Middle of six children to an affluent oil worker, Sister Olga of the Eucharist was born in Kirkuk, Iraq in 1966. From a young age, she was drawn to Catholicism and the Blessed Mother Mary in a region where the Assyrian religion is prominent - a Christian sect where nuns or female clergy members do not exist.
After multiple attempts at running away from home to convents, her parents decided to "punish" her by sending her to college, the first of her siblings, in order to physically separate her from the Church. But the call was still too strong to resist, so her parents tried a second tactic in order to stop their daughter from becoming a religious person and leading a celibate lifestyle, which was frowned upon by parents in the region.
In a second attempt to remove her from the religious community, Sister Olga's parents orchestrated for her to run away to Jordan and then the United Kingdom with her youngest and only brother. This was explained to her as a way to prevent him from having to fight in the Kuwait war. It was only before she boarded the plane she found out that her parents had promised her hand to a man in the United Kingdom.
"In my heart," Sister explains "I knew I was engaged to Jesus." So, she stopped herself from getting on the plane, instead sending her brother alone. For this act of disobedience to her family, she was disowned for 7 years.
Having been exiled from her family, she moved into Baghdad where she led a poor lifestyle and she continued her pursuit to be accepted in her Assyrian religion as a religious member. Having lived as the daughter of a wealthy oil worker to living out of a garage in Baghdad, the effects of the first Gulf War shook Sister to her soul. From this she knew she had to actively help the community.
In 1995, the Bishop of Baghdad got word of Olga's spiritual desires. In response, he gave her permission to join the Assyrian Church as the first nun and, as such, she founded the first order of nuns in the religion that year.
Because Assyrian was not the religion in her heart, she still practiced her Catholic traditions in secret. This secret put Sister's status as a nun in the Assyrian religion in jeopardy, as her superior didn't approve. So in 1999 he gave her and ultimatum to "change or leave." She had to choose whether to stay in the community she had been helping for years and deny the religion in her heart, or chose her religion.
She likens this choice to Abraham's in the Old Testament. He waited years for God to give him a son and once he had him, was asked by the Lord to sacrifice him without hesitation. In the same way she waited years for God to give her a path into the religious life and now asked to give it up so as not to deny Him. She was dismissed from the Assyrian Church that year.
In response to this the people of Baghdad rose up in protest, but for that year she says, "I lived in hell for a year [but] the more I suffered for the Church the more I loved it."
She joined a seminary in these times in order to further her religious education and graduated as Suma Cum Laude from her class. Her achievements were so great in this male dominated field that Rome itself recognized her accomplishments. And it was eventually through this reputation that two Jesuit priests offered to let her study for her MA and Ph.D. at Boston College. She came here not knowing any English at all so she was soon put in Boston University's Center for English Language and Orientation Program (CELOP) and fell in love with the campus. It was during this time in that States that she also was given the chance to convert from her Assyrian past to Catholicism and become a Catholic nun.
In December 2005, Olga retook her vows as a Catholic nun at Marsh Chapel. The process was completed.
Since coming to the States, she has revisited Iraq twice: once in 2003 and once this past December 2007. She is often asked why she goes back to the community she left, especially with regard to her Holiday-time visit. In response, Sister says that "as God gave us the gift of presence-Jesus Christ-on Christmas. I too want to give the Iraqi people and American soldiers the gift of my presence [...] I want to show the American soldiers the other side of the Iraqi heart."
Many people too wonder how they can help to change the atrocities occurring in the Middle East and around the world. For this question, Sister tells a story of her childhood. As a girl, she heard a homily from a pastor that said "you can see the face of God in the face of the waves, hear His voice in their sound." Unfortunately, she lived in a part of Iraq where there were no bodies of water around to experience this, so she was afraid she would never get to see and hear God. Luckily, one year their father decided to take them for a vacation up north to a house by a lake. She was so excited that she would finally get a chance to witness God.
When she got there, however, the lake was still, placid and smooth. She did not understand how this could sound like or look like the Lord. As she sat there disheartened, fiddling with pebbles, she threw one in on an impulse. The small pebble disrupted the placid surface and created ripples with a decisive plop. So excited by the noise and appearance she began tossing in more pebbles and watched as the ripples intermingled with one another until the surface of the lake was changed.
In the same way, she says, that is what we are called to do. Not to be preoccupied by changing the world as a whole, but by lovingly tossing one peddle of good into a world frozen in its calamities. And if one person does something small and it ripples out, and another does something as well, soon our ripples will mingle together. That is how we gradually change the whole. How we break this silence and stillness to affect the world.
And that is precisely what this warm-hearted woman, who has seen so much adversity, tries to accomplish each day-small acts of genuine love.
