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Novice sees community as 'down home prayerful women'

Sarah Hennessey is the personification of the cliché “still waters run deep.” She is not the type of person who shares her life story at a first or even second meeting. Yet, even a brief look at her life story suggests she has been on quite a journey. How else could a young woman who was raised a Quaker in the South arrive at the FSPA doorstep?

Sarah was the first child of Mary Kay and Thomas Hennessey. She was born in Boston, Mass., but raised in Fayetteville, N.C. Sarah has a sister Eleanor and brother Joe. She attended public school throughout her life in Fayetteville, with the exception of her eighth grade year when she attended Arthur Morgan School (AMS).

Sarah explains that AMS was designed to teach young people at a time when their adult consciousness is firstformed on a social and intellectual level, and thus the school only offers programming at the junior high level. Students live in an intentional community setting with their teachers; they work, study and play together. Sarah says, “It helped me become a more independent individual.”

After Sarah graduated from Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., with a bachelor’s degree in religious studies, she returned to AMS to teach for three years.

Just before her reception ceremony Sarah Hennessey, center, prays with affiliate Sharon Chavolla, left, and Sister Deborah Schwab, right, her companion sister. During the ceremony Sharon read the Gospel reading, Luke 1:39-45 in Spanish.

While she was a student at AMS, her class went on a field trip to the Mexican border. At that time there were hundreds of refugees from the wars in Central America gathered at the border. Sarah vividly remembers meeting 14-year-old boys whose entire families had been killed. They had walked from El Salvador by themselves. She remembers playing games with the children and listening to their stories.

Sarah was so moved by the experience that at one point she broke down crying, “I remember a 7-year-old boy came up to me and said in Spanish, ‘No cry.’ That’s been my whole experience in Latin America–they are always giving, and I am always receiving. As hard as I have tried, even now that I am fluent in Spanish and have worked with them, I am still the one receiving hospitality from them.”

During the summer after her first year of college, Sarah lived in a rural village in Mexico with American Friends Service Committee. She taught school, built latrines and made tortillas with the women. With emphasis she exclaims, “I knew I wanted to walk with those people, I was so alive.”
Sarah remembers the first time she made tortillas—they looked like the shape of the United States instead of a circle. She felt the women were such gentle teachers. When she asked them how they made good tortillas, their responses were similar, “When I am content with life my tortillas are beautiful, and when I’m not they are ugly.” Sarah comments, “That was a lesson about the unity of life. The circle of sacredness was never broken in their lives.”

It was on another trip to Mexico during her college years that Sarah first met Sisters Cecilia Corcoran and Marie Des Jarlais. She started corresponding with them immediately after she returned to school. Later that year she visited St. Rose Convent, and in 1997 she went back to Mexico to work with the GATE program for a month. In 2000 Sarah was commissioned as a covenant affiliate. She says, “I loved the affiliate connection. It was amazing how much more I felt connected.”

Sarah’s call to religious life came while she was still a Quaker. She says, “I fell in love with God very clearly, and then I fell in love with the people of God. I had already made commitments to God of living simply and justly. I had a hunger for prayer that I couldn’t get rid of, and somewhere in that a commitment to being celibate happened.”

When she experienced her call she began to struggle with whether she would live her life as a Quaker or whether the call was really a call to religious life in Catholicism. After she became an affiliate she knew that she could have that connection to FSPA for the rest of her life, but in the end that did not satisfy her. She realized then that she wanted to become Catholic.

Sarah chose to do her conversion process in a Spanish-speaking parish, because it was through Spanish-speaking people that she had first been introduced to Catholicism. She notes, “I felt at home in that community.”

When she seriously began looking at religious life in the Catholic church, Sarah considered several communities. She was strongly considering a community with a missionary focus. Before making her final decision she returned to La Crosse, “I came back and I went into the chapel. Within 24 hours of coming back, every doubt was taken away. I had been trying to find a community that had the FSPA heart and was international. What I realized was that I wasn’t willing to sacrifice the FSPA heart to be in an international community. There is nothing to say that there may not be some international component of my life as an FSPA.”

Sister Marlene Weisenbeck, left, listens as Sarah Hennessey asks to enter the FSPA novitiate. Sarah, now known as Sister Sarah, included Quaker and Franciscan readings in her reception ceremony. As in the Quaker tradition, there was an extended pause for silent reflection following the readings.

Sarah allows that she cannot fully describe the FSPA heart, but knows that open communication is a part of it. She describes what she saw, “flexibility on a communal as well as an individual level that I felt was very healthy. It was a real sense of being prophetic women religious in this moment. That translates into the individual qualities of being ‘down-home’ prayerful joyful women.”

Throughout this transition Sarah has had her parents’ support. She describes them as “faithful people who are so justice oriented.” There was an occasion when she was about 20 when Sarah remembers thinking about her own commitment to justice and radical simple living. She says, “I turned around and looked at my parents and realized I hadn’t done anything by comparison. They have done it all.”

When she talks about her year in La Crosse, Sarah acknowledges the gifts of a new place, such as its culture and natural beauty, are exciting to receive. But she also felt some anger at the disparity of resources between the Midwest and the South. “I experience the Midwest as being very privileged, as having a high degree of education, medical care and arts.” Sarah found that knowing inequities existed in this country is different than experiencing it. She has also been adjusting to the homogeneity of the Midwest since she has lived her life surrounded by ethnic diversity.

This past year she has been taking theology and Spanish classes at Viterbo, finding it helpful to have scripture classes in a Catholic framework. She has also worked part-time with children at the YMCA and as a tutor at the Coulee Region Literacy Council. Her life at Chiara house has been full. She says, “I love the community that we’ve formed.”

Once each month she travels to Racine with Sister Lucy Ann Meyer to the Inter-Community Pre-Novitiate Program. She comments, “It was a way to integrate past life with current life. I was able to speak my own language and be my young self with people who can also do that.” Sarah is particularly excited that several of the women from the Racine workshops will be at the Common Franciscan Novitiate with her this fall.

When asked what she wants to do in her life, Sarah responded with a tale about a man who lives in a Quaker work camp located in the inner-city of Philadelphia. This man has lived through and with his fears. When she asked him what he was doing, he replied, “I am trying to get right with God.” Sarah follows quickly by saying, “That’s what I want to do, too.” Then she chuckled as though she is a little uncomfortable with her own profundity. She is, after all, a young woman.

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