Taniele Tucker grew up in the Bahamas. The island’s economic mainstay is tourism, the climate is warm and tropical, and the scenery beautiful.
Almost every Sunday Taniele enjoyed picnics on the beach with her tight-knit family, including aunts, uncles and cousins. At the time she never imagined she would spend years of her life in Rhode Island, with its long, snowy winters.
When she was 15, Taniele met a group of Catholic missionaries from a movement called Regnum Christi. They were high schoolers who had come to the Bahamas for Holy Week missions. Since the missionaries stayed at Taniele’s parish, she helped them out, showed them the neighborhood and hung out with them. She was impressed by the joy and happiness in these young people, and discovered that the Church was active and alive.
At 18 years old, and already in her second year of college, Taniele had big decisions to face. She loved the Bahamas, and was enjoying her classes in computer programming, but it seemed like something was missing. She had always been active at her Church, teaching CCD and involved in the youth group, but she still couldn’t shake off the feeling that God might be asking for something more. She asked a priest for advice, and he encouraged her to pray more.
Taniele decided to go on a retreat, and kneeling before Jesus in the Tabernacle, she received a life-changing grace. In an instant she understood that the same Jesus who died 2,000 years ago was alive! He was a real person who could be her friend, a part of her life. Not only was Jesus real, but he was really present in the Eucharist, and through communion He could become present and alive in Taniele. From that point on Jesus became someone Taniele thought about and talked to, and she started going to daily Mass and frequent confession. Once Jesus got his foot in the door of her heart, Taniele could no longer be the same person.
“I still remember the last time I went dancing at a nightclub,” she shared. “I looked around at all the ‘fun’ … I saw the looks on people’s faces, people who were drunk, and my dance partner I didn’t even know. I suddenly realized it was all so fake, and I knew these people were unfulfilled. I told my two best friends, ‘Let’s go.’ They asked me, ‘Why? What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘These people aren’t happy, and I don’t want to be like them.’“ She walked out of that club and went home.
As she finished her second year of college, Taniele continued to pray and found the space and time to look back on her life and reflect. She soon recognized God’s hand in her family upbringing, in her search for something more. As she herself put it, “I saw then that the only thing which would fulfill me was belonging totally to Christ.” She quit computer programming, left the sunny Bahamas and came to Rhode Island to discern her vocation to consecrated life in Regnum Christi.
Fourteen years have passed, and Taniele is consecrated and energetically serving in administration at Mater Ecclesiae College, the formation center for consecrated women in Rhode Island. She also offers spiritual support to young adults in the diocese of Providence. Having experienced the Lord’s mercy in her own life, she feels the desire to incarnate that merciful heart for others. By listening and understanding, she wants to bring others to meet a God who is loving, and yet challenges them to be the best they can.
She recently bumped into one of the missionaries who had visited the Bahamas. Father Simon Devereaux is now a Legionary priest working in New England, and the two reminisced over those Bahama missions. At one point Taniele confessed she had asked a friend of hers who was in a gang to watch over the missionaries as they went from house to house. Her friend, with a few others, kept an eye on the young Catholics from street corners, warning other gangs to keep their distance. It made for a good laugh between Taniele and Fr. Simon, who hadn’t known anything about it at the time.
Some people have contagious laughs, and Taniele is definitely one of them. When she laughs, everything in her laughs, as though the laughter was dancing its way through her. Her big smile lights up the hallways of our house in Rhode Island, like a ray of Bahama sunshine. Anyone who meets Taniele will see the joy that Jesus promises to those who leave everything for his sake: “Rejoice, and leap for joy! For your reward will be great in heaven” (Lk. 6:23).
