Much deeper reality

The
Catholic Weekly
Online

Sydney
19 October 2003

Peace in our hands

Jubilee week for Pope

Special guests at Mother Teresa’s beatification

School insurance hike

Honoured by university

It’s truly feminine and truly beautiful

Spiritually renewed by Lourdes

$1.75m for Caritas

Catholic Women’s Network

Board short bonanza for Vinnies

Advice to lectors, acolytes

Much deeper reality

Editorial: Time for tribute

Letters: Barrel of a gun

Conversation: Terry Hanley, lay missionary who has spent nearly 15 years in the field - Happy to ‘spend rest of my life in Africa’

What is peace like?

Religion test upsurge

Malouf on campus

Ministry of Jesus to the sick and dying

‘Father, this is your life’

‘Priest in residence’ honoured

Bushland setting for Thurgoona church

Full-on disciple of Jesus

Active practice of faith

Requiem Mass for ‘Bacon Priest’

Much deeper reality

By Marilyn Rodrigues

Serious swimming is a bit like prayer, says Mercy Sr Rebecca McCabe.

As a teenager she was a member of the Australian swimming team and the 1983 national women’s 800m freestyle champion.

Now 36, she still swims for fitness but her commitment is to something much more worthwhile.

“Swimming, like prayer, is hanging in there even though the results aren’t immediately evident,” she says.

“It involves discipline and it’s a commitment to something you believe in. For me then it was sport, now it is a much deeper reality.”

Sr Rebecca grew up in Cronulla and always loved the water. She remembers “mucking around” in a small pool in Wooloware when a swimming coach told her that she had a lot of potential. She was only seven.

“I was sort of taken by that, that someone would notice that potential in me. So I got more involved and one thing led to another and I got to state level,” she says.

With her mind firmly set on qualifying for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Rebecca would swim four or five hours a day on top of her school and part time work commitments.

Then she developed a shoulder injury during the lead-up to the Olympics trials which forced her out of elite swimming altogether and took away everything she had been working so hard for.

She was forced to reflect on what her life was really about.

Sr Rebecca defines the next few years as a period of searching. She began to visit her parish church regularly.

“It was a re-evaluation of the direction of my life; time to stop and think,” she says.

“I suppose that’s why I kept going back to the church, to have time to be alone. All of a sudden I had this extra time.”

However, Rebecca’s many hours of swimming had been a sort of spiritual training, too, without her realising it.

“I don’t think we can decompartmentalise ourselves, we are one whole person, and when you’re fit you feel good about yourself and it reflects on your spiritual life and other areas,” she says.

Swimming, being such a solitary sport, had afforded her a lot of time to “reflect on life and the injustices of the world and all that stuff that fires you up when you’re in your teens”.

“I spent a lot of time with my head in the water pondering faith issues and doing my maths homework,” she says.

“I’m quite reflective by nature and I think swimming allowed me to develop (that part of) myself, even though it was a very active process.”

Two highlights in Rebecca’s journey of faith occurred in those earlier years.

“I was 15 and travelling with the Australian swimming team when it went to Mexico in 1982. And I remember being struck by the poverty and suffering of the people there,” she says.

“I thought it’s not just, it’s not right; I was an idealist, I wanted to do something about it.

“It sort of disturbed my faith.

I thought if God is so powerful and all-knowing why doesn’t he intervene here.”

The other time was an experience, during those unsettled years after her swimming career ended, that she struggles to put into words.

“I was in the church in Cronulla by myself and I really was deeply aware of the mercy and the love of God; the tenderness of God,” she says.

“I don’t know what prompted it but it was a certain nudging. My faith doesn’t exclude doubts at times, but at moments like that I just knew. It was definitely a pivotal moment.

“This experience changed me. It set the direction of my life.

“I became more involved in the local Church. We set up a youth group at Cronulla parish but then I thought, no, I need to do something more than this.”

Rebecca wanted to make a radical choice and joining the Mercy Sisters seemed the right thing to do.

She chose them because she was familiar with them, having attended Our Lady of Mercy College, Burraneer Bay, but also because mercy resonated deeply with her experience of a merciful God.

She firmly identifies with the words of St John of the Cross:

At the evening of our life we will be judged by love.

“I just thought if I don’t pursue this option, I’ll always think I missed my boat, and I can’t live like that,” she says.

Sr Rebecca had obtained a science degree majoring in biochemistry and microbiology at the University of NSW, and decided to take up physiotherapy.

She now works at the Royal North Shore Hospital in its Adapt program for people suffering persistent and incurable pain that is not cancer-related.

“I’m fortunate to love what I do,” she says.

“Physiotherapy is my work of mercy as a Mercy sister. For me it is an expression of my commitment to the God of Mercy. It gives expression to my core commitment to show that face of God.

“You can’t see pain, but you can see its effects on people’s lives.

“An estimated one in five Australians suffers from persistent non-cancer pain.

“One third of these people suffer substantial interference to their lives: low self confidence; loss of job; inactivity; multiple medications; decreased socialisation and excessive suffering. The financial cost is $10 billion a year. The human cost is even greater.”

Sr Rebecca makes links between her own ministry working with people to relieve their pain, and Jesus’ ministry of healing.

“It isn’t something I put on to people. Healing is an active process. Jesus didn’t give people a pill and say: ‘You’ll be better in the morning’. He said: ‘Do you want to be healed? Then follow me; stay with me’.

“The Adapt program gives people the confidence and opportunity to change; to cease reliance on pain medication, become more active and start living again. People learn to manage their pain so it doesn’t control their life.

“The medical system has limits. It is often freeing for our patients to hear this after years of investigations, appointments and repeated treatment failures.

“I work in a multidisciplinary team with a psychologist, a nurse and a rehabilitation counsellor.

“In the gym I gradually re-expose them to activities that they have avoided or feared for many years.

“People report that their pain is still there but they can cuddle their child again, or they can work again, activities they had enjoyed but had stopped.

“Given the skills, patients can do a lot more for themselves than we believe.”

Sr Rebecca is the youngest member of the Parramatta Sisters of Mercy, but she is not discouraged by the fact of fewer vocations to religious life.

“The large numbers of vocations in the 50s and 60s were unusually high. The norm in the history of religious life has been a trickle of women desiring this way of life,” she says.

“One of the attractions of living in a religious community is that you are living with people committed to the same mission.

“The companionship that comes with that is very important. And it’s that continuum of mercy I believe will keep going.

“And it’s not like I don’t have choices, and other alternatives look attractive at times, but it’s that sense of rightness that this is where I’m meant to be and live my life.

“I feel that God’s claimed me.

I don’t feel that it is restrictive.

It is an unusual life’s choice - and it works for me.”