By Gretchen Keiser

In 50 years of service as a sister of St. Joseph of Carondolet, Sister Marcella Meyer has been to every part of Georgia and, at one time or another, taught every grade from first through eighth.

Her eyes twinkle as she voices the one mild objection she has to the places she’s been and the work she’s done. It’s the one year she spent teaching in Kansas City, Missouri.

“I couldn’t wait to get back” to Georgia, Sister Marcella said.

Her vocation was shaped here as she grew up in St. Anthony’s parish, attended the school and later Sacred Heart, and saw the Sisters of St. Joseph as teachers. The desire to enter the religious life which she had “early in life” crystallized in high school. The example of her teachers and the nearness of the order, which at that time had a province in Augusta, drew her to it.

She went off, the only daughter in a family of three children, to the strict discipline of what was then a very cloistered order devoted to teaching and nursing. “It was hard, very difficult at times,” Sister Marcella recalled. “But when I look back on it, I think the discipline of that period was good.” Hinting that the only girl in the family might have been a bit spoiled by her brothers, she says “somehow or other, the mistress got that message” and assigned her tasks accordingly.

But if growing up with boys affected her disposition, it also shaped the teaching she would most enjoy. In a career which included teaching in Savannah, Augusta, and Atlanta schools, she recalls as highlights the years she spent at the Boy’s Home in Washington, Georgia and those as a teacher and head of one of the cottages at the Village of St. Joseph in Atlanta.

“I like boys. I guess I knew how to get along with them,” she said, and her memories quickly spill over to certain boys, now grown men, who got a push from the sisters, and some encouragement when things were bad at home. Some of them made it and they’re well remembered.

Sister Marcella stopped teaching about thee and a half years ago, and with Sister Roberta Sutton, accepted an invitation from Father Jacob Bollmer of Catholic Social Services to work among the elderly poor in Atlanta. Their work with Service for the Elderly keeps them on the road, delivering food and visiting people isolated by age and changing neighborhoods.

Growing up in Atlanta, Sister Marcella recalls all the children, black and white, playing together, but accepting official segregation as a matter of fact. Like the changes toward correcting racial injustice, she welcomes the changes within the Church opening to other Christian denominations.

“At one time we were very narrow-minded as far as I’m concerned,” she said. The only Catholic among her childhood friends, Sister Marcella found herself after the Second Vatican Council able to do something she calls a “very human thing, what I call just basic Christianity” – accepting an invitation to hear the son of a close friend preach in his church.

Sister Marcella also reflects the changes in the order, from the simple street clothes that have replaced the traditional habit to the type of work she has chosen.

But in her own journey over that time, Sister Marcella speaks more in terms of a steady, “day by day” progression.

“I think when you first enter, your ideals are way up in the clouds,” she said. “After a few knocks, you come down and realize that this is a place of trials.”

While others may talk about the day of making final vows to the religious life as the deepest experience, Sister Marcella said her’s was earlier, when she received her habit for the first time.

“That joy and that feeling I had was something I never lost,” she said. “I made my vows that day I got the habit. I knew this was my life.”