There aren’t many things you can count on these days, but one of them is Sister Jean.
If Loyola has a basketball team, Sister Jean is there. Maybe not on the road and maybe not always courtside these days, but she’s always spiritually close by because she’s the team’s chaplain and has been since 1994.
So let’s just say it:
Happy birthday, Sister Jean! Keep on rockin’!
On Sunday, the young lady turned 103. And with any luck — and God’s blessing — the woman born Jean Dolores Schmidt in San Francisco in 1919, eight months after the end of World War I, will live on forever.
Symbolically, it could happen.
She already has a platform on the Red Line named for her, and it seems the bobbleheads honoring her — usually with a basketball and always with some Ramblers colors — just keep coming.
More than anything, however, Sister Jean is a symbol of something without dimension or weight, an ephemeral quality so rare in our country that it seems to be in danger of extinction. And that quality is happiness.
You look at Sister Jean, you listen to her, you watch her with people, with her players and students and just about anybody who happens to be around, and it’s impossible not to smile.
She makes you smile because she is happy.
She’s happy.
Do you know anybody else you can say that about? Successful, beautiful, dominant, brilliant, funny, thoughtful, talented, adventuresome, seeking — sure, all those qualities can be found in people we know.
But plain old happy? No.
The thing about Sister Jean, of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is that age, sports, friendship, prayer and, as she always says, ‘‘sleeping well’’ have coalesced into this force of goodwill and good cheer that is a pleasure to behold.
Former Sun-Times sports reporter Madeline Kenney, once a Loyola cheerleader and one of Sister Jean’s devoted pals, wrote this in 2018: ‘‘Sister Jean has a way of making you feel at peace, no matter what adversity you are facing. Her smile is a comforting serum. She makes you feel like her best friend.’’
Kenney told me Monday she still absolutely ‘‘loves’’ Sister Jean. She got so excited with the mere mention of the person she calls ‘‘a living saint’’ that I told her to get back to her work in San Francisco, then have a beer on me.
In days of yore, poets and essayists might sit and contemplate objects in the natural world and let their minds drift where they may. John Keats pondered the Elgin Marbles, for example, and wrote about the mixing of ‘‘Grecian grandeur with the rude/Wasting of old time.’’
And if you ponder Sister Jean, you get lost in the mystery of old age and that thing of which we hate to speak — death — and how she can face its inevitability, get closer and closer to it, yet smile with contentment.
Sister Jean says she eats bacon or sausage or pastries for breakfast because, healthy food or not, that’s what she likes. She adds: ‘‘At this age, what difference does it make?’’
She’s smiling into the abyss, and it only can be because of an inner peace that has come to her through prayer, contemplation and a life dedicated to helping others.
I’ve written about old women before — sports fans, of course — and always found them to be delightful. There was, in particular, Mary Melberg at a retirement home in Plano, Texas, in 2012. I saw Mary when she was 106 and the oldest Cubs fan in the nation. This was four years before the Cubs would win a World Series, which Mary had dreamed about since she was a child but would not live to see, and I asked her what she would do if those lovable losers ever won a title.
Without hesitation, she said, ‘‘I’d go crazy.’’
Mary checked out of this mortal coil at 107 in 2013, but I’m sure she went nuts in 2016 in some spirit world.
Sister Jean has that similar calm and cheerfulness we all inwardly covet. To be a nun is to give up much. Clearly, however, much is gained, as well.
I have a friend whose sister is a cloistered nun, has been for almost 60 years. That means she sees no one except occasionally through a screen.
Is that nun depressed, sad, melancholic? No, the friend tells me. Her sister is joyful.
There’s something to it, and Sister Jean has it.
Rock on, young lady.
