Catherine Conlon: ‘It was Sr Stan’s writing that really touched my heart’

Campaigner and advocate Sr Stanislaus Kennedy showed us how to live – with courage, empathy, a spiritual core and iron will.

Sr Stanislaus Kennedy, or Sr Stan, died this week at the age of 86, leaving behind a legacy of social service programmes that have benefited thousands of needy people throughout Ireland and Europe.

Through her spiritual writings, she guided thousands more through deeply challenging times. Her contribution to society was profound.

An Irish Sister of Charity, listed among her achievements was becoming the first chair of the Combat Poverty Agency in the 1970s. Minister for Social Welfare, Charles Haughey, disagreed with Sr Stan about the need for such an agency, suggesting we shouldn’t be trying to change systems.

“He told me I was one of the most intransigent women he had ever met,” Sr Stan said in June of last year.

In 1985, she founded Focus Point – the charity still running today as Focus Ireland. Two decades later, she responded to the number of new arrivals to the country, often overwhelmed and in need of services by setting up The Immigrant Council of Ireland.

At its opening, she said of these new arrivals: “They’re a huge benefit to our society, and have the potential to be huge of benefit, not only economically, but socially and culturally as well.”

The Sanctuary, located on Stanhope Street in Dublin, was founded in 1998 by the indomitable Sr Stan and her long-time friend Síle Wall. At its heart, it is a meditation centre in North Inner City Dublin dedicated to mindfulness, based on the pillars of meditation, spirituality, creativity and community. It receives no State support and has a no turn away policy that ensures access to services for those facing financial difficulties, illness, unemployment, mental health challenges, addiction, homelessness, or disability.

One regular attendee described it as “the well I return to again and again to replenish my soul”.

President Michael D Higgins led the tributes to Sr Stan following news of her death, describing her as a “woman of immense courage and vision”, and a “fearless advocate for human rights and equality”.

But tackling homelessness was the constant throughout the last four decades of her life. Just two years ago, she was still campaigning, with the launch of 16 new Focus Ireland homes from previously derelict buildings on Grand Parade in Cork, saying that homelessness was not inevitable but the result of choices made.

“The deepening crisis is awful to see, and it makes me angry,” Sr Stan said. “You must get angry as it gives you the energy to do something. There is a saying that anger has two daughters, and they are courage and hope. When you become angry, it gives you courage to act and this brings hope.”

But it was her writings that really touched my heart.

In 2020, I compiled a book Sonas; Celtic Thoughts on Happiness, with contributions from well-known Irish people on what happiness means to them.

Sr Stan sent me a piece from her book Stillness Through My Prayers, that she had written in 2009, that she called “Mystery”. It included the following lines.

“God of my heart, create in me an awareness of the impermanence, transitoriness and limitations of the material world.

“Create in me an awareness of the permanence, endurance, timeliness of what is spiritual, eternal.”

It ended with the line “The more I bless, the more I am blessed.”

But it was her book Gardening the Soul, A spiritual daybook through the seasons, that to me summed up Sr Stan’s unique qualities of empathy, innovative vision, iron-clad courage and steely determination to meet challenges and opportunities, head on.

At one point, she talked about the unspeakable suffering that some people undergo as they are brutalised by society.

“People who have suffered greatly have much to teach us. Every day in our lives when we meet people who are rejected by society - homeless people, prisoners, people in mental hospitals, people who are depressed, people who are abandoned – we are meeting beautiful people, if only we can see beyond their suffering.”

In her entry on Christmas Day, she talked about home.

“Home is the place where we discover who we are, where we are coming from and where we are going to. It is where we are helped to establish our own identity. It is where we learnt to love and be loved. It is where our needs of mind, body and spirit are first recognised and met.”

A home is the rock on which everything else hangs as we forge through life. Without it, we are swinging in the wind.

Sr Stan voiced at every opportunity how everyone, no matter what colour or creed or income, deserved that rock to call home.

In Gardening the Soul, she described how, growing up as a child, she spent long hours trying to cross a river near her home, stepping from one rock to another.

“When I was perched on a rock I felt safe, but the satisfaction of safety soon wore off and I sought the challenge of stepping on the next rock. That moment between two rocks was always scary, but it was that insecure, challenging, scary moment that made the whole endeavour so thrilling.”

Childhood seeds that grew into a lifetime of risk-taking and challenging the safe harbour of the status quo. How many of us sink back to safety rather than taking that terrifying leap into the unknown?

• Dr Catherine Conlon is a public health doctor in Cork