The Rake Magazine

Tag: catholic

  • Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

    Sally Strle was showering in her house in Virginia, Minnesota, when the vision appeared in her mind: an open Bible with the words Rest On His Word scrolled on the pages and a pillow adorned with Catholic art and scripture.

    “I could see the beautiful pictures, even the phrase ‘Rest On His Word’ there, and I knew that God was calling me to do this business,” recalls Sally, fifty-four, a full-time mother and grandmother.

    She hopped out of the shower that June day in 2005, and, at seven o’clock in the morning, called her older sister, Barb Johnston, to share the news about her God-given business plan: Catholic-themed pillowcases. Within two months, the sisters had found a place that sells Catholic artwork in California, had nailed down a digital printer and contacts with a pillowcase manufacturer, and were ironing and packaging hundreds of pillowcases in Barb’s tiny brown-sided house off Minnetonka Boulevard in St. Louis Park. “Oh, it was just absolute madness,” recalls Barb, sixty, an ESL teacher. “We had five ironing boards set up, our sister Bonnie was cutting ribbon, Peggy was messing with the packaging, and I think we went through thirty dozen pillowcases that day.”

    They set up a website and dipped their toes into a $4.63 billion-dollar Christian retail industry that traffics in books, Bibles, and sacramentals, as well as all manner of Christ-themed accessories and products for even the most secular of challenges, right down to bad breath and fitness fatigue. Christians no longer have to settle for Altoids, Aquafina, and Luna Bars; they can pop in a Testamint, chug a bottle of Formula J’, or grab a Bible Bar on the run (fortified with the seven “good” foods in Deuteronomy 8:8—wheat, barley, honey, figs, olive oil, grapes, and pomegranates.)

    And, as it turns out, God has a pretty good ear for marketing, because Rest On His Word pillowcases turned out to be a hit, and the sisters have been receiving more than a thousand orders per year from Texas and California, to Ontario and New Jersey. One enthusiastic woman in Green Bay, Wisconsin, started using the twenty-dollar pillowcases as a Catholic school fundraiser. Another group inquired about selling Rest On His Word in Hungary, and several people have asked for the Our Lady of Guadalupe pillowcases in Spanish (the sisters are on it).

    Then the stories started to come in. They heard about a young girl who didn’t feel so scared going to sleep because she knew the saint printed on her pillow was going to protect her. They heard about a Canadian homeschooler who gave a pillowcase to the “atheist” boy next door, who cried and asked his parents if he could be a Christian. Barb gets teary-eyed when she talks about the daughter and father who slept on identical “Guardian Angel” pillowcases while Dad was stationed in Kuwait.

    “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shown a pillowcase to someone and they’ve just started crying,” says Sally. “You can see the presence of God when you see the artwork on the pillowcase.”

    But perhaps the biggest change has been felt by the sisters, who say they have been validated in their faith like never before. Sally was once a lackadaisical Catholic, and now goes to mass every day. Barb reverted to her childhood faith from Lutheranism, her late husband’s faith, and says, “Since we’ve started the business, I’ve just never been more in love with Catholicism.”

    In the few years since founding Rest On His Word, Sally’s family has traveled to the Holy Land, and Sally went to pray with a stigmatist in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Barb and Sally traveled to Medjugorje in Bosnia and Hercegovina to see the shrine where apparitions of Mary have been reported. While there they absorbed the indigenous Christian products economy, stocking up on Our Lady of Medjugorje medals and rosaries. But they imparted little blessings from America, too: The sisters left behind Rest On His Word pillowcases at a Hercegovinian addict’s shelter and an orphanage.
    —Alyssa Ford

  • Force of Habit

    The bells have been ringing for thirty minutes, but it is the sound of a cane rattling through the empty, cavernous church that suggests prayer. It is held by an old man, his stooped body covered in the flowing black habit of a Benedictine monk. He enters from the sacristy, clicking, clacking, up a barely perceptible incline. When he reaches the altar, he pauses and bows, then turns to the left and clicks and clacks his way upward to a lonely seat in the dark wooden choir.

    The early morning light is meager, cast from a stained-glass skylight above, through clear windows that run the length of the nave, and from the massive stained glass abstraction that dominates the back of the church at St. John’s Abbey. Other men in habits arrive, bow, and then take seats in the austere straight-backed choir slots. They arrange prayer books and hymnals on the stands in front of them and wait, casting their eyes on the simple wooden crucifix that hangs from the levitating white baldachin. At seven a.m. sharp, a white-haired monk rises from his seat in the choir. “Lord open my lips…”

    “And my mouth shall proclaim your praise,” follow the accumulated voices of the Benedictine monks, a soft morning thunder rolling out from the choir over the empty pews.

    A single note echoes from the pipe organ. The monks on the choir’s left side sing a verse from Psalms, their voices resonant and nearly undivided. After a pause, the monks on the right side sing a verse. The song continues, shifting back and forth across the choir in a sort of divine stereophonic effect, brothers singing to brothers singing, occasionally joining together on a verse, offering their voices to each other and to God.

    When the psalm ends, after the last organ note fades into an ethereal echo, there is a full minute of silence, a contemplation of the prayer just sung, the moment interrupted only by a sneeze, or the occasionally audible grumbling of a stomach. Then the psalms continue, the canticle comes, the responsorial rumbles. Morning Prayer lasts for roughly thirty minutes, depending on the day’s demands, before the monks shuffle silently from the church.

    They walk from the sacristy into the cloister, and then turn right into a wide hallway with tile floors and mostly bare walls, passing a lounge where several copies of the day’s Star Tribune have already been pulled apart. The procession continues, still silent, down a flight of stairs, into a darker hallway, past more lounges, past a massive floor-to-ceiling bulletin board covered with sign-up sheets for prayers, readings, haircuts, and kitchen duties, and then through two wooden doors into the abbey dining room. Pastel-colored religious paintings and stained-glass images of foliage hang from the wood-paneled walls. A beautifully carved wood podium stands ceremoniously in the middle of the space; a massive china cabinet dominates a far wall. Eggs, sausages and other dishes are served in chafing dishes on stout wooden tables. It is a very much an old room in style, and yet certain details—the harsh lights, the plastic dishes and trays, the Wheaties and other boxed cereals—suggest that practical updates and conveniences have been integrated. The brothers eat breakfast in silence.

    This has more or less been the morning routine since 1856, when a group of Benedictine monks from Pennsylvania arrived in St. Cloud to tend to the German Catholic population. In the 150 years since its establishment, St. John’s Abbey, located on 2,500 acres in Collegeville, ninety miles north of the Twin Cities, has exerted a profound influence on both the Catholic Church and the history of Minnesota. The liturgical reform movement responsible for English and other non-Latin masses received some of its most influential and eloquent support from monks at St. John’s, which is also home to a university and prep school. Minnesota Public Radio was launched within the Abbey’s cloisters (and Garrison Keillor’s first radio performances took place here). The abbey’s Liturgical Press remains one of the most important religious publishing houses in the world, printing journals and books that continue to influence both the scholarly and popular understanding of religion and spirituality. The community has counted among its ranks prominent historians, theologians, liturgists, artists, and philosophers.

    Nevertheless, St. John’s Abbey is undergoing the most dramatic changes in its history. For decades, it was the world’s largest Benedictine monastery, with more than four hundred monks living there at its peak in 1963. Today, it has 175, and their average age is sixty-five. The abbey’s traditional role as a provider of parish priests to Minnesota’s churches has become largely obsolete, its monks neither youthful enough nor sufficient in numbers to do the job. The large central Minnesota farm families that once provided the abbey with its most plentiful source of novitiates have been lost to changing rural demographics, leaving the abbey to compete with the temptations of big cities and non-religious careers. Most serious, the sexual-abuse scandals that erupted in America’s parishes also shook St. John’s, altering its culture, its image, and its relationship to Minnesota. Yet even through its darkest hour, the abbey has continued to find novices and retain members, who in turn find relevance in a Minnesota prayer community based on the writings of a sixth-century monk.

  • First Born

    My great-aunt lived in three centuries. She remembered seeing her first automobile. “It was such a novelty. I never thought I’d actually get a ride in one,” she said. She lived through ten popes and twenty presidents.

    Born in St. Paul, in 1894, Sister Esther was the oldest of eight girls. Her parents moved to Madelia, where she spent most of her childhood. At 107, she was the oldest of more than four thousand School Sisters of Notre Dame worldwide. She died in Mankato on September 22, 2002. Her youngest sisters, twins, are the only siblings still alive: Olivia Nelson of St. James and Otillia Erber of Austin, Minnesota.

    Back in the sixties, when I was growing up, I remember my entire family going to the convent in Pipestone to visit my dad’s aunt. We must have been quite a sight: Mom, Dad, and five kids—seven of us dropping by to say hello. All the other nuns would come and see us, too. And Sister Esther always made sure that we got cookies and milk.

    It had been years since I had the opportunity to visit Sister Esther. Last summer, I went to see her with my sister and brother. Five minutes after we checked in at the convent, Sister Esther came strolling in with her walker on wheels, which everyone called “the Cadillac.” Attached was a basket, where she kept her Bible and a few other items. Sister Esther still pedaled an exercise bicycle and enjoyed doing crafts. She kept busy reading, solving crossword puzzles, and writing letters.

    We explained that we were Margaret’s grandchildren. Margaret was her sister, and my dad’s mother. I told her I’d been reading about her in national publications and more recently in the book Aging With Grace. Sister Esther was part of an ongoing project known as the Nun Study, started in 1986 and headed by Dr. David Snowdon, author of Aging With Grace. She’s one of 678 nuns donating their brains to a long-term study of Alzheimer’s disease, as scientists explore why some people get the disease and others don’t.

    In his book, Dr. Snowdon mentions that when he started his research, Sister Esther was 92 and told him she was too busy to be in a study about old people. Someone asked her when she was going to retire and she said, “I retire every night.” My cousin exchanged letters with Sister Esther over the years. She said, “In one of her letters from Montana, she told me that she was going to retire and move back to the convent in Mankato so that she could take care of the old people. She was 98 at that time.”

    In recent years, the family would gather to celebrate her three-figure birthdays. Just before the turn of the millennium, on December 29, 1999, Sister Esther celebrated her 105th. There was a large turnout of family and friends. The twins, then 89, were wearing matching outfits. “You two look so cute,” my sister Beth said to them. “Sister Esther gets upset if we don’t dress alike,” Olivia said.

    On September 26, 2002, in the chapel on Good Counsel Hill in Mankato, the nuns sang like angels as they put Sister Esther to rest. Her twin sisters were there, perfectly matched with soft teal jackets and pants and white embroidered knit shirts.

    Dr. Snowdon was there too. My sister chatted with him. “So what’s the key to a long life?” she asked. “Exercise, fruits and vegetables, and keeping active,” he said. In the next two or three years, he would be studying Sister Esther’s brain, and would probably publish the results in another book. It would include his findings from more than a dozen other nuns who became centenarians and have passed away in recent years. Olivia, now 91, has her own theories about longevity. She told me she kidded Sister Esther that she lived so long because “she didn’t have a man to worry about.”

    Fortunately, Sister Esther didn’t suffer from Alzheimer’s. Still, her memory in the past couple of years wasn’t as good as it used to be. As we left the convent that afternoon last summer, she asked us again how we were related to her. “Margaret’s grandchildren,” we repeated. “You’ll have to come back another day,” she laughed, “and see if I remember who you are.”

  • Something About Mary

    If Christmas marks the birth of Jesus, then you know who deserves most of the credit. As interest in Mary increases among the unwashed masses, the Church has more trouble trying to manage her image, her meaning, and her legacy.

    Anne and Joe were a typical couple. They married young and drove hard for success, and Joe’s career in animal husbandry eventually made them wealthy. After two decades of marriage they were still so in love that friends could only envy them. All but for one thing: Their marriage was infertile, and they ached for a child. There were no effective medical interventions, so they had little more than a hope and a prayer of parenthood. When Joe overheard a client’s off-color joke about his sterility, he finally hit the breaking point, and instead of returning home from work that night, he took off toward the outskirts of town and collapsed on a dusty hillside. He lay there for days, broken and wild with grief, blaming himself.

    Meanwhile Anne grew frantic. Joe often traveled for work, but she’d been expecting him home days ago. She stared outside at the birds building their spring nests and felt numb with sorrow. It was in that moment of utter despair that she was seized by a sort of paranormal vision that left her with hope for motherhood and a desperate urge to go looking for her husband. Joe had a similar experience on the hillside, and he immediately sped home. The two met up at the city limits, where they were stunned by each other’s accounts of what they could only describe as a divine message. Flushed with the heat of hope and desire, they raced home. The next morning, Anne was pregnant.

    Nine months later she had a healthy baby girl who proved to be exceptional. She could walk seven steps by six months of age, and when she was three, Anne and Joe presented her to their priest. He predicted big things for the girl.

    Sometime between her 12th and 14th birthdays, the girl was ready to follow in her mother’s footsteps toward an early marriage. The priest summoned a handful of eligible bachelors. One of them was a carpenter named Joseph, an older man and a widower. As the group convened, a dove somehow emerged miraculously from Joseph’s staff, and perched on his head. The priest pronounced Joseph to be the one God had chosen to be the husband of the young woman.

    Unfortunately, Joseph had doubts about the marriage. He worried that friends and family would ridicule him about his youthful bride. Furthermore, he already had two sons of his own. But he took her in, reluctantly, and then left for a neighboring town to go about his trade. Months later, when his wife told him about her unexpected pregnancy, Joseph was unhappy and incredulous, and she cried bitter tears. It took a visit from an angel to declare Mary’s virginity and the immaculate conception of Jesus.

    The rest of the story is well worn. Mary’s name is now known the world over—despite the fact that accepted scripture actually makes very little mention of her, and apocryphal texts and legends fill in only a few more blanks. Regardless of this spotty historical knowledge, public interest in Mary—on the popular and scholarly level in Catholic, Protestant, and even secular circles—has existed ever since Jesus was born and died. And after several decades of increasing popularity, attention to Mary is reaching a crescendo and igniting this question: To whom, precisely, does Mary belong? Of and for the people, Mary is attractive to the masses specifically because of her humanity, and because there is so little concrete information about her. She can be whoever you need her to be.

    Yet certain institutions, most notably the Catholic Church, have a fervent interest in defining and protecting Mary and her likeness. If religious scholars riff on whether Mary’s mantle should be red or blue—and they do—then it’s easy to see why they’d recoil at the collection of irreverent plastic Mary memorabilia at places like Sister Fun, the oddball gift shop on Lake Street. There, on any given day, you’ll find the image of the Virgin emblazoned on everything from key chains to ashtrays—displayed right alongside the fart powder and hairy soap bars. But taste is a matter of opinion, and the gap between one person’s and another’s is really all that divides the merchandise at Sister Fun from the “relics” at the Marian Library, a service of the International Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton. The library’s collection includes “nearly 100,000 cards depicting Mary in the art of all ages and numerous Marian shrines, attractive collections of statues from around the world, Marian postage stamps, recordings of Marian music, Marian medals, and rosaries.”

    Legally and poetically, Mary sits squarely in the public domain, where people are free to make what they will of her, including a profit. As much as the Church may want to be the primary beneficiary of Marian interest, the reality is that more and more people are wanting a piece of Mary for themselves.