Diplomatic Corps - Tracy Moran

Shields of Faith
A young nun journeys from "Are You here?" to "Here I am."

Ann Shields stared out the convent window at the gray February day. The desolate Pennsylvania landscape matched her mood. It was the late 1960's, and the young nun, not quite 30, was suffering from profound crisis of faith. Little could she have imagined that out of her suffering would blossom a deep love of the Lord and eventually, a powerful evangelizing ministry.

Until 1984, Ann belonged to a large religious community, whose leadership was taking it down "a very radical, feminist path," she says. She prefers not to identify the community because "many of the sisters are holy women."

"It was a very challenging time," she says of the era immediately following Vatican II. "Everything was questioned." Her own crisis during this time was "precipitated by my sin, the sin of others, disillusionment, high ideals and the reality of life."

Then came that cold, winter day. Despondent, she prayed, "Dear God, if You exist, please let me know."

That's when He answered her.

"I turned from the window," she says, "and it was as if I had bumped into somebody's chest. I stepped back and went forward again and the same thing happened. I heard this voice, not audible, but in my head, and it said, 'Don't you know I've been with you all the time?' It was inspiration, because I wouldn't have thought it on my own."

For the next two years, she continued working as a teacher. Then in December of 1970, one of the elderly sisters in the convent asked Ann if she would drive her to a prayer meeting at St. Francis Seminary in Loretto, Pennsylvania. Up the snowy mountain they went, drawn by a desire to grow in the Faith.

Leading the prayer group was Father Michael Scanlan, who four years later would become president of Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio. And 10 years after that, Ann would join him, Father John Bertolucci and Ralph Martin as members of FIRE, which has to date held more than 100 rallies worldwide focusing on Faith, Intercession, Repentance and Evangelism.

"Father Scanlan already had experience in the charismatic renewal," Ann says. "He had experienced the release of the Holy Spirit in his life in a profound way, and he wanted to introduce it to others." There she found what she'd been seeking.

"I realized these people believed that God is a personal God, a personal Savior," she says. "I was deeply touched."

She wanted to give her life to Jesus, but was baffled by the thought. Living a vowed life, she had assumed she'd already given Him everything. She had, she says, fallen into "an awful heresy."

"I believed that God got me started and then it was up to me to live a good, vowed life," she says. "I was practicing the 'enormous virtue' of self-reliance, the American ideal, but not the gospel ideal, which is, 'I count everything as loss, and in weakness, everything reaches perfection. I came to you in fear and trembling that you might know the glory that comes from God.' "

That knowledge "shattered something in me," she says. "There was a surrender, a yielding to a God Who loved me and Who would personally take care of me."

Shortly thereafter, she stopped to pray in a chapel, asking the Lord to give her a sign if He heard her prayer, her desire to give Him everything. She finished praying and started up the stairs, when suddenly, "It felt as if somebody took a pitcher of joy and poured it from the tip of my head to my toes," she says. "The feeling will go away," she thought. But it remains.

"It ebbs and flows," she says. "There are times when life has dealt some pretty big blows, where that joy isn't bubbling, but if I tap into it, it's there. That joy is the fountain of living waters, the Holy Spirit, a Comforter, a Counselor. It's very real, very personal. Baptism and confirmation came alive. They aren't merely rituals. They're life-giving encounters with the three Persons of the Trinity. God really does intend that joy for everyone who puts their faith in Him. It doesn't matter how far you've been from God. He offers it to everyone."

Allowing Jesus to have full control over every aspect of our lives is possible only through the Holy Spirit, she says. "Only if we understand a personal God and Savior will the Holy Spirit really breathe through us, so that we decrease and He increases. Only then do you have the power to say, 'Jesus, be Lord of my life.' Only when that kind of surrender takes place does that prayer get fulfilled.

"God brings us to that point of surrender in many ways: through other people, a crisis, a book, the beauty of nature. Anything that speaks to us of God in a way that attracts us so much that all we can do is say yes."

Today, Ann is saying yes to Him in a variety of ways.

She heads the Servants of God's Love, a community of 10 consecrated, vowed women in the Diocese of Lansing, Michigan, which was canonically established in 1995.

She also evangelizes through books she's written, her daily radio Bible study, and her work with FIRE and Renewal Ministries. In these ministries, she's witnessed many miracles: The blind see, the deaf hear, the crippled walk.

"I see people walking out of wheelchairs, I see people delivered from all kinds of bondage — drugs, alcohol, prostitution," she says, adding that these types of miracles are more common in other parts of the world where "the people are simpler."

"They've had everything taken from them, or they've never had anything, so they put all their hope and trust in the gospel and in Jesus," she says. "As a result, God gathers them up to Himself." But in North America, "the soil is the rockiest I've experienced anywhere because we have so much."

She sees the need for evangelism increasing as the millennium approaches. "A major reason for that is because of John Paul II and his call on the Jubilee," she says. "There's a tremendous grace, and if we're docile to the Holy Spirit, we'll see a new springtime for Christianity."

She knows well the hardship this work entails. "In some parts of the country, springtime brings sleet and frost that try to destroy the new shoots," she says. "So evangelists have a tremendous task cut out for them. Nevertheless, the Holy Father says this is the key to understanding his whole pontificate: preparing the Church for the new millennium. He says break out of your comfortable modes of living, shout it from the rooftops, do not be afraid. Get out there and preach it, preach it with your life."

As Ann Shields has learned to do.



For more information, contact Ann Shields, Renewal Ministries, 230 Collingwood St., Ann Arbor, MI 48103, 736-662-1730, ext. 22.