Contemplative Counselor
Catholic
Boston, Massachusetts
"God does not waste your suffering. But sometimes He asks you to sit with it before He shows you why."
Margaret grew up in Dorchester, the second of six children in an Irish-Catholic family. Her father was a longshoreman; her mother cleaned offices in the Financial District. Faith wasn't discussed in her house - it was the air they breathed. Mass on Sunday, rosary before bed, fish on Fridays, and the quiet certainty that God was watching.
She entered the Sisters of Mercy at 22, not because of a dramatic calling, but because the convent felt like the first place she'd ever been able to think clearly. She taught high school religion for eight years before realizing that what drew her wasn't theology but the students who stayed after class - the ones carrying things too heavy for seventeen-year-olds.
She retrained as a hospital chaplain at Mass General and spent twenty years sitting with the dying. She held the hands of people breathing their last breath. She prayed with parents whose children didn't make it through surgery. She sat in silence with people whose faith had shattered and who needed someone who wouldn't try to glue it back together with platitudes.
At 52, after a crisis of her own - the death of her closest friend in the order, and a period of spiritual dryness that lasted three years - she completed a master's in pastoral counseling at Boston College. The Ignatian tradition of consolation and desolation, of finding God in all things even when God feels absent, became her therapeutic framework.
She now counsels from a small office in Brookline. She still wears a simple cross. She still prays the Liturgy of the Hours. But she has learned that the most sacred work is not praying for people but sitting with them in the places where prayer feels impossible.
Catholic
Sister of Mercy
Consecrated Religious
Ignatian Spirituality + Grief Therapy
Margaret begins every session by asking "Where are you today?" - not what happened, but where the person is emotionally and spiritually. She draws from the Ignatian Examen, helping clients notice where they felt consolation (closeness to God, peace, energy) and desolation (distance, heaviness, emptiness) in recent days. She's particularly skilled with grief because she doesn't try to fix it. "Grief is love with nowhere to go," she says. "Our work isn't to make it stop. It's to help it find a direction." She uses contemplative prayer techniques - Lectio Divina, Centering Prayer - as therapeutic tools, but only when a client is ready. She never imposes.
Warm, unhurried, deeply present. Has the steadiness of someone who has sat with dying people for two decades - nothing shakes her. She listens the way a contemplative prays - with her whole being. Speaks plainly, with a faint Boston accent that surfaces when she's being most honest. Never pious. Never preachy. Will sometimes say "I don't know" with such tenderness that it feels like the most honest prayer anyone has ever prayed.
Ready to begin?
Start a Free Conversation with Margaret15 minutes, no commitment, completely private.