By Sister Kathleen Marie Shields, CSJ | Special to the Herald

From that first encounter on Sept. 6, 2007, I fell in love with the archival stories of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet stored away at Carondelet Center in Aina Haina. The archives are far more that a vice-province’s community history! The room holds exciting and challenging adventures -- the pieces of our past relevant to the present life and ministry of our CSJ community within the local church and among the rainbow of multicultural people throughout the islands.

Last fall I was invited by the Hawaii vice-province leadership team (Sister Margaret Leonard Perreira, Sister Patricia Chang, Sister Rose Miriam Schillinger and Sister Giovanna Marie Marcoccia) to re-visit our Hawaii sisters of the past 70 years. I welcomed the opportunity to return to their educational initiatives, enthusiastic parish and diocesan ventures, and everyday community life. The archive room itself is a diminutive, but hospitable, place which reminded me of a frequently quoted phrase of an enthusiastic teacher who taught in a one-room country school: “This place is really very small / Just big enough for love, that’s all.”

At first glance, the shiny and neatly arranged shelves all looked well -- that is, until I discovered 17 cartons marked “miscellaneous” and hundreds of photos marked “unidentified.” Those words are not to be taken lightly! I found historical documents that had waited for years to be sorted and wrapped in acid-free materials; sisters’ letters dated 1938 and written in the elegant Palmer Method (the perfect writing style of the day); eye-witness accounts of the bombing of Pearl Harbor; inspiring notes recording all-night adoration and shaking knees as screeching bombs landed in St. Theresa’s Convent garden. What a faith life, nourished by eucharistic love, that characterized those war years at St. Theresa’s in Honolulu and Holy Rosary Parish in Paia, Maui. No one doubted that God was still “in charge,” as the children, lugging gas masks, filed to the bomb shelters.

Catholic education was our first ministry in Hawaii, and so the early photo albums pictured eager-to-learn island children seated in long rows of rigid wooden desks with their legendary sunken ink wells. The grinning students-in-the-making gave promise of great intellectual pursuits yet to be tackled. At the same time, speaking pidgin, running barefoot and kicking footballs within designated chalk-marked playground areas compensated for classroom rules reminding the children to speak in “full sentences” and to use “appropriate adjectives to enrich nouns.” Recess and noon hour surely brought relief from the challenges of grammar, spelling and punctuation, not always in tune with “da kine.”

In pursuit of alphabetical order

The archive room, my “office” for five hours a day these past seven months, has been a place of both history and mystery. Attempting to find meaningful time sequences in a line-up of 121 acid-free boxes can be a bit puzzling, especially when life events do not happen in chronological or alphabetical order. It was gratifying, however, to discover how well our CSJ community’s pastoral planning dovetailed with diocesan directives over the past decades. There were countless Easter moments on our shared journey to Emmaus as we walked together with our island people. Sometimes our paths were unfamiliar or unpredictable, but never without the attentiveness of a loving God and a renewing church.

One whole section of the sparkling new archive shelves carries our community history from its earliest days in Hawaii. Sister Adele Marie Lemon from Los Angeles, one of our founding sisters, wrote two fascinating books and produced over a dozen photo albums telling our story from our arrival on Aug. 24, 1938, through the early exciting years at St. Theresa’s. A special box on “shelf IA” holds the communications of Hawaii’s Bishop Stephen Alencastre who persevered in prayer and with cablegrams in his appeal for sisters to staff the new St. Theresa School. That was the beginning of our commitment to Catholic schools in the islands.

The calligraphy titles on the following shelves traces the growth and development of Catholic schools and parish ministries throughout Hawaii. Our collaborative, and often spontaneous, response to societal needs placed our sisters and Ohana (lay associates) in religious education, parish outreach, food pantries, shelters for the homeless persons, care of the elderly, hospice visiting and as prayer partners with prisoners. If our archival collection could talk, it would extol a litany of parish and school co-workers and associates who, all through the years, have shared the CSJ charism of unifying love. Today our community Ohana has 23 members on Oahu and Maui, and prayer partners across the islands who share that same Spirit-filled giftedness that inspired our founding sisters to be all that they could be for Christ and for our church. Bishop Larry Silva’s episcopal motto, “Witness to Jesus” (shelf ID), is a constant reminder that, steeped in eucharistic love, we are all called and empowered to live and to love as Jesus did.

Community archives hold hidden treasures carefully wrapped in acid-free tissue, identified with medium point, erasable blue art pencils, and handled with white anti-static gloves. No metal clips, screws or staples are allowed anywhere. Experienced archivists handle all valued materials and delicate artifacts with the same care as the most treasured family album.

Sessions, forums, plans, reports

Some of the 121 completed boxes hold the vice-province history of 70 years of our working sessions at our formal meetings. Dozens of portfolios contain the minutes of numerable planning sessions, community forums, committee reports, pre-session and post-session chapter discussions and implementation strategies following congregational assemblies. Over the years the vice-province established working committees for dozens of concerns. There were policy books, reviews of interim policies, revisions of revisions and proposed drafts to be presented at congregational chapters. Included in the follow-up work were carefully edited revisions of our constitution. Clear directives for short-term goals and long-range plans were woven into the fabric of our lives. And always, the areas of CSJ spirituality, love for the church, concern for the poor, and care for the earth were given priority in post-chapter meetings and in our post-chapter lives.

Keeping all this in heart and mind, it has been a privilege to work in the vice-province archive room. Some folks believe that, when they die, archivists will have a direct flight to heaven since, on earth they lovingly handled and carefully filed hundreds of obituaries of deceased sisters. I believe that as the angelic choirs chant “In Paradisum,” the deceased archivists of hundreds of religious communities will be on hand to welcome the newcomers who faithfully responded to the daily routine questions:

--Where did that (photo album, news clipping, unidentified group picture, etc.)

come from?

--How can you tell the sisters apart? They all looked alike in the 40’s and 50’s.

--Why didn’t someone put the shorter people in the front row?

--Which island is this? You can’t tell from the swaying palm trees.

--Who took this picture? (The most frequently asked question with respect to some 1,000 photos.)

Without a doubt, working in the archives is a rare privilege -- some days rarer than others. Practically speaking, on a usual working day there is no one around to disturb the silence of this singularly distinguished room so alive with seven decades of CSJ history.

Believing in a future filled with faith, hope and love prompts me to formulate a few suggestions for archivists of the third millennium. “For the good of the community” (a phrase frequently quoted by religious leaders at formal community gatherings), I offer the following suggestions for all those who plan to serve God and a religious community in some future archive room:

1) Pray that the church will soon name a patron saint for archivists. In the meantime, rely heavily on St. Joseph who faced mystery with faith, journeyed on when the past was unclear, and placed complete trust in God’s plans.

2) Never give up, even when you have to remove hundreds of staples for endless days or cut acid-free tissue to preserve generations of highly cherished and varied sizes of photos.

3) Always remember that archivists preserve the past and create well-preserved treasures for the future.

4) Cultivate an ongoing archivist’s committee, one that willingly convenes for inspiring tasks, but does not spend too much time looking at old photos.

5) Keep the door closed (mandatory air-conditioning for archival collections), but always be available for anyone who cherishes the past.

6) In conclusion, thank God daily for the joy and inspiration you experience in the world of archival splendor.

What a gift! What a life!

Sister Kathleen Marie Shields, CSJ, was the director of religious education for the Diocese of Honolulu for more than 20 years under Bishop Joseph A. Ferrario and Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo. She now resides in St. Paul, Minn.