In May this year, the Sisters of Life from New York visited England and Ireland. Four of their sisters took time to share their wisdom with some of The Good Counsel Network's staff and volunteers in London.
Here are some extracts from a talk given by Sister Marie Veritas, SV.
As we engage in praying outside of a clinic, we exercise a ministry of reverence. What is this ministry of reverence? Well, I would say it’s entering into the mystery of seeing, knowing, and loving the human person as God does. Seeing: I and three other Sisters were walking through a park one day. This little girl walked past us, looking at us with big eyes; as she passed, she excitedly whispered - in a little-kid whisper, which is, as you know, louder than their regular voice - “Look, mommy! Ghosts!” So many people feel like ghosts in their own lives, and it’s painful. Why? Because we all want to be seen. In a way, that’s what we’re made for. In Genesis we hear 6 times “And God saw that it was good...” And at the creation of man we hear the echo of something even greater… “God saw that it was very good.” God loves every person into existence, body and soul. God sees us and is moved by us. St. Catherine of Siena once said that God is “pazzo d’amore” – literally, “crazy in love”, with us. He looks at us with the eternity of His unbroken gaze. Cardinal O’Connor said, “God is being, that being which keeps the entire world in existence. If Almighty God withdrew His hand from us for a billionth of a second, we wouldn’t simply cease to exist, we wouldn’t be obliterated, it would be as though we had never been. Our being is derived from God. God is the being which extends throughout all the world.”The great glory of life is that my body is me, and I - head and heart and hands and soul - am a gift straight from the heart of the Trinity, made uniquely and unrepeatably in His image. And so I (and all that makes me me — every freckle and every hair and the shape of my nose and the tone of my voice and my temperament and my emotional bent and the stirrings of my heart) - is important to God. I am a unique reflection of the Almighty Beauty of God, I am a portal into the mystery of God Himself. Every human person is an icon of the living God. Every human person is meant to be seen, is meant to be encountered in truth, and is meant to draw us into the mystery of God’s love.
Cardinal O’Connor said: “Our entire search must be for the face of God. …we have to see Him in everyone we meet. We have to see Him in the unborn baby, in those who are helpless in hospital beds, in those who are twisted and deformed and looking like something less than human beings. We have to see Him in the crippled, in the retarded. We have to see Him in those who hate us. We have to hear His voice in the shrieks of those who ridicule us. Always, this must be our search.” Every person is holy ground, sacred. As C.S. Lewis wrote, – “it is hardly possible… to think too often or too deeply of the glory of my neighbour. It is a serious thing… to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship… There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal… Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.”. No person is an accessory; no life is useless, no life is worthless.
The Sisters of Life are a religious community of women, founded in 1991 by John Cardinal O’Connor,
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