Homily: Memorial Service for Sr. Monserrat
Before I took my first tip to Tijuana Ralph May sat me down and taught me the most important thing I needed to know about our mission:
We are not the heroes in this story. We drive down for a short visit, do a couple of good deeds, and go home to the comfort of our middle-class American lives. We give a little bit of our time and money. The real heroes are those people – most of them nuns – who give everything. They give their whole lives, all their attachments, all their dreams, all their hopes for the future, to God in the service of the orphans and the poor. They do God’s work. We just make sure their toilets flush and their roofs don’t leak.
Sr. Monserrat was one of those heroes. With her whole heart she devoted herself to ceaseless work. Try being a single mom with only one or two children. She had thirteen, some of them not in good health. In addition to the work itself, she faced very difficult circumstances. We learned only later that during several of the years that she worked at St. Joseph’s another nun she worked with was going through a personal crisis and melt-down that eventually had her setting aside her vows and leaving. I remember vividly how different things became after the troubled sister left. Most of us had never seen Sr. Monserrat smile, but now there was a lightness and smiling all around St. Joseph’s. We had never realized the pressure she was under.
My favorite memory of St. Moserrat is a glimpse through window of the tiny chapel at St. Joseph’s. There she was, having knelt down before the tabernacle to pray. She had leaned over just a bit to rest against the wall for a second and had fallen fast asleep. She worked so hard and rested so little!
The gift of one person’s life to God may seem like a small thing in the whole scheme of things. But God used her gift to bring all of us to St. Joseph’s, to bring all of us into touch with her and those beautiful children and with God. The outpouring of goodness that flowed from her gift still astounds me. I work hard to encourage the students at St. Paul’s to make the trip to Tijuana at least in part so they can be around people like you – holy and heroic people disguised as regular folks. But I’m convinced that your holiness would never have shone as brightly if Sr. Monserrat’s holiness hadn’t sparked the fire.
Some say that everything that happens is God’s will, that there are no accidents, that everything has a purpose. I love and respect people who hold that opinion, but they couldn’t be more wrong. It was not God’s will that Sr. Monserrat should die bloody and broken with a whole house full of kids needing her so badly. It is not God’s will that the children she gave her life to should be in the kind of peril they are in now.
But God is loving and powerful. God can bring good out of tragedy. In fact, that is God’s specialty. How else could we bear to have a cross as our Christian symbol? How can we stand to display everywhere the instrument of torture and death that claimed Jesus’ life? The reason is that Jesus, with his incredible love, with his incredible faith, with his incredible hope for us, made the cross holy, made the cross a symbol of the triumph of love over hate, of life over death.
We need to move ahead full of faith even though it is very hard to see where we are going right now. We need to start rebuilding a future for the children we love so much. We need to look forward with hope to a day when we can say: “You know, that was a really hard time when Sr. Monserrat died. We didn’t know where to go or what to do. But look at all the good that has come from that time.”
We need to join our prayers with the now much more powerful prayers of Sr. Monserrat.
Chuck Skoro
