May Lane received dozens of flyers from colleges during her senior year in high school in Baltimore. The postcard from Viterbo,with its Franciscan logo, caught her attention. At the top of the postcard it simply said, “Come Grow with Us.” She felt so drawn, she never visited campus before deciding to attend Viterbo, trusting her intuition.

“It was one of the best decisions of my life, and I’m grateful to my parents and family for supporting me in this endeavor,” Lane said. “Because of its size, I was never a number at Viterbo. I was cared for, could be myself, had wonderful friends, and amazing teachers and mentors, especially Sr. Carlene Unser, Sr. Arita Dopkins, and Tom Thibodeau, all instrumental in guiding me. I fully blossomed during those four years and felt empowered to be my best self in all my future endeavors.”

Lane started as an art major and loved the art department, but she was still contemplating “what to do with her life.” Lane found her calling in religious studies and education.

Since graduating from Viterbo in 1985, Lane has been a pastoral minister, a director of religious education, a theology teacher, and an eLearning developer and editor at a Catholic publishing company.

Lane always had a passion for fine arts and performance and integrated these areas while she was in the seminary working on her master’s degree in pastoral studies. She was able to bring the arts and theology together to create her own focus area in art and women’s spirituality. As a high school theology teacher, she proposed, developed, and taught a course on the arts in the Church, and students loved it as much as she did.

Lane found another passion in playing soccer starting at age 13. She played in high school and in a youth league in Baltimore. She was hoping to play soccer in college, but found women’s soccer had not yet migrated to the Midwest.

She really missed the sport so she decided to try out for the Viterbo men’s team in her sophomore year. “It was a little daunting at first, but the guys treated me just like ‘one of the guys’ and were very supportive,” Lane said. “They called me ‘Lady Luck.’”

Lane is especially grateful to teammates, Mike Smith ’83 and Vee Luz ’84, for being so kind and encouraging. “Also, my very dear friends from Belize, Jorge Espat ’83 and Ismael (Miley) Garcia ’83, were both incredible soccer players. I called them my ‘bookends,’” she said. “They’d take me out to the Wunderbar, Jorge seated on my right, Miley on my left, and treat me to beer and bar food.”

Lane really enjoyed watching Espat play soccer. “He was amazing, running and dribbling with precision, cutting through the opposing team members ‘like a hot knife through butter,’ as Vee Luz once said. It was a real privilege to be one of his teammates,” Lane said. “Bus rides to and from games were always … interesting, but that’s another story.”

Some of her fondest memories during her time at Viterbo were living on 3 South while a freshman, traveling back to Baltimore and exploring the East Coast with friends Kathleen Dowse ’82 and Lori Smetana ’82 during spring break, living in Treacy House the first year it became co-ed, the bluff Masses, hanging out with her art major friends, and traveling to the Chicago Art Institute for a department trip.

Lane has always been athletic, loves to perform, and dance. She was fortunate to study pantomime with Marcel Marceau for three weeks in 1988, and performed as a mime at corporate events, churches, and schools, developing a 30-minute show.

Later, she trained and performed in physical theatre with the Margolis Brown Adaptors Theatre Company for over 10 years. Since 2004, she’s been training in a Japanese martial art, aikido, and has reached the level of second-degree black belt.

“There is a spiritual element to aikido, which is one of the reasons why I was drawn to it. The founder was Buddhist, and he applied Buddhist philosophy and principles into aikido,” Lane said. “Loosely translated, aikido means ‘the way of the spirit of harmony.’ It’s based on samurai sword and circular movements. The point is to blend, or harmonize, with your opponent rather than use power against power, to cause the least amount of harm, even though you could definitely seriously hurt someone.

“You learn to remain calm and stay grounded in the face of conflict, to diffuse a heated confrontation with love, not violence,” Lane continued. “It sounds contradictory, but it’s really not. There are no competitions with others. You compete with yourself, masakatsu agatsu, ‘true victory is victory over oneself.’ When we practice, we practice with joy, always aiming to better yourself as a practitioner, but mainly as a human being. Aikido is often known as the Art of Peace. Sounds pretty Franciscan, doesn’t it?”

Lane’s proudest accomplishment is raising her two daughters as a single mom. Brianna, 29, is a lead caretaker at a hospice facility for AIDS/HIV patients and is planning on returning to school for a master’s degree in nursing. Shauna, 31, who graduated in 2011 from Viterbo with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre, is teaching third grade. Shauna has spent time working in Africa and recently married a young man from Kenya. They are expecting their first child this spring.

As for the future, Lane has started oil painting and contemplating her next career move and making sure she has time to be a doting grandmother this spring.