Susan Classen at this year's Bridgefolk conference at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minn. — Photo by Robert Rhodes/MWR

As a volunteer with Mennonite Central Committee in Latin America from 1981-2003, Classen witnessed violence in El Salvador and Nicaragua and served alongside Catholic clergy and laity in addressing the region’s many needs.

In El Salvador, Classen worked with a group of Irish Franciscans who challenged and stretched her Mennonite view of the world and of religion.

“They smoked and drank beer and cursed and risked their lives for the gospel,” said Classen, who spoke at the fifth annual meeting of Bridgefolk, an ecumenical Anabaptist-Catholic dialogue group that met June 29-July 2 at St. John’s Abbey. “I couldn’t write them off.”

And while she remains a Mennonite, Classen credits her direct experience of Catholic spirituality and its tradition of social teaching with deepening her Anabaptist faith. It also is what led her to live for the past few years in a Catholic convent in Kentucky.

When Classen arrived in Latin America with MCC, she was struggling to find her place in life.

Though being immersed in the predominantly Catholic, and conflicted, setting of El Salvador might seem to offer more obstacles than clarity, Classen found she had a mission there.

“In a cross-cultural experience, I learned how to be different,” Classen said. “Over a period of time, I found my place. . . . I needed to find my place in the ‘not-fitting,’ ” and this largely foreign environment made it possible.

Soon, Classen began to appreciate the common purpose she and her Catholic coworkers shared in responding to people in conflict. Because she worked so closely with Catholic priests and nuns, some of the locals assumed Classen was a nun herself — calling her, in Spanish, “Hermana Susanna,” or Sister Susan.

Classen believes the impulse to reconcile conflict, especially in war zones such as the ones where she served, comes from a common source that nourishes people of all faiths.

“Peacemaking to me is about . . . living my own sense of identity down to that living vein of water that serves us all,” Classen said.

As her time in Latin America continued, Classen began to feel an even closer link to the spirituality of her Catholic coworkers. Because she is Mennonite, Classen resisted taking communion during the Catholic services she attended. But increasingly, she began to sense a longing to experience the sacrament with the people whose lives she shared, often amid great risk.

Eventually, Classen and her Catholic colleagues helped resolve her conflict about receiving communion — a discernment settled by one of the more conservative nuns Classen worked with.

“She told me there was something more than [Catholic] canon law, and that it wasn’t right I didn’t participate,” Classen said.

This new closeness to Catholic spirituality eventually would help Classen take the next steps on her journey.

After serving more than two decades in Latin America — including terms in Honduras and Guatemala — Classen retreated to the Sisters of Loretto Motherhouse in Nerinx, Ky., south of Louisville. Classen had first encountered Loretto nuns in El Salvador and felt a kinship with them.

Facing burnout, she took refuge in the Loretto convent’s Cedars of Peace retreat center, not unlike a place Classen had helped establish with MCC in Patastule, Nicaragua — a retreat called The Garden in the Desert.

“That sense of leaving [Latin America] to receive God’s unconditional love . . . became very instrumental,” Classen said.

Today, Classen is director of Cedars of Peace, where she not only offers spiritual direction to retreatants, but does carpentry and any number of maintenance tasks on the center’s seven hermitages.

She compares ecumenical dialogue to adding leaves to lengthen a sturdy table, even while respecting the table’s original structure and taking steps to shore it up when it begins to sag.

“A good woodworker knows you can’t build a table that you want to last and fix the cracks with screws and glue,” Classen said. “A good, well-built table is one that respects the life of the wood.”

Likewise, mutual understanding is required for ecumenical growth to bear fruit.

“My own sense is that the Spirit is moving beyond denominations,” Classen said. “As peacemakers, we must move with the growth and stay free of the temptation to break the table apart.”

Classen finds her work at Cedars of Peace fulfilling. It feeds her Mennonite roots as much as it nurtures her newer Catholic grounding.

“I care for a space that has become sacred because so many people have prayed there,” Classen said. “People find healing in nature because God is present there. . . .

“It’s Catholic spirituality that allows me to be a good Mennonite, [and] it’s Catholic theology that sustains my Mennonite call to service.”