Why You're Not a Mean Old Wizard at All! God Pulls Back Curtain on Charity Sisters

You know that scene in the Wizard of Oz where Toto reveals the wizard to be a mere human?  I had one of those experiences this weekend. In my version, I was Dorothy, and God was the prodding, nagging  pup that pulls back the curtain.  This all had to do with a distaste I’ve harbored for 23 years against the handful of nuns who taught me in high school.  I DID feel my education was superior and I developed a solid ethical and spiritual foundation.  But of the several sisters at Seton LaSalle, I was not fond.  One in particular steered me away from any interest I may have had in becoming a sister at the time.  That’s because she told a classroom once that obedience in the religious life meant toting around an umbrella EVEN if there was no chance of rain--IF the superior said to do so.  There was another sister with whom I had a mixed experience.  She encouraged me greatly once by copying and distributing a poem I’d written for all of the other students in her classes.  She considered my work to be a model.  The next year, though, I felt thoroughly humiliated me when she yelled at me and my group for poorly preparing a poetry analysis.  I was the leader of the group, but with no leadership skills at the time I didn’t know how to pull the group together.  What I quickly learned is that a leader is a lightning rod for a group, and sister’s disdain was directed at me.  When this sister and I parted ways as I prepared for graduation, the rift grew as she expressed anger that I wasn’t pursuing a college degree in writing—I remember she wouldn’t even look at me, she was so upset.  I would have loved to have told her all the reasons that I thought I couldn’t and brainstormed with her, but she never asked.  I didn’t get from the sisters what I so desperately needed—compassion.  Recently, I signed up for a weekend of service with a group of sisters, and only later realized they were from the same religious order as my high school teachers.  That weekend ended today.  And it was as if God sent me directly to a place in my heart that needed healing.  I laughed and traveled and prayed and worked and experienced an abundance of compassion with the Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill.  The central point of the weekend was working with the sisters in service—taking donations and pressing clothes at a St. Vincent DePaul thrift store, spending time at a deaf services agency, and painting the home of a single woman in what was once a coal “company town.”  The sisters’ joy and kindness simply overflowed as they reached out to the poor.  But they also reached out to the poor and broken places in me.  It was particularly evident this morning when I slept in, and Sister Barbara calmed my panic by saying, “that’s ok…take your time.”  The next thing I knew, Sister Mary Lou was at my door to bring by a book and she joined me in making my bed, laughingly showing me how to make a “square corner” with the sheets and blankets as they are tucked into the mattress.  She learned this years ago as a new sister.  This morning during Mass, as I looked at some of the aged older sisters sitting in their wheelchairs with mouths seemingly stuck agape, I thought of the fearful Wizard of Oz and tears welled fell down my face as I thought, they were, and are, only humans, doing the best they could at the time.  And so am I.