Mechernich – I might have become a happy wife and mother as well,” said Elisabeth Meurer (84). However, she found the meaning of her life and her happiness as Sister Helene in the Ordo Communionis in Christo. Already at her first encounter with the foundress Mother Marie Therese in Mechernich the then 38 young religious from the Lower Rhine Region knew: “That’s it!”
She had previously already joined the congregation of the „Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ at the age of 21
the age of majority at that time.
This order for women was commonly called “Dernbach Sisters” because of the Motherhouse location in the Westerwald region. Dressed in the habit of this congregation Sr. Helene attended Mother Marie Therese’s foundation of a community for sisters and priests.
„I was fascinated by the spirituality and charism of Mother Marie Therese which you could really feel,” remembers Sister Helene in the interview. An acquainted who was also a religious and the aunt of the parish housekeeper in Floisdorf gave her Mother Marie Therese's first of what would later be 26 books to read: “The Road to Golgotha”. She was thrilled by this spirituality. “You can't do it with your mind, it's a matter of heart and soul...”
„A thousand years like one day“
Already as a little girl, she had been searching for “inner life”, a spiritualization of her earthly existence. It was the search for God and his other truth that the “Monk of Heisterbach” (place near Königswinter) once found on a walk through the “Siebengebirge” (seven mountains) when he reflected on the Bible verse, that with God a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day. When the monk returned from the forest to the monastery hours later - as he believed - no one he had known was still alive there, so many years had actually passed in the meantime...
„Our teacher in primary school was a devout lady. The story of the “Monk of Heisterbach” that she told us appealed to me so much that from then on, I longed for an inner life with God.” Every time she passed the church in Broich on her way to school or back home, she would kneel in front of the miraculous image of grace “Mary, our help”.
Elisabeth Meurer worked as a darnwoman in one of the many clothes factories of Mönchengladbach at that time and then became an assistant nurse for the Red Cross. “I spent every free minute in the Rheindahlen hospital run by the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ.” It seemed strange to those who knew her, but Helene Meurer, her mother (who had 14 children altogether) just joked: “I’d rather see Elisabeth there than see her run after the boys too much.”
When Elisabeth was 21 and clothed by the “Dernbach Sisters”, she took the religious name Helene, the name of her mother who was just as proud as her father Gerhard, a road construction worker, and her 13 siblings. “Five are still alive, I was number 13, Josef number 14.” Hermann Meurer, the twelfth, now lives in the same Communio senior citizens’ care facility, “Haus Effata”, as his sister.
„Wait till you turn 21“
„Already during my schooltime I wished for entering a convent and lead a contemplative life,” reports Sr. Helene: “However, respecting my mother’s wish I joined the convent only after I turned 21.” It was not because her parents might have forbidden her to enter a convent. “However, everyone should understand, that it was my very own decision to become a religious sister and that I did it out of my own free will.”
The „Poor Handmaid“ from the parish area of nine villages near Mönchengladbach not just became a religious sister, but also a qualified nurse and later the nursing care manager in the long-term care facility and the hospice of the Communio in Christo in Mechernich.
“It was my passion, and, despite all the work I found my happiness in the nursing care.
Often the sisters would gossip after the prayer times in the chapel: “As soon as Helene is in the pew, she falls asleep from exhaustion…”
The decisive moment of changing from the “Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ” to the Ordo Communionis in Christo, which was not unproblematic, were her first personal encounter with Mother Marie Therese and the discovery of her spirituality of encountering God and loving one’s neighbor in the books “Der Weg nach Golgota” (The road to Golgotha) and “Die Frucht der Liebe” (The fruit of love).
Sister Helene: „My first encounter with Mother Marie Therese was on 1 September 1978. I had no idea of what expected me. It was the day of the foundation of the community of priests and sisters in the parish church of Holzheim. I was searching for a contemplative life. I listened attentively when Mother Marie Therese said the founding words.”
After saying the founding words for the community of priests she said the following text: “At the same time, I fulfill the mission of founding a community of sisters to support the community of priests through a contemplative life of atonement for the offenses done to You.”
Helene: „These words on the foundation of the community of sisters hit right into my heart knowing for sure: “This is exactly what I was looking for!” I was a seeker, and this struck me like something you cannot extinguish. I totally had not anticipated what would expect me on that 1 September – and all of a sudden, I encountered God in an extraordinary way.
„It was what I had been looking for all my life,” said the then 38-year-old nun who worked as a ward sister in a Frankfurt hospital. Fellow sisters and superiors made her life difficult because of her desire to join the Communio. “They tried with harshness to stop me from leaving.” Rome was involved in the process of secularization which was mental torture.
„What I got was a lot of work and happiness“
„In Frankfurt there was always a pressure on my chest, and I knew if I withdrew my decision, that pressure would have disappeared, but I would never be happy again.”
„Mother Marie Therese wanted me“, and this made Sister Helene strong.
In October 1982, 21 years after having joined the Dernbach Sisters in 1961, she entered the Communio. Sister Virginiana, also a member of the “Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ”, followed her to the Communio Motherhouse in Mechernich.
„I never regretted my decision. What I got was a whole lot of work, but I also found my happiness there,” resumes Sister Helene today: “I was already shaped by the order life and I was experienced in nursing, but what I learned at the Communio in Christo, was living closer with God.” Living together with the foundress had something of the life in the Early Christian communities as the late Communio Sister Elisabeth, née Molinari, once put it: „When we sat together with Mother Marie Therese, it was probably like Jesus being with his disciples …”
“We were sure that we loved, but with Mother Marie Therese, this love for our neighbor, in which she encountered God, had a completely different dimension,” said Sister Helene. She asked the Deputy Superior General, Permanent Deacon and editor Manfred Lang to do this interview, because she wanted to report on her spiritual life and provide things for a fulfilled life in the Communio to those who are interested in a year and a half postulancy and novitiate before taking their vows and entering the Ordo Communionis in Christo.
„One does not enter a convent or a spiritual community, you are drawn into it”: A spiritual life is not something that you decide for and then put into practice, it is rather a “process”. It is like a desire. You need to open to such development with trust in God, “you need to live in accordance with the will of God, even if suffering and disease should occur”.
„I gave up my selfishness“
Sister Helene found her happiness and her fulfilment not in having “more”, but in “less”: “I learned to leave everything behind and to give up my selfishness. „It is hard to believe that the elderly nun blessed with humble wisdom also had to let got of pride and arrogance. “You have to be ready for change and seek prayer in your very personal way.” She would certainly pray the obligatory liturgy of the hour several times a day, but her “personal aspirations” which she sent to God several times a day, were even more intense.
The rosary was „a meditative prayer where the thoughts wander to people and situations but then always find their way back to the words that I pray”. It was different from what was commonly called “devout”. Sister Helene calls the rosary her “guideline“, and you can guess that this prayer is the contemplative guideline for her.
Sister Helene’s book recommendation for prospective members and candidates for joining the Ordo Communionis in Christo is “The Road to Golgotha”, “The fruit of love” and Mother Marie Therese’s last book “I implore you, o holy Church” which the first Superior General Karl-Heinz Haus described as the spiritual heritage of the foundress and a summary of the founding will, which ultimately did not come from the will of a woman, but from the Holy Spirit.
„God starts praying in me then“
„I might have become a happy wife and mother as well, that’s for sure. How did I eventually find out, whether the convent was my fulfilment?” asked Sister Helene at the end of our intensive conversation to give me, herself and God the answer: “Through prayer and taking time. When I seek advice and pray, all of a sudden God prays in me.”
It had been the extraordinary charism of Mother Marie Therese that had made her realize that her destiny was not in Frankfurt or Dernbach but in Mechernich. “I wanted to have a life again - and I found life in the Communio and in the community around Mother Marie Therese and the three founding fathers Father Haus, Father Robben and Father Walch. The community in this “team” as Sr. Helene explicitly points out, “has carried us …and still carries me!“ (ml)
pp/Agentur ProfiPress
