Sr Marie-Ange de Saint Chamas belonged to a monastic community of women that welcomed those with Down’s. Her life and and her recent death were a reminder that we find wholeness in reverence for the vulnerable and in relinquishing the illusion of self-sufficiency
On 17 August this year I attended the funeral of a contemplative nun. She had lived a life of exemplary, contagious dedication in the Loire Valley, in a convent near the town of Le Blanc. The day was glorious, the sun bright and clear but without stinging fierceness, lending a sheen of splendour to the rolling landscape. It was one of those days that make you see how the Psalmist might plausibly affirm that a tree, a flower, a blade of grass can “shout for joy”.
There was joy in the assembly, too. This is not to say that the sister was not missed or mourned. She was, for she had been profoundly loved. But I sensed the exultation peculiar (though not unique) to monastic funerals. It springs, I think, from corporate pride in a life well lived to the end; from wonder at the free gift, sealed as definitive by death, of an entire existence, reminding us that love cannot be merited or bought, only given and received; also from the sweet strength that spreads in a crowd ascertaining experientially, each for him or herself yet nonetheless together, that love is stronger than death, that our sense of death’s absurdity does not spring from pathologies of denial, but stands for ultimate truth.
In these ways, the funeral was like many others. It was singular on account of the vocation of the nun we had gathered to bury. Sr Marie-Ange de Saint Chamas had been one of the first Little Sisters, Disciples of the Lamb, an institute founded in 1985 to enable women with Down’s to embrace monastic life. When Marie-Ange was born in 1967, her parents soon discovered she was not like other children. They kept, her sister said in a tribute, “this treasure in their heart for some time, the time required to make of it an oblation, to own their perplexity and pain, the time, above all, we needed to learn to love and know her as she was. Little by little, they let us understand that she would be better equipped than we were to maintain the beauty of a child’s heart and would outdo us in her ability to love.”