The founder of the Sisters of Life shares insights from her decades working with women in need.
One of the founding sisters of the Sisters of Life shares insights from her decades working with women in need.
Orlando, Fla. — “We are pro-woman and we are pro-baby. And we must take care of both of them.” Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York pays tribute to Mother Mary Agnes Donovan and the Sisters of Life while not so subtly reminding those in the audience that the pro-life movement requires love above all. His remarks were part of an introductory video for the Knights of Columbus Gaudium et Spes Award (“Joy and Hope,” borrowing a title of an encyclical letter of Pope John Paul II).
For Mother Agnes, the founder of the Sisters of Life, the honor was all the more humbling because the late Cardinal John O’Connor received it in 1994, not long after the first honoree, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The award was no small effort to emphasize the charism of the Sisters of Life, founded three decades ago, and the need for the pro-life movement to radiate it.
“Offer it up.” That’s a very Catholic thing to say in the face of suffering. It can be annoying, challenging, and inspiring, perhaps even all at once. When a lifelong Catholic friend was in the last week of her life on earth, she asked a young priest, “How do you do that?” Saying we are offering up a pain is one thing, but doing it is another.
So it is with “Love one another as I have loved you.” It’s in Scripture. And yet, how do you do it?
“The question is, How do we love as God loves?” Mother Agnes said from the podium at the Knights of Columbus annual convention. What does such love look like? The Sisters of Life call it the secret of loving. “This way of love has three parts: receptivity, discovery, and delighting.”
The Sisters of Life live the reality of sacrificial love daily, welcoming abortion-minded women into their world, to help them feel welcome. The Sisters of Life know they are not in charge of what that pregnant mother will do, but they want to make sure she knows that she is loved and that she has options other than abortion. All too often the women they encounter think that abortion is their only option — because of a lack of support from their boyfriend or family or both. Because of their job. Because of the job they are working toward. If abortion is the only option that’s under consideration, it’s probably being considered under duress.
The way Mother Agnes explains receptivity is: “Love to man is an openness to mind and heart to receive the other. It’s an attitude which expresses to the other that I have nothing more important to do than to be with you at this moment.” About discovery, she says:
As I sit before the person, the first act of love is interior. It is allowing myself to be moved by the beauty, the strength of the vulnerability of the sheer goodness of the other. Love, in a certain sense, calls out to my heart, for it is the other who is attracting me, as if it were from within my heart.
She insists:
Even in the one who is difficult to love, our challenge is to allow ourselves to discover that something within the other person that can move our hearts. I promise you it’s possible to find that something if we allow our hearts to search for the good, for that which is delightful within the other. . . . Each person bears the imprint of [God’s] love and life in their being.
About delight, Mother Agnes says:
Why put in the effort to discover that which moves us toward the other? Because, when we find it, we then can mirror, reflecting back to the person, that which we have found in them that delights us. Then not only are we changed by her goodness, but so is she. The person before us experiences herself as affirmed precisely in the realization that it is a good thing within her which has caused my delight.
She describes this affirmation as “the source of new psychic birth, the emotional food needed for growth as a human person.” She also makes clear that “this is not white-knuckle love.” Instead, it is the result of truly being moved by the love in another. There is goodness within the other that we are moved by. People must know this! To not feel like a charity case.
Far from sentimentality, this love is the image of the love of God. It is the way of God’s love. Often such love requires courage to look beyond the distressing disguises of the sinful, the weak, or the vulnerable one before me, and to love them with consistency, perseverance, fortitude, and delight. . . . What a privilege it is to encounter in another person the unique goodness and gifts of God — and with it, lives are awakened, relationships changed.
Mother Agnes told the story of a woman who had lived with the Sisters and visited some years later. She had graduated with a nursing degree, had a job lined up, and had just decorated her own apartment. She told the Sisters: “You know, it’s funny. I’m just beginning to experience myself as the person you always knew me to be.”
To help a woman see the tremendous love that God has for her is at the heart of the pro-life movement. During the video introducing Mother Agnes, she said, “Our services begin with an invitation to community; the human need to belong, to have a place in a community, and a family is literally written into our spiritual DNA.”
This is who we need to be. Not political, so much as welcoming and embracing. I’ve seen it not only save but transform lives. Doesn’t that beat so much of our miserable politics? It’s the greatest, indeed.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.