Sister Suzanne Moynihan, SSND

• Professed 1961
• Past Ministries: Elementary education; religious education; Global Education director; coordinator of tutoring center; director of central city nonprofit
• Present Ministry: Second grade teacher at St. Vincent Pallotti School, Milwaukee

If I were considering religious life, It seems to me that the question which would intrigue me would not be why or how a woman enters a religious congregation so much as why she continues to stay in a culture emphasizing opposite values than what we profess. It is also somewhat difficult for me to share just why I became a School Sister of Notre Dame. The Mystery of Love and the SSND charism attracted me at a very deep level, and here I am!

S. Sue and Sam Rasmussen

Being an SSND continues to give me a lifestyle in which prayer, contemplation, spiritual reading and needed quiet are able to become priorities. Being an SSND has given me the strength, vision and courage to initiate several programs bent towards awareness and social change. I have worked among the economically disadvantaged on a Washington state Indian reservation, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and in the central city of Milwaukee. This could only have happened had I been empowered by our SSND charism and encouraged and supported by the larger community.

The whole purpose of our lives, as I see it, is to grow in love of self, the earth, each other and of God who is in "all in all". Because of friendships developed over many years within our congregation; because of a communal atmosphere emphasizing contemplation and ministry, I continue to grow as a person-from within. For me, being an SSND has facilitated that whole process.

I choose to continue to live religious life because I am able to bond with other women who have the same fire for mission within them as I do. We are very diverse, sometimes painfully so, but through experience and dialog I have learned that our basic root is the same. We are united, not by superficialities, but rather by the charism, which both attracts us and binds us to one another.

It is both a gift and a privilege for me to be a School Sister of Notre Dame.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference .

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