I have always admired the Poor Clares and in fact both Ursula and I belong to the Third Order of St. Francis (now called the Franciscan Secular Order).
One morning I was watering the plants in the house when I suddenly had an urge to visit these cloistered nuns who had their house just off the main Regional Road near St. Julians. When I eventually went to the convent, I rang the bell and the Mother Superior very kindly agreed to see me.
It was strange listening to her as she talked from behind the grill. I let her know how worried I was about one of my sons and her comment was, “a soul is like a plant that needs care and watering.” She then promised that they would pray.
Some months later my son came home and said he had the strangest thing happen to him near the beach. He was with a bunch of friends and heard someone calling for help. He went to find out who it was, and, to his amazement, it was a nun who had found herself trapped as she could not open the door of the toilets. What mystified him more than that was the fact that she spoke his name even though he had never seen her before. She also told him to give up ‘smoking’ and to give the money to the poor.
A few months later, we were all watching a programme on television about this same community of cloistered nuns when my son leaned forward and said, “that’s her! That’s the nun I saw on the playground by the beach.”
I was even more intrigued by all of this and decided to go back to the convent and tell Mother Superior the story. She smiled and said none of the nuns left the convent because they were an enclosed order and not allowed to beg. However, she did point out that the nun in question was the one she had assigned to pray for my son many months previously.