HELEN'S CALL TO ROME
WORDS Terry Monagle
PHOTO Peter Casamento
Helen had been in Kensington for decades.
Her order, the Sisters of Sion, was semi-enclosed. However, entranced by whiffs of liberation and reality from the Vatican Council of the 60s, she and four others founded a mission here. They took in young homeless people, drug-addicted jockeys, orphaned children who had seen their siblings murdered, and they went to court to give character witness. So unconventional was their way of life, a rumour went round the village that there was a new brothel on Derby Street.
The Sisters became used to early morning police raids. Once Helen stood with her arms folded in front of her bedroom door as a young onstable was about to search. ‘No, not there’, said the older sergeant.
For years they shared their house with the most apparently unattractive and homeless characters. They thought their Christianity had no integrity if they did not share the life of the poor.
Helen became the parish pastoral worker in the early 90s. In this work she moved quietly around the parish, knitting people together into a rich garment. She was self-effacing and always urged the community to be self-energising. She never sought any power or status. She was a brilliant and quietly effective community builder.
She worked with waves of refugees: Salvadorean, Vietnamese and African. She always taught us to look outwards.
She walked around the village, putting her feet down firmly but gently, as though meditating on each step, as though not to disturb anyone or thing. Her clothes were plain, her hair cut straight, and she wore no make-up. She came to visit you and there she was on the door-step, handbag over the crook of her arm. You made a cup of tea and chatted together with animation.
She went to court as character witness for drug users and other miscreants. When an old parishioner parked her car somewhere and couldn’t find it Helen organised search parties after Mass. She became the next-of-kin of one old parishioner, and spent weeks visiting her and trying to get her into a nursing home. She conducted funerals, often for non-churched locals. She was executive officer of the parish council and kept it afloat. She conceived and planned our liturgies through which she taught us about a life of faith.
On Wednesdays she lugged bags of left-over bread to the community health centre. On Mothers’ Day, she had representative women take flowers up to the altar. After the ceremony, she collected the flowers and took them to old women of the parish who were alone and mute in palliative care. She had the companionship and support of good priests.
Her goodness gave a welcoming translucency to her voice. I loved to listen to the pure loving faith of her prayers. To sit next to her in a pew and join your prayer to hers was like sitting under and being cleansed by a waterfall.
But she had opinions. You could hear her make corrections under her breath when the scriptures attributed maleness to God, muttering, ‘She, Her, It’.
Confucius said that by the time he was seventy, but not before, he could listen to his heart and follow it without hesitation. Helen said that she often felt a call to visit someone in the parish and found that she had gone at a time of great need. Her heart and the people’s hearts, her heart and Kensington’s heart, had somehow joined.
But then at the 7.30 Mass one Saturday night last year, she went to the microphone straight after the gospel reading. ‘That’s unusual’, you thought to yourself.
She said: ‘You know that I have been in Costa Rica. It is an event that happens every six years and the order reviews its direction and ways of doing things. Another thing we do is that we elect a Council to take the order forward. I was one of the four elected to go to Rome to look after the order. I have to go at the end of November, so we will have to do some planning to make sure that there is a replacement. The role is for six years. I have loved being with you so much. I have found the face of God in you; you have meant a very great deal to me. I have loved being here’.
Around me in the church were some of the holy ones she had loved and who had loved and supported her. Patrick, the two Joans, Maureen, Bill. I could tell they were in tears. I was shocked at the sharpness of the sorrow. A biblical grief. The grief the apostles felt at the Christ’s ascension could have been like this.
There was desultory clapping. The priest led us in the Creed. Very few succeeded in saying anything. The voices that did start the prayer trailed off as the news sank in.
Jesus had spent much time and effort preparing the apostles for his departure–‘I am going away, you have no idea where’–and still they did not understand. The apostles were glum when Jesus insisted that he was going away, but he promised to leave them with the guidance of the Spirit. Helen’s departure is abrupt and bewildering.
The shepherd of the flock was to be taken away, and what now would hold us together, we who had shared lives, good works and worship? We feared, that left to ourselves, we would wander, get confused, each attending to his or her own needs. How could we survive in a hostile church and world?
After Mass she approached the group of grievers. She told them about the election. Though she had had no expectation, she fully trusted that the Spirit’s hand was in her election. And though we were grieving now, the Spirit would look after our community too. If we trusted her faith-filled view of her leaving, perhaps we could trust that this was part of God’s plan for us too.
Notionally, this should have comforted us, but our feelings made us fear that things would never be the same again. We were getting old and sick; we would probably retreat back into ourselves. Maybe we need more faith.
However, one thing is incontrovertible. Helen and the parishioners had proved that the Christian story is not a fantasy. She had proved that Christian community was possible. There had been an intimate community which had drawn strength from faith, human bonds and geography.
We might never experience it again, but, at least for a glorious few years, it has been real and delicious. And if it was possible there in humble Kensington, it might be possible universally. The struggle of faith had been justified.
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