- May 24, 2019 Sister Stories, Vocations
Sister Mary Alice Collar professed her first vows with the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet on May 11 in a ceremony that was held at the province’s motherhouse in St. Louis.
The youngest of the late Charles and Rosemary Collar’s seven children in Pittsburg, Kansas, Mary Alice attended Our Lady of Lourdes Parish. She was taught by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Wichita, Kansas at St. Mary’s Colgan School.
Her journey in religious life began when she entered with the Wichita sisters in the 1990s but, after six years, she decided it was not the right fit for her at that time. “I still had a hunger to form myself,” she says.
With a bachelor’s in health science in dental hygiene from Wichita State, she continued working as a hygienist as well as in youth ministry. In 2001, she moved to St. Louis to attend Aquinas Institute of Theology in pastoral studies, and she met a few Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet.
She ended up living with some of the sisters and, ultimately, she found that the CSJ mission was deep inside her. “This unifying love is about bringing people together. In doing that, I’m uniting myself with them, but I’m also bringing them together with God and with others,” she says. She re-entered religious life with the CSJs in 2017.
Mary Alice’s eclectic resume includes dental hygiene with youth ministry, hospital chaplaincy and religious education at all levels, as well as her experience growing up in the family business, Winco Fireworks. Her current goal is to work in campus ministry with high school or college students. “I continue to hear I am most gifted with young adults, and that they respond to me well, so I hope to work in that arena,” she says.
Wherever she ends up, Mary Alice will bring the mission of welcoming to the role. “I’m constantly widening my radius of who I come to know because I don’t want to miss the blessing that is the stranger,” she says. “Building relationships is part of being a CSJ. It’s who I am through and through.”