Mom Of 3 Answers To Higher Calling

Kate Malin has played a lot of roles in her life: actress, wife and mom. But along the way, something changed for her. CBS News correspondent Mika Brzezinski explains how this mom of three decided to follow her religious calling.

Kate is a typical mom, overscheduled, and sometimes even a little wacky. But after she had her boys, her life's mission began to change.

"Something very new had been opened in me when I became a mother," she recalls.

That "something" — so hard to discern at the time — would put Kate on a path toward the priesthood.

"When I first detected that call, that tickle that said 'Hmm, maybe you should be doing this,' I said 'No. No!' " she says, laughing. " 'You couldn't want me.' "

Despite her confusion, Kate's spiritual journey had begun. And after 9/11, she was sure.

"It was just a very intense time. I found that I was stepping into this roll of a listener, and I wanted to be there," she remembers. "I needed to be doing this."

So began the process of becoming an Episcopal priest, though Kate sometimes felt she was a little too human for the job.

"It's not that I sensed, 'Oh, I may be called to the priesthood so I better just shape up. I better, you know, kick the caffeine habit and, you know, organize my apartment and somehow be perfect so that others will want to be perfect like me,' " she says.

"I think that's the call of the priest, too — is to constantly be in front of your people and be with your people that you serve, you are their servant, and remind them that you are in the mist of a struggle as they are," she adds.

Now, seven years after she began the journey, Kate sees how the roles of priest and mom work together.

Once a week, she hosts a gathering of women where she relates directly to struggles of motherhood.

What does she find challenges them the most?

"I think we all came in with the sense of 'I'm not doing it well enough, and therefore I must not be a good Christian, you must not be a good mother. I'm somehow dropping the ball here.' And it was such a relief for all of us, myself included, to say. 'Ah, I'm not alone,' " Kate explains.

Kate and her family live in a seminary in New York City. The boys are starting to understand that their working mom has an important job.

"She tells the sermon, she sings songs," says her son, Walker.

"Sometimes she hands out the bread and the wine," her other son, Caleb, adds.

"For all the craziness of our life, and all the, 'Mommy has to go to church now. Mommy's writing a sermon,' that there's something they really sort of get about why I'm doing this. Why the whole family is here," Kate says.

Caleb agrees. "She's accomplishing something big in her life," he says.

Her little flock at home is a source of daily inspiration, where she finds the divine in the day to day.

"Just going into your children's bedroom when they're asleep at last and just taking a few minutes, while they're sleeping, to just sit in the bedroom and listen to them breathing," she says.

On July 1, the Rev. Kate Malin took up her first post at a church just north of New York City.