at the crossroads
We are not front-liners, in terms of position. Our power and our happiness reside in our service.
Bernadette Wallis MSS, Congregational Leader, 2007
Twenty-four women sit in an uneven horse-shoe shape around a red and gold cross, topped by a set of constitutions, tailed by the Scriptures with a lighted candle on the cross.
They are Missionary Sisters of Service gathered in Melbourne from five Australian States for a mid-term gathering: At the Crossroads.
For the first time, a significant number of their members is not with them due to age and distance. The absence of those not present is felt.
The women's discussion this morning is naming the reality of their situation: their personal situation; that of their ministry; that of the congregation; that of the world in which they live, minister, believe. They speak quietly; they listen with respect. There are fears and expectations; hope tinged with reality.
The "oldest" in MSS terms was professed forty-nine years ago; the "newest", twenty-eight. Collectively they bring 1001 years of consecrated religious life and ministry to the discussion. This morning is the beginning of a process that, in a few days time, will end with renewed enthusiasm, further encouragement and possibly new creative directions.
Irish Missionary of the Sacred Heart Diarmuid O'Murchu writes that religious life has always been "at its best when it remains close to God's people, honouring their unfolding struggles and responding to acute needs". (1)
Some Australian religious congregations have found this freedom in the post Vatican II Church; it has always been the very soul of the Missionary Sisters of Service.
Their Constitutions (2) say that their mission is one of pastoral love and service (#5) … They live in the midst of people sharing their lives (#6). In their ministry, they face with people the challenge to live justly, to love tenderly and to walk humbly with God in the ordinary circumstances of family and social life (#14). In the service of love they are called to radical freedom ... to be faithful to God, to themselves, to their charism and to the people with whom they share their lives (#15). Called to share corporately the one mission (#16) this mission requires each Sister to collaborate with others while bringing her own gifts to the task. (#17). Inherent in the character of their mission and life-style is the call to be available, responsible and adaptable (#18) as they read and respond to the signs of the times.
To be available.
To be responsible.
To be adaptable.
They might not have been considered "real Sisters" by many who saw them in the streets and churches of Launceston and Hobart in those early days of the 1940s and 1950s but they were forging new ways as they moved out along the Australian highways and byways. And they excited those with whom they engaged.
The dream - to go into the highways and byways to people wherever they were ... Love, respect, hope through listening, laughing, talking about things that mattered and things that didn't matter. Playing with the dogs, walking around the cowshed, looking at the wheat crop, seeing the kangaroos and emus along the road, sitting under gum trees. Ritualising our presence with God through the Eucharistic meal, or a prayer, or a healing service. Or sitting at the kitchen table thanking God for the rain, or that the water tank was fixed. Maybe sharing grieving tears of loneliness and disappointment - for a child who had died, a loved partner choosing to take his life, or end a relationship, the desperate feeling of not being able to financially care for the children ... (Bernadette Wallis MSS, Melbourne)
They were pastoral. They went to the people, into their homes, into their lives. The Sisters knew as much about the latest dip in the price of wool as they did about the theology and scripture they treasured.
When they arrived at a property, they simply joined with the family. If the meal were being prepared, they helped peel the vegetables. If the children needed to be bathed, they helped out.
It must have been about 1966 , and the Sisters were to come for lunch at the property "Brynog", where my husband Bob worked as a station hand. The property had mostly sheep, a few cattle and had begun some cultivation. I was busy cleaning my silver at the table for the special event, in my "work clothes". I can even remember the skirt and blouse - with a torn sleeve - I was wearing!
Up to the door rolled the Sisters' car, surprising me a day early! 'Someone' had mixed up the dates. Me, being a not-so-confident city girl in a country environment, I was quite flustered and embarrassed. But what did the Sisters do? They sat right down and helped finish cleaning the silver!
But I've never forgotten that visit by the Sisters and how they put me at ease in my predicament. They even had a loaf of lovely fresh bread which they had purchased from the local baker, Bob Harvey. (3)
Later, they would teach the children and talk with the parents about matters religious. Often the work of the Lord was not always "religious":
One visit remains with me: a family, with young children, living in a house that was barely adequate and where the mother had just given up on even trying to keep herself or home tidy. I was embarrassed when my fellow Sister said we would like to come for a meal the following night. I am sure I questioned her wisdom.
So we arrived for that meal, to find a spotless house, and a beautifully prepared meal, including an entree of grapefruit cut into an intricate pattern with a cherry placed in the centre. Our hostess explained that she had worked in a restaurant before she was married, and that since she had been married we were her first ever guests. What an honour! (4)
The Sisters have suffered through drought, flood, fire and mouse plagues. They have shared celebrations and have become friends. In going into Australia's highways and byways, they were ecumenical before most people knew the term. They were there "for the people" regardless of whom those people might be and where they might have come from.
Today, the Missionary Sisters of Service fit comfortably within the mix of Women Religious within the post-Vatican II Catholic Church in Australia and it would be understandable should they be seen as members of one more ageing congregation facing what might be an obvious future. Yet, while the MSS has never been a big congregation - fifty-five women at its peak and now (5) there are forty - there remains a 'something' about the women, an indefinable quality.
Paradoxically, while they were founded to be different, the charism that has always set them apart is their ordinariness. "They are so ordinary!" is the oft-repeated explanation for why people admire them and so easily welcome them into their lives. And the Sisters, themselves acknowledge this:
If I try to name one specific characteristic of our congregation, I think it is the capacity to be ordinary women relating to ordinary people in their ordinary lives. I think we are able to be with people with a reverence for the beauty and mystery of each person, with love and compassion for them in their joys and sorrow, their hopes and anxieties. We can celebrate these with them, and draw on the deep source of the Spirit within them and within ourselves. It is this which makes the ordinary extra-ordinary. (Corrie van den Bosch MSS, Melbourne)
They are able to be with people in the everyday-ness of their lives. Being faithful to the ordinary has led to extra-ordinary heights, for not only did the first women forge a new style of religious life in Australia, the congregation has been at the forefront of other pioneering endeavours in the Australian Church.
As the 'Caravan Sisters' in Tasmania, they were the first to be permitted to take the reserved Blessed Sacrament on mission, effectively converting the caravan into a chapel.
Nancy Doyle MSS, now living in Landsborough, Queensland, was the first Religious Sister in charge of a parish without a resident priest. That was in Tasmania, at Oatlands. And she is probably one of the few Religious in Australia to have been given a rifle as part of a welcome-to-the-parish survival kit when she arrived in the Townsville Diocese in Queensland, to be the first pastoral leader for Giru and the Burdekin Valley!
The sixth woman to join, Agnes Ryan MSS (Melbourne) was one of the first Religious woman to lecture at a seminary in Australia (6). Her subject was Catechetics.
Joan Shannon MSS (Brisbane) and Marie Carroll MSS (Nanango) pioneered the Rockhampton Diocese-based aerial ministry to outback Queensland which took them also into the Northern Territory and South Australia with Father Terry Loth, now based in Bundaberg.
Mary O'Connor MSS (Melbourne) led the way with adult formation in scripture after Vatican II, honing her skills at the Ecole Biblique, in Jerusalem; and Mary Cleary MSS based in Jandowae is in the process of becoming a certified civil marriage celebrant.
Delphine O'Shea MSS, writing as the Sister General to the 1981 Chapter, said:
It seems to me that, in its founding years, in the providence of God, our Congregation played a prophetic role when we were called to a pastoral ministry within the Australian Church and endowed with the gifts of mobility, availability and adaptability. Where God led our Congregation He has since called other religious to follow. We no longer stand alone in our pastoral mission and this should give us reason to wonder, to rejoice and to give glory to God.
(1) Diarmuid O'Murchu MSC; Consecrated Religious Life: The Changing Paradigms; Orbis Books, New York, 2006; p 106
(2) Although the current Constitutions were adopted in 1990, these imperatives have been at the heart of the congregation from its inception.
(3) from Jean Weinert, Pittsworth, Queensland; letter, January 2006
(4) on mission in Queensland, Fran Spora; letter, November 2005
(5) the date point-of-reference for Around the Kitchen Table is January 1, 2008
(6) then Pius XII Seminary, Banyo, Brisbane
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