“Hope Trails Me Like A Best Friend”

Benedictine sister and writer Macrina Wiederkehr. (Photo courtesy of St. Scholastica Monastery)

There are people we encounter who transform our lives. We meet them by a grace that we neither expect nor deserve. For me, Sister Macrina Wiederkehr was one of those people. She died Friday of a brain tumor at the age of 80. I want to tell you about her expansive spirit.

I first became aware of Sister Macrina through her books on Benedictine spirituality, starting with “Seven Sacred Pauses,” then “The Song of the Seed” and “Abide,” and on down the line until I had read every one of her works.

She wrote as I imagined a mystic would, keenly attuned to reality and to the meaning and truth behind everyday experiences that the rest of us are too distracted to perceive.

In 2016, I was invited to guide a retreat for her monastic community, St. Scholastica in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Because of my awe of Sister Macrina, I almost declined the invitation. I questioned what I possibly could offer a community that included a modern-day prophet.

Another Benedictine mentor of mine encouraged me to say yes. Deep down I knew I would regret missing the chance to meet Sister Macrina in person if I had said no.

Sister Macrina in Thorncrown Chapel, Eureka Springs, AR. She sought silence and solitude, but loved the company of friends.

My first morning at the monastery, as I went through the breakfast line with my tray, a tall, slender, silver-haired sister bounded over to me. In the most delightful drawl, she said, “Hi, I’m Macrina,” I hadn’t recognized her!

When it was time to make my first presentation, Sister Macrina took a seat on the side of the meeting room. As I arranged my papers at the podium, she stood for a moment, clasped her hands together, and bowed to me.

I still tear up thinking of that moment of grace. That generous gesture from a master teacher gave me the confidence I needed to forge on with my presentation, impoverished as it might be.

The night before I was to leave for home, she came to my room with Sister Madeline, one of her close friends in the community. She was carrying a can of spiced almonds someone had brought back from Africa for her.

She also brought along a couple of single-serving bottles of wine like the kind you’re given on airplanes, which she got from who knows where. I wish I could recall the conversation that night. What I remember is our laughter, the sheer joy of simply being together.

When I returned to St. Scholastica in March of last year, I was able to spend more personal time with Sister Macrina. She showed me her room in the new monastery, which the sisters had just moved into. She was giddy about having a private toilet.

With author Judith Valente, left, discussing their love of books in the library of St. Scholastica Monastery, March 2019.

She loved the view from her room, and had placed some pillows and blankets to make a window seat. The window looked out on the monastery’s cemetery and some tall pines. Death and life, she said.

A clock in the room had stopped at four o’clock. “It’s been four o’clock for six weeks now,” she told me. “That’s all right. It’s four o’clock somewhere in the world.”

We took a walk on a summer-like afternoon in Carol Ann Cross Park where children were chasing ducks and men were fishing in a pond. Spring wild flowers spread out in an array of colors.

Sister Macrina would stop in mid-sentence to gasp with delight at the sight of a patch of bluebells, Johnny jump ups or purple clover.

She could be charmingly self-aware too. I wanted to take a photo of her in the park, but she kept erasing the ones I snapped, saying she didn’t like the way she looked in them. Only later did I realize she’d erased all of the photos I’d taken of her in the park.

After our walk, we went on to Tropical Smoothie — a pilgrimage stop on her excursions outside the monastery — where she ordered one of her favorites, the Bahama Mama.

It is hard to believe that a little over a year later this fun-loving woman would be gone from a world that brought her such simple joys.

“Hope trails alongside me like my best friend no matter how desperate I might feel.”

Sister Macrina shared something on our last visit that seems prescient now, given her decision earlier this year to let her diagnosis take its course rather than spend whatever time she had left trapped in hospital rooms in an endless whirl of tests and procedures.

She told me, “Hope trails alongside me like my best friend, no matter how desperate I might feel.”

They weren’t just words. It was her way of life. In her last weeks, she asked to be wheeled outside to watch the sun rise, to see the April “super moon” emerge from the horizon, and appreciate the pink and orange azaleas and purple irises bursting open on the monastery grounds.

In early April, admiring spring azaleas outside the monastery. (Photo courtesy of St. Scholastica Monastery)

Words she wrote well before the current pandemic speak to the struggles we are facing agt this time. “We sometimes forget how important it is that we always honor the need to be still, motionless, not moving at all,” she wrote in one of her essays.

“How difficult it is to stand silent and unmoving with our flask of oil, which is our very being, and let God anoint our restless hearts.”

In January with her close friend Joyce Rupp, with whom she wrote “The Circle of Life.”

Throughout her illness, Sister Macrina’s family members, her vast number of friends, and most especially her monastic sisters were there to “anoint” her heart.

I’ve given presentations at countless monasteries. The St. Scholastica community has always stood out for its warm, light-hearted hospitality. It has endured through the aging of its members, financial strain, and the closing of its former monastery. Still, these sisters know how to have fun. They understand that joy too is sacramental.

That day in the park, Sister Macrina brought along copies of some of her favorite poems. I remember one in particular she read to me by Charles Mungoshi, called, “What to Do.” Looking back, the poem seems so like her:

Take out all your belongings

Furniture, clothes, crockery –

All you have since held dear

Take them all out

And return them to the forest.

Now bring in the sky

The mountains, distant views

Of anything, the rivers, trees

Boulders, the animals, birds

And insects –

Set them loose in your room.

Now –

Kneel down anywhere

And give thanks.

Sister Macrina once said she wanted to be a blessing to others, “another Christ, a servant leader, a disciplined disciple.” She was all that and more.

She taught us to give thanks always, for hope trails alongside us like a best friend.

With St. Scholastica’s Prioress-elect Sister Kimberly Prohaska, left. The monastic sisters kept vigil at Sister Macrina’s bedside in her final days, praying and holding her hand. (Photo courtesy of St. Scholastica Monastery)