COMMUNITY PROFILES
By DIDIER DIELS Special to the Daily Press
Forced to give up teaching due to multiple sclerosis, Sister Maureen Craig of Saint John’s Health Center has not let her own medical condition prevent her from spreading cheer among patients and employees, or rob her of her sense of humor.
Her disease and its degenerative effects on her central nervous system have led Sister Maureen to take quite a few spills.
“I’m the poster girl for bruised nuns,” she joked, grinning from beneath the bruises on her face. “This nurse gave me some coverall makeup, so if I smile too hard this side of my face will crack off.”
Born in 1933 in Little Rock, Ark., as one of 10 children to a southern mother and an Irish immigrant father, Sister Maureen moved to Tulsa, Okla., at age 6 and entered the convent for the Sisters of Charity at 19.
Determined to help her fellow citizens and instilled with a love of literature, she taught English for decades before accepting an offer from Sister Marie Madeleine to come write a history of Saint John’s for the institution’s 50th anniversary.
Last week, Sister Maureen sat down with the Daily Press to discuss her work at the hospital, teaching in the Midwest, politics and growing up Catholic in a segregated America.
What do you do at Saint John’s? “I enjoy what I do here. I write poetry, a lot of poetry, and I write for my religious community, and I write for stuff here at the hospital, the hospital magazine, and I visit patients, and I visit employees. It’s almost like constantly running for office. I see if people are happy, and try to get people to realize the importance of the mission of the hospital and what we are about. I love doing it.”
What does Saint John’s mission mean to you?
“There’s a story from the second World War. I’m not sure if it’s true, but I always loved it. Some soldiers were going to an Italian town that had been terribly bombed, and they saw a statue of our Lord. The arms were broken off, and one of the soldiers stuck a note at the bottom of the statue that said, ‘Now, I have no hands but yours.’
“We have to be God’s hands. We have to revere each person as someone special, created by God and loved by God. Each person has the spark of the divine in them, and we have to find it. Now, it can be pretty well hidden some time. We used to have this old nun that said, ‘God is a rascal, and he loves to hide.’ A lot of life is playing hide and seek, looking for the good in the other person.
“I don’t have a medical background. I have some medical knowledge because I’ve been ill for years with multiple sclerosis, but there are universal truths that affect everybody. Everybody wants to feel valued. Everybody wants to feel that someone cares about them personally, and that someone will be there to help them and defend them. We have to be that for them.
“And I like meeting people. It’s fascinating all the people we have here. We have employees from so many different cultures, and you learn all kinds of things about the different cultures. If a client comes in and can only speak one language, we can find an employee to speak with them.
“One day there was this little man in the hall, and he gave me a sheet of paper that had a name on it. I looked up the name and found out what room he was in, but I could tell while I was talking to him that he hadn’t the foggiest idea what I was saying. I thought he was Hispanic, so I grabbed a Hispanic employee. He turned and said, ‘It’s not Spanish, but I think I know someone who can help.’ He called one of the units, and this man came who could speak Portuguese. He spoke to the man, and the man just wept. He was so relieved to have someone talk to him in his language.”
As a writer and avid reader, how did your interest in English begin?
“My mother did not believe in school. She thought school dulled your mind, but she believed madly in education. My parents would have these contests, poetry contests and writing contests. You would have a 6-year-old prize. You had an 8-year-old prize, a 9-year-old prize, and I didn’t realize ’til I was an adult—shows you I was a slow learner—that you were the only contestant. When we wrote our poems and submitted them, our mother typed them up on pretty paper, and my father hung them up on the wall—we had quite a good art collection—with the paintings. We just thought we were the cat’s meow.
“My first poem was, ‘Cat’s have kittens. Gloves have mittens,’ which shows a strange view of human, or really inanimate, sexuality.”
You had art contests as well? “We did have art contests, which I was just terrible at. I would still get a prize, but I looked at what some of my siblings were doing, and I could tell I wasn’t very good. My younger brother, Frank, would paint these elaborate pictures of the Civil War. He just loved the Civil War.
“I mean, when we were kids in Arkansas, people talked about the Civil War like it happened last Wednesday. The South had a long time getting over the Civil War, and you kind of grew up thinking it was fought down in the next neighborhood.”
What was it like growing up with nine siblings?
“You had these moments wanting to be an only child. My best friend was an only child, and I could never figure out why she wanted to come play at our house when we were kids. I had five brothers, whom I cheerfully loathed, and I always wanted to go to her house, because no one ever messed with her things. Everything was always neat and orderly. But it was a happy childhood. You grew up in a mob scene. You always had someone to play with or fight with or plot with.
“We lived in a neighborhood of big houses and jillions of kids, and it was a world where you played outside after supper. When the streetlights went on, every child automatically turned toward home cause if you didn’t you’d hear the fathers start to call the names. If our father called the whole family—‘Therese, Pan, Rosaleen, Brenda, John, Kevin, Ricky, Maureen and Frank’—you knew the world was coming to an end. One of the 10 of you would be annihilated. “We were brought up reading and writing, and we were brought up with a great deal of intellectual freedom, being allowed to challenge and being challenged when you said something. And we were made politically aware. Oh Lord, we spent presidential elections glued to the radio.”
What was your family like politically? “Democrat. We were liberal and, in some ways, ahead of our time. My father was from Northern Ireland, and he was exiled by the British, sent with the clothes on his back to Canada. He was involved in Sinn Fein, the Irish revolutionary party, so he was exiled.
“His life was to go back go Ireland and free Ireland. We’re talking about someone who used to sing, ‘God save Ireland, cry we all, we all. God save Ireland, cry we.’ Every Sunday afternoon all the Irish would gather at our house for high tea and talk about how they were going to free Ireland. Some of them were in their 70s and 80s, and we kind of thought maybe the Fitzgerald boys, as they were called, were not going to make it over to Ireland.
“Patriotism was very big, American and Irish. Some newspaper editor once wrote, ‘My country, right or wrong,’ and my father used to say if your country was wrong you had to challenge it, and I think Democrats do.
“In the South, being anti-segregation was really almost a dangerous thing. The Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in our front yard one night. I woke up my parents and was like, ‘There’s this beautiful cross in the front yard. It’s got fire on it.’ My mother was like, ‘Oh, my God,’ and ran to make sure all the doors and windows were locked.
“The neighbors did not like that mother and daddy treated their servants so well. We were Catholic, and people didn’t like Catholics. There was this sort of polite bigotry.”
Well, cross burning doesn’t seem that polite. How did it come to that?
“We had servants, and my mother gave them two days off a week, and she paid higher wages than the other families, and that was it. My mother used to say, ‘Don’t think it’s all because we’re Catholic and because of the servants. You children are something worth burning a cross for some days.’ Well, we were wild.
“Neighborhoods had what they call covenants, and when you bought a house you were to sign the covenant that said you would not allow Jews or negroes or any other racial group in your home and that you would not sell your house or rent to any of those groups. My father would-n’t sign the covenant, but he was prominent enough they had to sell to him any- PROFILES, from page 6 Sister Maureen Craig Born: August 15, 1933, in Little Rock, Ark. Education: English major and history minor from the University of Saint Mary in Leavenworth, Kan. Hobbies: Reading and jigsaw puzzles. Salary: Donated services to the hospital. Family: Older siblings Bill, Therese, Pan, Rosaleen, Brenda, John, Kevin and Ricky; younger brother, Frank. Aspirations: “Staying around and doing what I do as long as I’m physically able.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 31, 2005. Read the original PDF.