Sister Eileen Rice, O.P.

​Occasionally I dedicate these weekly blogs to a special person in my life. Today is one such blog. And the person in question is the late Sister Eileen Rice, O.P., a Dominican nun who belonged to the Siena Dominicans. I first met Eileen at a small, invitational academic conference known as the Shakertown Conversations on General Education. I’d read about this annual meeting after its first offering in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, our trade newspaper. It brought together educators from around the country who had a special interest in generally educating undergraduate college students and who wanted to discuss with colleagues how, in an age of specialization, to do that better. The setting was a restored Shaker village an hour outside of Lexington, Kentucky. This interpretive museum was staffed by costumed actors who demonstrated the arts and crafts of a 19th-century Shaker community. It was our good fortune that Shakertown housed and fed small groups such as ours with delicious home-grown or prepared-from-scratch meals and placed us in delightful single rooms, bright from their large windows, with Shaker chairs hung on wall pegs and refurbished original furniture...

But on to Sister Eileen. At our first meeting, when we were all introducing ourselves, Eileen, who by that time was, as she would say, “out of the habit,” was a young-looking middle-aged woman with a radiant smile and a ready sense of humor. She was also very pretty. She was, as she told us, “the” Education Department at Sienna Heights College, at the time a small woman’s college run by her Order in Adrian, Michigan. Over the dozen-and-a-half years I attended these long weekends of sharing, Eileen and I became fast friends. In fact, when I was confirmed as a Lutheran in a Chicago church, Eileen was one of my sponsors. Later, when she visited us in St. Paul, Minnesota, she so impressed my non-English-speaking mother-in-law that the latter, a staunch Lutheran, always spoke in high terms (in German) about “Schwester Eileen.” And my older daughter, Marianna, started wondering if she should become a nun like Sister Eileen.

Eileen had her doctorate from the University of Michigan and had been a Woodrow Wilson Scholar at Princeton. She had also been the director for some years of the Order’s Catholic school. In addition, she was an inveterate cat mother who always carried cat treats in her purse just in case. Not only that, but she would inevitably have three or four stray kitties in her college office. So when the parents of new freshmen came to meet her she’d say to them in her Michigan accent, “You give us a kid, we give you a cat.” She once told me she had placed over a hundred cats with families in this way.

When at age 49 she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she informed her large internet family as if she were reporting on an upcoming weather event. Soon she asked me and my daughter Christine, who had graduated with a joint college major in culture studies and film making to do a documentary film on her life. During several days of interviewing current and past students as well as faculty and staff colleagues plus Sister Eileen herself, we recorded how impressed they all were with her. When we asked her what she would advise a cradle-Catholic student who had left the Church and had found meaning in Buddhism, “Oh,” she answered, “I’d advise them to stick with their Buddhism.” During one interview she mentioned that, after losing her hair, she used three different wigs and would have audience responses from her students about their favorites, inevitably “Big Hair.” Or in another session she said she was happy that she’d kept her appetite so when friends would come, they would take her out for a fancy meal. Eileen’s comment: “Jesus got only one last supper. I’ve had 25 and counting!”
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Sister Eileen died just before her 50th birthday. Dear Sister, you were a blessing in so many lives, including mine. Requiescat in pace. Amen.

“You give us a student; we give you a cat!” (Sr. Eileen Rice, O.P., 1944-1994)