Jennifer Rahim

There are few real treasures that we take with us through life. One of my dearest began sometime in 1989 when I was in the throes of writing my doctoral dissertation and feeling the task was getting the better of me.

It was during this period that Sr Monique Moniquette made me an offer that would change my life forever. I was a regular visitor at the Chaplaincy on Carmody Road, finding in the solitude there a nurturing space to re-gather mind and spirit before returning to the world of books.

I was also asking deep questions about my future. That haunting question put to Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel: “What must I do?” (Mt 19:16) had taken on greater significance in my own life. After a series of talks with Sr Monique, she did what I now understand to be a rather daring thing.

She invited me, a lay woman with no clear direction as to where my life was heading, my only reality being rather ill-defined promptings about wanting a deeper walk with God, to stay with the community of Dominican sisters at the Chaplaincy.

 It would allow me to live in close proximity to the St Augustine campus so that I could comfortably continue my research, as well as give me an opportunity to “see” what Dominican religious life was like. I accepted that invitation and I will be forever grateful for the welcome the sisters offered me and the important exposure I received to the life of prayer and community. That introduction would grow into an even greater gift.

While my own journey with my persistent questionings would take a long time to answer, a truly significant and transforming leg of that walk was marked by my encounter with Sr Diane Jagdeo who was part of the Chaplaincy community during the period I lived there.

Her generous sharing of her own struggle as a doctoral student and her infinite patience as she listened to my efforts to shape my own research were fundamental in helping me to bring closure to my dissertation.

But what was of even greater significance to me was the friendship we developed and the sound direction I found in her deep appreciation for the value of shared faith; her profound giftedness in illuminating the truths of Catholicism; her love for the Dominican way of life, particularly its special regard for study and the preaching of the Word of God; and what I discovered to be her most intense drive: to serve the Church beyond the parameters of the convent and institutions of learning.

This call would mean placing herself in the very centre of the ordinary lives of people as a pilgrim participator and enabler in the common human hunger for community, dignity and the fullest possible communion with God. There is so much work to do was her constant mantra.

When I arrived at the Chaplaincy, she was passionately involved in an outreach project in the parish of Gran Couva, which she initiated on the invitation of Fr Lennox Mc Phillip, the parish priest at the time.

Sr Diane Jagdeo

“Father Mac” as he was affectionately called by all, seemed to equal her passion for service. In its early stages, the St Catherine’s Centre for Integral Development, as it was called before it became the retreat centre, St Catherine’s Well, was an itinerant mission geared to offer holistic development programmes particularly for the young women of the community.

I know little of the mission’s new phase as a retreat house which undoubtedly emerged after much discernment about God’s will for the sisters’ presence in the community. However, from our last precious conversations, Diane spoke with equal enthusiasm about the orientation of the community around contemplative prayer and sharing of the Gospel, the focus on preaching and teaching of the faith to the wider community such as her beloved mission in Los-Attajos, and the nurturing of an almost Franciscan integration with the environment that grew, no doubt, from her engagement with Creation Theology.

I therefore leave that elaboration to those more intimate with the rhythm of life and vision she had for St Catherine’s Well, which seems to have evolved almost naturally from the first phase and so still remains, I believe, in living conversation with it.

Diane’s energy was always remarkable, but in relation to what was happening in Gran Couva and its neighbouring communities, it was phenomenal. This was a woman on fire with a vision.

Listening to her dreams for her work there was infectious. She had the special gift of awakening the dreamer in others and nothing got her more excited than sharing conversations about possibilities.

At her innermost being she was constructed, one might even say wired, for the work of renewal. Most of all, she believed that faith was only made real in the living of it. The dreaming was one thing, but the doing was the refining fire where convictions were tested and clarified.

I soon found myself wanting to see what was brewing in Central that had this sister so alive with hope and so creatively restless with possibility. These, let me tell you, are rare qualities in a world that is often afflicted with exhaustion or noisy with information devoid of spirit.

At that time, when I was searching for deeper meaning, Diane mirrored what it meant to be driven by faith. She literally provoked one to discover in oneself the inner spring of the life that animated and directed her life.

Even when you became frustrated or daunted by her seemingly unlimited store of energy and knack for pushing at the limits of your comfort zones, she was always, in the end, a source of challenge and hope.

A practical understanding of what Diane was striving for in Gran Couva came when I would sometimes accompany her during the itinerant stages of the Centre’s life. I soon discovered that San Coco Road, where St Catherine’s Church is located, was a-buzz with all sorts of activities that drew together a variety of people from the community and surrounding villages.

Along with her tremendous input, a small network of volunteers provided sessions in sewing, art and craft, Bible study, math, music and even philosophy. A little puzzled by the latter I remember asking, “You teach philosophy here?” Reading well the source of my scepticism, she answered, “The women have to learn how they process their conflicts,” and left me to go figure.

From that moment it became clear to me that Diane’s aim was to provide this small rural community with the highest quality of whatever she had to offer, while respecting what they had to give.

She eagerly became integrated into their lives, sometimes running at breakneck speed down the convent’s steps to answer a call or knock at the door. To say that I was awestruck by the life the project generated is an understatement. One experienced the Church alive as people were drawn together to learn and grow.

That previously hidden country road soon became the site of the Dominican convent, which housed the learning Centre and a stone’s throw away, the St Catherine’s Early Childhood Centre was constructed.

But before all the buildings came, one of my dearest memories of the mission’s formative phase was that long scenic drive in the early hours of Sunday morning along the Uriah Butler Highway to the Gran Couva exit.

Then, there was the winding road through quiet, dew-washed cane fields, and finally up the back of the Montserrat Hills to the Church where Diane helped with the choir. As a way of involving me in things, she  even agreed to endure my efforts to learn the guitar – mis-struck cords and all.

We spoke very little during those Sunday trips from the Chaplaincy to the St Catherine’s Church. It was my first encounter with her great capacity for silence, even as she enjoyed a good lime and a good laugh.

One could see her body simply settle into the stillness as into the cradle of a gently cupped hand. It took me a while to recognise that this surrender was her pre-Sabbath before Mass, and simply by trying to respect her space, I gradually learned to welcome the prayer as we journeyed.

Once Sr Julie Marie Peters (SSM) described her own vocation to me as an itinerant who was learning to be a contemplative on the way. I can think of no better description for my experience of Diane during those morning trips and when at her funeral Mass Fr Harvey, reading from her own words, spoke of the urgency of her call to live as a contemplative itinerant, the experience of those Sunday journeys suddenly gelled.

 Interestingly, while she loved solitude, she seemed to be interiorly vitalised when she was prayerfully silent in the presence of others. I believe she lived intensely two faces of what being in community meant: the active interaction of shared life and the unspeakable mystery of presence.

It is no accident therefore that the picture she chose to hang at the entrance of the chapel at the Gran Couva convent was Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Trinity. At a later visit to the convent, I remember feeling an inexplicable wave of delight when I discovered that with the relocation of the chapel to the ground floor of the sisters’ residence to accommodate the retreat centre, the Rublev had found its way right inside. Community was the very the axis of her faith and was, as such, the source of her greatest joy and her deepest pain. It was the seat of her saving challenge.

I consider myself truly blessed to have shared in the beginnings of that Gran Couva project. The more we talked and the more I saw what she was attempting to do there, I came to appreciate and be inspired by her genuine desire to be with people, by which I mean to draw closer in lived partnership as a religious sister with the laity.

This embrace was also the twin side of another burning preoccupation: the renewal of religious life, which she saw as inseparable from the renewal of the whole body of the Church – all its people in whatever state of life they were called.

She seemed to be constantly propelled by the pains of trying to birth a model for religious communities and by extension, a model for parish life. The Gran Couva community therefore sought to facilitate a dynamic and truly democratic meeting ground for religious and laity.

So that when in 1991 the construction of the convent was completed or near completion, I did not hesitate to volunteer to be part of that fledgling community. Out of deep concern about my choice and its implications for my own journey, I remember Diane asking, “Are you sure?” My exact response was, “Why not. I have nothing to lose”. And indeed I can say I gained full measure during the six or so years I shared in that mission.

One of the first documents we engaged during our weekly study sessions there was Pope John Paul II’s Christifideles Laici. On two occasions I remember that small gathering of religious sisters, a lay woman living in community, a parish priest and members of the community being suspended in wonder by two aspects of that exhortation.

The first was the Church’s open invitation, extended to all God’s people, to share equally in its evangelical life in-built in Jesus’ vineyard parable: “You go into the vineyard too” (Mt 20:3-4) (6). The second was the remarkable image of the Church as a “house of welcome to all” and drawing from Pope John XXIII, a “village fountain”that quenches the thirst of all (76).

I firmly believe that Diane’s work in Gran Couva was greatly shaped by these insights. She hoped for an environment where a culture of prayer, on-going learning and shared life could animate the mystery of a Eucharistic community and the very heart of the Blessed Trinity she so loved.

The parish as a living monastery without walls is how I shall always remember my experience there. I hope that the small well of possibility that Gran Couva represented in Diane’s journey of faith, and which she opened to others, will release a teeming river of hope to which many will be drawn to find welcome and refreshment. May she rest in peace.