As we celebrate Vocations Awareness Week this January, we look inside the lives of two Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia and learn how they were called to follow Francis.
Sister Elaine Thaden, director of St. Joseph Family Center in Spokane, Washington, and Sister Marie Monica Borden, intake therapist, said following Francis is more practice and approach than doctrine.
There are more than 600 Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia and “probably 600 ways to live the spirit of St. Francis and Clare,” said Sister Marie Monica, who grew up in the Yakima Valley and first met Franciscan sisters during high school studies in Pendleton. They inspired her to commit her life to work in the church.
“We are Gospel driven, but individuals seeking to follow what Jesus did by living a cycle of prayer and intimacy with God”. That drives us “to justice and caring for the poor, especially women and children,” she said.
That relationship permeates her relationship with other sisters living in community and with people she served as a teacher and school administrator in Oregon, Washington, California, and Wyoming. 
From 1959 to 1986, she was involved in education ministry as a teacher and a principal. She earned two Master's degrees—in 1972 from the Universityof Oregon and in 1981 from the University of San Francisco. Sister Monica began vocation ministry in 1986, serving as the congregation's Novice Director in Puerto Rico from 1990 to 1996 and as Formation Director from 1996 to 2002. Three years ago she began her volunteer ministry at St. Joseph, where she is the first to listen to clients' stories to match them with the most suitable therapist.
Sister Elaine, who has been director at St. Joseph Family Center for three years, was drawn by the sense of sisterhood and Francis’ charism—his understanding of “the relationship of all of creation and of all people of all nations as brothers and sisters.”
For her, life as a Franciscan sister is about radical living of Gospe life—committed to the poorest of the poor, the most marginalized people of society, and committed to establishing peace and justice in ministries in the United States, Caribbean, Central America, Europe, and Africa.
“St. Francis' peace prayer is a favorite. It expresses how we balance contemplative living and active service,” said Sister Elaine. She was principal at St. Charles’ Elementary School and at All Saints Middle School and worked at St. Anne’s Infants and Maternity Home in Spokane in the 1970s, before she spent nine years doing spiritual direction and formation for laity, religious, and priests in Zambia. She was also ineducation ministry for twenty-five years in California and Oregon.
In a Tacoma high school taught by Franciscans, Sister Elaine was impressed and attracted by the community and simplicity of the young sisters who taught her.
From first grade at a Benedictine grade school, she knew she wanted to be a sister. So she entered the novitiate out of high school and completed college studies in Marylhurst, a Holy Names college near Portland.
At St. Joseph Family Center, she oversees a staff of twenty-two who provide holistic services in counseling, spirituality, and body therapies. Individual, family, and child counseling are growing. About 53 percent of clients are on the sliding scale or fee assistance.
Recent cuts in Medicaid are resulting in more referrals of people who would have nowhere else to go, Sister Elaine said.
St. Joseph Center has 250 to 300 monthly client visits, more than 3,000 ayear. Counselors see thirty-eight new clients a month, a 15 percent increase in recent months. So they will add more staff and services.
People coming are depressed, anxious, facing the run of mental health issues, family issues, and abuse.
“Helping them heal strengthens the whole community,” Sister Elaine said.
Sister Marie Monica added that counseling strengthens people for their daily journeys so they are healthier and better able to deal with injustices they face.
“We help people heal themselves. We do not heal them,” she clarified.
Both value living in community, sharing all in common, and having a daily schedule with time for community and personal prayer.
The five sisters living at St. Joseph’s dine together every evening. Often dinner conversations go on and on into the evening.
“We live a cycle of prayer and intimacy with God but need to be in relationship,” said Sister Marie Monica. “My prayer time is less about words and more about quiet, listening, being in the presence of God. I believe that: ‘Bidden or not bidden, God is present.’
“Even when I am not thinking of God, I know God is present. God knows me in prayer and in my life doing God’s work. Without human foibles and limitations, we can move forward because there is goodness in everyone, even in the worst of us,” Sister Marie Monica affirmed.
Sister Elaine summed up her understanding of Franciscan Spirituality, saying: “God is goodness and everything is gift. Our ministry here conveys that understanding through the way we are, the way we interact as staff, and the way we treat people who come to us.
“Those who come enrich us as we enrich them. We receive in giving,” she said. “All people we serve are gifts to us as we are to be gift to them. We are to give respect, whether to men in anger or someone depressed. Each person is still a gift.”
Although the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia sponsor the center and have worked there for 115 years, staff includes Sufi, Jewish, Catholic, and other Christians.
“So clients of all belief systems are comfortable about our services as we seek to make them whole,” she said, “healing body, mind, emotion and spirit.”
Sister Elaine described other local ministries in which Sisters of St. Francis have been partners:
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Transitional Programs for Women, which began as Miryam’s House of Transition in 1986, a long-term residential program for women seeking to recover from abuse, addiction, and displacement, includes a women’s drop-in center and a transitional home. The Franciscans are cosponsors with the Dominican Sisters of Spokane, the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, and the Sisters of Providence.
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In the 1970s, Sister Florence Leon, OSF, established Kairos House of Prayer on twenty-seven acres of wooded land at 1714 W. Stearns Road. It is a contemplative community with a rhythm of prayer, work, and study, offering a place for centering meditation, relaxation, Buddhist meditation, breathing techniques, yoga, and other forms of meditation.
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In 1951, the order opened St. Charles Parish School and had sisters there through the 1980s.
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Seven administrators of the Catholic Charities’ St. Ann’s Children’s Home—from its beginning to 1943 to 1983—were Sisters of St. Francis. It first provided daycare for children whose mothers worked in defense plants. Then it sheltered both orphans awaiting adoption and unwed pregnant women. In 1994, services evolved to providing childcare and early childhood education.
Permission to reprint by Mary Stamp, Editor, The Fig Tree
