Courtney McGrailSr Gwen Collins tells Rachel Beard about her journey from Olympic swimming coach to Carmelite nun
Rachel Beard
When former Olympic swimmer Gary O’Toole was asked who his toughest coach was, he didn’t hesitate to answer: it was Sr Gwen Collins, a member of the Carmelite Monastery in Delgany.
“I took him and I coached him, and he began to win, but he was only a kid,” Sr Gwen says. “He was only 10 when I left, but I was his first coach. But we’ve kept great friends all these years. He calls down and he writes, but he says I was a very tough lady. Very fair, that would be his comment.”
Before she became a nun, Sr Gwen taught at Presentation College Bray, where Gary was a student. Sr Gwen says he had “this really strong urge to win”.
“I saw a potential there, so I kind of took him under my wing with a lot of the other kids there,” she says. “No matter what you asked Gary to do, he would do it, no question of ‘I can’t do that’, or ‘I can’t get up’. If you say, ‘Gary, I’ll meet you at four o’clock in the morning’, that’s fine, he’d be there.”
Coaching an Olympic swimmer isn’t the only unexpected story Sr Gwen has to tell. The story of how she came to join the Carmelite sisters began with a decision to step away from her teaching career to travel the world. “I had this itchy feet that I wanted to travel, just something I always wanted to do,” she says. “So I headed off with two friends, two girl friends. We decided we’d just get on a boat in Dún Laoghaire and travel east and see where we’d end up.”
Adventure
Sr Gwen’s “great adventure” eventually took her to Australia, where she stayed and worked with her friends. One day, when she and her friends were leaving the church, a couple offered them a ride home. They had to stop by a Carmelite monastery, and the nuns insisted on seeing the three Irish girls in the back of their car.
“So we went in and we said hello and in those days, there was a big curtain and a grate,” Sr Gwen says. “You wouldn’t actually see the nuns. You’d just hear a voice coming through. So they asked us where we were from. The other girls were from Kerry, and I was from Wicklow, then the sister, whoever it was behind the grate, said ‘you must know the sisters from Delgany’ and I said ‘no, no I don’t actually’. I didn’t know it at all.”
The travelling girls returned to Ireland 18 months after they left. Sr Gwen returned to teaching, but the Carmelite monastery was always in the back of her mind so she decided she had to pay it a visit.
“So they talked to me and they explained and as I was leaving, one of the sisters who’s still here with us today, she said ‘maybe the Lord is calling you to be a Carmelite’,” Sr Gwen says. “Just like that she said to me, and I said ‘I really don’t think so, no, it couldn’t possibly be, no’.”
Sr Gwen found she wasn’t satisfied with her life as a layperson. Even though she says she “had it all” at the time, she still felt drawn to the Carmelite monastery.
“They kept inviting me back about once a month,” she says. “They said ‘just come back and talk to us, anyway’. I could feel this attraction, it was like a magnet. I really couldn’t resist it at this stage. I said ‘I have to give this a try. I definitely have to give a try. It probably won’t work but that’s fine. I can manage.’ They said ‘okay’.”
When she eventually joined the sisters, Sr Gwen “didn’t want to do a live in” and instead just moved in with the sisters right off the bat.
“Maybe because I was kind of local, too, but I didn’t feel the need to do that,” she says. “So I came, after about six months of meeting them and with the spiritual director and so on, they said ‘look, maybe you should just come and join for a year or something’ so I said ‘okay, I’ll give it a try’.”
When she eventually decided to join the sisters, Sr Gwen’s family was “devastated”.
“They saw no value in the life at all,” she says. “They were good Catholics and they went to Mass and all. My brothers and sisters thought it was off the wall all together. But anyway, I went in in July and they all said, ‘well we’ll see you in two weeks, you’ll be out’. So that was it.”
Visitors
Sr Gwen finds her life as Carmelite nun as rewarding as she hoped it’d be. Aside from praying and working with her fellow sisters, Sr Gwen also offers support to visitors to the monastery.
“Because they come to us and all they want to hear at the end of the day, all they want is to share their problem,” she says. “All they want to hear is that we’ll pray for them. That’s really what they want you to say at the end of the day. Because we’re not counsellors and we’re not specially trained in any other field, but that’s what they come for, the prayer.”
After becoming a postulant, Sr Gwen “struggled for years” to adjust to her new life.
“Their life was such a change, from a very active lifestyle to contemplative,” she says. “To silence, to solitude living in a community. So I struggled for years and years, but things seemed to go smoothly enough.”
But Sr Gwen is still a devoted Carmelite nun to this day. “We’re still here,” she jokes. “So far, so good.”