A Friar's Tale. John Collins
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was an expression of faith, whether my mother realized it or not. We are all made in God’s image. We are all important to our heavenly Father. Our Divine Savior died for each one of us. My mother might not have articulated things that way, but she didn’t have to. She simply lived that truth, and as the old saying goes: “Actions speak louder than words.”
At one point, several years after I left New Jersey and soon after I began my seminary training in Garrison, New York, a town that is not terribly far from my parents’ home, my family came to visit me. It was a wonderful visit. I can remember my youngest brother, Mark, happily climbing some of the huge old trees on the seminary property as I sat talking to my mother and father. My two young sisters were taking turns sitting in my lap and playing with my Capuchin-style beard, which was something that seemed to hold endless fascination for them. Apparently, though, at some time during that visit one of the Capuchin superiors told my parents and my brothers and sisters that they were no longer my family, that now the Capuchins were. His words were not meant to be cruel; they were simply an expression of the way religious life was understood at that time, but they must have hurt my family and especially my mother and father deeply. Yet my parents still supported me, never tried to stand in the way of God’s will for their son, even if that will involved a sense of loss for them. There is only one word for that: love.
I’m a sisters’ boy, and that’s a fact of which I am very proud. Aside from my family, the religious sisters who educated me from first grade straight through high school (with the exception of only one year) probably had the most influence on my early life—even greater than that of priests, because in those days the contact was greater. I consider it a real tragedy that today’s Catholic children often have few occasions to be in the presence of religious sisters. I know that many of the lay teachers in Catholic schools these days do a fine job. Yet it is still an enormous loss that the sisters are, for the most part, gone, and that the children are denied the opportunity to be in the daily presence of someone who has dedicated her entire life to Christ. I pray every day for the rebirth of our great religious communities of women, and I urge my readers to do the same.
When I was a boy—even in first or second grade—I think that I could sense that many of the sisters had an indefinable quality, one that most of the laypeople I knew did not. Of course, I didn’t understand it then and certainly couldn’t have articulated it, but it seemed to me that the sisters were aware of (or maybe even in touch with) something out of the ordinary, even as they went about the business of daily life. Perhaps this feeling was simply a child’s response to their rather dramatic physical presence, to their flowing habits that always rustled softly as they walked, to the musical clinking of the rosary beads that were always hanging from their belts—rosary beads that were much longer and more impressive than the ones lay-people used. But perhaps it was more. Perhaps I was being granted a tiny glimmer of understanding concerning the quiet joy and peace that can reside in the heart of a dedicated religious. I can’t say for sure what it really was, especially after so many years, but I can say very definitely that even now I treasure my memories of those sisters.
One such recollection in particular remains with me. When I was in high school, I would attend the 7:00 a.m. Mass at St. Aloysius Church in Caldwell, New Jersey, nearly every day. I usually got there early, a few minutes before the Dominican sisters who taught in the parish school did; and so I would be in my seat as the door opened and the sisters entered, one by one in a long, silent line, the gaze of each sister cast down meditatively as she walked. As they made their way up the center aisle their habits looked so perfectly white that the sisters seemed to brighten, even to illuminate, the dimly lit church with their arrival. It was as if they bore the light of Christ with them—and perhaps they did. I was fascinated as each one of them genuflected gracefully and reverently before entering their pews at the front of the church, and I was almost envious of what seemed to me to be their perfect focus on the altar, their great awareness of the presence of our Divine Savior among us during the Mass. I came to realize deep in my heart that those sisters possessed something that was very beautiful, something that I desired to possess, as well. Gradually this desire grew and grew until it almost became an ache.
Now, I know the skeptics among my readers will be quick to say that I have greatly romanticized this recollection, endowing it over the years with qualities that the original events never possessed and could never possess. Perhaps that is true, but it is not really the point. The point is that the sisters who taught me had a profound influence on my life, not just as teachers, but as religious. Although I didn’t understand it, even when I was in high school, they were showing me a way of life, helping me to develop my vocation. I have always believed that God was using them to draw me not just to His priesthood, but to the religious life.
There were few male religious for me to observe and emulate at that point, although I knew many fine diocesan priests. It was the sisters who made clear to me the potential joys of a life dedicated to Christ through the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience. For this great gift I will be forever grateful to the Dominican Sisters of Caldwell and the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth, Convent Station, New Jersey. Without them my life would have been very different and, I believe, much diminished.
The sisters, however, gave me more than just a window into the life of prayer and adoration, for the ones I knew as a boy were members of active religious communities, not contemplatives, and they were very devoted to their apostolates. They were always real people too. Some were quite vivacious. A number of them could be very funny when they wanted to be. And, of course, a couple of them could be rather tough. Thus at an early age I was able to see what it meant to combine a life of faith and dedication to God with—let us say—the more ordinary and even earthbound things of life. They taught me early and well that the Christian life is the full life, that it combines the interior and the exterior in a truly balanced way, and that it is within this careful balance that most of us are called to live.
I have often said that a Christian who spends enormous amounts of time in prayer—even someone who claims to feel the presence of God in his life at nearly every moment—but who somehow ignores the needs of those around him has missed the boat in a very serious way. Our love for Christ is not real, and can even be called an illusion, unless it overflows into a love for others. True love of Christ never exists in a vacuum; love of Christ and love of neighbor are two sides of the same coin and can never be completely separated. One of the most dramatic events of my early life demonstrated this overflow of love to me in a way that has stayed with me to this very day.
I have told this story many times before, so I will not repeat it fully here. If you want to know every detail, I suggest you refer to my book entitled Travelers Along the Way, in which I treated it at some length. In fact, it forms the beginning of that book, because it was an important beginning for me. The story concerns my second grade teacher, Sr. Teresa Maria, a Sister of Charity of Convent Station, New Jersey. She truly was a woman of great charity, not to mention a woman of great faith. In fact, Sr. Teresa Maria was, in my estimation, one of those quiet and hidden saints whom God sometimes places in our paths as we make our journey through life.
At the age of seven I was an avid people watcher, as many children are. I noticed what the adults around me were doing and tried to figure out why they were doing it. One day I noticed that Sr. Teresa Maria did something unusual. She left by herself after school, carrying a box. I wondered about that since the sisters usually went out two by two and rarely carried anything. A few days later I saw that she did the same thing; then she did it again and again, always heading in exactly the same direction. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, so I decided to make it my mission to find out. (My father had been reading to me from a book that had a title something like The Boy’s Book of Great Detective Stories. It had convinced me that I had the makings of a Sherlock Holmes—or at least a Hercule Poirot.) The next time sister appeared with her mysterious box I, the great detective, followed her, taking care that she didn’t see me.
Sister walked to a rundown building, very different from the places in which people I knew lived, and I peered through the window to discover her taking a tray of food out of the box and placing it on a table. In the room with her was the person to whom she was giving the food: a woman so misshapen and ugly that to my seven-year-old mind she could be only one thing—a witch. I had recently seen my very first