March celebrates Women’s History Month, and Father Dave welcomes Taryn DeLong and Elise Crawford Gallagher to examine work-life balance from the viewpoint of Catholic women. Taryn and Elise are the co-presidents of the online community Catholic Women in Business and the authors of “Holy Ambition: Thriving as a Catholic Woman at Work and at Home.”
Elise is also the Chief Operations Officer at a regional law firm and explains why she first founded Catholic Women in Business in 2018. “I was new to my career and profession, and I felt really lonely,” she says. “I couldn’t find other Catholic women who were working but also taking their faith very seriously, and I wanted to integrate those two things on a daily basis.” She founded a blog which led to a large Facebook group community, a podcast, and more.
RELATED: How Can I Live Out My Faith at Work?
They discuss how Catholic women can live out their faith within a career. “Our Church gives us such a wide view and variety of saints to look to and ideas of what being a good Catholic woman can be,” Elise says. “We have everyone from Saint Gianna Molla to Saint Joan of Arc and Saint Catherine of Siena; all these amazing women who show up in their own unique vocation, and the Lord [shines] through them in their own specific way. We see in our community of Catholic Women in Business [how] the Lord shows up in their lives in so many different varieties of working and living.”
Taryn adds, “The Church doesn’t give us a formula for what it means to be a good Catholic woman, because the Church trusts us to discern that for ourselves with God…so the best way to be a faithful Catholic woman is to pray, have a relationship with with Jesus, and ask him what he wants you to do. [For example], Saint Zélie Martin is Saint Thérèse of Lisieux’s Mother – she’s a saint. She raised a saint, and yet she owned her own business.”
Elise describes how her faith informed her career while starting a marketing firm as her first business. “We worked with women in the secular sphere, and I felt very called to be salt and light in the world at that time of my life,” she says. “I really saw my mission during that time was to bring Christ to those who probably would have never encountered him, and that was through my word, my speech, the way I treated my employees and my clients – just talking about my faith in an organic way, because it is such a big part of my everyday life.”
Taryn and Elise also live out their vocations as wives and mothers, and Krista asks them about the balance of a career, parenting, and faith. “Whether you’re a man or woman, the term ‘work-life balance’ is the buzzword,” Krista says. “I’ve found that I’m doing lots of things, but I’m not sure if I’m doing any of them well. How do you kind of quiet that inner voice that everything is suffering because you’re trying to do too much?”
RELATED: Renewing the Spirit: A Catholic Guide to Overcoming Career Burnout
Elise contends that while a perfect work-life balance is an unrealistic expectation, there is hope. “I rely tremendously on the reminder that God is truly the final caretaker for my children. My husband and I have been entrusted with them, and they are our whole worlds…but I know that this [work] is what I’m being called to do in this moment,” Elise says. “I remember a few weeks ago just a whispering on my heart from the Lord saying, ‘Do you not think I’m with them while you leave? I’m here when you’re gone.’”
“I think as Catholic women, sometimes we talk about working like, ‘it’s my career’ as if it’s something that I possess. As a Catholic working woman, that’s not true. This is not my career; this is my family’s career and my family’s life,” Elise continues. “The Lord’s not only calling me to work, but the Lord is calling my daughters to have a working mom in this season. He’s calling my husband to have a working wife in this season. So it’s not a calling just for me, but for my whole family as well.”
