Sr Anne-Lise RIP
Sister Anne-Lise Strøm was buried today. We are many who will miss her deeply. She was a fully given person. In a book of conversations she published with Brita Rosenberg in 1997, she described her departure from Oslo in 1961, when she set out for Lourdes to join the convent of enclosed Dominican nuns there, on a hill overlooking the sanctuary: ‘The train started moving. Her father ran alongside it crying out, ‘Anne! Write!’ He was weeping.’ It seemed as if this intelligent, enthusiastic young woman full of joie de vivre was lost to the world. Little did one know. Through her long, faithful monastic life, Sr Anne-Lise became the Catholic Church’s best known (and probably best loved) ambassador in Norway. She directed, taught, consoled, and encouraged countless people with her characteristic mixture of lucid realism and unshakable trust in the transforming power of God’s mercy. She was funny, full of self-irony; at the same time inscrutable, with her mind set on eternity. Grace and experience made her wise. She was a thoroughly loveable human being. May God grant her the hundredfold she herself so credibly embodied.
