IT IS 9 A.M. on a recent Thursday, and seven frail workers file into a chilly, fluorescent-lit room to begin their daily work.
Until noon, they will mix batter, work with a scalding- hot bread iron, or sit for hours on end, silently counting hundreds of tiny baked products with aging hands, depositing them in decades-old shoe boxes.
The women will work without a break. Most are in their late 70s, some in their 80s.
They aren’t paid a salary, and they are rarely ever seen in public.
Yet they smile as they scuttle around the outdated room crowded with old wooden school desks that serve as work tables, and push-pedal baking equipment that hasn’t been updated since the 1950s.
They are doing God’s work.
For decades, these same seven Poor Clare sisters, cloistered in the hushed grounds of the Monastery of Saint Clare near Langhorne, Bucks County, have been working side by side to make the tens of thousands of communion wafers used each year by churches, hospitals and nursing homes up and down the East Coast – and around the country.
The Franciscan order sisters don aprons over their beige habits five days a week to bake, a labor of love that earns not even a quarter of the money they need to live, eat and maintain the monastery. They depend on additional donations from the public to make ends meet.
The sisters have learned to talk about "clients," "accounts" and "rush deliveries." They know what time the UPS man comes every day. They track their inventory by computer. Their screen saver? It’s more of a screen Savior: Christ’s portrait. [Source]
10 comments
“Their screen saver? It’s more of a screen Savior: Christ’s portrait”
Sounds like something you’d come up with, Jeff.
I hate it when the press refers to “communion wafers.” Reminds me of the “Nilla Vanilla Wafers” I gorged myself upon in childhood, recklessly shoving them in my mouth, crumbs flying capriciously, so I could be like Cookie Monster. (Now I hear they have him eating vegetables. I just can’t imagine my five-year old self wanting to imitate THAT Cookie Monster!)
Now that’s a NUN!!! It’s nice to see that they all haven’t gone the way of rainbow sashes, feathers and peace pipes, or mazes, and gay pride parades.
What a great post! It shows what faith, love and humility can do along with a good cup of sheer pluck. The next time that I see Sister White Eagle’s Tail Feathers, OP, banging on a drum to the four winds, I will remember this act of grace.
Really puts a foot in your mouth when you start complaining about work lol.
when my father-in-law was growing up in philadelphia, as a special honor he’d be chosen to go to langhorne to pick up the *communion wafers* (for lack of a better term?) for his parish for the week.
to this day, he considers it as one of his greatest pleasures.
Don’t you just want to give them a hug? Thanks, Jeff.
Something exceptionally beautiful about a nun in a habit.
Amen, Cathy…..
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