A vocation of prayer behind the walls at Henry Clay

    The Poor Clare monastery on Henry Clay Avenue is a powerhouse of prayer, so much so that the sisters who live behind the 10-foot brick walls fulfill their identity and purpose through communal and personal prayer.
    Five times a day, the Poor Clare Sisters gather in the monastery chapel to recite the Daily Office and other prayers, and they also schedule time for personal prayer and Mass. Prayer isn’t simply in the air. It is more essential than that. It is the air they breathe.
    “I’ve learned that God wants to talk to us more than we want to talk to him,” said Poor Clare Sister Rita Hickey, 72, who was 8 years old and picking up pinecones with her Uncle Marty outside a New Jersey Catholic academy for girls when she first became aware of a spiritual tug in her life.
    Sister Rita’s great aunt – Aunt Lizzie – was a Sister of St. Joseph, and little Rita accompanied Aunt Lizzie and Uncle Marty on the visit to the College of St. Elizabeth. Rita and Uncle Marty stayed outside and picked up pinecones while Aunt Lizzie visited her friend.
    “I remember standing and looking up through the pine trees and the building and thinking, ‘I’m coming back here,’” she said.
    She did, attending high school as a full-time boarder and then entering the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth after high school and becoming a teacher. After having grown up in a Carmelite parish, Sister Rita also knew a lot about St. Therese of Lisieux and always had an attraction to contemplative life.
    “I got patted on the head and people said, ‘Oh, everybody wants to run off and be ‘The Little Flower.’ You’re a good student and you’re going to be a wonderful teacher,’” Sister Rita recalled.
    Her spiritual journey was about to take a detour. She asked for an assignment in “the missions” and wound up being sent to downtown Pensacola, Fla., where she taught at St. Joseph School for African-American Catholics. This was 1963, when civil rights issues were boiling.
    There were eight nuns in the community there, and when the sports teams traveled to Alabama for games, they would ride in a van behind the school bus to make sure nothing bad happened.
    She taught her high school students how to call in to radio shows and write letters to the newspapers to advocate for important things. The kids did enough research on traffic accidents to convince city officials to turn a blinking traffic light in front of the school into a regular light.
    “They changed it back, and the kids couldn’t believe it,” Sister Rita said. “It was a real breakthrough.”
    But in the midst of winning these political battles, Sister Rita sensed her commitment to the civil rights movement was becoming “more important than being faithful to my vocation. It became the dominant thing in my life, and eventually, I just left.”
    Dispensed from her vows, she moved to Mobile, Ala., and worked at Spring Hill College.
    “I really loved living in Mobile,” she said. “I owned my own home, I had my own car,  I dated and I went to just about every Mardi Gras event.”
    But while she was beginning a master’s degree program in theology, she began to reflect once again on contemplative life. She went to confession, and to her surprise, she poured out her heart about her sorrow over not having acted on her contemplative vocation.
    “I’m too old to do anything about it,” she told the priest.
    The priest replied: “No, you’re not.”
    So, in the mid-1980s – after having given away her closetful of Mardi Gras shoes and dresses to St. Vincent de Paul employees who asked, “Would you mind if we let our wives look at these first?” – she walked into the monastery at Henry Clay.
    “They gave me the chance to come try my vocation,” Sister Rita said.
    She sees her life as simply another example of “God writing straight with crooked lines.”
    “Everybody can pray, but some people have a gift for prayer, and I feel like God has given that to me,” Sister Rita said. “Not that you have to go to a convent to pray, but I felt this was really the vocation God had given to me. I can make it the center of my life.”
    The church celebrates Vocations Awareness Week Jan. 19-23, and Sister Rita said her prayer is that more people will become aware of God’s presence in their lives. She and the other Poor Clares take shifts answering the phone from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and taking prayer requests from friends and total strangers.
    They get letters by the sack-ful. “This is really amazing to me,” she said.
     Sister Rita feels blessed.
    “I’ve been very lucky,” she said. “I was raised a Catholic and shielded from a lot of problems and difficulties which I got myself into without ever hardly realizing it. I’m very conscious of the way God gets things right.”
    For more information on the Poor Clares, call 895-2019 or go to poorclarenuns.com. Information on the Magnificat House of Discernment for Women is available at 861-6281. The archdiocesan Vocation Office can be reached at 861-6298. Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at pfinney@clarionherald.org.