The Mystery of Healing

by Sister Maureen Grady, CSC

It was the kind of life-changing event that runs through the history of the Sisters of the Holy Cross.

Consulting with pastoral care student and an elderly patient at Getawi Hospital, Greater Beirut, Lebanon

One moment in 1980 Sister Maureen Grady was leading a “tidy, comfortable life” as a Sister of the Holy Cross, halfway through her doctoral program and operating a successful pastoral care program at the local Holy Cross hospital.  Four days later she was on a plane to Thailand to help care for the hundreds of thousands of refugees who were swarming over Cambodia’s border to escape the genocide the military government was waging there on its citizens.

It wasn’t an easy decision.

“A gifted and wise regional superior,” she remembers, “suggested I ‘think’ about it.  So I spent that entire night in chapel, thinking.  By dawn I realized that what kept me from answering was my own convenience, my comfortable life.  Once I faced this, I was free.”

The next months were the most difficult period of her life, she recalls.  Medical personnel worked from dawn until dusk, stepping over the dead as they went about their work of tending the living.  “The transition,” she says, “from the comforts of home to the hell of the Thai camps was disturbing, but the experience changed and redirected my life.”

The following year she was sent to Lebanon for three tours as a representative of Catholic Services, which, with her Congregation, had sponsored her tour in Thailand.

Lebanon was in the midst of its own civil war.  In the course of rallying emergency relief resources for displaced families, she fell in love with the people and the country.

“The hope of the young and the courage of the women religious,” she says, “inspired in me a passion for a people who were so saddened and burdened by the destruction of their country by their own.”

Danger was a constant presence.  A restaurant became the scene of a bloodbath just 30 minutes after she had eaten lunch there.  Other close calls led her to feel she was protected.

“How I survived, I do not know,” she recalls. “I do know that taking such a risk is something I would do only once. But it was God who invited me to begin this journey, and it was God who sustained and protected me.”

Distributing food and supplies with Catholic Relief Services to Lebanese people during the invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 1982

In 1986 she was hired by the Pontifical Mission’s (PM) Beirut office to work in the project department.  When the director’s post became vacant shortly thereafter, she was asked to stay on and “hold things together” temporarily.  In the interim she was moved to write the president of the Pontifical Mission, Msgr. John Nolan, to describe the kind of person — she assumed it would be a priest — that ought to be recruited for the politically sensitive post:

“. . . someone,” she wrote, “with astute awareness of the political, religious and military realities of the country which demand: absolute neutrality . . . posture of equality and fairness . . . strict understanding of the proper realm and boundaries of PM operations . . . low-key approach and behavior . . . the ability to maintain good public relations with key persons and organizations [and] . . . skills in French and/or Arabic.”

It didn’t dawn on her that she was describing herself.  Shortly thereafter Monsignor Nolan encouraged John Cardinal O’Connor to ask Sister Maureen if she herself would take the post.  Sister Maureen accepted the call.

The following four years were as hazardous as the conditions she had encountered in her war experiences in Cambodia and Lebanon.  Communicating by walkie-talkie, Sister Maureen and her staff would apprise each other daily of the safety and security of each individual’s neighborhood. (“In those four years of fighting, we missed only two working days,” she smiles.)

Her staff doubled, PM projects and programs increased “tenfold.” Sister Maureen was overseeing a $7 million budget by directing the organization’s operations throughout the Middle East in Amman, Beirut, Jerusalem and also Rome.  Under her leadership the healing influence of the Pontifical Mission project office was extended into Syria, Cyprus and Iraq.  By 1993 it was time for a break.

She found the time and space needed for regrouping her inner resources by taking a sabbatical in a cloistered convent in South Carolina.  Ever resourceful, she also took the opportunity to perfect her French and improve her Arabic.

Her new command of the French and Arabic languages soon served her well.  Drawn back to Lebanon and to the people there, she found herself increasingly identifying with the women religious in the country — “the social arm, the backbone and spiritual strength of the Church.”  Why, the people there asked her, had she returned to their war-torn country?

“When strangers come to a land to be helpful in wartime,” she explains, “they generally leave the country when the war ends and go find other wars [to work in]. I couldn’t do that. I had been of help here during wartime.  Now here was an opportunity to continue to help — and rebuild the peace.”

The nurses with whom she had been corresponding at various hospitals in the greater Beirut area, mostly women religious, were “good nurses, wonderful nurses; but so many of them were saying, ‘I feel like there’s so much more I can be doing for my patients.’”

And so, beginning with the religious and hospital leadership, Sister Maureen began to lay out plans for implementing pastoral care programs in Lebanese hospitals.  Gradually working her way “down” through the hospital administrative structure, she developed curriculum, set up classes, and began teaching classes in pastoral care for floor nurses and supervisors.  She was on her way to developing a new kind of nurse:  the pastoral counselor.

Greeting a resident at a refugee camp during the Lebanese civil war, 1986

Her classes and curriculum helped medical staff deal with the emotional and spiritual issues that surface with fear and illness.

“You have a patient,” she explains, “who tells you, the floor nurse, ‘I know I’m going to die. . . .’  What do you say?  How do you respond?  When we’re in trouble, we have to reach down into ourselves and pull out some resources. Sometimes people come up pretty empty, depending on the values they hold in life.  So it’s easy to get lost when things go wrong.  Our job as pastoral ministers is to walk along with, accompanying people, in a very accepting, nonjudgmental, loving, caring presence in the light of our own faith . . . and build a relationship of trust that’s there to pick up the pieces and support the [patient’s] effort however it unfolds.

“It’s not a matter of conversion, it’s a stance of appreciation — for the person, for his or her situation and for your own ability to respond.”

Even though the Middle East is a very Catholic and Christian area, there has been little focus on this pastoral aspect of care. “But the sisters, well-trained in theology, spirituality and in their own prayer life, have picked up on this need.  They see this crisis of faith, the anguish of the spirit, that accompanies physical crisis every day.”

By helping her nurse-students deal with their own fears and insecurities, Sister Maureen showed them how to develop clinical listening skills and ways of relating deeply to the other person.  In classes and in tutorial sessions that analyze nurse and patient behavior during patient visits, students were taught to examine the ways they unintentionally limit their communication with others and to find ways through their own confusion.

The demand for pastoral care instruction in Lebanon and nearby countries is increasing, partly due to Sister Maureen’s personal dedication to bring the training to religious of the many languages and cultures that make up this part of the world.

Since October 2000 she has been teaching pastoral formation courses to third- and fourth-level nursing students at Saint Anthony University in Beirut — the first time that this discipline has been given the recognition to be taught at the college level.  The university has also decided to include pastoral formation as part of a program of spirituality which is currently in the planning stage.  When that develops, Sister Maureen expects to be involved in some of the teaching and curriculum activities of the program.

Meeting Pope John Paul II, 1988, in her duties as director of the Pontifical Mission office in Beirut

Another possibility for pastoral formation education is a project planned for the neighboring countries of Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Palestine.

“This proposal is especially gratifying,” she says, “because it has been initiated at the request of four of my former sister-students who took my basic course of pastoral formation under the sponsorship of the National Assembly of Women Religious of Lebanon, and are now elected superiors of their respective congregations in these various Middle-Eastern countries.”

The first of these programs in Syria will involve a weekend workshop that will introduce pastoral care to a local assembly of sisters from different religious congregations who are involved in a variety of ministerial activities.

“This kind of activity is particularly important in a country like Syria,” she believes, “where the government for many years has taken over the schools, hospitals, and other social institutions of all religious congregations, leaving the sisters bereft of many resources.”

Finally, when time permits, Sister Maureen is involved in activities that support the Afro-Asian migrant community in Lebanon.

“This group is composed of the poor who come here to find work in order to support from afar their families who stay at home in their native countries,” she notes.  “The majority are Srilankans, Africans, Indians and Filipinos, who make up the domestic and non-skilled labor force of the country.”

For example, she decided that she would worship with the migrant community for the Advent season.  “It was a very rich and rewarding experience for me.  The first Sunday of Advent I attended a Mass celebrated by a French priest in an Armenian chapel with a Nigerian choir singing protestant hymns — it is difficult to surpass that as an ecumenical experience.”