My Birmingham
A conversation with Sister Dinah White, DoC, Senior VPMission Integration
Sister Dinah White is one of the Daughters of Charity at St. Vincent’s hospital. In her current position she oversees pastoral care, mission integration, community service and outreach, and in her words, is there to “ensure that the original mission of St. Vincent de Paul is alive and well.” We spoke to Sister at her office on the St. Vincent’s campus.
Birmingham magazine: Where are you from?
Sister Dinah: I was born in Philadelphia, Miss. I went to nursing school in New Orleans and did my [spiritual] training and worked in the Midwest for many years.
BHAM: When did you decide to become a sister?
SD: Oh, I knew I wanted to be a sister from the time I was 4 or 6 years old. Trinitarians from Holy Trinity in Alabama were [the clergy] in my town, and I knew I wanted to do what they did but not join them.
When I was a junior in high school my mother suggested nursing. I had an aunt who is also my godmother; she was a nurse and was living in New Orleans, and so my family felt safe sending me to school there. But on the eight-hour bus ride I had a tremendous crisis of faith and thought, “God wants me to be a sister, and I’m learning to be a nurse.” But a good friend told me that if the call was really from God, it would be there when I graduated, and it was.
BHAM: What is the difference between a nun and a sister?
SD: Nuns take perpetual vows, and sisters take annual vows. I’ll renew my vows in a letter to my Sister Superior, and then I’ll publicly renew my vows at a Mass on March 25, 2010.
BHAM: So in theory a sister could say at some point during the year that her work as a sister is done?
SD: That’s right. She could say, “I’m not being called to do this anymore.”
BHAM: Tell me about your order, the Daughters of Charity.
SD: Well, it was cofounded by St. Vincent de Paul, a [17th-century] French peasant who became a priest and saw that the people in his community were not serving the sick with love, and so he founded the Ladies of Charity. He asked St. Louise de Marillac, to go around the area and visit charities to see how they were doing. St. Louise also sheltered some young girls in her home during the Plague, and those young girls were called the Daughters of Charity. Today our commitment to the poor has not changed. There has been lots of debate over what “poor” means, but one thing we still say in our vows is that we are “servants of the sick poor.”
BHAM: What do you do at St. Vincent’s?
SD: One of the things I do is called formation. Formation is what happened in your family as you grew up that makes you what you are. Formation is when you really have to change your heart, and it also means to be formed in a tradition, in my case the Vincentian tradition. Here at the hospital we have what’s called “Executive Formation” that we teach quarterly, and right now we’re talking about reverence, being reverent in the workplace. It’s a recognition that you are a child of God, and so I need to be reverent when I speak to and care for you. We talk a lot about spirituality in the workplace. What makes a place spiritual are the people there. So how to we take that to the nursing units? We want to make [the staff ] more aware of the spiritual dimension.
BHAM: I can imagine that even for a happy event like the birth of a child, most everyone comes here feeling some anxiety or fear about what is going to happen.
SD: Yes. I call that a “transcendental crisis.” That is what is happening when you come into this hospital. But to me that is an opportunity when God is knocking at our door, and we all respond in different ways. I often talk about bringing your “whole self” to work. Formation is also about bringing your whole self to work—body, mind and spirit. From the nurses to our CFO who pays the bills, however you do your job directly impacts the patient.
