Sister Maria Walfriede

Sister  Maria  Walfriede         ND 4284         ⇒ PDF Download
Maria Wübbelmann

Maria Regina Province, Coesfeld / Germany

Date and Place of Birth:    May 15, 1923       Bakum, County Vechta, Germany
Date and Place of Profession:     August 12, 1952   Ahlen
Date and Place of Death:    September 25, 2015    Vechta, Infirmary
Date and Place of Funeral: October 01, 2015       Vechta, Convent Cemetery

“When shall I come and behold the face of God”? Ps 42:3

This psalm verse accompanied Sister Maria Walfriede for many years during her long life. Now God has fulfilled her deep longing to behold his face forever.

Sister Maria Walfriede, was the second child of Heinrich and Josefine Wübbelmann. Maria spent her childhood and youth together with her four brothers and three sisters in her deeply Christian parental home in the rural south of the Oldenburger Land. After finishing school, she helped on her parental farm. For two and a half years, she was employed by another farmer.

For one year, she helped as an apprentice cook at the children’s home in Hüls near Krefeld. After that she entered our congregation in Mülhausen in 1949 and received the name Sister Maria Walfriede.

In the course of her long religious life she ministered in different institutions and in different areas of work, e.g. in the kitchen, at the reception desk, in the garden, the laundry, the refectory, the chapel as well as in the parish and as local superior. This shows her manifold talents.

After being trained as a nurse’s aid, she devoted herself wholeheartedly to outpatient care and to the care of our sick and elderly sisters in the infirmary.

After this varied life, Sr. M. Walfriede began her well-deserved retirement and in 2005, she moved to our infirmary in Marienhain. She assumed the ministry of prayer. She spent almost every morning in the adjacent chapel to bring all our prayer intentions before God, even when she was no longer able to express them – her heart was with God.

In a report from her time in Hüls we read: “Maria is faithful, conscientious and reliable. She is very cautious and unobtrusive. First she thinks. Then she talks and acts“. These attitudes have characterised her all her life. When she was no longer able to do any practical jobs, her personality still radiated what she had always tried to live: joy, hope, and calmness.

She enjoyed when someone talked to her in her “mother tongue“(Low German). Then her eyes started to sparkle.

We thank God and Sr. M. Walfriede for her life among us. She will certainly be our intercessor with God in all our concerns.

We hope that Sr. M. Walfriede, having entrusted herself completely to God and constantly looking at Him during her life on earth, is now beholding Him face-to-face.