Sister Mary Frances Reis
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Sister Mary Francis with
neighborhood children
https://www.flickr.com/photos/46292937@N02/sets
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My full name is Frances Mary Reis but my religious name is Sister Mary Frances Reis. I was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. I have 5 other siblings, they're all living, they all have children and grandchildren. Let's see. [long pause] I went to Visitation for high school, then I went on to St. Kate's to get a degree in elementary education, and then I went on to St. Thomas University to get a masters in administration, and then I went on to St. John's to get a masters in theology. I actually founded the Campus Ministry department at Visitation (1), it’s a wonderful, wonderful school. I’ve also moved a lot so I believe I understand people very well in neighborhoods. I was 19. I really felt like I was called to the contemplative life and I knew that God was really calling me, I mean I really believed that God was calling me to this life of prayer and community. Back in those days it was blind obedience, you were told what you were going to do more or less by your superior, so I was going to be teaching. I never dreamed to teach in school, I was kind of a bum student raised in a dysfunctional family, ya know, I really didn’t know I was even smart.
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“That’s where God was calling us”
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Visitation Sisters featured in National Catholic Reporter
about "nuns living out expressions of contemplative life in the US."
https://www.flickr.com/photos/46292937@N02/sets
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“We get reactions from people”
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Sisters of North Minneapolis all wearing their silver
cross necklaces
https://www.flickr.com/photos/46292937@N02/sets
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“We need to go out there and be leaven in the world”
The ministry is very, very simple. It is prayer, community, and answering the door. When I grew up everything was pretty well set in the Catholic church, there was one way of doing mass and you know of course all men on the altar. With Vatican Council II, everything began to change because of the basic document from the church in the modern world and the idea that we are of this world, this is God’s world and this is God’s creation we need to go out there and be leaven (3) in the world, not separate ourselves from the world. Some Sisters still chose to wear the religious habit and that's fine, I love the religious habit, but I wore it for 18 years. But I mean we shaved our heads and we all wore that but it was a 16th century dress, so why would you wear a 16th century dress today?
“It’s all about relationships”
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When we personally make a commitment to this life we promise to live this life, just like a marriage covenant. Well, we have a religious life covenant. We have, every month we get $400 worth of Cub gift cards at $10 a piece, they go just like that [snaps fingers]! And we also get $400-600 worth of bus tokens, because we're right on a bus line here, too. We had been here about two years and Sister Karen and I were the only two home and we were getting ready to go away on retreat when we heard this explosion, we thought it was maybe the furnace room because we weren’t that accustomed to gunshots. Karen ran over to the window, and we were getting ready to go away on retreat, and she goes over to the window and she said, “My god, someone’s been shot." So, we immediately ran out there. . . we just ran out and we just did what you do if somebody’s dying, you know, we held him and we prayed with him like I’ve prayed with the nuns over at Vis, remember I said I was in the infirmary and I took care of the elder Sisters and I held them as they were dying? So we were here, I mean it was a little different, I don't know if this is shocking, you just do what you have to do when a man has 3 or 5 bullets in his head and we just prayed with him and you know naturally called 911, or somebody called 911, and the paramedics and the cops came and we were going to get away so they could do their thing and they said, “Oh no, you're doing the most important thing for this guy” and we stayed with him and he was unconscious so we said, ‘Good Shepherd's Psalm’, and ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’, and whatever, and when we got to the Our Father, he started groaning and it was very happy because we knew then that he heard us-and they say hearing is the last thing to go when a person is dying-so he died en route to the hospital. But it was a very profound experience for us. God can bring good out of something so horrible as a person dying in such a violent way, and it was a drug deal. A few days after he died, his significant other was in jail at the time, and her social worker brought her over so we could kind of walk through with her what happened to Lulu and I think she came about 2 weeks later. And A few days after some of his gang members came over and they wanted to know if we were the nuns that did the last rights on Lulu and we said, “Well yeah,” and they said, “Will you pray with us? We don’t really like what we’re doing with our lives.” And so they came into the chapel and we gathered around them like we always do and we prayed with them and, I mean, I don’t know where those guys are today but you hope maybe that made a little bit of a difference but that was, the thing about that was, what this said to the community around here these white ladies are okay, we’re going to have their backs-and they did. And I know somebody once said,“Maybe it's prayer that keeps this world from going totally down the tubes.” You know and I do believe it. This is just to show you, its all about relationships. You can pour a million dollars into something but if there's no relationship its not gonna make a difference. . .
“They’re not our projects”
You have a stereotype of us in North Minneapolis and I have a stereotype of Edina, too. Okay so they [St. Patrick’s church parishioners] came, they had heard about us, and they were really wanting to make a bridge across town and to be able to share, ya know, some of the good things they have going on there-just the best of intentions. So, we sat with them for, uh, a couple of hours and they want us to participate in a forum out at their parish to talk about North Minneapolis so we said, “Well, if you want us to do that we’d be happy to do it but we would like to have our neighbors participate in this planning." So we’ve had our neighbors come here and what happens is that the neighbors in the [North Minneapolis] neighborhood they’re teaching the people out in Edina. And what they’re saying and really what the, basically what the neighbors are saying is, “We’re not asking anybody to come in and do anything for us, we’re asking you to help us get some of those skills so we can do for ourselves”. . . So what's neat about living here is that it's not like people are coming in and bringing stuff and then leaving so that I can get all the neighbors to come and help the Vis girls, right? They help them do their deliver the baskets or do whatever they’re doing so they, people in the neighborhood, consider these their projects. They’re not our projects, it’s kind of sweet you know?
“There are so many good things going on here”
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I was over at the Y this morning and there was a big sign there and it said, you know, you could put a post-it on there saying how you’d try to build up the community or what you’d do for the community and I just said ‘I try to affirm all the great things that are happening in North Minneapolis’ and then I listed them: the cookie cart, it's a bakery for kids; there's a thing called NAZ, they got a 26 million dollar grant from the government, to do something about the achievement gap between kids of color and white kids and that's called Northside Achievement Zone. There are so many good things going on here that you do not see on the news but I mean I guess just, my thing is, that it just takes living here and being with people and establishing really genuine real relationships. Well I hope that, my hope is that North Minneapolis continues to be this wonderful, diverse community. . .You know my hope and my dream is that it will remain the diverse community it is, that people who have or the people in this community [who] don't have will help empower people in this community to be successful.
http://www.startribune.com/nuns-in-the-hood-25-years-of-doing-good/280428452/
http://www.startribune.com/nuns-in-the-hood-25-years-of-doing-good/280428452/
Footnotes:
- Visitation- Convent of the Visitation is a Montessori through high school (high school is all girls) Catholic, college-preparatory school in Mendota Heights, MN. Abbreviated Vis. Visitation Monastery of Minneapolis- Sisters live a monastic life of prayer and community: being present, welcoming, and reaching out to all in the diverse setting of north Minneapolis (founded in 1610 by St. Jane de Chantal and St. Francis de Sales).
- Discernment- (in Christian contexts) perception in the absence of judgment with a view to obtaining spiritual direction and understanding.
3. Leaven- a pervasive influence that modifies something or transforms it for the better.
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