Fellow residents at Harbor View Manor in Tacoma, Wash., call her the Flying Nun because she is almost always in motion, engaged with a cluster of political and community issues.

That commitment began when she was a young girl, before the politically active ’60s and ’70s and long before the recent surge of interest in community service. It was the 1950s, Adlai Stevenson was running for president, and her grandmother took her to the Democratic national convention in her native Chicago.

“That triggered something in me,” she says. “I started to look at issues and try to find something I could work on in my small way.” She joined the Dominican order, whose members, she says, “try to preach good news and be a prophet for those who are voiceless and powerless.” She taught school in Seattle and Tacoma and later served as a hospital and hospice care chaplain. All the while, she worked with the Dominicans to end violence, empower the poor and bring about greater social equality.

She joined the peace movement soon after the Vietnam War. One of her Dominican sisters participated in Martin Luther King’s march in Selma, and Sister Eileen found her account of that historic episode inspiring. With the Dominican community, she is currently working to stop human trafficking. And for the last eight years, she has made abolishing the death penalty a personal focus.

At Harbor View Manor, where she has lived for nearly five years, she leads vesper services and writes a spiritual column for the newsletter. She also serves on the food committee, as a hall monitor, and on the greeting desk.

She worked with neighbors and city officials to shut down a bothersome rave club and to reduce drug dealing in a city park. She was instrumental in bringing residents and nearby businesses together for the neighborhood’s first block party, and the Tacoma mayor wrote to thank her for helping build bridges among the community’s ethnic groups.

Sister Eileen’s continued activism is even more remarkable in light of the fact she has had Parkinson’s disease for 10 years. When she speaks at community functions, she sums up her approach to life in the acronym HEAL, which stands for Humor, Exercise, Attitude and Love.

Of her lifelong political and community engagement, she says simply, “St. Teresa said to do little things well, and that’s all I could do – little things.”

Source: ABHOW Words, February 2009