Summer 2009

Reflections on a Wonderful Teacher

This column that I wrote about Sister Faith was one of three that won first place for me in the Wyoming Newspaper Association column writing category for large weeklies in 2008. The column speaks for itself of my love and admiration for Sister Faith. God bless all of you who bring so much goodness to the world!
Mike Fitzgerald
Pinedale Roundup Editor
Pinedale, Wyoming

Her eyes would always twinkle like stars behind her glasses, illuminated by love and joy and excitement. Especially when the birds were singing. Or flowers blooming. When her day was filled with God and poetry. “Write with your heart as well as your mind,” Sister Mary Faith would tell her students with a warm smile. “Rejoice in the world around you.” Rejoice we did after meeting and learning so much from the Benedictine nun, who was slight in physical stature but huge in literary circles around the nation.

Sister Faith, who moved into her heavenly home at the age of 92 last year (obituary), taught me how to write and so much more. We met back in 1973, when I attended Benedictine College out of high school, before heading off to eventually graduate from Southern Illinois University. The former St. Benedict’s College is located in a beautiful setting on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River just outside of tiny Atchison, Kansas. Her beloved Mount Saint Scholastica was on the other side of town, also an idyllic location.

I decided to take Sister Faith’s English class initially for a wrong reason. She only gave A’s and B’s for grades, which was hard to pass up at the time with a C average. Soon I realized that the grades didn’t matter. Sister Faith, who taught for more than 50 years around the world, was a rock star in the classroom.

She would suddenly close her book, walk over and open the classroom windows and we would all listen to the wind in the trees. Sometimes we would spill out of the old building and gather at a nearby garden. “It’s OK to walk on the grass,” she would always say. “We get tired of feeling cement under our feet.” You should never kill a moth, Sister Faith instructed. It might someday be a butterfly. She said to always carry a pen or pencil. The best writing often began on a napkin or scrap of paper, which always filled her pockets.

Sister Faith was brilliant with words. She celebrated their meaning and influence and as her obituary said “urged her students to capture the fleeting moments of insight or beauty.” Her writings were published for more than 50 years in national and regional magazines and newspapers. She co-founded the Kansas Poetry Society in 1985 and edited its Sunflower Petals, which gave young writers a chance to be published. My prose on Lake Michigan was printed in it and a framed copy still hangs in my mom’s living room. Sister Faith told me that she could hear the waves after reading it. I was so proud.

She believed in miracles, of course, and was part of more than one. She once told me that information for a crucial chapter in her local monastery history book The Meaning of the Mountain was missing. Her prayers were answered when she had a dream about that time reference. The dream later proved to be a perfectly accurate account of what had happened many years earlier.

I also asked her one time to please pray for a friend of mine who was in jail for weeks in New Orleans and didn’t have the money to get out. He was released on his own recognizance the next day with little explanation.

Back at Benedictine College, I was very close to getting kicked out in mid-semester for a variety of dorm rule violations. It very likely would have ended my college education and sent me back to the steel mills for good. Sister Faith said she would attend a private hearing with the dean of students (his name was Elmer Fangman and it did not look good) and a few other faculty members on the expulsion board. She emerged from the meeting with a smile and simply told me “Everything is fine.”

Sister Faith was an excellent public speaker and a champion of foreign students and minorities as well. She marched for peace and always had the courage to stand up against injustice.

We became friends for life and I gave her a poster on my final day at Benedictine. It was a scene from Ireland with the classic poem: “May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face. The rains fall soft upon your fields. And, until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.” She put it up on the back of her office door and often remarked about it when we wrote to each other over the years.

One time she sent me this advice: “I don’t believe anything can harm us as long as we do not give in to sadness, bitterness or weakness. As long as we hold fast to faith and prayer, hard work and grateful love. And as disciplined a life as we can lead.” Sister Faith published beautiful prose and poetry (just do an Internet search on her full name) over the years and was friends with many of the nation’s most prominent poets, whom she often invited to campus.

I’ll say goodbye today in words, as the tiny frozen snowflakes of Pinedale swirl in the late-day crimson light, framed by shiny white mountain peaks against an endless azure sky. Some of God’s best work, to be sure. Just like Sister Mary Faith Schuster, who forever touched my heart and soul with her wisdom and her words and her love.

I would like to finish with a poem by the great Robert Bly, which appeared in the Jan. 9, 2006, edition of New Yorker magazine. Enjoy!




Sister Faith reading her poetry (photo courtesy Jen McClaflin)

A Poetry Reading at Benedictine College
in Atchison, Kansas

We moved the poetry reading to the Exercise Room
For coziness. There we shifted a large bike to the side.
A certain exhilaration entered the room
When the words all agreed to point in one direction.

They say Lewis and Clark’s gang one night
Slept over there by the river, and Amelia Earhart
Lived till she was twelve in that gray house.
Maybe we could all do something brave if we tried.

We, even the heaviest, started to float when we
Remembered the sound of a moth on a screen
Trying to get out. Our lives might change today!
Listening with Sister Faith in the Exercise Room.

Robert Bly
New Yorker Magazine
January 9, 2006