Sister Peg Hynes S.S.J.
Peg O' My Heart
January 2003
Hi:
There
were six lit candles of welcome in the windows, when Sr. Peg Hynes hung a
little bag of bread on the doorknob of Mary Brady's house in Westmont, NJ.
It was Friday, December 20, 2002, Solstice Eve, and the longest darkness was
arriving early as she drove away. She would return later to break that bread
with three friends at dinner and enjoy a special evening.
Earlier in the day, she came over to Sacred Heart and gave me her Christmas card and sat down to chat about her coming sabbatical in California. She spoke of a Camden woman whom she had struggled to help for several years who is doing better now. "It takes a long time for the seed to blossom," she said. Indeed. Peg has been planting good seeds in South Camden for 16 years and many are blossoming. Some are slow. As director of the Heart of Camden Housing, she worked unceasingly to renovate more than a hundred houses, turned many poor people into owners, and sowed seeds of hope in their hearts. Her own heart was happy on Friday. I knew her knee was hurting terribly but she brought presents to several poor people. Like Dorothy Day, she had a great sense of hospitality and personal generosity. The next day, more than 1,000 Christmas baskets and turkeys would be delivered by Sacred Heart in Camden. Annually, it is a glorious day for Peg.
Later, she called me about the church roof in the pouring rain. It was her last message to Sacred Heart. Before the day was over, all would be changed. Not of much concern now, the missing tiles on the roof but the missing smile that blessed us. Now the Heart is broken. There's rain on pane and pillow.
On the way from dinner that night to her home in Holy Rosary Convent, Cherry Hill, she sat in the front passenger seat of a Kia and chatted happily with her friends, Tom Quinn and Muriel Prickitt. Suddenly, at 11: 35 PM, an oncoming 2002 Lincoln, with its driver crazed on crack cocaine, steering with his knees as he used a pipe, went straight at a blind bend, crashed into the Kia, and, God help us all, killed Sister Peg Hynes. She was pronounced dead at 12:10 AM. Tom and Muriel were seriously injured. (They are doing well now.)
Only God could have known that all the steps of her holy life would bring her to this pinpoint of deadly collision on Route 570, otherwise known as Burnt Mill Road. It was not her destiny to die in any long, lingering illness, even though she has battled breast cancer in recent years, but like Jesus in the cruel clash between good and evil. The oncoming force so horrific that seat belt and air bag could not save the dear body that worked so hard, suffered so much, laughed and danced and walked these South Camden streets in service to all. Battered streets they are indeed, with drugs and all that drugs entail and yet ironically it was in suburbia that she was killed by the reckless antics of a drug addict.
All of her life, Peg Hynes gave her life unselfishly. Born in 1933, she soon became a star student in St. Columba's grammar school and Hallahan High. Always a joy to her parents, Tom Hynes and Nellie Burke, emigrants from Gort, Co. Galway, who raised their five daughters in the Swampoodle section of Philadelphia, PA. Not only in learning did she shine but on the basket ball court, the softball field and the swimming pool. Entering the Order of St. Joseph in Chestnut Hill, PA on September the 8, 1954, she was called to a career in education, obtaining degrees in Chestnut Hill College and Boston College to equip her for 30 years as a great teacher in a classroom and a great principal in several schools. With all that behind her, she tackled housing in South Camden in 1986. Ownership for the poor. Surely the most difficult housing assignment in America. Here, as I wrote before, the hoops were higher and rougher, but it was here that she stretched for her "three pointers" of enormous generosity and got them. A night game without lights. But she was a star.
Sr. Peg Hynes was a formidable leader but she balanced that with an easy hospitality of nature, good humor, and a constant sense of gratitude. She had great integrity. A holy woman with a happy heart. The pole of the tent in any tent she was in…and not suited for anything less. All the canvas droops without her.
She never ceased thanking people which reminds me to say thanks, a thousand thanks to you, for your prayers and good wishes and especially for the donations that provided Christmas baskets with turkeys to a thousand families (1,012) in South Camden and toys for almost 1,700 children.
Several people had gathered in Sacred Heart Cafeteria by 8:30 AM for the great basket delivery day December 21st, when I had to tell them of the terrible accident. "Tom and Muriel are in Cooper Hospital," and in the hushed moment, the three shattering words: "Peg is dead." That most happy of mornings was suddenly the saddest. Silent prayers and tears blessed the baskets but they were borne lovingly to the people. As she surely would have wanted. Great sorrow settled into the heart as the word went forth to near and far by fax and phone, by e-mailed letters and whispered words. Patrick Hynes from Gort, Co. Galway responded immediately: "You have lost a wonderful friend and colleague. Here in Ireland, the Burke family and the Hynes family have lost a loving cousin who was proud of her Irish roots…an inspiration to all of us." Raindrops clung to the whins and the whitethorns in the hedges around Gort and the fields of Athenry.
Peg loved her Philadelphia, the place of her birth and life and she loved Ireland the land of her parents. She was Irish to her toes and they wriggled to say so in Shoe the Donkey and all the set dances she enjoyed. Her aching knee hurt more than her knee. "If I dance I hurt," she said. "If I don't dance I hurt. So I dance."
Her wake on December 27th brought a 1,000 people to her side at Sacred Heart and besides her family, none wept more than the people of this Camden neighborhood whom she served so well with homes and all they needed. The Vietnamese were inconsolable. Five hundred people sang her Mass of Resurrection into glory. They honored her who gave to the Catholic Church "the lovable face of a mother." The dream of Pope John XXIII. Stories were told but none so charming as the one about the stormy day when Peg took a woman to the bus to get her away from an abusive situation. The woman arrived in pathetic slippers that were gold in color. Peg gave her own big boots to the woman and came home squeezed into the golden slippers.
At 10:00 PM all the people went out and walked in procession in the streets followed by her casket borne on the old Mitsubishi pick-up truck that hauled so much used furniture, etc. for her. It was magnificently decorated by a Joe Balzano crew with green carpet, floodlights, Christmas lights and flowers. Around it, seven lanterns burning and her sisters singing Peg O' My Heart. On Ferry Avenue, it passed through a sea of lighted candles and singing people and then the Overbrook String Band struck up a mummer's favorite, Golden Slippers. Immediately, her four sisters - Mary, Sister Jody, Kathy, and Pat Hynes danced on the street behind Peg's casket on the old, navy-blue pick-up. Their hearts were broken but they danced in their grief like Zorba.
After another mass in St. Joseph's Villa the following day, she was laid to rest there in the cemetery of the sisters in Flourtown, PA. It was December 28th, the Feast of the Holy Innocents. The lambs that died to save the wolves. Not the ones in the woods but the ones that wreck havoc on our lives because they have no hands on the wheel. No control on their lives.
There was perpetual light in the windows of heaven when Peg Hynes came in her glory, not just to hang the bread of her labors on the doorknobs outside, but to enter with joy into the everlasting welcome of God.
Sincerely,
Michael Doyle