SISTER MARY TERESA NIES, O.C.D.
This is the Funeral Homily given March 16, 2005 at St. Ann's Church, Long Grove, by Rev. Edmond J. Dunn:
Would it be too much to suggest that Sister Mary Teresa Nies, whose passing over to a new and glorious life we are here to celebrate this day, was, as a young woman, an athlete for God? And if so, would it be too much to suggest that becoming a Carmelite nun later in her life was a natural match - and I don't mean a cricket match. This slight Australian woman who was apparently a power house on the cricket field, as she played on the Commonwealth Women's Cricket Championship team in 1951, even with the royal family watching, this "Aussie" athlete had to be concerned with the spirit of competing but also that with a body able to perform. The match I am talking about in Carmel is what St. Teresa, whose name in religious life Sister Mary bore, --- is what St. Teresa said about the inextricable interdependence of body and soul or body and spirit. "We are not angels; Teresa wrote, "we've got bodies." And the body is an integral part of the human make-up by which God may be loved and served and glorified. "Glorify God in your body," St. Paul says. When Sister Mary Teresa made her solemn vows in Carmel she was quoted as saying, "I've retired from athletics, but cricket is still in my heart." Was she then, do you suppose, a "closet cricket Carmelite"?
We know that indeed Mary was more than an athlete. In one of her world-wide travels with the cricket team she found herself in India. The encounter with the poverty and people dying in the streets touched her heart so deeply that she vowed one day to return, and she did - twenty-five years later. Indeed she had heard that call from her youth, like Samuel heard, and now was able to respond, "Speak, Lord, your servant is listening." Working with Mother Theresa for a time, but finding herself too old to join a religious order in India, she continued as a lay missionary, founding a home for people in need of mental care, which she named after the Blessed Mother, Mary's Institute. Later, even as a Carmelite nun, she never lost her missionary spirit.
When Mary made her way to Iowa, to Eldridge, after having seen a notice about the Carmelite Monastery in a publication while she was in Chicago, having accompanied a young woman from the institute in India to the United States after the girl's family had migrated, she got on a bus headed west and ended up in Iowa City. When she called Sister Mary Jo and Mary Jo wanted to get to know a little bit more about her before she arrived, she asked Mary Teresa why she wanted to come to Carmel. "I want to give my life to God," she said; and she did. "Here I am, Lord, I come to do your will."
Sister Mary Teresa took her Carmelite commitment very seriously. Perhaps as a carry-over from her athletic training or the need for strict order in the Institute in India, Mary looked on the Rule of Carmel as the rules of the game, and at times she wasn't sure her sister colleagues were toeing the line enough! Perhaps like calisthenics, Sister Mary wanted everyone to do everything on the mark! But her impish smile and sense of humor always got her over the rough spots. In many ways Sister Mary was a mover, and in some ways, she always saw the green grass on the other side - be it back home in Australia, in India, or in Eldridge.
If there is one gift that Mary gave us all - in addition to the Indian greeting of peace with the palms of the hands just so, and the slight dignified bow - it was the lesson of dying. Father Rahner says that death is not something to be endured passively, but to be encountered actively. It is the last real decision that we make and in a real way it crowns our whole life. Having struggled with skin cancer for many years, probably as a result of the strenuous exercise under the strong Australian sun, she then developed the cancer that finally claimed her life. But it was not, as the sisters and the hospice nurses know so well, a passive acceptance. She bargained hard with God, set goals about feasts and the like that she was determined to celebrate, and made them again and again. To the end she felt her responsibility to her community. When she talked to me just two weeks ago tomorrow, and told me that she had decided that she was going to go to the Kahl Home because she realized she needed more care than it was right to ask her sisters to give, I praised her for her brave decision and reminded her that Father Rahner reminded us that at whatever stage of life we are, that is our vocation.
For this athlete for Christ, to see her physical body diminishing step by step, and still keeping up her indomitable spirit, the words of St. Paul in his Second Letter to the Corinthians parallel what Sister Mary must have been experiencing: "We are not discouraged' rather, although our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day....For we know that if our earthly dwelling, a tent, should be destroyed, we have a building from God, a dwelling not made with hands, eternal in heaven."
When Sister Mary Teresa was professed, the words on her invitation read, "My heart sings with joy." I am sure that all of us here would agree, as it was then so it is now in ever more glorious strains. Her sings with joy.
One song that Sister Mary Teresa especially loved was "This Is My Song," and it captures the vision of this "closet cricket Carmelite," who came to us in Iowa, in the U.S.A., from Australia by way of India. In essence the words are: "This is my song, O God of all the nations, A song of peace for lands afar and mine....But other lands have sunlight too, and clover, and skies are everywhere as blue as mine. O hear my prayer, thou God of all the nations; Myself I give thee; let thy will be done."
As the passage from the Book of Revelation instructs us: "Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord." "Yes," says the Spirit, "they will rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them."
Mary, we'll miss you. God bless.
Question: Why do you want to come to Carmel?
Mary Teresa: I want to serve God.
