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River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey by Sister Helen Prejean REVIEWED BY JOAN MITCHELL, CSJ, ’62
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nergetic and full of Cajun zest, Helen Prejean always connects the river and the fire that flowed through her with God. “Call it Mystery. Call it Grace,” she writes in her memoir River of Fire. Helen describes feeling “aflow with yes” as her parents drive her to New Orleans to enter the Sisters of St. Joseph. That call persists across Sister Helen’s 60 years in religious life and transforms her into a world leader in efforts to end the death penalty. Her memoir provides a lively record of one Sister living through the Second Vatican Council’s modern turn 1962– 1965. The religious life Helen enters had not yet left behind medieval practices of penance and humility, nor does she find a wise and kind Sound of Music-style temperament in every religious superior — but Sr. Helen remains irrepressible. After a lecture about faults and foibles, her reaction is not to improve her behavior, but
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ST. CATHERINE UNIVERSITY • SPRING 2020
instead to write “foibles” in her journal as a new word. Helen’s resilience is born of a close, loving family, which includes her athletic sister Mary and her brother Louie — a family she recognizes as privileged when in her later years she moves into an impoverished housing project. After making vows, Helen begins several years of teaching in a traditional classroom of seventh graders who delight in her exuberance. As the Catholic Church turns toward the modern world and solidarity with the afflicted, Helen’s community sends her to study the new theology at Notre Dame. She fills her journals with insights, explores and later ends a close relationship with a priest, moves out of schools and into parish religious education, and is then elected director of novices. When she takes her novices to hear Sister Marie Augusta Neal, SND, speak, it is Helen who takes to heart the social justice message, “Integral to that good
