God Is With Me in the Faithfulness - Sister Louise Dumont
Sisters Louise DuMont, Mary Powers and Eileen Keane, 1968
by Sister Susan Dewitt, CSJP
At 91, Sister Louise DuMont is, as she always has been, quiet, peaceful, unassuming and reflective. She is also, as she has always been, a woman of wisdom and deep insight. Louise doesn’t speak often in meetings, but when she does speak everyone quiets down to listen.
Twenty-one years ago, in 1994, everyone quieted down when Louise stood up in a painful and contentious meeting of sisters in the Archdiocese of Seattle with Archbishop Thomas Murphy. This meeting was in preparation for the Bishops’ Synod on Religious Life, which was not going to hear many of the voices or perspectives of religious women (a few religious women and men were auditors).
Louise stood up to address the gathering, holding her handwritten words because, as she said, “I don’t want to get carried away with emotion nor do I want to leave anything out.” She said, “We know the history of the struggle that women had as they strove to move out of the cloister into the streets, the Spirit of God was calling to new ways of being Church, of serving God’s people, and the Church, over years, continued to try to find ways to keep the women locked up . . . I look to the upcoming Synod on Religious Life with much apprehension … [but] somehow I am confident that the Spirit is at work, She always is and will not die.”
Louise has carried that prophetic sense of religious life through times of great and turbulent change. She was the first sister to be elected (rather than appointed) Province Leader in 1968, and the first Sister to have an official photograph in street clothes. The drama of that change is visible in a succession of leadership photographs at St. Mary-on-the-Lake, Bellevue, Washington.
The more essential meaning of the change takes shape from Louise DuMont’s commitment to the responsibility of each Sister for her own life. When she became a Sister in 1944, everything in the life of a religious was controlled: she remembers a young sister asking, “Can the Provincial even tell me I need to have a dresser scarf on my dresser?” In those days, the answer would have been “Yes.”
Louise, who was challenged by being put in charge of the Juniorate (sisters who had made their first profession and were completing schooling or training for their ministries) had to chart her own path in this new responsibility. “I didn’t know what I was doing or what I was supposed to do. But somehow I found that it was God’s work.” As she did that work with God, she asked the young sisters to take charge of their own lives, silencing the community’s morning bell at St. Mary’s and telling the juniors to set their own alarms.
As the first elected Provincial, she chose to both accept and share the responsibility, developing the first leadership teams with Sisters Joan Leonard, Mary Powers, and Eileen Keane. There were difficult times. Louise recalls one Chapter meeting when a Sister claimed that the community had lost all sense of obedience. Louise got so angry that she left and went to her room with a raging headache. But, characteristically, she took responsibility, went back and addressed the situation, “and I think there was peace from that.”
Louise’s deep peacefulness is grounded in her life of prayer, though she makes little of that daily faithfulness. “I have never been a great pray-er, but I was faithful throughout the years to a time of prayer each day, and that has been my source of hope, my source of peace. I never had any visions or any great moments of light. I have continued to feel that God is with me in the faithfulness.”
Now in her nineties, Sister Louise DuMont continues that life of faithfulness, with a few questions. “In recent months, I have been thinking more and more about death. I’m trying to figure out what God still wants of me. I don’t have a fear of death, yet I find myself wondering what death is all about, and what’son the other side of death.”
That honesty and fearlessness, along with a lively sense of joy and hospitality, characterizes Louise DuMont’s whole life, a life rooted in God. “I’m always amazed at being seen as a person with wisdom,” she says. “I have to say that for me there have been hard moments, but I have never felt I was abandoned by God or people. Life has been good.”
This article by Sister Susan Dewitt, CSJP originally appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of Living Peace.