By Sister Cornelia Ransom ’51

It was on a Sunday afternoon in December of 2004. I had just returned home from church and two of my sisters at the convent greeted me with unusual excitement and urgency in their voices. “Here, call this number this afternoon.” I caught the urgency and wondered what on earth was going on.  I dialed the number, no answer. I dialed again, no answer. The third try worked like a charm. It was Carrie Bolton, President of the Wells College Alumnae Association informing me that I was one of two persons selected to receive the Alumnae Award of the year – WOW!

All I could say was “Oh my goodness…oh my goodness…OH MY GOODNESS!” And then I thought of my father and my eyes filled with tears. He had worked so hard to provide me with the best education possible. How pleased, how proud of me he would have been.

I quickly pulled myself together and started to chat with Carrie. “Of course I’ll be there in June to accept the award. What’s the date?” And I pulled out my calendar.

So here I am, along with friends, classmates, cousins, a sister from the convent, and of course all of you out there and here on the stage. WHAT AN HONOR, and what fun I have had anticipating this day. Thank you, Carrie; thank you, Nell; thank you, Virginia (who probably knows more about me than I know about myself). Thank you to everyone who had been involved including my classmate Virginia Stockfish Borland who nominated me. And thank you, too, to all those persons who led me through my four years at Wells. And to you also, Lisa Marsh Ryerson, for your leadership of Wells College over the past years and especially at this time with the major changes that are taking place. Having been in a leadership role myself for 12 years, I am very aware of the stresses as well as the joys. It’s hard work. Thank you.

My introduction to Wells College began in the spring of 1947. I was anxiously waiting to hear from three large, well known, East Coast women’s colleges. Would one of them accept me?

The answers came, No, No, No.

I was devastated, embarrassed and felt like a failure. Needless to say the tears were plentiful.

An older woman, a dear friend of mine, a Wells graduate of the class of 1932, Marjorie Emerson, suggested that I apply to Wells.

I did. My mother and I drove up to the campus. I fell in love with the beauty of the place and I applied. About a week later the phone call came. “We have a place for you but we need to know within the week if you will accept it.” Of course I accepted it.

That was the beginning of my journey with Wells College.

Years later I discovered that my cousin Katherine Bryant had graduated from Wells in 1926. I also had a distant relative through marriage, Mary Armor, class of 1885.

I loved my years at Wells. At that time in my life, it was my desire to be a missionary teacher. My major in Mathematics gave me just the tool I needed to start preparing for a teaching career. 

In addition to my classes, I was especially involved in church activities and the Service League. I was a member of the choir at Wells all four years. I took advantage of the chapel services and the Sunday services at the local Episcopal Church. If my memory is correct, I even helped with the Sunday School. Each year the college would bring a visiting clergy person to spend two or three days on campus. I remember the time Bishop Pike came. I was greatly influenced by his visit. Professor Davis of the Religion Department became an important mentor for me. I still have a paper I wrote for one of her classes.

I was active in the Service League, so active that at the end of my junior year one of my classmates asked if she could put my name forward for President of the Service League. I panicked at the thought of making the required speech and turned down the nomination. I guess I just wasn’t ready for such a leadership role.  Now as I look back, I know that Wells did prepare me for a demanding leadership role in ways I didn’t recognize at the time. For twelve years (from 1985-1997) I was the Superior of the Order of St. Helena. No one could have been more surprised than I, when I was elected.

Other Wells memories:  Some of my classmates were honored by being on the Dean’s List. I, however, spent two years on the Registrar’s List as I struggled with the language requirement. Somehow I overcame the hurdle. Graduation Day arrived and when they announced the recipient of the Mathematics award my classmate sitting next to me had to poke me. “THAT’S YOU!” she said. I had never expected it. After that my father was so proud of me that he began to tell his friends that his daughter was a mathematical genius! (I found that a bit of an overstatement.) 

Wells certainly was just the right place for me. It had small classes and close faculty-student interaction, a tradition that continues today, I’m pleased to note. I know now I would have been lost in one of those large colleges, and the chances are I would have dropped out. 

So thank you, Wells, for being there for me.

Before attending Wells, I attended a small girls’ school in Rowayton, CT. Every day began with an all school assembly which  always ended with the recitation of  words from the Hebrew Scriptures, the book of Micah, chapter 6: “and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God” For ten years I recited those words every school day. When I began to reflect on what I would share you today, I realized what an influence those words have had on my life and on my vocation. Certainly justice and mercy, but I’m not so sure about the humility part!

People always want to know why I became a nun, so let me begin there. I met my first nun when I was a teenager, and like many young girls I was fascinated and drawn to the idea of becoming a nun. However, at that time I really wanted to be a missionary teacher of math. I graduated from Wells and began to teach in South Dakota at St. Mary’s School for Native American Girls. The next ten years were spent in Hawaii. I loved it there. In addition to teaching math, I was very involved in the Episcopal Church. This involvement included running the church camps every summer for a few years. Always the thought would keep surfacing: How about the convent? One day it came to me, you love to teach, you love to pray and you desire the mission field…Bingo! “Get thee to a nunnery.”

So here I am, some 40 years later, still teaching, still praying, sometimes working  in local missions and sometimes overseas. It has been an incredibly rich life. As a member of the Order of St. Helena I have had wonderful opportunities for ministry that I could never have carried out by myself. 

Now I would like to share with you a few of my experiences as a nun.

One assignment I had was in Liberia, West Africa, way up in the bush country. I was in charge of the girls’ boarding compound. It wasn’t at all unusual for teen-age girls to get pregnant before they graduated. That meant the end of their education in the mission school and there was no government high school in the area.  OF COURSE THE BOYS WERE NEVER PUNISHED! 

Janet became pregnant at the end of her junior year. She was one of twins and had been abandoned at birth. Matilda took her in and raised her. Janet had attended the mission schools right up to her senior year. Now that was denied her. I was furious. So I made other arrangements for Janet. I told her if she would spend the daytime in the village helping Matilda (who was quite elderly by this time), then she could come and live at the convent with me. I would give her a room and board in exchange for some small tasks she could do for me. It worked out wonderfully for both of us. No one in the town said anything to me but I have no doubt that many an eyebrow was raised in disapproval. Eventually Janet finished her education and became a licensed practical nurse. She named her first child, a girl, Cornelia.

In the early 80’s I worked in New York City with Asian Refugee Women who were homebound. These were mostly  women from rural Cambodia who had little or no formal education and often were illiterate in their own language. These women lived in the Bronx and in Brooklyn. They lived on the 4th or 5th floor of walkup apartment building. They had preschool children or they were elderly. Their husbands were out all day, either looking for work or in school learning English or a trade. For all practical purposes the women were homebound. They couldn’t speak any English, and they were scared to death to step outside. There were no government programs addressing their special needs. 

We met in one of the apartments twice a week for two hours. They learned a little English; sometimes I would take them to the market or the park or the zoo. etc. They became a support group for each other. 

In the Bronx the class got so large that I needed a bigger space. The local Episcopal Church offered me wonderful space at no cost. So I announced we would move. The first day in the new location four or five women arrived. Where were all the others? The next couple of meetings the same thing; only a very few women showed up. I kept asking what the problem was. Finally one woman was brave enough to tell me. In order to get to the entrance where we were meeting, one had to walk through the cemetery! These women  believed that if you went near a cemetery the spirits would follow you home and enter into their children and make them sick! I couldn’t believe what I had done in all innocence. Of course we had to go back to meeting in the apartment.

      I arranged for an interpreter to come with me and I sent word that we would next meet in the apartment. I hoped to see them all there. I’ll never forget my experience when I arrived: 

Eyes filled with fear!!!! What was I going to do to them? We talked through the interpreter, and eventually someone had the courage to tell me that the problem was the cemetery.  I tried to explain that it was different in America. I honored their concern and we returned to our regular classes in the apartment.

At present I teach Sunday School at the Chinese Church in Chinatown, NYC. The children are young, ages 3-9. It’s like a one room schoolhouse. During the prayer time the children are learning to pray aloud, to pray for whatever they wanted to pray for.  I am often in awe of their prayers. Recently, after the tsunami in the South Pacific, a seven-year-old girl prayed that parents would be found for the children who lost their parents. I was deeply moved.

The last experience I will share with you happened at St. Paul’s Chapel in NYC. This was the chapel near the Twin Towers where a 24-hour relief ministry was offered to any of the workers at Ground Zero. As many of you know, I volunteered there every Sunday after church. The first day I went there I asked what I could DO. “Just hang out.” That’s more difficult than you realize in this work-oriented society we live in.  In June when the recovery period ended, the Chapel was closed for a few weeks. It was cleaned, painted and a display was set up illustrating the work that had gone on in there during the recovery period. The chapel became a shrine of sorts and two to three thousand or more persons would pass through every day. I continued to go down on Sunday afternoons, again just to be a presence. I wore my long white habit so it was obvious that I ‘belonged there’. People would stop to chat, ask questions, tell me about a friend they had lost, etc. One day a woman came to me in some distress. “They told me there was a list here in the chapel of all the people who died on 9/11.” I wasn’t aware of any list, but she insisted. Then I recalled one of the banners that had been made. It was a quilted banner, about one yard square. It depicted the fallen towers on a pile of earth and rubble. Hanging from the bottom were narrow streamers, about half an inch wide. There were many of these streamers and the names of all the persons who had died were listed. I showed the woman the banner. She knelt down in order to see the names. She looked for a while and then, even more distraught, she looked up at me and said, “The name isn’t there; my daughter’s name isn’t there.” “Oh I’m sure it’s there; all the names are there, thak your time, look at some of the streamers in the back.” (All the time I was hoping the name really was there.) Then she looked up at me again, much calmer, with a tear in her eye and her thumb pressed on the name “That’s My daughter”. We hugged.

What more can I say but “Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.” Amen.