Wondering how God is calling you? Are you curious about how your job or set of relationships is really a vocation? Do you want some awesome discussions around faith in real-life and more? Think hanging out with Catholic sisters and a fun thoughtful, faith community is cool? Then you are in the right place! Welcome! Explore and be sure to visit with us every weekday at 6 pm CT in our chat room.
The Sisters of Mount Angel – Part 4
The fourth part of a story by Brian Doyle in Best Catholic Writing 2007 on The Sisters of Mount Angel (return to the beginning of the story)
And I stood there at the lectern, in that cavernous room in that lovely old monastery, with its cedarn air like music in the nose, the extraordinary faces of the nuns held up to me in the twilight, and I tried to imagine or articulate or conceive a world without my mother in it, and I started to cry, and I could not stop. Forty-nine years old, and still sobbing in front of nuns.
No one spoke.
After a couple of minutes I got a grip and looked out at those women, and in the sweet silence, the brilliant shine of tears flashing here and there, I saw them for who they really are. I swear I did. I was granted and vouchsafed a vision: these sisters, and all sisters, are the sinews who hold the Church together. Their prayers hold us like hands. The Church has for centuries rested on their thin, bony shoulders. They are brave beyond words and we take them for granted and we should get down on our creaky knees and clasp our hands in prayer and speak to the dust and say, “Lord, we thank you for these women; for their grace we thank you, for their sacrifices and sweat we thank you, for their hearts in which we swim we thank you.”
Look, I am not an idiot all the time, and I know full well, all too well, that the story of the world is struggle and sad, loneliness and loss, but to my mind there just is no way to stay sad as long as there are thin, bony, brave women like these nuns, like my mom, like your mom, in the world. It just cannot be done. We cannot let ourselves despair at the greed and cruelty of the world, and sometimes of our Church, because the sisters do not despair; they fight the brambles all day and night for us, and they are lodestars and compasses and prisms and leaders of the world that will come, the world of joy and light, where no child weeps from fear, where no one huddles in hopelessness.
If we are to properly honor and celebrate the legacy of such graceful and strong people as the sisters at Mt. Angel …
Check in tomorrow for the finale of The Sisters of Mount Angel.
Previous post: The Sisters of Mount Angel – Part 3
Next post: The Sisters of Mount Angel – Part 5
Get your nun schwag! -- We've got cool nunly items including this awesome mug at 
{ 3 comments }
wow. i too am always in awe of holy, simple people living anonymously in our world. they contribute a lot in my faith, in a world of disappointments and doubts, they make me believe. they give me a glimpse of how God really looks like. and they make me yearn to be more like Him.
Hi mjpss, I know what you mean.
At our Christmas morning mass Sister Mildred said her usual prayer during the Prayer of the Faithful “For all travellers, that they may arrive safely too and from their destination.” She does this every day, at morning prayer, at mass and at evening prayer. I remember thinking that people dashing too and fro are being held in prayer by this wonderful woman with her walker, and don’t even know it!