"Let nothing disturb you."
Could anything sound more exotic today? This opening line comes from a 16th-century prayer by the Carmelite reformer St. Teresa of Avila. She carried it in the breviary she used for daily prayer. It also captures the quiet steadiness of Martha Kunesh, who entered a Dominican convent just before the opening of the Second Vatican Council. She took the religious name Sister Teresa Avila. She eventually returned to her birth name, but she never lost the contemplative spirit of her first patron.
Sister Martha died quietly in early November. Thanksgiving was so much a part of her that I don't remember her ever taking anything for granted.
"She was born on the feast of the Epiphany, that bright, beautiful event where Christ is revealed to the entire world," her dearest friend, Sister Christine Cosgrove, said at Sister Martha's funeral at St. Vincent Ferrer in NYC. I met the two sisters in 1990, when they were the principal and vice principal of my high school, Dominican Academy.
Sister Martha lived out the "law of the gift," as St. John Paul II would put it. She was blessed with a loving family, good friends, a solid faith in God and almost too many talents for one person. When I was in high school, she made her own clothes. You'd never have guessed it. She also sang like a lark. More than one Dominican Academy teacher asked her to sing "Ave Maria" at her wedding.
I was blessed to know Sister Martha as a young person and as an adult, and at both stages of my life she had plenty of reasons to give up on me. And yet she never gave me the slightest hint that giving up was an option. When I was a teenager, she spent summer days coaching my math-deficient brain toward a miracle: passing the New York State Regents exam. And she did it without ever making me feel dumb. She treated me like someone made in God's image. That's how she treated everyone.
Sister Martha died peacefully after a final bout with cancer. She never complained. And I have no idea if she knew some of my classmates called her "the Church Lady," after Dana Carvey's character on "Saturday Night Live," but I can only imagine her smiling if she did. Even when she wanted better for us (classier entertainment, for instance), there was her smile. It was a reflection of God's love. And the last time my class had a milestone reunion, she and Sister Christine were there with us — because there would have been no us without them.
At the funeral, Sister Christine told us that a St. Vincent Ferrer senior had just brought her sunflowers on behalf of some of the girls. Sunflowers, the student said, signify friendship. Sister Martha and Sister Christine demonstrated what Christian friendship means.
Their friendship took courage in 2009. When their longtime congregation, the Dominican Sisters of St. Mary of the Springs, merged with several others, Sister Martha and Sister Christine joined a small group of sisters in establishing a new community. With the help of a few good brothers, chief among them William E. Lori, then bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut, they founded the Dominican Sisters of Our Lady of the Springs. Sister Martha made her perpetual profession in the new congregation. The sisters also took up the veil, which had fallen out of use in their former community after the Second Vatican Council. Some of the sisters had never worn one, even in their early formation.
May she rest in peace with the God she loved so much and to whom she gave her life in thanksgiving.
Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review magazine and author of the new book "A Year With the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living." She is also chair of Cardinal Dolans pro-life commission in New York and is on the board of the University of Mary. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.