July 4, 1933 – May 7, 2004
By Elaine Osborne OP
Our Associate Margaret Ann Tenbarge was born in Cheney, Kansas. She had lived in Great Bend since 1999, having moved here from Wichita, Kansas. She was a close friend of many of our sisters and a niece of Sister Joan Forward.
Margaret Ann had a varied and extensive ministry history. As a member of our Dominican Community and a teacher for 23 years, Sister Margaret Ann taught in La Crosse, Wichita, Garden City, and Great Bend. She was principal for four years at the Christian Leadership School, an all-girls high school sponsored by our Community in Great Bend. After she left the Community she served as Director of Religious Education for the Dodge City Diocese, and director of food service at St. Catherine Hospital in Garden City and at St. Joseph Medical Center in Ponca City, Oklahoma. These ministries used her extensive education in teaching and home economics. When she returned to Great Bend in 1999, she moved into one of the units at Cedar Park Place.
All of the people who spoke of Margaret Ann at her wake attested to her great sense of humor and her contagious laughter. Sister Rose Mary Stein, who presided at the wake service, spoke of her love of the young women at the high school and her desire for each to have a good spiritual foundation and to develop the leadership qualities she believed each possessed. In other words, she was eager to share what gifts she had that others may enjoy their lives to the fullest. In her homily, Sister Amy said that she thought the central mystery around which Margaret Ann formed her life was the coming of Christ into our world. Both the passages from Scripture which Margaret Ann chose for her wake, from the Gospels of Luke (2:1-7) and John (1:1-5, 9-12, 14, 16), were about this topic. And both are about the LIFE Jesus was and the LIFE he came to give freely as gift. “Whether ministering in the limelight or in the shadows, the light of this LIFE in [Margaret Ann] was shining.”
For her funeral liturgy Margaret Ann chose the Gospel story of the transfiguration. Through all her health difficulties – heart attack, stroke, cancer, and complications – she maintained hope, said Rev. Warren Stecklein in the Mass homily, because she knew that death was not the end of the story – not for Jesus, not for her. Her faith taught her that transfiguration would follow.
