MISSIONARY work can take a person to many parts of the world.
For Verbum Dei missionary, theology lecturer and musician Sister Maeve Louise Heaney, her mission has taken her from her home in Dublin, Ireland, to Spain, London, Rome and now to Brisbane.
For the 46-year-old, the journey to Brisbane, where Sr Maeve lectures in systematic theology focusing on music and art aesthetics at the Australian Catholic University, started 30 years ago.
At 16, Sr Maeve, a keen and talented musician, began to question faith and sought out answers.
On her quest for faith, Sr Maeve found herself weaving in and out of Catholic churches, eagerly searching for Christ.
These searches, she said, were “Eucharistic oriented”.
“I sort of began to wonder about the Church and about the Gospel and began to ask myself, did I believe or didn’t I?” she said.
“I remember in Ireland we used to have the habit of when you pass the church you bless yourself.
“I remember being on a bus, passing in front of a church and blessing myself, and then asking myself what I was doing.
“And I answered myself that I was recognising the presence of Jesus, and then I said – I don’t believe that.
“I thought if I really believed that the same Jesus that walked Nazareth, that cured people, that changed the life of Mary Magdalene, nothing would drag me away from that; I wouldn’t have the kind of relationship that I did.
“So I began to enter into churches and sit at the back, and look at the tabernacle and say, ‘If you’re real, I need to know you’.”
It was in this search for Christ in the Eucharist and in recognising that her faith was weaker than she thought, that Sr Maeve met the Verbum Dei missionaries.
“They struck me as a group of very joyful young women, with very little, and they said it (their joy) was because they prayed, so I asked them to teach me how to pray,” she said.
At the time, Sr Maeve was pursuing a career in music, but felt the future would not be “secure” without faith.
“I was studying music and going to continue on with music, and I realised at that stage that if I didn’t stop and clarify my faith, that the future wasn’t secure for me,” she said.
“I wanted to walk on solid ground.”
She eventually found solid ground on a year-long hiatus in Spain.
“It was a long year of searching as I was very young, I did have an experience of Jesus, of prayer, that went to the very core – there’s no other way to describe it – that touched a place in me that was thirsty and it felt like I had drunk something,” she said.
The thirst that only Christ could quench changed the direction of Sr Maeve’s life.
She became a consecrated religious with Verbum Dei, a vocation that had initially never crossed her mind.
“It was simply the experience of Jesus and the realisation that that was the core of everything, and that was the key to changing me,” she said.
“I entered (religious life) quite young, probably too young, in one sense, but God writes straight lines from crooked ones.”
Although she’s moved from several different countries, the missionary has never moved away from her love of music.
Writing her first song at 15, Sr Maeve has recorded three CDs, with another anticipated for a release in March.
She said her Verbum Dei community had always supported her passion for music, particularly in using it to preach and evangelise, which was at the heart of Verbum Dei.
“I’ve been a member of this community for 28 years, nearly 29 now, and the more I worked the more I realised that, yes, words are important, and they always will be, but sometimes, it’s as if they’re not understood,” she said.
“I began to realise that music sometimes reaches spaces that we couldn’t get with words, or finished off a process in a way that did things that words can’t do,” she said.
After recording two CDs and organising various Catholic and ecumenical music events in London and Southampton, Maeve realised she needed to do more than just compose and sing.
“All of that dynamism made me realise that there was something very important going on, and for it to go further, I could always make music, and sing, but for it to go further and to lead to formation and a spirituality that would help the Church, I needed more knowledge,” she said.
Withdrawing to study, Sr Maeve received in 2010 a Doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, focusing on fundamental theology and theological aesthetics.
The pinnacle of all her study and subsequent teaching came on November 20, when Sr Maeve launched her new book, Music as Theology: What music says about the Word, outside St Stephen’s Cathedral.
“(The book) answers the question of what music means, and why it’s so important in human life and for Christian faith,” she said.
“It recognises the fact that for many people, it is the bridge towards faith, so it tries to speak about that in theological terms.”
The book and the study behind the text has been a work-in-progress for almost 12 years, developed in between the spaces where Sr Maeve sits down to compose or perform her music.
“A lot of my music would be either for prayer, or to bridge the faith/non-faith world,” she said.
“It would be music that’s expressing life through a Catholic lens, if you like, but not necessarily so Word of God or Bible-based that somebody who is outside that circle of understanding couldn’t hear something that would be helpful.
“And I also think that we find it helpful, to hear things expressed in a poetic way, or in a different way.
“So the attempt is that it can bridge the world for me.”
Sr Maeve said her exciting life, which now brings her to the southern hemisphere, was “always rewarding and fulfilling”.
“And Jesus, I trust Him as much, or more, as I did then, so that’s firm,” she said.
“It’s felt like a thread that’s moved through continually, and although God would change some aspects of it, the core is the same.”
