Born Not to Be A Saint
By Father John Halligan, SJ
I said, "Happy seventy fifth birthday, Sister Miguel! You look exactly the same as you looked when you came in 1967 and when that article on you appeared in the Shoeshine Special in 1981." She ignored me and didn't have to repeat that my humor is not funny and doesn't deserve a counter-attack about who's looking how.
But there's a separate and very real truth in how "she looks" today the same as when she came to Quito and to the Working Boys' Center. She looked and saw and still sees the basic need for encouraging our people: little kids, teenagers, youg adults and parents, into the ways of becoming what God wants them to be. They don't need lots of information and instruction. They need a mother's kind of eye to eye insistence. They need the way she looks at them.
She knew perfectly well that that wasn't what my birthday greeting meant.
Reprinted from a 1981 Shoeshine Special
We all went to the airport a while back to see her off to the U.S.A. for retreat, rehabilitation, reform and some recreation. When we got back home to the Center, eleven year old Jose Tupiza was in bad shape, all bent around because the only mother he's ever had was to be away for a while. It is holy and good that many boys and girls in Quito have found the "madre" (Sister Miguel) as they wandered seeking a mother in place of what, in one sense or another, wasn't it. Jose happens to a physical orphan. So Miguel is his in that special way. There's no tragedy involved. She's back and he's okay along with everybody else.
I look back and remember an attic into which a BVM Sister, almost five feet tall, serious, businesslike and downright unimpressed, to my first impression, came at my request. It was 1967. I could tell, right off, that all my three years of striving for discipline, cleanliness, and overall human development had achieved an "F" in Sister's evaluation; and, as an outdated priest contemplating his modern Church, was I ever nervous that I had asked the Superior General, Mother Mary Consolatrice (Sister Helen Wright, BVM) for BVM help.
Everything changed.
It will never be the same.
Fixed her, though. We all spoke Spanish. She had to live with that, day and night and afternoon. Of course she won the language battle.
In the meantime, she did other things like varnish the floor of that old attic, clean up the kitchen, establish systems controls, set up a few thousand rules to live by for the Center's free-wheeling poor people; and, folks, the really important thing she did, while the petroleum consortium was drilling out the oil which wasn't there until the market ripened green, was dig into Quito a foundation that won't be upset, even by an earthquake.
Stability is only a word until one needs to hold on to it. Then it becomes a person like Sister Miguel.
I personally know a couple of dozen fellows who are crushing thirty years of age and have their wives and their kids and their jobs and sins and their virtues and their solid devotion to Sister Miguel, who made the difference that only a strong personality can make in others.
The Holy Spirit does strange, wild and outlandish things, such as create love out of avarice or out of resentment or out of simple, old contempt for each other. The Holy Spirit of Christ works through terrific people like Sister Miguel who sear this earth with their presence. How's that? Obvious: real love is an awful power; real love pains all within range; real love changes even people.
Most people want to be popular and not hurt others with doses of truth. To our very poor people, nothing is more acceptable than to allow them to be as they are with handouts of sympathy and no honest claims against the sin of staying miserable. Sister Miguel spends her days handing out, but seeks no escapist popularity with male or female. She has a true human-development driver's instinct for the road; and she won't veer off. Not even with the parents and old folks. She's mean to everybody. She wants a change from bad to good.
Sister Miguel is not struggling for rights of people who can struggle for their own rights, once they achieve personal dignity. She has other fights to fight and has dedicated her life to creating solidy moral values among our poor people here in Quito. She gets up at 5:30 a.m. each day and goes down about 11:00 p.m. during which time she has recently been training some hard nuts (Jorge Borja, Manuel Loachamin, and Carlos Gomez) and former shoeshine boys to replace her at Working Boys' Center Number One, since she's committed to moving out in order to go and get Working Boys' Center Number Two started in October 1981.
We all thank God that Sister Miguel came to Quito fourteen years ago to give permanent, Christian direction to the Working Boys' Center movement. It's clear already that this doesn't all end when one or another of us goes off to Heaven or if and when the physical facilities go into hock.
Anyway, Sister Mary Miguel Conway, this our poorly written tribute to a genuine human being. Gracias, Madre. Y muchos anos mas.