Today, January 10th, 2018, would have been Sister Thecla’s 104th birthday.
Born Agnes Bonner in 1914 in Scott, LA, Sister Thecla was a nun in New Orleans’ Order of the Holy Family for 75 years!
I first met the good sister through mutual friend John Lee in the aftermath of a rather painful divorce. We took to each other immediately. She wore her air of peaceful equanimity and compassionate non-judgment like a crown.
Calling the house every night for 7 straight years, she consoled and comforted, listened and directed, laughed and cried … and prayed with me.
Would that we all could make the ‘other side’ so clearly visible from this one.
Never one to proselytize, catechize or evangelize – ‘Sister Tee’ showed by her example, the way she lived her life every minute of everyday … the way to a Kingly life.
After all, True religion is not something to be ‘put on’ for an hour or two a week in a building, but rightly used is knit into the day-to-day fabric of our very lives. Wow! Did Thecla ever get that.
Through her 75 year run as a nun she led the posse at the Order, in the French Quarter originally, and then on Chef Menteur, through quite a litany list of soap operas … as they tended to the temporal, as well as the spiritual, needs of everyone!
That’s everyone. From hookers, homeless and drug addicts … to abandoned children and severely abused women. The Sisters of the Order of the Holy Family even took in Louis Armstrong at one point in his life.
*** Thecla Therapy ~ “What a Wonderful World” from Airlift ***
Sister Thecla’s unyielding faith, relentless compassion, and inner strength are captured in her voice. Listen to just a bit of this remarkable spirit – the patron saint of Airlift Productions – in this recording made on her 90th birthday in 2004.
Though she dropped her body in 2009, I won’t say ‘rest in peace’ at this point. Because she’s still at it today … planning her work, and working her plan. That’s what that Roman Catholic concept of ‘communion of the saints’ is really all about.
Let me just say God Speed, ‘Sister Tee’! And thanks ever so for helping me to be a little more than just human … and for helping Airlift Productions in NOLA to be a little something more than just a recording studio.
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“Mike, thank you for 25 years of successfully teaching Algebra to children of color and students who were living in poverty. They aren’t living in poverty anymore thanks to you and the mathematical skills you gave them. They are doctors, engineers and scientists today.” ~ the late JOHN R. LEE, founder & creator of the I CAN Learn Mathematics Educational Software
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Airlift Productions ~ Audio Alchemy & Digital Magic from New Orleans… since 1984