Psalm 16; 1
Peter 1:3-9
April 27,
2014
Easter continues; we celebrate the
resurrection – the fact that no matter how broken we are, how broken the world
is, God lives, hope remains, and we have the capacity to be a part of the
divine movement in this world. That is
good news.
During this season, we will look at
some Easter people – people who I think give us particularly clear pictures of
what it means to live the resurrection.
We are, of course, all Easter people.
But it can be helpful to look at the lives of folks that, through their
stories, might call us to our higher selves.
This year, in a kind of odd twist,
I am doing all monks and nuns. This grew
out of an experience I had a few years back going through an exhibit about
religious sisters – nuns – in the United States. It showed the impact sisters have had on this
country – and especially on the most vulnerable people in our country – and it was
astounding.
But then I realized that that
shouldn’t completely surprise me. The
Catholic Social teachings, which have impacted millions upon millions of Catholics
over the years, are unequivocal in their call to social justice: Life and Dignity of the Human Person; Option
for the Poor and Vulnerable; Rights of Workers; Solidarity; Care for God’s
Creation…all fundamental principles of Catholic Social Teaching.
So, I thought it would be fun to
look at people who were either influenced heavily by these teachings, or
themselves were a source of the teachings.
Religious sisters built our
nation’s largest private school and nonprofit hospital systems. They were the nation’s first large network of
female professionals in an age when the prevailing sentiment was that a woman’s
place was in the home. They were, in
some significant ways, America’s first feminists, battling for the rights and
opinions of women. And they have been
relentless in their care of the poor, ill, marginalized, and oppressed.
I knew I wanted to do a nun from
the 1800s who started schools in the United States. There were SO many. So as I was reading about a few, I chose
Cornelia Connelly because, when her character traits are listed, they usually
say something like: strong, beautiful,
lively, intelligent, and… untidy. It was
the untidy that caught my eye. Though a
1922 biography – which was subject to the approval of the Pope – saw it
necessary to say she grew out of this most unseemly quality, I like to picture
her room as being a bit like my house.
As was happening with many
religious sisters and orders at the time, in the mid to late 1800s, Cornelia
Connelly, and her order of The Society of The Holy Child Jesus, brought their
teachers to the United States and they started schools all over the country,
and this order remains today. Just one
of the many ministries going today is the Bethlehem House in D.C. – a
residential facility for developmentally delayed individuals.
Cornelia – her story is so
interesting, in part because of its twists and turns, but also because of the
way she responded to whatever life brought her.
The way I read her story, she would not have had the fortitude she did
were it not for the way she chose to live through suffering and loss.
Psalm 16 and the passage from 1
Peter are helpful for framing the life of Cornelia Connelly. They are both about clinging to God, praising
God, finding joy in God, despite sufferings.
Cornelia did this.
Cornelia’s story begins in
Philadelphia, where she was born to a wealthy, Episcopalian family. Giving a hint of the defiance that will
appear again later, she married Pierce Connelly against the wishes of her
family – he was not considered her social equal…(which I take a little offense
at as he was a minister.) The marriage
began, by all accounts, as a happy one.
They were part of the elite social scene, well connected, and both very
bright.
They moved to Mississippi where
Pierce pastored a church and they had two children. But Pierce began to feel called to the
Catholic faith. He was sure they were
meant to convert, and so they did – Cornelia along with him.
Then they moved to Louisiana where
Pierce taught at a Jesuit school and Cornelia taught music at Sacred Heart
School and raised their now four children.
Cornelia from the very beginning was interested in religion and getting
answers to the bigger questions of life.
Both her and Pierce participated in spiritual direction, retreats, and conversations
with priests and nuns.
But then Cornelia experienced
tragedy. She gave birth to their fifth
child, Mary Magdalene, and she died only two months later. That was in 1839, and in 1840 she went on her
first longer retreat of three days. It
is this retreat that she credits with a conversation of heart and mind. She said that God touched her deeply and her
life was profoundly changed. She gave
herself to God, desiring to “do God’s will as it was made known through her duties
and events of daily life,” as she wrote.
Tragedy soon struck again. Her two-year-old son, John Henry, was scalded
in an accident and died in Cornelia’s arms.
Adding insult to injury, at that same time Pierce told her he now felt
called to the priesthood; Cornelia was four months pregnant. Now, we have to hop back to the mid 1800s and
remember that womedid not have a lot of rights then. When Pierce decided to be a priest, he told
Cornelia she had to enter a convent and take a vow of chastity – it was not a
suggestion.
And so, a couple of years later
when Pierce began the process for preisthood, Cornelia entered the Sacred Heart
Convent in Rome under what was called “special circumstances,” meaning she took
her baby son with her. Cornelia at this
time was not happy – I think most of us can agree she had been through quite a
lot.
However, during her time here, her
commitment to follow God grew. This is a
quote from a journal she kept at a retreat while at that convent:
“In whatever state Thou shouldst
please to place me I resolve by Thy help to reject and renounce all temptations
to sin or to that which would lead to sin, in Vigilance, Humility, and
Fidelity, by Prayer and Practice, in purity of heart and simplicity of
intention.”
Also from her journal at that
retreat we get the first glimpse of what would become her mantra and
vocation. She wrote, “Action not words,”
and “Those who teach others shall shine as stars in Heaven.”
Action not words…that is a phrase
that comes up over and over in her writings – and continues as the motto of her
religious order today. And it makes
sense. She was a woman of action, and
that was soon discovered by the bishop connected to her convent. She was asked to start a new religious order.
In 1846 she established the first
house of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, or Holy Child, in England. She was now poised to live out the vocation
to which she believed she was called:
being a leader in education and spirituality.
“Its beginning were small and there
were many deprivations,” writes one author, “but a spirit of joy and peace
prevailed; Cornelia was able to inspire in her sisters something of her own
serenity in adversity.” But it is the
mission of her new order that mattered most to Cornelia. Theirs was a ministry of education, but
specifically for mill girls and poor children, and they set up day and night
schools as well as Sunday classes to accommodate the young factory workers.
Soon the order spread, across
England and then, like so many other religious orders, to the United States.
Cornelia had very definite ideas
about philosophy of education and how the order of nuns should be ruled. But, so did other people, who tried, via
their varying positions of assumed authority, to influence her. In fact, Pierce, her now ex-husband, tried
harder than anyone to have control over the convent and their activities. This is where Cornelia’s strength and
intelligence came to bear: Each time,
whether her husband or a bishop, someone tried to change what she had done, she
won…things were done her way.
Reading her letters is incredibly
enjoyable – and I didn’t even come close to reading all of them. I don’t know what was normal for that time,
but it seems to me Cornelia wrote reams of letters to her male superiors – I
shudder to think what she would have done with email. She had her hand in absolutely everything,
from the education of the kids, to matters of property, to telling hired help
how to fix a railing. “My Lord like me
to have a wee finger in the pie,” she wrote to a friend.
I do know that her tone and
defiance was not normal for a nun writing a bishop or priest. “I shall be glad to hear from you simply that
I am right,” she says when writing to a priest about a dispute about how the
buildings should be used.
She argued often for increased
salaries for the teachers and higher teacher to student ratios. She believed children were best educated
one-on-one and with great care and kindness.
Not exactly the stereotype we see today of nun educators.
Most of Cornelia’s life was spent
in this first convent in Derby. She
established schools on her own principles and philosophy. But her sufferings
did not end. Pierce sought to once again
regain control of her life. He left the
priesthood and then demanded that she return as his wife. He removed their children from their schools
and denied Cornelia contact with them hoping that would force her to
return. He even filed a lawsuit against
her. But in the end he lost, though at
great cost to Cornelia of course – she almost never spoke to her children again.
Through everything Cornelia clung
steadfastly to God. She wrote in her
journal, “I belong all to God,” and, as one person put it, “this total
belonging freed her to give herself to others…she endured suffering and learned
not to be embittered by it. Joy became
one of her hallmarks and a hallmark of Holy Child education.”
Cornelia died on April 18, 1879.
Psalm 16 reads, “I bless the Lord
who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me.” We might call listening to our hearts
something like instinct, or intuition, or going with our passion. We think of it as emotion. But for the Psalmist, and for Cornelia, that
verse must always be read in its entirety.
God gives counsel and the heart instructs. The heart can only instruct because it has
been informed by a relationship with God.
Before any decision, Cornelia
always spent time praying, in retreat, writing, and, maybe most importantly to
her, praising God. These were not
perfunctory or disingenuous. When she
praised God even when her life was full of loss and turmoil, that was a faith
decision. It was a spiritual
discipline.
This will come up again and again
with our Easter people – they all had spiritual practices that were essential
to their faith, essential to keeping them going in hard times, and essential to
motivating them to serve and care for others.
Peter writes: “By God’s great mercy, you have been given a new
birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus.” And he goes on, “In this you rejoice, even if
now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the
genuineness of your faith … may be found to result in praise and glory and
honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”
In this you rejoice, even if now
for a little while you have had to suffer various trials. Cornelia was able to rejoice in God, and to
respond to what she heard God calling her to do with joy and enthusiasm, even
though she suffered and could have given up.
Mass, retreats, prayer, reading the bible, confession, fasting. I think that all had something to do with
it. She was able to rise above herself
and see the bigger picture and calling. “The
best way to overcome ourselves,” she writes, “is to impose some acts of virtue,
to be performed each day.”
During one of her retreats,
Cornelia wrote a prayer, that surely deserves a place alongside our
Psalms.
Open to me, O Jesus, Thy Sacred
Heart. Unite me to it forever, that each
breath, each palpitation of my heart, which ceases not even in sleep, may be a
witness of my love, and say to Thee without ceasing: “Yes, Lord, I am all Thine.” Receive, O my God, the little good I may do
this day, and give me grace to repair the ill, that I may bless Thee during
this life, and raise Thee through all eternity.
Life will do what it will. So much we can’t control. But our faith tradition, beginning with our
Hebrew ancestors, has always called us to religious practices to help shape us
into people that can respond faithfully no matter what comes up. What those practices are and look like have,
of course, changed over time as our culture and understandings of God have
changed. We still are familiar with
prayer, worship and reading the scriptures.
But we have added things like meditation, spiritual and theological
reading, and communing with nature. But
I think Cornelia’s advice is still worth considering: “The best way to overcome ourselves is to
impose some acts of virtue, to be performed each day.” Seemed to work pretty well for her. Amen.
