Meet a Sister

Brooklyn, New York, was my childhood home. Along with Mass, my mother took me with her to Novenas and other services at our parish church, and I loved accompanying her to these devotional prayer services. My mom's two brothers are priests who were missionaries when I was a child. There was always great excitement in our family when my uncles returned home for visit from far away Brazil and Panama. Somehow, my call to religious life was fused with the notion of leaving home for a "foreign land," in this case, Columbus, Ohio!

My vocation to religious life and specifically to the Dominican Sisters, seems, in retrospect, to be the natural unfolding of the ordinary and unremarkable circumstances of my personal history. Growing up in a Catholic family, attending parochial schools, I had daily contact with Sisters - the Sisters of Notre Dame deNamur in grade school and the Dominicans of St. Mary of the Springs at Watterson High School in Columbus.

I was in fourth grade when a missionary Sister from India visited my school. She was dressed in white and she was radiant. She showed pictures of her work and I was so impressed. As a high school sophomore, I met a Notre Dame Sister. She wore a modified habit and was always smiling. We became friends. At John Carroll University, a Mercy Sister was studying math like I was; she was a loving, kind woman.

Adapting to her new home in America in her early teen years proved a difficult change for Rose Chen after birth and young years in her native Shanghai, China. Speaking Mandarin, she knew little English upon arriving at the Motherhouse of the Dominican Sisters of St. Mary of the Springs (now Dominican Sisters of Peace). Introduced phrase by phrase to the Sisters in Columbus, Ohio, after accompanying the Dominicans in China back to the US at that time, she remembers her halting progress learning just the necessary phrases first. But her high school years at St.

Not yet a middle-aged Sister when her eyesight became more and more dim and when nothing could be done surgically, Sr. Eleanor Lang heard her dear mother come to the "psychological" rescue with these stern words, "Eleanor, you have some living to do yet. Don't be putting yourself on a shelf."

Sr. Bernardita Abeyta, truly devoted to her New Mexican heritage, to her family life there, and to her ministry in New Mexico, describes excitedly, in Spanish and English, a colorful, happy, and very religious childhood in her native place, Barranco. Stories around some of its farm fields owned by the family, its neighbors formed in close-knit relationships of unity, in good times and in sadder ones, all the happenings in the family life, all spill out easily as Sr. Bernardita proclaims her heritage with warmth and joy.