#189: Being the Medicine and the Refuge with Sister Lucy of Maher
Episode summary:
One night in the early years of her religious life, a young Catholic nun turned away a pregnant woman who had come to her door asking for shelter. That night, the woman's husband set her on fire. Sister Lucy Kurien has spent every day since building the home she wishes had existed — Maher, "my mother's home," which began in 1997 with one woman and two children in a village outside Pune and now shelters over 1,200 women, 1,000 children, and men and elders too, across 75 centers in seven states of India.
In this conversation, Sister Lucy tells Christine the whole arc: the Kerala childhood with nine siblings and no electricity, the teenage arrival in Bombay, Mother Teresa glimpsed across a crowd, the fire, the rage, and the priest whose one sentence — "if you have love in your heart, everything will be possible" — became a life. They talk about running an interfaith sanctuary as a Catholic nun (the Bible, the Quran, and the Gita share one altar; "I know only the law of love"), about the woman she unchained from a tree and what it taught a village about mental illness, about telling Pope Francis to his face to ordain women, and about her work now, at 71: turning Maher into a leadership school so that thousands of daughters can take the mother's home forward.
A content note: this episode includes an account of domestic violence and a death by burning. It is told with great care — please listen with care too.
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