Posted by Life isn’t fair. It was only after acknowledging that fact that Sister Ave Clark was able to move through the struggles and traumas she had endured to find God’s light again. And as she used her wounds to bring that light to others through her Heart to Heart Ministry programs, she found an even greater level of healing herself.
Sister Ave has shared her insights in numerous books, the latest of which is “Sewing ~ ~ Sowing Good Deeds with Joy and Hope,” and we discussed it recently on “Christopher Closeup” (podcast below).
Sister Ave deeply appreciates the role that Dr. Frederic Gannon played in her life, beginning in 1988. Though he is now “in the cloud of witnesses in heaven,” she says, he was the “spiritual psychiatrist” who guided her through the trauma and PTSD that came with having been abused and assaulted. It was at this time that Dr. Gannon told her, “Life isn’t fair.”
This viewpoint came as a shock to Sister Ave, who could not accept it at first, despited what had happened to her. But Dr. Gannon responded, “You’re wearing yourself out. When you learn that life isn’t fair…you will learn to weave compassion around it.”
That revelation changed Sister Ave and laid the foundation for her to deal with the complex PTSD she suffered after her car was hit by a runaway train in 2004.
She realized that when bad things happened to her or to her loved ones, feelings of anger could arise and become all-consuming. But accepting life’s unfairness allowed Sister Ave to ask, “How can I help someone, or myself, to get up in a better way? Because sometimes people get up, and they’re saying, ‘Let’s be angry.’ That is not going to help the situation or our world community…You can implode in yourself about your sorrow or your hurts…But if you can look out and realize, ‘How could I use them? How could I be [a help] for someone else,’ so that you see your struggle not in a negative way, but maybe it also has a grace in it? So, there’s a balance to it. I’m not naive. Some things are a great struggle to get through…[But] we have to get up, and we have to look at life in more positive, life-giving ways.”
This perspective led Sister Ave to contemplate the words “sew” and “sow” and their spiritual subtext. We can sew threads that bring people together, and sow seeds that produce good fruit. “What do we put into our soil of life,” she reflected, “so not only that it blooms for us, but it also blooms for other people, like with charity and hope and forgiveness and understanding?”
As an example, Sister Ave recalled speaking at a Compassionate Friends meeting, which brings together people who have endured the tragedy of losing a child: “As I looked out at them, I realized that these people, they’re helping each other, they’re carrying each other. And there’s joy there, too. The joy of befriending someone in their sorrow. [It’s] not saying, ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’ll go away in time.’ No, no, no. There are many sorrows we’ll carry with us for the rest of life. But how do we learn to carry them? Maybe that’s where we start to weave. Like a sewer, we become a mender.”
Another incident occurred just a few weeks ago when Sister Ave was taking part in a program that offers support to domestic violence victims. She arrived at the meeting site and saw a mother and her young son sitting together on a bench, “huddled and crying.” The boy joyfully welcomed Sister Ave and invited her to sit between them and hold their hands.
She recalled, “As I held their hand, they were holding mine so tight on either side, and the boy said, ‘Thank you for coming to be with us’…About an hour later, somebody picked them up, and I had things for them. The boy says, ‘Sister A, we’ll never forget you.’ And the mother looked, and she said, ‘I wish we didn’t have to do this, but we do,’ leaving where it’s violent for them. So I sat there for a little while, and I put my hand over my heart…To this day, I can feel their hands holding me, but I also feel that they were the God of love for me that day, and I was the God of love for them. [It] goes both ways.”
Sister Ave also finds God’s love in two of her favorite mystic saints: Therese of Lisieux and Catherine of Siena. She said, “I like…the Little Way, whatever we can do in life is good. You don’t have to judge yourself against anybody else or whatever standard there is in life. God’s standard is: wherever you are, God is. Wherever you are, love is. And Catherine of Siena was always being bold, knocking on the doors, and saying, ‘Hey, let me in with God’s love.’ So, I hope I kind of do that in some way. Let me in with God’s love.”
A good friend in Sister Ave’s life is James Palmaro, a poet who lost his sight at age 27. Now in his 60s, James had some difficulty coming to terms with his blindness initially, but his faith helped him navigate that difficult journey. He even tells Sister Ave, “I see in a better way now.”
James always contributes a few poems to Sister Ave’s books, and in “Sewing ~ ~ Sowing Good Deeds with Joy and Hope,” he wrote one called, “The Seed of Joy.” It sums up Sister Ave’s message very well:
“There is a seed that is not made of matter
It isn’t material
In essence, it is ethereal
It is the seed of joy.
“When it is grown in the fertile grounds of gratitude
Blessed by the water of empathy and kindness
Nurtured by the sunlight of compassion
It will flourish and fashion a fruit that will nourish the soul
Quench the thirst and satisfy the hunger for connection
“It will make you feel whole and set you free
To be and become what you are meant to be
Allow you to cope
Help you to heal, hope
Search for truth, seek beauty
And then you can go on to grace the garden of humanity
With seeds of your own joy.”
(To listen to my full interview with Sister Ave Clark, click on the podcast link):
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