Category: The Enchanted Ones

Sister Jane’s drop-in Center, Chez Nous, operated in an old bank building at the corner of Main Street and Higgins Avenue. When Jane was sick, the Center was frequently closed. When Jane died, her friends and supporters on the Board of directors of the non-profit corporation were left with a decision to sell the building, or to try to carry on Sister Jane’s work.
They have carried on. Jane’s therapist and friend Vicki Frankel helped the Board to reorganize itself. The Board members trained themselves to work in the drop-in Center, and they found and trained more volunteers. They raised money, and they kept the doors open. The Archdiocese of Winnipeg has been recognizing their work, and Sister Jane’s work in taking collections and publicizing the work of Chez Nous in its internal newsletter in May 2004.

On Sunday May 16, 2004, Chez Nous held an open house to unveil a plaque in memory of Sister Jane. I arrived late and missed the unveiling. The Archbishop of Winnipeg was there, which meant a lot to Jane’s Catholic friends who saw it as supportive of Jane and her calling to work with the poor. I spoke with some of Jane’s friends about how they were handling work with addicts and street people, and how they managed their safety and emotional boundaries with needy and sometimes dangerous people. I looked at the comfortable old furniture, the posters, the pictures of visitors and volunteers. Again, I was moved to realize that while Chez Nous offers little in the way of financial support, it tries to provide a safe respite from the street, with respect and love. I realized again that Sister Jane, from her own pain and confusion, had been true to her calling and true to the Gospel message of loving the poor.

I wasn’t able to stay long because I found myself breaking down into tears. I don’t think it was honest grief for Sister Jane, although I believe that her life and death were painful and sad. It was a more personal grief, of a self-pitying kind.

Jane’s case also marked some turning points in my life. When I met Jane in late 2001 I was a few months past a series of surgical procedures and a diagnosis – incorrect as it happened – of colo-rectal cancer. I had started to go to Church again, after years of skepticism and anger at the Church. I was rejoicing in not having cancer, and in having had an explanation and an end to years of GI tract problems. However, my son was growing away from the family, and my wife was becoming desperately sad about n. and angrily disappointed that I was more skeptical than ever about her favoured spirituality – the New Age. As I worked on Jane’s case, I read about questionable Alternative therapies and human growth movements. Some books and articles directly indicted my wife’s parents, friends and counsellors. For instance Singer and Lalich’s book “Crazy Therapies” had a chapter on Neuro-Linguistic Therapy which was one of my mother-in-law’s strong interests. My wife and her parents did not like my research into cults and quack therapies. My wife became convinced that my negative and skeptical attitude to life was the main cause for our son’s estrangement and rebellion and our daughter’s emotional problems during her childhood and mid-teen years. Eventually she said that I was hurting her by criticizing the New Age, and demanded a divorce.

Visiting Chez Nous this past Sunday brought that sharply and painfully into focus. I don’t blame my decision to take Jane’s case for the changes in my own life. I think working with and for Jane has helped me, then and now, to understand what I believe in, and to accept that life comes with pain and loss.

A little over two years ago, in the early months of 2002, I started a court proceeding for a woman who ran a drop-in center at Higgins and Main, in the very deepest, poorest, most alcohol and drug addled part of Winnipeg’s inner City core. (I am, by the way, a lawyer by day). Sister Jane was, at that time, 50 and had been a Catholic nun since she 20. She was living alone, without the support of her religious congregation, and she had terminal cancer.

She had been raised in New Hampshire and joined her congregation as a young woman just at the time that memberships in the Catholic Religious Orders was plummeting. Soon after she joined her Order, she accepted an invitation from a Canadian nun, a self-styled visionary reformer, to move to Edmonton and then to Winnipeg to be part of an innovative spiritual commune.

It didn’t work for Sister Jane. The project tried to fuse transformational psychology with Catholic spirituality. It became the leader’s personal project, and became whatever the leader wanted it to be. Jane found that her leader was controlling and grandiose. Jane swore in Affidavits that the leader introduced a purported therapy in which she initiated naked hugs which progressed to other sexual acts. Jane submitted sometimes but started to resist and react, which angered her leader, who disciplined her within the close confines of their communal life, and expelled her from the commune. She was then marginalized in her own Order because of her alienation from the leader and the rest of her Sisters who were connected to commune and the project.

Sister Jane had remained a member of her Order, but had started to live on her own. She received a little support to find a building and start a drop-in place but she had to recruit a board and to find funds for operating expenses and her own needs from a very early stage. She made friends, and her friends supported her and her ministry.

When she found that she had cancer, she sought some support from her superiors in the Order. In that process she described her personal experiences in the new movement, and she found that she was getting very little support. The Archbishop of Winnipeg listened to her and helped her personally with some other needs, but he did not intervene in the affairs of Jane’s autonomous Religious Order.

When I met Jane, her cancer was in remission and she was trying to understand if she could continue in that Religious Order, or if she had to leave. We started Court proceedings to recover compensation for the harm caused by illegal acts, her cancer came back in the winter of 2002-2003 and she died last summer. Her ministry was curtailed by her illness, and it closed for a while after she died. Her friends have been trying to revive it.
I visited her last spring, before her last hospitalization. Her ministry was based in an old three story bank building. The drop in was on the main floor and she lived in a suite on the upper floors. It was a small apartment, with a little chapel or prayer room. It was small oasis for her in a tough area of town and Jane lived with anxiety and fear.

When I had been discussing her evidence with her, I had tried to understand what she did at a drop-in. Did she provide a social service? Counselling? Teaching? Referrals to other agencies? Some kind of therapy? She explained it as living out the Church’s preferential option for the poor. I recognized that as an articulation of liberation theology, but I don’t think I started to understand it until later. What she did was to be present for people and to listen to them, providing them with a safety and respect. The theologian Rowan Williams, in his book Christ on Trial, How the Gospel Unsettled our Judgment
wrote:

God’s transcendence is in some sense present in and with those who do not have a voice, in and with those without power to affect their world, in and with those believed to have lost any right they might have had in the world. God is not with them because they are naturally virtuous, or because they are martyrs; he is simply there in the fact that they are ‘left over’ when the social and moral score is added up by the managers of social and moral behaviour.

What strikes me about Sister Jane’s work is that she was able to carry on while she herself was deeply wounded. I think I have only been able understand the value of her ministry as I have begun to experience my own pain and powerlessness over the events and the people in my life, and when I have needed to have people listen to me.

Last week a common friend of Jane’s and mine told me that Sister Jane had seen that I was going through some changes – as I certainly have been. I was simply moved to tears that she had the compassion to see me clearly while I thought I was helping her.