Grace told Our Sunday Visitor. She shared the story of a special exercise to help shed light on Lent.

For one drill, the Navy SEALs divided the sisters into three groups, with each group receiving a “huge backpack full of sand,” Sister Mary Grace said on the podcast. The exercise was simple: The sisters had to move their backpacks from one location to another as fast as possible.

“Okay, sisters,” the SEALs instructed, “gun’s about to go, just get to the other side together.”

Originally from Australia, Sister Mary Grace felt at home on the beach.

“I immediately thought, ‘Oh my goodness, when you run on the beach, if you’re on the hard sand near the water, you can move so much faster,'” she remembered. “I’m like, ‘Sisters, I got a great idea.’ I was like, ‘Let’s just beeline to the water, with the hardest sand, and then race to the end and we’ll win.'”

The sisters in her group happily followed her lead.

“We picked up the sandbag, dragged it all the way down, ran, and smashed it,” Sister Mary Grace said of their success.

Their excitement came to a halt when an angry Navy SEAL approached them and ordered them to do 50 push-ups on the spot.

“I was like, ‘What?'” Sister Mary Grace described her surprise. “Usually that’s punishment.”

During their push-ups, he explained what went wrong: “Sisters, the whole point was to stay together. … Even the three groups of you, when you’re on the same side, the whole point of when things get tough, is that you actually find ways — get creative from within the body — to stay together.”

A Lenten message

The drill, Sister Mary Grace said, revealed a deeper message that can be applied to Lent.

“There’s a real invitation, too, to Lent here,” she said on the podcast. “God is inviting us actually to a radical communio together. To do the tough stuff together. To try something new together.”

She added: “There’s a strength and a power within, when we turn to one another in a tough season — that is so full of power and grace — that God is inviting us to consider in Lent.”

A ‘conversion moment’

A turning point came, Sister Mary Grace said, when Navy SEALs ordered the sisters to run back to their starting point with the same sandbags.

Sister Ann Immaculée took action this time.

“I’ll never forget it, because it’s been a grace for me over the years,” Sister Mary Grace said. “She kind of just breaks out and runs to the middle of these three groups of sisters and just starts singing.”

Her singing encouraged each and every sister.

“All our spirits were lifted,” Sister Mary Grace said. “Everybody, all of a sudden, was able to kind of like laugh, smile, sing along — and we were carried together.”

She called it a “real conversion moment.”

“The more that we focus on one another and encourage one another,” she commented, “we actually move together as a pack.”

With Our Sunday Visitor, she shared more about how the sisters connected with the SEALs.

“One of our Sister’s friends was a Navy SEAL and we had the rare, one-off opportunity to learn from some of our bravest servicemen,” she said. “It never happened again, but their insights into teamwork and sticking together under high pressure situations taught us invaluable lessons we still remember!”

A podcast leading up to Easter

Season 13 of the sisters’ “Let Love” podcast, called “Let’s Do Lent Together!,” began Feb. 19, 2024, and continues every Monday through Easter Monday. Listeners can tune in on Apple Podcasts, PodBean, Spotify, Castbox, Overcast, iHeartRadio and Google Podcasts.

If listeners take away one thing from the new season, Sister Mary Grace hopes that is an encounter with Christ.

“Jesus invites us to follow him and not forget finding him in each other,” she told Our Sunday Visitor.

She emphasized the importance of journeying through Lent together.

“We can sometimes approach Lent through the lens of serving our own need for growth and transformation,” she said. “We all need this time of renewal, but doing it together not only lightens the load, but allows us to go deeper than we could go alone.”

“We’re created for union with God and one another,” she concluded. “Communion is the whole point and we’re inviting others to join us, as we look to Jesus together.”