SISTER Eileen Deegan is a fairly ordinary nun. She wears "ordinary" lay clothes and lives in an "ordinary" house on a Finglas South estate. Her face is not to be seen regularly on television chat shows. Her words are not to be found in newspaper columns. Yet the day to day work Sister Eileen does as part of a parish team in Rivermount parish is far from mundane.

Last Saturday, I visited Sister Eileen at her house in a neat working class area which she shares with another nun, Sister Rita Minehan.

I arrived at 10.30 a.m. and was greeted at the door with the comforting smell of a carrot cake baking in the oven.

I have not come into contact with a woman religious since I left school 10 years ago, and like many others, my abiding image of nuns has been one of dark veils, stern hairlines, tight lips and squeaky shoes on polished floors. But after two hours spent with Tipperary born Sister Eileen over coffee in her bright kitchen, I now have a radically new image of nunhood.

We chatted about her work in the local community, about women, men, nuns, priests, spirituality, the future of the church.

Sister Eileen's work as a parish sister involves doing everything a parish priest does, except saying Mass. She visits homes in the parish, brings communion to the elderly, facilitates meditation sessions and helps organise prayer events.

"I call myself a pastoral worker," she says. "I see my role as being with the people, walking compassionately with people on their journey. It's not all about doing, doing, doing. It's about being a presence, a compassionate, non judgmental listener."

The parish team Sister Eileen is a member of also includes three priests and another sister. Every Monday morning they meet for two hours to review the parish work, plan the week's events and take an overview of the needs of the parish. Their aim is to give people the chance not just to participate in parish activities organised for them, but to empower and energise them to play an active role themselves.

"We're not here to bring God to people, we're here to help each other to find God," she says.

Last Mothers' Day, for example, a group of mothers talked in Mass about the vocation of motherhood and carnations were handed out to every mother. Pregnant women in the parish are currently organising a celebratory service later this month. Another group of women have formed a Baptism Team which is trained to visit families preparing for baptism. Members of a similar group, called Faith Friends, are trained to befriend young people who are about to make their First Communion or Confirmation. Local teenagers facing Junior and Leaving Certificate exams this summer, are currently involved in planning a late night prayer experience.

This "life cycle" approach to ministry is continued in Sister Eileen's pastoral out reach work. She facilitates a weekly, meeting of a group of women in her kitchen which includes lots of chat and tea drinking as well as meditation and discussions on issues such as self worth, sexuality, spirituality and womanhood.

She also tries to help the women to learn to celebrate themselves as individuals, rather than just as someone's grandmother, mother or wife.

"I am so taken by these women," she says. "They have traumas and difficulties and struggles and yet they have a tremendous desire to be in there and to share in their community," she says.

While Sunday Mass attendance in the parish is quite low, Sister Eileen says she sees the spirituality of these women manifest itself in their daily sacrifices and gestures.

"I believe very strongly that just because someone doesn't go to church doesn't mean they don't have faith," she says. "So for me, it's just being with them, in what Patrick Kavanagh termed the `bits and pieces' of their lives that is important."

On a practical level, she also helps organise talks with the women about drugs, AIDS, and health issue.

Sister Eileen firmly believes the future for the church lies in the development of this grass roots model with the religious, "inserted" into the communities they serve. "If we're not in touch with the issues of our time, we have nothing to say to people," she says.

Sister Eileen is a Brigidine nun. A gold coloured cast of the rough little rush cross which is a symbol of the order's patroness, St Brigid, hangs on her kitchen wall.

The Kildare based Brigidines have a lay associate programme which Sister Eileen and another nun co ordinate. Its members meet once a month for discussions and prayers and are encouraged to become active in religious events in their communities.

"It's more a way of life than a programme," she says. "The members refer to it as coming back to the well or the source once a month to share spirituality and then going back to their families and bringing back the spirituality of Brigid".

Sister Eileen's own spirituality - which she describes as creation centred mixed with Celtic - is inspired by the image of St Brigid as an earth woman.

HER belief that justice and peace and care for the earth are integral to religious life account far Sister Eileen's membership of the Brigidine Justice Group and Greenpeace Ireland.

She joined demonstrations last year outside the French Embassy over its nuclear testing in the South Pacific. She participated in a vigil outside the Shell Station in Harcourt Street, Dublin in support of the Ogoni people in Nigeria. She is an active member of the small but vocal justice and peace organisation, Action From Ireland (AFRI). Since returning from a sabbatical in Brazil in 1993, she now meets regularly with the Irish Brazil Solidarity Group.

Sister Eileen says her activities are "not about protesting, but about making people aware".

And when this "ordinary" nun is asked if she considers herself to be a modern nun, she replies: "It's not a question of being a modern nun. I think it's somebody living life in the late 1990s and trying to touch the issues that exist today."