When we think of mission work, we often picture airplane tickets and passport stamps; Sisters packing for far shores, building schools in remote villages, learning languages far from the place they were born. This work continues, and it matters. But something else is happening too, something quieter and just as essential.
In Ireland, many of our Sisters – some returned home after decades away – are living a different kind of mission, some still in active mission, working with those on the fringes of Irish society, and others moving more slowly now, their hands less steady, their voices softer. What some might see as the end of active ministry is actually revealing something deeply profound: mission has never depended on stamina or mobility. It depends on being willing to see another person, to listen without rushing toward solutions, to sit with someone in their uncertainty.
An elderly Sister who prays for her neighbours by name each morning is doing mission work. The Sister who remembers that the woman down the road is waiting for medical results and asks about them, that’s mission too. Faith isn’t an abstraction when someone embodies it in front of you, when you can see that belief shapes how a person spends their days, even the difficult ones.
We also have Sisters here on mission to Ireland from other countries, and others still who have newly been granted Irish citizenship.
Ireland has changed. The country that once sent missionaries to every corner of the world is now home to people from those same places. Across the street or down the road, new languages are spoken, new customs celebrated. Walk through any town now and you’ll hear languages that would have been rare here twenty years ago. People arrive from Ukraine, Nigeria, Brazil, Syria – some fleeing violence, others chasing opportunity, many carrying both hope and exhaustion in equal measure.
For many who arrive here, the sense of displacement runs deep. And yet, within that, there are Sisters who understand. They know what it means to be foreign, to navigate a new country while missing home, stumbling through languages, adjusting to different ways of doing things. Now, in a sense, that experience is coming home. Their welcome carries a rare empathy. It says: you belong.
There is a mutuality to the experience, one side meeting another, both slightly vulnerable, both with something to offer.
There’s a clarity that comes with age. The ability to distinguish between what’s essential and what’s just noise, to recognise patterns others are seeing for the first time.
Our Irish Sisters have watched the Church change, communities shift, certainties dissolve. That history is a ballast. When younger Sisters face difficult decisions, the Irish voices in those conversations carry weight precisely because they’ve weathered transitions before.
On Mission Sunday, we’re often asked to think about those who go. But what about those who stay? What about mission that looks like presence rather than projects, like consistency rather than campaigns? Every baptized person receives the same call – not to a location, but to a way of being. Open rather than closed. Present rather than distracted. Willing to be inconvenienced by other people’s needs.
The OLA Sisters in Ireland embody this because they’ve chosen, day after day, to treat mission as real – whether on distant shores or at home on Irish soil. To our Sisters, the Gospel is an invitation they’re trying to live into, imperfectly, persistently.
Mission happens on doorsteps, in kitchens, during the brief conversation at the bus stop. It happens when we choose connection over efficiency, when we let someone’s story interrupt our plans.
That’s mission. Not somewhere else, but here. Not someday, but now. Not despite our limitations, but often through them.
And maybe that’s the real message of Mission Sunday: we’re all already standing on mission ground. The only question is whether we notice.