“The poet Tagore says poetically what we know in our hearts to be true: ‘Death is not extinguishing the light. It is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.’ Sister Annette was a ray of sunshine, and her faithfulness a guiding light in all of our lives. Through her, the Light of Christ burned brightly.” The Most Rev. George Leo Thomas, Ph.D., Bishop of Helena.
A QUIET FORCE—SR. ANNETTE MORAN
On Sunday, July 8, 2007, Sister Annette Moran, C.S.J., Ph.D., Carroll College Theology Department Chair and beloved professor, died after an 11-year battle with breast cancer. She was surrounded by loved ones and by the loving embrace of prayers from the many who adored her and knew of her suffering. Carroll College is grateful to the Moran family and the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet for giving us permission to share Annette’s poetry, included in italics throughout this story, with our readers.
“She was loved as a teacher, mentor, colleague and friend,” said the Rev. Dan Shea, Ph.D., Carroll associate professor of languages. “She made important contributions to both academic freedom and Catholic identity at Carroll College. As a teacher, she had the gift of being able to present theology so that students wanted to embrace it, and she inspired students to enter into the mystery of theology.”
At the July 12 Eucharistic Celebration of Sr. Moran’s life at Our Lady of the Valley Catholic
Church in Helena, Bishop of Helena George Leo Thomas, Ph.D., remarked, “Sister Annette was friend and mentor to so many. In my own life, she was among the first to welcome me to the Diocese of Helena, was a frequent welcome visitor to my office, and a trusted theological advisor. Hers was a life replete with admirable qualities rarely found in such abundance in one person – prayerfulness and scholarship, humor and wisdom, humility and greatness, insightfulness and incisiveness, warmth and hospitality. Words attributed to Blessed John XXIII capture poetically what many of us experienced upon encountering Sister Annette, ‘There will always be a little lamp shining in my window. All may come in. The arms of a friend are waiting.’”
“Sister Annette was a manifestation of grace. No matter what their perspective, beliefs or worldview, she greeted others with open arms,” said Carroll Associate Professor of English Kay Satre, Ph.D. “She possessed a heartfelt knowledge, insight and understanding of what Carroll College is at its very best and what it can and should be. She saw clearly that Carroll is an open, loving, academically serious place offering a transformative educational experience. And, she helped make this true.”
After growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, Sister Annette entered the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. At the time of her death, she had been a member of this religious community for 41 years. She held a master’s in English from Ohio State University and a master’s in theology from St. John’s University, Collegeville. She went on to earn her Ph.D. at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., where she served as director of Admissions at the Jesuit School of Theology.
In 1996, Sister Annette became a faculty member at Carroll College and over the years taught courses integrating theology, literature, film and spirituality. Her courses were always full with waiting lists. Some of her most popular were “Christian Mystery in Film and Fiction,” “Women Mystics,” and “Sin and Grace in Theology and Literature.” For the past six years, she served a vital role as chair of the Carroll Theology Department. At Carroll’s graduation ceremony in May 2007, she was greeted by a standing ovation from thousands as she received the college’s Outstanding Teaching Award. In addition to her reputation as an outstanding professor, she also served as a dear and respected counselor, mentor, spiritual director and friend to many on campus.
“She emerged at Carroll as a leader,” said longtime friend and Carroll colleague Jeannie Downs during the vigil service. “She led with wisdom and thoughtfulness, with authority rather than power, with patience and perseverance and always in a spirit of service, collaboration and empowerment. Her leadership style flowed from her commitment to excellence, to enlightenment, to her students and colleagues, to the spirit of the Carroll’s mission and from her deep and abiding faith in the healing, holy, transforming gifts of the Catholic tradition. She was a quiet woman who made a big noise.”
Sr. Annette was buried at Nazareth Cemetery at the Motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Joseph in St. Louis, Missouri. Her memory at Carroll lives on in hearts and in the newly established Sr. Annette Moran Endowment for Servant Leadership, which is now part of the college’s Centennial Campaign. The endowment was established by Carroll President Tom Trebon, Ph.D., with matching funds from Dr. James and Joan Schneller. The Sister Annette Moran Scholarship has also been established to assist Carroll students. To offer a gift to either of these legacies in her memory, contact Dr. Richard Ortega, vice president for Advancement at Carroll College, 406-447-5409.
VIGIL SERVICE REFLECTIONS BY THE REV. TIM CLANCY, S.J., Ph.D.
July 11, 2007
Annette Moran: In memoriam
Annette had a fascination with dance. Last year while she was battling ever stronger chemotherapies, she was taking salsa lessons in the evening. Whenever a dance movie would come out, especially one in which troubled high schoolers were inspired by a dance teacher brought in as a last ditch effort to deal with them, she would immediately tell me all about it and insist that I had to see it. I suspect that part of the lure of dance for Annette was her own self-consciousness and perception of being awkward. For dance involves a coincidence of opposites, a carefree natural spontaneity combined with elegance and grace. Dance resonated so strongly with Annette I suspect because she too was both a free spirit and was all about grace.
Though she felt awkward in her body, Annette did dance freely and with grace in the world of words. Tonight I would like to share with you some of Annette’s dances with words, her poetry that she wrote over the years. She shared few of her poems with anyone, but in the last month of her life she took all the saved scraps of paper on which they were written and created an anthology of the ones she thought worth saving. She left them on her office computer screen to be found when her office was cleared off. So I take that as a sign she was now ready to share them.
The first poem I would like to share is over her teaching. Annette was first and foremost a teacher. One of her favorite sayings about teaching was adapted from a passage from the “Tao Te Ching” on leadership. A good king, says the “Tao,” is one for whom his subjects do not think he is needed at all, who think that the king is not doing anything. Rather his subjects think they are doing everything themselves. But order and harmony somehow “miraculously” result. So too Annette sought to teach in such a way that students thought they were learning the material by themselves. And yet, miraculously, by the end of the class all the important issues Annette wanted to cover would somehow have been discussed and critiqued.
In her early years at Carroll, on the first day of class she would explain what she was looking for in class discussion by tossing a ball to a student. The student would toss it back to her only to have her toss it back to the student. This would continue back and forth until the student for a change of pace would toss it to another student, who would toss it to another and another. “That is what I am looking for!” she would announce. “Don’t just talk to me, talk to one another, respond to one another.” Leading by not leading the discussion, students learned in her class, learned and were even inspired.
Here is a poem she wrote early on while teaching high school English.
To My Students
For this short time
we have you here.
What is to be our gift?
Truth (what is that?)
Or how to handle pain?
Love?
And all the things
that we are not?
Our failures present
before you every day,
like tattered scraps of life
we forgot to hide away.
I would give you
a red kite in a blue sky,
a dawn-colored rose
and all the blue bonnets
a field could hold.
But no, all I have is this:
loneliness embraced,
an opening to grace,
a letting go of you,
too dear to be possessed.
As anyone who took “Sin and Grace” or “Theology and Film” could tell you, Annette taught doctrine through gritty literature and often disturbing stories and films that could be hard to read and watch. For like her mentor Flannery O’Connor, she was convinced that God became incarnate and visible in the darkest of places.
Here are a couple of her poems she wrote for the Lenten season:
The cross is not pretend,
a wood and golden show.
The nails begin to tear.
We understand until
the deep and black despair.
Then we cry loud His name.
Do you remember me?
There is no answer save
the crushing of the wood.
Here is another:
Lent was dark,
even terror,
in the cocoon
spun out of
my own selfishness.
Now as I peer out
onto Good Friday
I can’t believe
these crumpled wings
can go from
death to life.
Fortunately God
does not leave
such things
to Me.
Eleven years ago, after her first year at Carroll, Annette was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her doctor thought they had caught it early, but to his surprise it had already spread to some of her lymph nodes, and a year later, again to his surprise, it spread to her bones. Bone cancer is incurable, but it can be managed for a time. For the next ten years, Annette was always taking one medication or another to knock the cancer counts down. As time went on she would be taking drugs that did not even exist when she started. But eventually the drugs would run out, and she would be having to take harsher and harsher chemo, until in January she decided that enough was enough, that she could no longer endure the increasingly ravaging shocks to her system. As you all know she kept the news of her cancer close to her vest. She did not want people to know for fear that they would treat her different, that people would feel sorry for her or view her as an invalid.
The first poem about her cancer came from a weekend she spent with a couple she was close to who had a cabin down near Yellowstone.
Cancer
“There was a path,” she said.
I kept looking, walking into the deep grass
Fearful of snakes I could not see.
“No snakes in this country,” he said.
There is always that one that surprises
like the cancer inside silently
hiding, waiting to rear up and strike.
“There is no path here,” I said.
The hardest part of the cancer was the roller coaster of hope and disappointment. She sought to get off the roller coaster by letting go of expectations and living in the moment. But easier said then done.
Miracles have a way
of leaving much too soon.
Clinging will not keep them;
their going will not stay;
cajoling does not alter
the bent rose or already empty space
Once the darkness settles in
it is foolish of the Monarch
to insist on Day.
Here is another one:
Feast of Christ the King
Christ, rose-giver King
your feast is today
It used to be in a golden wine-
red time.
The church changed it,
being wise.
Thorned trees crown
the gray sky.
November becomes you better.
My cross-king Christ
Not a sun king,
Cold like winter’s light.
You wooed me
with a silver winter rose
and a promise whispered in the night.
Annette’s religious order, the Sisters of Saint Joseph, were founded in the early seventeenth century in Le Puy, a rocky, impoverished area of central France. A group of women who shared a common spiritual director banded together to serve unwed mothers and poor widows in the area. They worked for free. They and those they ministered to made money to live on by sewing lace.
Lace
I like to think of me as lace
where God is all the empty space
Oh to be lace where the light
Flows through beautifully
patterning me for You.
I would like to close with a final poem that needs to introduction:
To Christ, On Death
Opening to thunder,
sun and lightening, grace
that spills out of all my
inward being.
I will not run from
stones and scrapes
and scars that
speak of wrestling
with an Incarnate God.
Not closed and drawn small
but open wide,
eyes seeing, ears hearing
arms reaching wide, cross-wide
to love the world.
Only then will I be shaped
enough for the final openness
to dark, for the reluctant offering up
of so loved self and world
to a final, total grasp of grace,
Becoming finally Me,
Given back, most beautiful in Thee.
Originally published in the Fall 2007 issue of the Carroll Magazine.