Really marvelous NYTimes piece about a Dominican Sister of Hawthorne who’s a big Braves fan.

In 1999, while Bobby Dews, the Braves’ bullpen coach, was jogging near Turner Field, he became curious about the cancer home across from the stadium. He entered Our Lady, met Sister Marian and learned about the home’s mission. Dews told Sister Marian that he prayed for the Braves, but understood that he was not supposed to pray for them to win.

“So I told her I pray for the other team to lose,” Dews said. “She liked that.”

Dews and Sister Marian became instant friends. He gave her tickets, and she formed the Bobby Dews Fan Club, probably the only one of its kind for a bullpen coach. As a recovering alcoholic who has not had a drink for 20 years, Dews said he is a spiritual man who called Sister Marian a walking, talking inspiration.

“To know there’s somebody like her and what she does on a daily basis, it makes you appreciate life more,” Dews said. “It’s just an incredible feeling to know there are people, earthly people, who care about us the way God does.”

As the article says, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne is a religious order dedicated to the care of the terminally ill. Sister is in their New York facility now, but as the article states, her Braves love developed when she ministered in the Atlanta foundation.

The order was founded by Rose Hawthorne, the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her cause for sainthood was introduced in 2003.

Flannery O’Connor had some involvement with the order – she did rewrites, wrote an introduction and convinced  her publisher, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, to publish a book the sisters had written about a girl in their care who suffered from a disfiguring, difficult disease, who had died at the age of 12. The resultant A Memoir of Mary Ann is well known, for among other things, the place where we read O’Connor’s famous phrase, the end of a paragraph reflecting on the suffering of children, which some see as an argument against the existence, and at the very least, the love of God.

In the absence of fait now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness, which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends i forced labor camps and the fumes of the gas chamber.