By Marisa Iati ’14

In a city whose ski resorts attract celebrities, athletes, and CEOs, a few Sisters of the Holy Cross have immersed themselves in a different side of this southwestern town.

Sisters Suzanne and Mary Ann help to run Holy Cross Ministries, which hosts an academic enrichment program in Park City, Utah, for young students who have struggled in school. Most of the program’s participants are immigrants or children of immigrants, and English is a second language for many.

Operating the summer program, as well as the non-profit organization’s various other initiatives, requires grit beyond what is necessary for most other jobs. I quickly discovered during a summer volunteering there that working with the young students is life-giving, but also exhausting and often frustrating.

The life circumstances of many of the kids are sobering: One girl has never met her baby sibling in Mexico because immigration policies prevent the family from reuniting. Some students’ parents can’t help them with their homework because they don’t speak English. A third-grader’s family members live in constant fear of deportation.

Sisters Suzanne and Mary Ann push forward in the midst of all of this. Through their efforts to keep the program running, they show up every day for each of those students and for each of those students’ families.

They do it despite the fact that the administrative work cannot possibly be fun. They do it in the face of occasional funding issues. They do it even though the challenges the students wrestle with can sometimes seem insurmountable.

And when the sisters are done doing all of that, they make themselves present to everyone else in their lives. I will always remember sitting in their kitchen and talking through a personal struggle with Sister Mary Ann, who somehow had energy to give of herself to me after she had already given so much to others through her work.

“In the light of Mary, the Church sees in the face of women the reflection of a beauty which mirrors the loftiest sentiments of which the human heart is capable: the self-offering totality of love” (Redemptoris Mater, #46).

Of the many things that compel me about the Catholic faith, it is this idea of self-gift that I have always thought to be the most beautiful. We saw it almost 2,000 years ago in Mary, who offered her life to God so that, ultimately, humanity could be freed from sin. I see it today in many women, but especially in those Sisters of the Holy Cross whom I came to love so much that summer.

I’m often not very good at this self-offering. I find it much easier to exist in a bubble of my own needs, desires, and whims, instead of seeking ways to put my actions in service of something greater. If we’re being honest, I think most of us feel that way.

But through the women of the Church, Mary issues us a humbling charge: to let our actions reveal that our lives belong not to ourselves, but to God.