Sister Ann Kenyon’s call to religious life didn’t come as a note tied to a brick thrown through a window, as a student once asked her. It was a persistent pull that grabbed her at an early age and didn’t let her go.
She planned to put thoughts about religious life behind her in high school, but she caught the spirit of her teachers — the Sisters of St. Francis. “Their spirituality, the way they were with each other, was very inspiring to me, and I knew I wanted to be part of that,” she recalls.
She entered community right after high school so that, if it didn’t work out, “I could go on with my life.” Her parents suggested college or that she work for a year, but she wanted to “get this out of my system and move on. I felt I just couldn’t rest until I explored it.”
Sister Ann never got it out of her system. She entered in August of 1978 andprofessed her final vows six years later.
Her road to leadership began with ministering as a high school math teacher, at one point teaching in the same high school she attended in Oswego, New York. She headed the community’s formation program, then ministered several years at Syracuse’s Assumption Church. When she missed working with young people, she found an open position in campus ministry at LeMoyne College. Just a little more than a year after she began ministering at Francis House, the sisters’ sponsored ministry for the terminally ill, she was nominated for leadership.
“In the past, when sisters put my name forward, there were reasons why I discerned it wasn’t the right time. But this time around, I didn’t have a good reason to say no.” And as with her vocation, Sister Ann says she felt called by God and her sisters.
She is especially looking forward to bringing the direction statement into action. “I see the Franciscan values very much part of it,” she says, “Particularly regarding bringing peace and hope. I know this has been said before, but if there was ever a time when the Franciscan spirit is needed, I think it’s in our world today.”
Her role in governance is about relationships and collaboration. “Though we’re aging as a community, there are still so many things we can do. We need to be creative about how we do it,” Sister Ann says. “I look forward to working on that, bringing the Franciscan spirit to the world.”
