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Susan Hendricks has been a member of the Medaille Associate Community in Newcastle since its inception in 1987. She has lived in the Newcastle area since 1984 with her husband, Vince and a menagerie of cows, cats and dogs! Their son, Jonathon, aged 30, is a television reporter with CTV in Winnipeg. Susan is a member of St. Francis of Assisi Parish in Newcastle where she is a reader at Saturday evening mass. In the past, she has been a member of the Parish Folk Choir, her Parish Council and President of the C.W.L. She counts Ottawa, where she spent her teenage years, as "home" but lived overseas in Scotland, Geneva and Vienna for many of her childhood and teenage years. These cross-cultural experiences had a life-long impact on Susan’s appreciation of the unity of all peoples in our world. A former Presbyterian who converted to Catholicism upon marriage to her South American husband, Vince, Susan has a firm belief in the importance of living our spirituality within each life encounter. Susan became involved with the Sisters of St. Joseph when she began attending retreats and workshops at the Peterborough Congregation’s retreat center in Cobourg, ON. Her thirst for a deeper connection with God and the universal mysteries of life coincided with an invitation to join the newly forming Medaille Community. The congregation’s charism of unity and reconciliation seemed to call Susan "home" to herself and she willingly made her commitment as a csja within the first year of her association with the Congregation. A turning point in Susan’s life came on Easter Sunday, 1991 when she experienced the death of Kristina, her 15-year old daughter. This incomprehensible loss on such a significant day in the Christian community initiated a time of intense spiritual confusion as she struggled with the nature of God and her fractured sense of self and family. Finding it too difficult to continue with her Associate commitment, she eventually left the Medaille community for several years. She continued searching and eventually, through identifying with the mysteries of the cross, Susan came to know in a deeply felt way Christ’s presence among us. As she emerged on the other side of pain and looked back on her personal experience of unity and reconciliation, Susan realized she could not leave, nor had she ever actually left the Associate community in a spiritual way, because the charism and mission of the Sisters of St. Joseph is a part of WHO SHE IS, in her God-created Self. She was welcomed back into her community with loving and open arms, in keeping with our community’s charism of active and inclusive love. Since then, Susan has become involved in grief and bereavement ministry to bereaved parents through the self-help organization, Bereaved Families of Ontario. She has also completed a degree in counseling psychology and recently established a private grief counselling practice. For the past several years, she has facilitated retreats for bereaved mothers at the Villa St. Joseph in Cobourg, where her association with the congregation first began. This ministry has given her a way to live her mission of active and inclusive love by bringing hope, unity and reconciliation to the dear neighbour who like herself, may not be able to feel God’s love in the midst of pain. It feels good, she says, to have come "full circle" into the oneness of life. Susan’s lived experience of the possibilities of growth and life in and through loss and change also provide her with insight and focus into the issues facing our congregation and community today. With her daughter’s memory in her heart, she humbly and tearfully accepted her Associate Community’s nomination as Associate Co-Director in the Fall of 2002. |
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