​Sister Joan Chittister, OSB (Order of Saint Benedict) writes,“To have a friend is to acknowledge that some part of someone else’s life which we have held tenderly, trustingly in our own hands might well die with us.  Where does grief for the dead come from, in fact, if not from the anger and sense of abandonment that emerges from the realization that some part of ourselves has been taken away from us without our permission?  Grief is simple a measure of the joy, the depth that comes from growing to know another and letting them know me in ways in which I am exposed to no one else.  Indeed, to lose a friend is to be cast into the insularism that is the self.  It is a dark and sniveling place to be.  It is a dangerous place to be, narrow and confined by the limits of the self.  Only friendship can really save us from our own smallness.  But, what exactly is friendship?  Everything.”Sister Maureen Tobin, Sister Joan Chittister’s closest and dearest friend for more than 57 years, died on Saturday, January 21, 2017, at Mount Saint Benedict Monastery in Erie, Pennsylvania, following a brief illness.

“My friends,” writes the poet Emily Dickerson, “are my estate.”  “Friends are, in other words,” writes Sister Joan Chittister, “the only thing I will have at the end.  My friends will be the treasure I accrue in life and a measure, perhaps, of my own worth, as well.  It is surely, then, of the highest spiritual order to celebrate the Sacrament of Friendship.” (The Friendship of Women, by Joan Chittister)

Read more and let us remember in our hearts and in our prayers,Sister Maureen Tobin, OSB, a sister and friend whose “dedication was immeasurable and her generosity limitless.”