Turner remarks upon receiving the Mary Emil Penet Award

Turner remarks upon receiving the Mary Emil Penet Award at the Sixteenth National Congress of the Religious Formation Conference:

What is it I, Mary Daniel Turner, want you to know about me?

• “Being-at-home” with my creatureliness has been an amazing journey.
• Learning how to learn, alone and with others, has been an enduring passion of my life.
• Institutional roles (of which I have had many) have both seduced and transformed me.

And what more do I want you to know about me?

• The Gospel has been the text and context of my truth-seeking-sharing-doing.
• The Church, my religious cultural heritage, is paradoxically my home yet and alien territory from which, all-too-often, I long to flee.
• The story and women of Notre Dame have nurtured me from my earliest years, fed my hunger for “matters that matter”, and tutored me in the ways of God whom we purposely name Good.
• Persistently, the world cried out for my participation in its ceaseless dyings and risings, it unending births, signaling that no matter how unskilled, my midwifery is not inconsequential.

And, what else do I want you to know?

• The Sister Formation Conference and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious have been two significant formative agencies in my life:
• In the 50’s, the Sister Formation Conference evoked within me an abiding conviction that the Church is for the world, and that has made all the difference in the ways I view and relate to both Church and world
• LCWR has offered me the companionship of exceptionally sterling women, provided opportunities for leadership (nationally and internationally) and fashioned within me a political, social and cultural sensitivity that disturbs a too-easliy-maintained false peace, and too-stubbornly-held pseudo-certitudes.

And as I end, I want you to know

• of my local community, a bi-racial and multigenerational household, where taking-for-granted and exquisite care; questions and occasionally answers; doubt and sureties; tears and teasing; aloneness and togetherness embrace and beget fierce loyalty, dogged hope, steadfast love.