Galilee: Beginning of a faith
During Pope John Paul's visit to the Holy Land in 2000, Newsday sent me and my colleague and friend, Paul Moses, to join Matt McAllester, our Middle East bureau chief, to cover the historic events. We did a lot of running around, and I came fairly close to a nervous breakdown at—of all places—the Mount of the Beatitudes. But I had some memorable moments. One of my favorite pieces was one that I wrote about the Sea of Galilee, in advance of the papal Mass on its shores. Tim Phelps, the foreign editor, was kind enough to let me write a piece that felt more like a homily than a news analysis. I answered his questions by phone, in a taxi taking me to a West Bank town where I was to meet a group of Catholics for a bus ride to the Mount of the Beatitudes. I'll always be grateful to Tim for his gentle editing.
Newsday, March 24, 2000
Jerusalem—Drawing a huge crowd of young people to the steeply sloping hill where tradition holds that Jesus preached the Beatitudes, Pope John Paul II brings his pilgrimage today to the lake and the countryside where Jesus began his itinerant public ministry. On the shores of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus asked a handful of rough-hewn fishermen to become fishers of men and women, and they dropped everything to follow him.
In its surrounding towns and on its gentle hills, Jesus preached in the synagogues, cured the sick, multiplied a few loaves of bread and some fresh fish to feed thousands, and delivered the most enduring sermon ever uttered.
On its waters, placid one moment and raging the next, with waves driven by sudden winds from the dry wadis, Jesus calmed a storm, strode across the troubled waters to his fearful friends and climbed into a boat to find solitude, when the demands of the crowd became too raucous.
And after his death, Jesus appeared to his still-grieving followers, guided them to a plentiful catch, fixed them a grilled fish breakfast and commanded Simon, renamed Peter, to feed his sheep and lead his flock. Now, Peter's current successor comes to the shores of that sweet-water lake to break bread at a mass on the traditional Mount of Beatitudes with as many as 100,000—the largest event of his whole Middle East pilgrimage.
Spreading out below that gathering dominated by young people, the lake has many names. In the Old Testament, it is the Sea of Kinnereth. In the New Testament, it is the Sea of Galilee, the Sea of Tiberias and the Lake of Gennesaret. By any name, this lake is utterly central to the life of Jesus and his disciples and to the rise of Christianity.
It is not simply the region where Jesus chose his followers, confirmed their leader and spelled out in the Beatitudes his sermon on the way of life that he urged on them. It is also a place that shaped him and his disciples. Jesus suffered from the skepticism of others: an attitude that nothing good could emerge from Nazareth. Peter had such a strong Galilean accent that, when he tried to deny that he knew Jesus, the accent gave him away.
Like Peter's accent, the spirit of Galilee has a way of clinging to people, of making the Gospels more vivid, amplifying the text with the texture of the land, the smell of the lake, the gritty dust of the roads. In 1989, Cardinal William Keeler of Baltimore took a helicopter ride over Galilee, provided by the Israeli government. It took him over the lake itself, over Nazareth, where Jesus grew up, over Cana, where he performed his first miracle, and cast its spinning shadow over other scenes from the Gospels.
"So much holy happened in this little piece of land," Keeler said. "I found it very...uplifting at the time, and I just have to think about it to be uplifted now."
In contrast to the hustle of Jerusalem, where a fast pace of modern life surrounds the places of pilgrimage, Galilee is different. "A lot of it is still peaceful and quiet and serene, and you can stop there and look around and get a sense of Jesus' presence there," said Bishop Emil Wcela, an auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Rockville Centre and a scripture scholar.
This place calls strongly to John Paul, not only because he can follow in the steps of Jesus, but because he can return to the roots of his papacy, the impetuous fisherman Peter—visiting the sites of Peter's house and Peter's primacy over the church. This pope has exercised that primacy vigorously, but publicly raised the issue of re-examining the way the primacy works. For him, as for all Christians, the Sea of Galilee is where it all began.
Newsday, March 24, 2000
Jerusalem—Drawing a huge crowd of young people to the steeply sloping hill where tradition holds that Jesus preached the Beatitudes, Pope John Paul II brings his pilgrimage today to the lake and the countryside where Jesus began his itinerant public ministry. On the shores of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus asked a handful of rough-hewn fishermen to become fishers of men and women, and they dropped everything to follow him.
In its surrounding towns and on its gentle hills, Jesus preached in the synagogues, cured the sick, multiplied a few loaves of bread and some fresh fish to feed thousands, and delivered the most enduring sermon ever uttered.
On its waters, placid one moment and raging the next, with waves driven by sudden winds from the dry wadis, Jesus calmed a storm, strode across the troubled waters to his fearful friends and climbed into a boat to find solitude, when the demands of the crowd became too raucous.
And after his death, Jesus appeared to his still-grieving followers, guided them to a plentiful catch, fixed them a grilled fish breakfast and commanded Simon, renamed Peter, to feed his sheep and lead his flock. Now, Peter's current successor comes to the shores of that sweet-water lake to break bread at a mass on the traditional Mount of Beatitudes with as many as 100,000—the largest event of his whole Middle East pilgrimage.
Spreading out below that gathering dominated by young people, the lake has many names. In the Old Testament, it is the Sea of Kinnereth. In the New Testament, it is the Sea of Galilee, the Sea of Tiberias and the Lake of Gennesaret. By any name, this lake is utterly central to the life of Jesus and his disciples and to the rise of Christianity.
It is not simply the region where Jesus chose his followers, confirmed their leader and spelled out in the Beatitudes his sermon on the way of life that he urged on them. It is also a place that shaped him and his disciples. Jesus suffered from the skepticism of others: an attitude that nothing good could emerge from Nazareth. Peter had such a strong Galilean accent that, when he tried to deny that he knew Jesus, the accent gave him away.
Like Peter's accent, the spirit of Galilee has a way of clinging to people, of making the Gospels more vivid, amplifying the text with the texture of the land, the smell of the lake, the gritty dust of the roads. In 1989, Cardinal William Keeler of Baltimore took a helicopter ride over Galilee, provided by the Israeli government. It took him over the lake itself, over Nazareth, where Jesus grew up, over Cana, where he performed his first miracle, and cast its spinning shadow over other scenes from the Gospels.
"So much holy happened in this little piece of land," Keeler said. "I found it very...uplifting at the time, and I just have to think about it to be uplifted now."
In contrast to the hustle of Jerusalem, where a fast pace of modern life surrounds the places of pilgrimage, Galilee is different. "A lot of it is still peaceful and quiet and serene, and you can stop there and look around and get a sense of Jesus' presence there," said Bishop Emil Wcela, an auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Rockville Centre and a scripture scholar.
This place calls strongly to John Paul, not only because he can follow in the steps of Jesus, but because he can return to the roots of his papacy, the impetuous fisherman Peter—visiting the sites of Peter's house and Peter's primacy over the church. This pope has exercised that primacy vigorously, but publicly raised the issue of re-examining the way the primacy works. For him, as for all Christians, the Sea of Galilee is where it all began.
A great Great Plains poet
Newsday, July 15, 1998
Invited to the White House by Hillary Clinton this spring, Kathleen Norris sat down with the first lady, in the nation’s most powerful residence, and chatted amicably for an hour about life, literature and spirituality.
At the United Center, the home of the Chicago Bulls, Norris and her husband, the poet David Dwyer—with a Benedictine abbot friend, Leo Ryska—cheered through an intense April battle with the Knicks. They sat in second-row seats provided by Bulls coach Phil Jackson, who had used her writing for meditation, written her regularly and arranged the tickets, after she told him about Ryska’s dream of seeing Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen play. After the game, Jackson escorted them to a private lounge and spent an hour with them in companionable conversation.
These may appear to be exotic venues for a woman who lives and writes in a South Dakota town of 1,600. But it is perhaps equally surprising that this Great Plains poet, once so troubled by doubts that she wondered if she was even a Christian, now leads retreats at monasteries, and does it well. Last year, Norris led one for Ryska at St. Benedict’s Abbey in Benet Lake, Wis. “She’s herself,” Ryska says. “She used poetry as the text on which she then conversed.”
Even in her tiny hometown of Lemmon, in northwestern South Dakota, Norris is definitely not a prophet without honor. For a July 11 parade, part of the five-day Boss Cowman festivities, business leaders asked her to ride on the Chamber of Commerce float. Lemmon is still recovering from the blizzards of two years ago, which hit cattle hard, but Norris boosts another sector of the economy: tourism.
In the first prose book she wrote, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Norris described Lemmon so vividly that it still draws visitors to town. “It’s hard to know how many of those there are, because a lot of them don’t basically tell anybody, but they’ll drive down the street and look for her house,” says Joyce Dustman, of Bill’s Super Valu supermarket, who offered Norris a featured role in the parade. “I’m sure it’s helped, as far as tourist trade in the community.”
The mayor of Lemmon, William Kohn, proprietor of Kohn’s Sports Shop, ranks Norris as a tourist attraction right behind a prehistoric remnant called the Petrified Wood Park. “For economic development reasons, we would like to use Kathleen much more,” Kohn says, “but yet, we still know she wants her privacy.”
Similarly, her work has drawn people to monasticism, a vital motif in her three best-selling books, Dakota (Ticknor & Fields, 1993), The Cloister Walk (Riverhead, 1996) and now Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, also from Riverhead Books. Just as visitors drive to Lemmon to see her house, her words have led others to seek out Benedictines.
“They come from all over the country . . . and they’ll say they want to come here for a retreat and they have read Kathleen Norris,” says Abbot Patrick Moore of Assumption Abbey in Richardton, the North Dakota town where she first encountered monasticism. “They’ll add that on kind of parenthetically at the end.” But it’s clear that her work is a primary reason why they come to Assumption.
Her writing has also attracted people to the Benedictine nuns at Sacred Heart Monastery, a mile away from Assumption.
“In our little rural area, we’ve had about 2,500 men and women come through here seeking spiritual guidance or attending a workshop or something like that, and I would say a good percent of those people have read Kathleen Norris’ works,” says Sister Paula Larson, the prioress at Sacred Heart. After reading Norris, two women showed up, asking to volunteer. “We’ve also had two young women who are considering a monastic vocation,” Larson says. “They also have read the book Dakota.”
Her books have become guides, both comfortable and challenging, for the interior journey of thousands, and an accurate reflection of monasticism.
“She has been able to articulate in a way that’s understandable to most people in our society a lot of the elements of monastic life, and she makes them very attractive,” Moore says. Norris does not write about monasticism as a dusty, distant phenomenon, but as a paradigm for life in the world.
“The Cloister Walk, I thought, was using monastic life, but it was really as a guide to living a secular life,” says Cindy Spiegel, her editor. “What can you learn if you examine monastic life? What can you take back to secular life? Through celibacy, what can you learn about married life?”
In her books, Norris taps the wisdom of the monks, from the Desert Fathers in Fourth Century Egypt to the Benedictines of the 20th Century American heartland. She does it so evocatively that one admirer compares her emergence to the arrival of the most prolific chronicler of monasticism, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.
“In a curious way, she’s almost a mirror image of Merton,” says Patrick Henry, executive director of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, who invited Norris to be a resident scholar at the institute, at St. John’s Abbey and University, in Collegeville, Minn. “Merton becomes a monk, and people want to do what Merton did. Kathleen visits the monastery, drinks deep at its well, then interprets it for people.”
Fifty years ago this year, Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, described his conversion to Catholicism and his entry into the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. It quickly became an overwhelming best-seller.
“Kathleen hasn’t mimicked his particular life choice,” Henry says, “but she has, I think, somehow caught the spirit of the times and given it voice, given it magnificent voice.”
The first time Norris heard this comparison, it shocked her. “I’m always cautious about that,” she says, “because there’s this huge difference between me and Merton: He was writing from the inside, and I’m writing from the outside.”
Still, both authors have met a need. Merton’s autobiography rolled off the presses soon after the savagery of World War II. Together, the bleakness of the era and the power of his words drew significant numbers of men into monastic life. Norris is also writing at a time of spiritual yearning.
“I think people are looking for a spirituality often that’s unattached to anything that resembles institutions,” Ryska says. While Norris can appeal to those searchers, because she avoided institutional church herself for so long, her writing is not faddish or New Age, but grounded in the monastic wisdom of the desert.
“My own life has opened up more than I thought possible in the Dakota desert, the desert of the monastery and of the small town, the desert of a small and fairly conservative Presbyterian church,” she wrote in Dakota.
In her spiritual journey to those intertwined deserts, Kathleen Norris has traced a great circle from faith to doubt and back to faith again, from the sophistication of New York to the simplicity of the Great Plains, from obscurity to the book-tour circuit.
She drifted away from the faith of her grandmothers, stumbling on the language of religion and the harsh imagery of fundamentalism. For two decades, she used the language of her art as a substitute for religion. Then that art brought her back to faith, luring her to the doors of Assumption Abbey, where the daily poetry of the psalms began to capture her.
The roots of her journey lie in the vast, windswept West River region of the Dakotas, west of the Missouri River, where both sets of grandparents came to live.
Her paternal grandmother, Beatrice Norris, married a man who had experienced a revival-tent conversion and later pastored 17 churches. She had a fundamentalist strain, talking constantly about the return of Jesus and the end of the world, in language that became a stumbling block for Norris.
Her maternal grandmother, Charlotte Totten, married a physician who practiced in South Dakota for 55 years. She read her well-worn Bible faithfully and lived a less ominous Christianity. “She was what I call the sane Presbyterian, a very wonderful lady, although they were both wonderful women in their own way,” Norris recalls.
The Tottens built a small house in Lemmon in 1923. In this house, their daughter, Lois Ferne Totten, grew up. She went off to study music at Northwestern University in Chicago, where she met another music major, John Heyward Norris. They eloped.
She taught piano and music. He played in symphony orchestras and Dixieland bands and directed church choirs, but his primary job was the Navy Band, which provided stability for his son and three daughters. “The people in the music branch of the Navy don’t move around much,” Kathleen Norris says. “So we really only lived in three places.”
In 1947, John Norris was an assistant conductor of the Navy Band, when Kathleen was born in Washington, D.C. Later, they moved to Illinois for his assignment to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, and in 1959, to Honolulu, where he conducted the Seventh Fleet’s band. The family set down its roots in Hawaii, but after Kathleen’s graduation from a highly structured prep school there, she left for Bennington College in Vermont, a much freer environment.
“Really, because I had the study discipline, it was a very good school for me,” Norris says. “I just started reading the minute I got there and spent four years just reading everything I could get my hands on.”
At Bennington, the one thing she didn’t do was go to church. As a child, she had always attended, rejoicing in the liturgy and thinking very little about dogma. “I just thought we went to church to sing,” Norris says, “which is really not that bad a perception.”
Norris had drifted away from church not so much because of anything in her past but because of her own attitudes. “It was more, I think, faddish intellectual stuff that had gotten a hold of me in high school, that religion was sort of for immature people, maybe for little kids and grandmas, but I was much too sophisticated for it,” she says. “At Bennington, because of all the emphasis on the arts, I was able to explore that. Then, eventually, it led me back to religion, but it was a long road.”
After graduation from Bennington in 1969, Norris took the traditional option for young writers, moving to New York City. There, she worked for the Academy of American Poets, running poetry programs in libraries and parks throughout the city.
“Unlike a lot of young people who come and work in Manhattan for a few years, I ended up going out to Staten Island and the far reaches of Queens, and even the South Bronx, Hunts Point and Tremont,” Norris recalls. “That was a really fruitful experience for me, and it really gave me a sort of an abiding love for New York City.”
In New York, she met David Dwyer, who had grown up Catholic there and had also drifted away from church. As the two young poets built a relationship that became a marriage, and both avoided institutional church, she began to wrestle with the question, “What is sin?” Only later did she understand the source of the question: the lingering echo of her grandmother Totten’s gentle piety.
It was the death of her grandmother Totten that drew Norris and Dwyer into a life-changing decision in 1974: to move to the home in Lemmon where her mother had grown up and her grandmother had died. The rest of her family was rooted in Hawaii, which made her the natural choice to move from New York to the Great Plains and manage the property. At a deeper level, she came to see that it was also a religious pilgrimage, “a search for inheritance, for place.”
Initially, they planned to stay just a few years. Somehow, the two young poets found the prairie congenial and discovered ways to survive. David tended bar, wrote computer programs, translated French literature, won a seat on the city council. Kathleen worked in a library, did bookkeeping and freelance writing, and drove endless stretches of road to bring poetry into small towns, as an artist in residence for the North Dakota Arts Council. Together, they launched a cable TV company.
Through all this time, she crafted her writer’s voice, an elegant instrument tuned to brilliance by her omnivorous reading; by her internal dance of faith and doubt; by her ear for the sounds of prairie people and Dakota wind; by her eye for the details of waving grass and wildflowers and scurrying animals, and by her encounter with monastic wisdom.
She had been in Lemmon nearly a decade before she met the monks, in 1983. “A wonderful writer named Carol Bly was giving a reading at Assumption Abbey in North Dakota,” Norris recalls. “I did not even know what an abbey was, but I wanted to go hear Carol read.”
Once she had fallen into the orbit of the monks, she couldn’t stay away. Regularly, she drove the straight, 90-mile stretch from Lemmon north to the abbey in Richardton, to join the monks in the Liturgy of the Hours, the daily recitation of prayers and psalms. She began to feel the psalms harmonizing with her own poetic voice, and she grew to need regular infusions of monastic liturgy.
As she repeatedly visited Assumption, she began borrowing books from monks, focusing on the simple stories of the Fourth Century Desert Fathers, the irreducible core of monastic life. “It really broadened my whole sense of the Christian tradition,” Norris says. More than anything else, the reason she kept coming back to Assumption was the sense of welcome.
“For much of that time, I really wasn’t even sure I was a Christian. So what was I do hanging around these monks?” Norris says. “The main thing was that I knew that if I showed up there, I would be received with great hospitality, no matter what condition I was in—mentally or physically.”
Over a period of three years, she decided to become an oblate, a lay associate of the monks at Assumption. From her first visit in 1983 until she became an oblate in 1986, she experienced two major spiritual landmarks.
Almost two decades after she had drifted away from church, she decided in 1984 to join her grandmother’s church, Spencer Memorial Presbyterian in Lemmon. Then, in 1985, during an arts council trip, she stayed with some Benedictine nuns at a convent in Belcourt, N.D. They gave her a copy of the Rule of St. Benedict, and she fell in love with the sensibly gentle legislation that has guided Benedictines for almost 1,500 years. As she grew more attached to the rule and to monastic life, she found herself invited to speak, from the perspective of a Presbyterian laywoman, at a South Dakota meeting of the American Benedictine Academy in the fall of 1990. There, she met Patrick Henry, of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research.
“I thought, ‘Here is somebody who is potentially a very important interpreter of the monastic tradition for the sake of the church at large,’ ” Henry recalls. So he told her about the institute’s resident scholars program. She later applied, and in the fall of 1991, began a nine-month stay.
In one sense, it was a painful time. As a poet surrounded by academics, she often felt out of place. Still, it gave her a chance to worship with the monks at St. John’s Abbey—every day, and not just at frequent intervals, as she had done at Assumption. So, several times daily, she heard her anxieties and joys reflected back at her in the words of the psalms, felt herself surprised that the recitation of that haunting poetry could more than suffice as prayer for her.
“The psalms really do address the human emotions,” Norris says. “That’s one of the things that is so powerful about them.” Increasingly, she appreciated the wisdom of liturgical scholar Gail Ramshaw, who likes to say that theology is prose, but liturgy is poetry.
During those nine months, she learned from her editor, Cindy Spiegel, that Ticknor & Fields had finally decided to publish her first prose book, after months of uncertainty.
Spiegel had connected with Norris serendipitously. Katrina Kenison, Spiegel’s predecessor in editing the Best American Essays series, had once written to Norris, saying that one of her essays just missed being included, but that she liked it immensely. Many months later, Norris wrote to Kenison, saying she had the makings of a book. By then, Kenison had left. So the letter reached Spiegel, who arranged to meet Norris at a Manhattan poetry reading.
“She didn’t really have a book,” Spiegel recalls. “She had a great title, which was Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. And then she had a lot of loose pieces.” Still, she thought Norris was an “amazing” writer. The young editor, raised Jewish in New York City, loved the way this Presbyterian poet wrote soaring prose about small-town life and faith.
“I am wary of Christianity,” Spiegel says. “Yet it was the first time that I had really felt that I was not threatened or put off, but actually invited into the Christian world.”
Together, they figured out a structure for the book. But Spiegel could not promise Norris that Ticknor & Fields would buy it, because her boss feared that its market appeal would be too small. “The very last time I showed it to him, he said, ‘She’s such a good writer, we can’t not do the book.’ ”
So Norris finished it at Henry’s institute, and the book rolled off the presses in 1993. Before it reached Lemmon, rumors about its contents swept the town. As people read it, though, they saw clearly in its pages her love for their community, and they embraced it.
“Everybody kind of thinks that Kathleen is their friend,” Mayor Kohn says. “I mean, she absolutely can do no wrong as far as people in Lemmon, South Dakota, are concerned.”
In the world beyond Lemmon, it went from hardcover to paperback and became a best-seller, based on its luminous writing. “I consider a single page of that book, the April 14 weather report, as beautiful, concentrated a piece of English prose as I’m ever likely to see,” Henry says. “Somehow, that page distills for me the genius of Kathleen, the compression of her prose. She doesn’t waste a word, but you don’t get the sense of its being clipped or hurried, either.”
On the strength of that book, Norris ended up with a powerhouse literary agent, Lynn Nesbit, and the beginnings of two more books.
In editing Dakota, Spiegel had trimmed perhaps 100 pages of material as too religious. But Norris put them to good use later, during a second nine-month stay as a scholar at the institute, in 1993-94. That fall, with the monastic liturgy as her muse, Norris produced a prodigious stream of poetry. In the spring, she worked on her second book, The Cloister Walk, published by Riverhead, where Spiegel had landed after Ticknor & Fields folded.
This book, using many of the pages edited out of Dakota, is more directly focused on monastic life than the first, and the monks think she got it right.
“She captures it as a poet,” says Abbot Timothy Kelly of St. John’s Abbey, where she has spent so much time praying. “I think she knows how to read the symbolism, and I think that’s a real important part of it all, because a poet basically deals with symbols and signs, and of course, so do we....I think she encounters monastic life not as somebody who is trying to counter it in some way, but rather, she wants to embrace the truth of it....She gives us the benefit of the doubt.”
More than capturing the reality of monasticism, her books appeal to a far broader audience. “She is making theology very grounded in the real world,” says Nesbit, her agent. “There’s a great interest on the part of people now for some kind of spiritual or religious underpinning. And, unfortunately, many people don’t have a church, and they look for it in contemporary writers.”
Now, in Amazing Grace, Norris has come full circle, wrestling with words that drove her away from religion to begin with, and interpreting their meaning for others.
“I’m a storyteller, and basically I’m trying to tell stories about my experience of the scary words,” Norris said. “I found that, when I was making my way back to church, the language of the church was a terrible obstacle . . . So I really wrote the book for myself, in a sense, to try to come to some adult accommodation of this language.”
Spiegel has high hopes for it. “It will be the best-selling of all these three books, because it’s the most general of them,” Spiegel says. “It talks about religion in a way that’s incredibly accessible.”
That accessibility has made Norris a three-time best-selling author, increased her financial security and brought thousands of letters from people saying that her work has changed their lives. “It’s like my story has gone out into the world and now it’s just coming back to me in so many ways,” Norris says. “It really is an absolute gift.”
Her story has made her an unusual author in the crowded field of books on spirituality. “I think she has really forged her own idiosyncratic path,” Nesbit says. “I don’t think there is anyone like her.”
Invited to the White House by Hillary Clinton this spring, Kathleen Norris sat down with the first lady, in the nation’s most powerful residence, and chatted amicably for an hour about life, literature and spirituality.
At the United Center, the home of the Chicago Bulls, Norris and her husband, the poet David Dwyer—with a Benedictine abbot friend, Leo Ryska—cheered through an intense April battle with the Knicks. They sat in second-row seats provided by Bulls coach Phil Jackson, who had used her writing for meditation, written her regularly and arranged the tickets, after she told him about Ryska’s dream of seeing Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen play. After the game, Jackson escorted them to a private lounge and spent an hour with them in companionable conversation.
These may appear to be exotic venues for a woman who lives and writes in a South Dakota town of 1,600. But it is perhaps equally surprising that this Great Plains poet, once so troubled by doubts that she wondered if she was even a Christian, now leads retreats at monasteries, and does it well. Last year, Norris led one for Ryska at St. Benedict’s Abbey in Benet Lake, Wis. “She’s herself,” Ryska says. “She used poetry as the text on which she then conversed.”
Even in her tiny hometown of Lemmon, in northwestern South Dakota, Norris is definitely not a prophet without honor. For a July 11 parade, part of the five-day Boss Cowman festivities, business leaders asked her to ride on the Chamber of Commerce float. Lemmon is still recovering from the blizzards of two years ago, which hit cattle hard, but Norris boosts another sector of the economy: tourism.
In the first prose book she wrote, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Norris described Lemmon so vividly that it still draws visitors to town. “It’s hard to know how many of those there are, because a lot of them don’t basically tell anybody, but they’ll drive down the street and look for her house,” says Joyce Dustman, of Bill’s Super Valu supermarket, who offered Norris a featured role in the parade. “I’m sure it’s helped, as far as tourist trade in the community.”
The mayor of Lemmon, William Kohn, proprietor of Kohn’s Sports Shop, ranks Norris as a tourist attraction right behind a prehistoric remnant called the Petrified Wood Park. “For economic development reasons, we would like to use Kathleen much more,” Kohn says, “but yet, we still know she wants her privacy.”
Similarly, her work has drawn people to monasticism, a vital motif in her three best-selling books, Dakota (Ticknor & Fields, 1993), The Cloister Walk (Riverhead, 1996) and now Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, also from Riverhead Books. Just as visitors drive to Lemmon to see her house, her words have led others to seek out Benedictines.
“They come from all over the country . . . and they’ll say they want to come here for a retreat and they have read Kathleen Norris,” says Abbot Patrick Moore of Assumption Abbey in Richardton, the North Dakota town where she first encountered monasticism. “They’ll add that on kind of parenthetically at the end.” But it’s clear that her work is a primary reason why they come to Assumption.
Her writing has also attracted people to the Benedictine nuns at Sacred Heart Monastery, a mile away from Assumption.
“In our little rural area, we’ve had about 2,500 men and women come through here seeking spiritual guidance or attending a workshop or something like that, and I would say a good percent of those people have read Kathleen Norris’ works,” says Sister Paula Larson, the prioress at Sacred Heart. After reading Norris, two women showed up, asking to volunteer. “We’ve also had two young women who are considering a monastic vocation,” Larson says. “They also have read the book Dakota.”
Her books have become guides, both comfortable and challenging, for the interior journey of thousands, and an accurate reflection of monasticism.
“She has been able to articulate in a way that’s understandable to most people in our society a lot of the elements of monastic life, and she makes them very attractive,” Moore says. Norris does not write about monasticism as a dusty, distant phenomenon, but as a paradigm for life in the world.
“The Cloister Walk, I thought, was using monastic life, but it was really as a guide to living a secular life,” says Cindy Spiegel, her editor. “What can you learn if you examine monastic life? What can you take back to secular life? Through celibacy, what can you learn about married life?”
In her books, Norris taps the wisdom of the monks, from the Desert Fathers in Fourth Century Egypt to the Benedictines of the 20th Century American heartland. She does it so evocatively that one admirer compares her emergence to the arrival of the most prolific chronicler of monasticism, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.
“In a curious way, she’s almost a mirror image of Merton,” says Patrick Henry, executive director of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, who invited Norris to be a resident scholar at the institute, at St. John’s Abbey and University, in Collegeville, Minn. “Merton becomes a monk, and people want to do what Merton did. Kathleen visits the monastery, drinks deep at its well, then interprets it for people.”
Fifty years ago this year, Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, described his conversion to Catholicism and his entry into the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. It quickly became an overwhelming best-seller.
“Kathleen hasn’t mimicked his particular life choice,” Henry says, “but she has, I think, somehow caught the spirit of the times and given it voice, given it magnificent voice.”
The first time Norris heard this comparison, it shocked her. “I’m always cautious about that,” she says, “because there’s this huge difference between me and Merton: He was writing from the inside, and I’m writing from the outside.”
Still, both authors have met a need. Merton’s autobiography rolled off the presses soon after the savagery of World War II. Together, the bleakness of the era and the power of his words drew significant numbers of men into monastic life. Norris is also writing at a time of spiritual yearning.
“I think people are looking for a spirituality often that’s unattached to anything that resembles institutions,” Ryska says. While Norris can appeal to those searchers, because she avoided institutional church herself for so long, her writing is not faddish or New Age, but grounded in the monastic wisdom of the desert.
“My own life has opened up more than I thought possible in the Dakota desert, the desert of the monastery and of the small town, the desert of a small and fairly conservative Presbyterian church,” she wrote in Dakota.
In her spiritual journey to those intertwined deserts, Kathleen Norris has traced a great circle from faith to doubt and back to faith again, from the sophistication of New York to the simplicity of the Great Plains, from obscurity to the book-tour circuit.
She drifted away from the faith of her grandmothers, stumbling on the language of religion and the harsh imagery of fundamentalism. For two decades, she used the language of her art as a substitute for religion. Then that art brought her back to faith, luring her to the doors of Assumption Abbey, where the daily poetry of the psalms began to capture her.
The roots of her journey lie in the vast, windswept West River region of the Dakotas, west of the Missouri River, where both sets of grandparents came to live.
Her paternal grandmother, Beatrice Norris, married a man who had experienced a revival-tent conversion and later pastored 17 churches. She had a fundamentalist strain, talking constantly about the return of Jesus and the end of the world, in language that became a stumbling block for Norris.
Her maternal grandmother, Charlotte Totten, married a physician who practiced in South Dakota for 55 years. She read her well-worn Bible faithfully and lived a less ominous Christianity. “She was what I call the sane Presbyterian, a very wonderful lady, although they were both wonderful women in their own way,” Norris recalls.
The Tottens built a small house in Lemmon in 1923. In this house, their daughter, Lois Ferne Totten, grew up. She went off to study music at Northwestern University in Chicago, where she met another music major, John Heyward Norris. They eloped.
She taught piano and music. He played in symphony orchestras and Dixieland bands and directed church choirs, but his primary job was the Navy Band, which provided stability for his son and three daughters. “The people in the music branch of the Navy don’t move around much,” Kathleen Norris says. “So we really only lived in three places.”
In 1947, John Norris was an assistant conductor of the Navy Band, when Kathleen was born in Washington, D.C. Later, they moved to Illinois for his assignment to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, and in 1959, to Honolulu, where he conducted the Seventh Fleet’s band. The family set down its roots in Hawaii, but after Kathleen’s graduation from a highly structured prep school there, she left for Bennington College in Vermont, a much freer environment.
“Really, because I had the study discipline, it was a very good school for me,” Norris says. “I just started reading the minute I got there and spent four years just reading everything I could get my hands on.”
At Bennington, the one thing she didn’t do was go to church. As a child, she had always attended, rejoicing in the liturgy and thinking very little about dogma. “I just thought we went to church to sing,” Norris says, “which is really not that bad a perception.”
Norris had drifted away from church not so much because of anything in her past but because of her own attitudes. “It was more, I think, faddish intellectual stuff that had gotten a hold of me in high school, that religion was sort of for immature people, maybe for little kids and grandmas, but I was much too sophisticated for it,” she says. “At Bennington, because of all the emphasis on the arts, I was able to explore that. Then, eventually, it led me back to religion, but it was a long road.”
After graduation from Bennington in 1969, Norris took the traditional option for young writers, moving to New York City. There, she worked for the Academy of American Poets, running poetry programs in libraries and parks throughout the city.
“Unlike a lot of young people who come and work in Manhattan for a few years, I ended up going out to Staten Island and the far reaches of Queens, and even the South Bronx, Hunts Point and Tremont,” Norris recalls. “That was a really fruitful experience for me, and it really gave me a sort of an abiding love for New York City.”
In New York, she met David Dwyer, who had grown up Catholic there and had also drifted away from church. As the two young poets built a relationship that became a marriage, and both avoided institutional church, she began to wrestle with the question, “What is sin?” Only later did she understand the source of the question: the lingering echo of her grandmother Totten’s gentle piety.
It was the death of her grandmother Totten that drew Norris and Dwyer into a life-changing decision in 1974: to move to the home in Lemmon where her mother had grown up and her grandmother had died. The rest of her family was rooted in Hawaii, which made her the natural choice to move from New York to the Great Plains and manage the property. At a deeper level, she came to see that it was also a religious pilgrimage, “a search for inheritance, for place.”
Initially, they planned to stay just a few years. Somehow, the two young poets found the prairie congenial and discovered ways to survive. David tended bar, wrote computer programs, translated French literature, won a seat on the city council. Kathleen worked in a library, did bookkeeping and freelance writing, and drove endless stretches of road to bring poetry into small towns, as an artist in residence for the North Dakota Arts Council. Together, they launched a cable TV company.
Through all this time, she crafted her writer’s voice, an elegant instrument tuned to brilliance by her omnivorous reading; by her internal dance of faith and doubt; by her ear for the sounds of prairie people and Dakota wind; by her eye for the details of waving grass and wildflowers and scurrying animals, and by her encounter with monastic wisdom.
She had been in Lemmon nearly a decade before she met the monks, in 1983. “A wonderful writer named Carol Bly was giving a reading at Assumption Abbey in North Dakota,” Norris recalls. “I did not even know what an abbey was, but I wanted to go hear Carol read.”
Once she had fallen into the orbit of the monks, she couldn’t stay away. Regularly, she drove the straight, 90-mile stretch from Lemmon north to the abbey in Richardton, to join the monks in the Liturgy of the Hours, the daily recitation of prayers and psalms. She began to feel the psalms harmonizing with her own poetic voice, and she grew to need regular infusions of monastic liturgy.
As she repeatedly visited Assumption, she began borrowing books from monks, focusing on the simple stories of the Fourth Century Desert Fathers, the irreducible core of monastic life. “It really broadened my whole sense of the Christian tradition,” Norris says. More than anything else, the reason she kept coming back to Assumption was the sense of welcome.
“For much of that time, I really wasn’t even sure I was a Christian. So what was I do hanging around these monks?” Norris says. “The main thing was that I knew that if I showed up there, I would be received with great hospitality, no matter what condition I was in—mentally or physically.”
Over a period of three years, she decided to become an oblate, a lay associate of the monks at Assumption. From her first visit in 1983 until she became an oblate in 1986, she experienced two major spiritual landmarks.
Almost two decades after she had drifted away from church, she decided in 1984 to join her grandmother’s church, Spencer Memorial Presbyterian in Lemmon. Then, in 1985, during an arts council trip, she stayed with some Benedictine nuns at a convent in Belcourt, N.D. They gave her a copy of the Rule of St. Benedict, and she fell in love with the sensibly gentle legislation that has guided Benedictines for almost 1,500 years. As she grew more attached to the rule and to monastic life, she found herself invited to speak, from the perspective of a Presbyterian laywoman, at a South Dakota meeting of the American Benedictine Academy in the fall of 1990. There, she met Patrick Henry, of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research.
“I thought, ‘Here is somebody who is potentially a very important interpreter of the monastic tradition for the sake of the church at large,’ ” Henry recalls. So he told her about the institute’s resident scholars program. She later applied, and in the fall of 1991, began a nine-month stay.
In one sense, it was a painful time. As a poet surrounded by academics, she often felt out of place. Still, it gave her a chance to worship with the monks at St. John’s Abbey—every day, and not just at frequent intervals, as she had done at Assumption. So, several times daily, she heard her anxieties and joys reflected back at her in the words of the psalms, felt herself surprised that the recitation of that haunting poetry could more than suffice as prayer for her.
“The psalms really do address the human emotions,” Norris says. “That’s one of the things that is so powerful about them.” Increasingly, she appreciated the wisdom of liturgical scholar Gail Ramshaw, who likes to say that theology is prose, but liturgy is poetry.
During those nine months, she learned from her editor, Cindy Spiegel, that Ticknor & Fields had finally decided to publish her first prose book, after months of uncertainty.
Spiegel had connected with Norris serendipitously. Katrina Kenison, Spiegel’s predecessor in editing the Best American Essays series, had once written to Norris, saying that one of her essays just missed being included, but that she liked it immensely. Many months later, Norris wrote to Kenison, saying she had the makings of a book. By then, Kenison had left. So the letter reached Spiegel, who arranged to meet Norris at a Manhattan poetry reading.
“She didn’t really have a book,” Spiegel recalls. “She had a great title, which was Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. And then she had a lot of loose pieces.” Still, she thought Norris was an “amazing” writer. The young editor, raised Jewish in New York City, loved the way this Presbyterian poet wrote soaring prose about small-town life and faith.
“I am wary of Christianity,” Spiegel says. “Yet it was the first time that I had really felt that I was not threatened or put off, but actually invited into the Christian world.”
Together, they figured out a structure for the book. But Spiegel could not promise Norris that Ticknor & Fields would buy it, because her boss feared that its market appeal would be too small. “The very last time I showed it to him, he said, ‘She’s such a good writer, we can’t not do the book.’ ”
So Norris finished it at Henry’s institute, and the book rolled off the presses in 1993. Before it reached Lemmon, rumors about its contents swept the town. As people read it, though, they saw clearly in its pages her love for their community, and they embraced it.
“Everybody kind of thinks that Kathleen is their friend,” Mayor Kohn says. “I mean, she absolutely can do no wrong as far as people in Lemmon, South Dakota, are concerned.”
In the world beyond Lemmon, it went from hardcover to paperback and became a best-seller, based on its luminous writing. “I consider a single page of that book, the April 14 weather report, as beautiful, concentrated a piece of English prose as I’m ever likely to see,” Henry says. “Somehow, that page distills for me the genius of Kathleen, the compression of her prose. She doesn’t waste a word, but you don’t get the sense of its being clipped or hurried, either.”
On the strength of that book, Norris ended up with a powerhouse literary agent, Lynn Nesbit, and the beginnings of two more books.
In editing Dakota, Spiegel had trimmed perhaps 100 pages of material as too religious. But Norris put them to good use later, during a second nine-month stay as a scholar at the institute, in 1993-94. That fall, with the monastic liturgy as her muse, Norris produced a prodigious stream of poetry. In the spring, she worked on her second book, The Cloister Walk, published by Riverhead, where Spiegel had landed after Ticknor & Fields folded.
This book, using many of the pages edited out of Dakota, is more directly focused on monastic life than the first, and the monks think she got it right.
“She captures it as a poet,” says Abbot Timothy Kelly of St. John’s Abbey, where she has spent so much time praying. “I think she knows how to read the symbolism, and I think that’s a real important part of it all, because a poet basically deals with symbols and signs, and of course, so do we....I think she encounters monastic life not as somebody who is trying to counter it in some way, but rather, she wants to embrace the truth of it....She gives us the benefit of the doubt.”
More than capturing the reality of monasticism, her books appeal to a far broader audience. “She is making theology very grounded in the real world,” says Nesbit, her agent. “There’s a great interest on the part of people now for some kind of spiritual or religious underpinning. And, unfortunately, many people don’t have a church, and they look for it in contemporary writers.”
Now, in Amazing Grace, Norris has come full circle, wrestling with words that drove her away from religion to begin with, and interpreting their meaning for others.
“I’m a storyteller, and basically I’m trying to tell stories about my experience of the scary words,” Norris said. “I found that, when I was making my way back to church, the language of the church was a terrible obstacle . . . So I really wrote the book for myself, in a sense, to try to come to some adult accommodation of this language.”
Spiegel has high hopes for it. “It will be the best-selling of all these three books, because it’s the most general of them,” Spiegel says. “It talks about religion in a way that’s incredibly accessible.”
That accessibility has made Norris a three-time best-selling author, increased her financial security and brought thousands of letters from people saying that her work has changed their lives. “It’s like my story has gone out into the world and now it’s just coming back to me in so many ways,” Norris says. “It really is an absolute gift.”
Her story has made her an unusual author in the crowded field of books on spirituality. “I think she has really forged her own idiosyncratic path,” Nesbit says. “I don’t think there is anyone like her.”
Nuns embrace people with AIDS
Newsday, March 18, 1997
The vision is a starkly simple, Gospel-based approach to the complex task of providing care to poor people who face the final stages of AIDS without a home or family to call their own: Build them a home and live there with them as they die.
Like a tree with a broad root system, this tenacious vision called Christa House rose out of the deep, diverse experiences of the women who brought it into the world.
It grew from Jean Prochilo’s scary encounter with the HIV virus in her family and with test results that led her to believe that it was lurking in her own body. It sprang from the deaths of two close friends of Sister Pat Ryan, one from AIDS and another from cancer. It flowed from Sister Jeremiah Manning’s work with AIDS patients in Queens and Sister Beth McGarvey’s in Manhattan. It swept up Sister Anthony Therese Roncallo, who lost a nephew to AIDS and volunteered regularly at an AIDS home in Pennsylvania.
These separate tendrils of the vision grew together, through an intricate series of connections, and the original group grew to 30—including sisters from eight different religious communities and laywomen. As the circle widened, the women drew in a handful of men with practical experience in building, fund-raising and the law. Among others, they included Msgr. James McNamara, a pastor and experienced administrator; Msgr. Thomas Hartman, a legendary fund raiser who lost a brother to AIDS, and retired judge Angelo Roncallo, who lost a son.
The women kept it growing through the first fallow summer, when no one else seemed to respond. They stuck with it when the purity of their vision met the more practical perspective of the men. Now, three years after the idea sprouted, it is starting to look like a reality.
Since October, Ryan has been working in the Christa House office at McNamara’s parish, Our Lady of Grace in West Babylon, where the proposed building would rise. Next month, the newly named board of trustees will meet for the first time. On May 2, a choir and orchestra concert at Tilles Center, at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University, Brookville, will launch the public fund-raising. And in the next few months, the Town of Babylon will examine the proposal. If it approves, Christa House will open as a family home for end-stage AIDS patients, in an area with more AIDS cases than any other suburb—and few good places for them to spend their dying days. But it has not been easy.
“When they first approached me, I thought it was like The Man of La Mancha,’ ” Angelo Roncallo said. “I thought they were fighting windmills. It seemed like such a task to raise the kind of money that they wanted to raise.” But as things began to happen, such as the offer of land that materialized when they most needed it, he began to believe that the idea—and the women who had birthed it—were invincible. “If I were in trouble,” said Roncallo, a veteran of the political wars, “I’d want these five or six or seven women behind me.”
From 1981 to 1986, when a congenital defect caused her blood vessels to start bleeding, Jean Prochilo endured 13 surgeries and needed 122 pints of donated blood. In 1986, she had a blood test, and a doctor informed her that she was HIV-positive. As a nurse, she knew well what that meant. For the next five years, she carried around that frightening knowledge.
Since two of her three original tests had been positive, she saw no reason to take another test. Finally, in 1991, while she was working in hospice care at the Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Centre, she had another blood test, when she volunteered to take experimental medication. By then, tests were more accurate, and it turned out, after all the fear and torment, that she was not HIV-positive after all. The same year that she felt that profound relief, she experienced the killing power of the virus in her own family. Marc Roncallo, the son of Prochilo’s cousin, Angelo Roncallo, and the nephew of her other cousin, Sister Anthony Therese Roncallo, died of AIDS at age 38.
The following year, Prochilo became the HIV-AIDS coordinator at Mercy, which gave her profound insight into the sociological and theological dimensions of the disease. “I was meeting people who, right up until their death, never knew that God loved them,” Prochilo said. “They had never been respected or affirmed.”
When AIDS had run its course and the patients neared death, many of them had no family support. “I would say 50 percent of the people that I see here at Mercy, when it comes time to die, there is no one who comes forward and says, ‘I’ll work with you,’ and there’s no safe place to discharge them to.”
That reality created her idea, and a community of nuns, the Amityville Dominicans, offered her a chance to express it. She had briefly been a member of another religious community, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood. Later, she had become a Dominican associate, a layperson who believes in the community’s goals and shares in its prayers and its works. In 1994, the vowed women of the community invited lay associates to present their ideas at chapter, the community’s policy-setting assembly.
In longhand, at the top of a “chapter proposal form,” Prochilo summarized her idea: “Co-living homes of vowed and lay, where community is formed with end-stage AIDS patients who have nowhere to go and no one to be with them as death nears.”
Unknown to Prochilo, the same need had become clear to a group of Josephites. “My involvement started with the death of a very dear friend from AIDS; he was like another brother to me,” said Sister Pat Ryan, one of the leaders of the Josephite group that was working on the issue. That friend died in 1988. Then, in 1990, cancer claimed the life of her closest Josephite friend.
“It was following that second death that I began to realize that I really wanted to be a nurse, that I had always wanted to be a nurse, and that if I was going to do anything about it, I’d better get moving,” Ryan said. “So the community gave me the green light to go ahead and go to nursing school.” She left behind her 30 years as a biology teacher, moved to Long Beach and studied nursing at Nassau Community College.
Toward the end of nursing school, she was at the community’s motherhouse in Brentwood, walking through its spacious grounds. “I looked at a building out there and said to myself, ‘Gee, that would be a great building for terminal AIDS patients,’ ” she recalled. “And that was the beginning of the idea.”
Soon after that, she had a visit in Long Beach from another longtime friend in the community, Sister Jeremiah Manning. Late that day, as Manning prepared to leave, Ryan told her about the AIDS house idea. Manning had worked with AIDS patients at Catholic Medical Center in Brooklyn and Queens, had seen how they had no place to die with dignity, and had been involved with a plan to buy a house for them. “We never got any place with it,” she said. Now, Ryan was proposing something similar. I think if she had said, I think it stinks; it’s such a crazy idea; forget it,’ I think that would have been kind of the end of it,” Ryan recalled. “But she said, I think that’s a great idea.’ ” So they put together a list of nuns who might be interested and called a meeting.
The first meeting took place at Manning’s home in Seaford. Other gatherings followed, but Ryan and Manning discovered that it wasn’t easy to get across the idea of what they wanted to do. “We didn’t have the vocabulary,” Manning said. “We didn’t have the word picture in our minds.”
That was how the idea began taking root shakily among the “Josies,” the largest community of nuns on Long Island. Through an odd, seemingly providential turn of events, the Josephites connected with the vision that was growing in the second largest community, the Amityville Dominicans.
Without ever knowing each other, Prochilo and Ryan had both been attending daily mass at St. Mary of the Isle in Long Beach, both praying over the same idea: helping terminal AIDS patients. Prochilo had heard that some Josephites were meeting to discuss a home for AIDS patients, and she learned of a coming meeting of the group. But she had a scheduling conflict. Finally, Prochilo and Ryan learned about each other from Sister Frances Monuszko, an Amityville Dominican on the parish staff in Long Beach, who knew both of them and their common vision.
Right outside the church, Monuszko introduced them. “I couldn’t believe it,” Ryan said. “The same thing essentially was happening in two different places, very close to each other, parallel and unknown to each other, and we finally found each other. It was the Spirit moving.”
Even before they met Prochilo, the Josephites had inspected an AIDS house in Pennsylvania, with help from Prochilo’s cousin, Sister Anthony Therese Roncallo. In 1991, Roncallo had attended a Dominican event and heard Sister Mary Headley make a plea for sisters to share her goal of caring for AIDS patients. The following summer, she began volunteering at Rainbow Home, the AIDS house that Headley runs in Wernersville, Pa.
One of the leaders of the Josephite community, Sister Rosalie Carven, had heard of Rainbow Home, and she knew that Roncallo had volunteered there and vouched for it. So Carven, Ryan, Manning and another Josephite, Sister Pat Berliner, made the trip to Pennsylvania. “What we saw visualized for us what we were trying to say that we wanted to do,” Manning said.
But the care providers at Rainbow Home did not live with the patients. What Prochilo brought to the developing vision was the focus on vowed women and laywomen living together in the house with AIDS patients. “That part of it we really hadn’t caught up with,” Manning said.
The vision already had a name, Christa House—a feminine version of Christ, because they thought that most of the patients they would serve would be women, the fastest-growing segment of the AIDS population. The house would be open to both men and women, but they expect women to predominate.
And with the merging of Prochilo’s idea into the ongoing process that the Josephites had started, the vision developed a sharper focus. Still, in the first year, from mid-1994 to mid-1995, some of those who had expressed interest dropped off, and momentum waned.
“There were many times when I really thought it was all going to fall apart,” Ryan said. “The summer of ‘95 was the worst summer, because there was nobody around—absolutely dead. Nobody was answering phone calls. Nobody was home. Everybody was on vacation. I said, ‘That’s it.’ ”
Early last year, Prochilo received a phone call at Mercy from her spiritual director, Msgr. James McNamara, the pastor of Our Lady of Grace parish in West Babylon. She had been telling him repeatedly about the Christa House project, which had become central to her spirituality.
“He said, ‘Are you sitting down? I have an acre of land, and would you be interested for Christa House?’ ” she recalled. “I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ ”
Prochilo told the others about his offer at one of their meetings in Brentwood, and they asked her how much money she thought he’d want for it. Right from that meeting, she went to see McNamara. “I said, ‘How much are you going to ask for this land?’ And he said, ‘Jean, I guess you didn’t understand me. I’m going to give it to you.’ ”
Until the moment when McNamara offered to lease them the land for $1 a year, they had only had a glimmer of a possibility for location: some surplus government land in Bellmore. McNamara knew that could take forever. “As I prayed about it, I said, ‘We have land, they need land, this work is of God,’ “ he recalled. “So I just made the offer.”
The women’s vision had impressed McNamara. He had also experienced personally the importance of giving someone a dignified place to die. His predecessor as pastor, the Rev. Patrick Shanahan, had spent his final days in the rectory. “I was very touched by that experience,” McNamara said.
Behind its parking lot, the parish had 7.7 acres that had been used for parish bazaars and auxiliary parking. McNamara proposed to let Christa House use about one acre, and to sell the rest to the Diocese of Rockville Centre for the construction of senior citizen housing.
Late last April, the group met at the parish with McNamara and looked over the land. By then, Angelo Roncallo had drawn up the incorporation papers. Msgr. Alan Placa, a diocesan lawyer, attended the meeting and advised them on procedures for leasing the land from the parish. Now, the depressing slump of the previous summer was past, and the prospect of getting somewhere looked better. “Once Jim gave us the land,” Prochilo said, “then we had a starting point.”
A month later, McNamara held a parish meeting about the two proposals. They discussed the senior citizen plan first, and parishioners raised serious objections. “The shocker was that here the majority of that audience was over 50, and they didn’t want the senior housing,” Sister Beth McGarvey recalled. “So, we’re sitting there, saying, ‘Forget it. Don’t even mention Christa House.’ ”
But they did discuss Christa House that night, and the parishioners raised few objections. “I was flabbergasted,” Prochilo recalled. That was a high point for the women, but they still had some low moments ahead.
The group knew that they’d need serious money to build the house and to operate it. That turned their attention to Msgr. Thomas Hartman, who runs the diocesan television operation, knows business leaders all over Long Island, and has built a reputation as a prodigious fundraiser. He also has a personal understanding of the issue: In 1995, AIDS had claimed the life of his brother, Gerard Hartman, senior vice president of MCA, the film and video producer.
Last year, Hartman preached at an AIDS liturgy at St. Agnes Cathedral in Rockville Centre. “People who attended that suggested I would be the perfect person for their committee,” Hartman said. So he began attending Christa House meetings.
“It became eminently clear by the third meeting that these were wonderful people who could do the work, and the work was needed, but they couldn’t raise between all of them anywhere near the money that was needed,” Hartman said.
As a result, Ryan asked him if he’d do the fund-raising. “As soon as I heard those words, I heard my brother say to me, ‘Yes, that’s what I want,’ ” Hartman recalled. “She turned to me with a look of relief on her face and said, ‘The committee wants to name this after your brother.’ ” So it will become “Christa House: The Jerry Hartman Residence.”
In the ensuing months, both McNamara and Hartman, who had known each other since high school, started asking questions. “That has been a very healthy process,” McNamara said. “While I respect their vision, I think their vision needed to be challenged within the confines of reality.”
At a meeting at Hartman’s television studios last September, for example, McNamara asked about the wisdom of having eight patients on a first floor and eight women volunteers living on the second floor. Could the women be exposing themselves to burnout by living daily with dying patients? What would happen to the second floor if they later decided no longer to live with the patients? As pastor, McNamara had to ask.
“I think this whole thing needs to be opened up for discussion,” McNamara said at that meeting. Hartman concurred. “I would wonder whether you could really create the community that you’re talking about,” Hartman said. “Living in that same environment, I think you’re asking for a lot of trouble.”
Later, as Hartman began to meet with businessmen to explore fund-raising, they also raised questions. Accustomed to cost efficiency, they wondered whether it made sense to have eight women caring for just eight patients. Instead, they suggested that Christa House should accommodate a larger number of patients. That clashed with the women’s desire to make it a real home, whatever the practical implications might be.
“We’ve had many, many, many meetings on that topic,” McGarvey said. In fact, the core group had been meeting with Sister Helen Chasse, director of Tabor Retreat Center in Oceanside, who served as a facilitator for their discussions of building the Christa House community.
“I was struck by their dedication to the vision,” Chasse said. “It’s one thing to have a vision and to really sense that this is something God is calling you to, but it’s not exactly like you get a blueprint. A lot of what has to be hashed out is the hard work of it, the nitty-gritty. They’re very good at listening to one another and working those things through.”
The women had to listen not only to one another, but to the people they were asking to raise the money. “All of a sudden, these men started coming out with different ideas, and it was as if the whole vision was being changed,” Sister Anthony Therese Roncallo said.
So the women had trouble conveying the core idea. “It’s a hard concept, what we want to do, what our hearts tell us should be done; it’s a hard concept to get across to business people,” Prochilo said. “We don’t make fiscal sense.”
Finally, it was a dying AIDS patient who helped clarify it all. Her name was Melanie. She had first been admitted to Mercy in 1994, and she had poured out to Prochilo a sad story of rape by a relative, then a descent into prostitution and drugs.
“She said, My life is hell, and the best day of my life will be the day I die,’ ” Prochilo recalled. “She didn’t believe that anybody could love her or accept her, because she saw herself as bad.” Melanie wasn’t easy. She threw trays and feces. She cursed and acted out. “She was a difficult young woman, but she had never learned to trust anybody in her life. Why should she?”
But over the course of her 15 admissions to Mercy, Melanie forged a friendship with Prochilo. “That’s my best friend,” Melanie said in a bedside interview. “I trust her.” She had heard Prochilo talk about Christa House, and as it became clearer that she was dying, Melanie asked why the place wasn’t ready. The hospital could do nothing more for her, Prochilo said, but there was no place in the community to place her. As Prochilo recalls it, Melanie said: “You’ve been telling me for two years about this place. I’m dying and I have no place to go. When are you going to get off your fat - - - and get this place built?”
Prochilo told her that they were about to meet with Hartman, and Melanie said that Hartman didn’t need to meet with the women, but with her. So they canceled the meeting, which had been scheduled to discuss the size of the project, and Hartman visited Melanie in the hospital.
“She said to me, I don’t know how much longer I have to live, but I’ll do anything for you to help people know how important this is,’ “ Hartman recalled. Not many days later, Melanie died, at age 34. But she accomplished what she wanted. Hartman left that bedside encounter with a clearer understanding of the Christa House vision.
“We need to keep this small, because we need to make sure that it’s a home,” Hartman said. “The sisters are right, that this should be a place for the poor. If we err on either side, it should be on the side of hospitality.”
As a result of the dialogue between the women’s vision and the men’s practicality, the plan has changed somewhat. It will now be on one floor, not two, to improve the patients’ accessibility to all areas of the building. It will house 12 patients, not eight. The larger number accommodates the efficiency concerns of the business community, but still allows Christa House to be a real home. Instead of eight women living with them, it will be four. The rest of the Christa House community will live nearby. It will be built near McNamara’s rectory, not on the back 7.7 acres. That new location will be quieter and will make it a more visible part of the parish community.
But for all that, the plan is moving. At a meeting in late February, Ryan got approvals for the proposed board of trustees from the principals of the corporation: Bishop John R. McGann and the superiors of the two religious communities, Sister Mary Hughes of the Dominicans and Sister Angela Gannon of the Josephites.
The next big hurdle is fund-raising. The house will be expensive to build, because it will be home to 16 people, which requires 12,000 to 14,000 square feet. It will have to be accessible to people with severe disabilities, and that means toilets in every room, a special therapeutic bathtub with a hydraulic lift, a call-bell system and other features. Hartman said he wants to raise $5 million, to cover the $2 million construction cost and provide a $3 million endowment that would produce enough income to fund most of the annual operating expenses. If all goes well, they hope to break ground this year.
Through all this, the essentials of the vision have survived, and the women believe that is because it is a work that needs doing. “We’ve trusted the Spirit since the very beginning of this,” Prochilo said. “If we’re not there, God’s going to send somebody else. Someone will come and take our place, if it is of God.”
The vision is a starkly simple, Gospel-based approach to the complex task of providing care to poor people who face the final stages of AIDS without a home or family to call their own: Build them a home and live there with them as they die.
Like a tree with a broad root system, this tenacious vision called Christa House rose out of the deep, diverse experiences of the women who brought it into the world.
It grew from Jean Prochilo’s scary encounter with the HIV virus in her family and with test results that led her to believe that it was lurking in her own body. It sprang from the deaths of two close friends of Sister Pat Ryan, one from AIDS and another from cancer. It flowed from Sister Jeremiah Manning’s work with AIDS patients in Queens and Sister Beth McGarvey’s in Manhattan. It swept up Sister Anthony Therese Roncallo, who lost a nephew to AIDS and volunteered regularly at an AIDS home in Pennsylvania.
These separate tendrils of the vision grew together, through an intricate series of connections, and the original group grew to 30—including sisters from eight different religious communities and laywomen. As the circle widened, the women drew in a handful of men with practical experience in building, fund-raising and the law. Among others, they included Msgr. James McNamara, a pastor and experienced administrator; Msgr. Thomas Hartman, a legendary fund raiser who lost a brother to AIDS, and retired judge Angelo Roncallo, who lost a son.
The women kept it growing through the first fallow summer, when no one else seemed to respond. They stuck with it when the purity of their vision met the more practical perspective of the men. Now, three years after the idea sprouted, it is starting to look like a reality.
Since October, Ryan has been working in the Christa House office at McNamara’s parish, Our Lady of Grace in West Babylon, where the proposed building would rise. Next month, the newly named board of trustees will meet for the first time. On May 2, a choir and orchestra concert at Tilles Center, at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University, Brookville, will launch the public fund-raising. And in the next few months, the Town of Babylon will examine the proposal. If it approves, Christa House will open as a family home for end-stage AIDS patients, in an area with more AIDS cases than any other suburb—and few good places for them to spend their dying days. But it has not been easy.
“When they first approached me, I thought it was like The Man of La Mancha,’ ” Angelo Roncallo said. “I thought they were fighting windmills. It seemed like such a task to raise the kind of money that they wanted to raise.” But as things began to happen, such as the offer of land that materialized when they most needed it, he began to believe that the idea—and the women who had birthed it—were invincible. “If I were in trouble,” said Roncallo, a veteran of the political wars, “I’d want these five or six or seven women behind me.”
From 1981 to 1986, when a congenital defect caused her blood vessels to start bleeding, Jean Prochilo endured 13 surgeries and needed 122 pints of donated blood. In 1986, she had a blood test, and a doctor informed her that she was HIV-positive. As a nurse, she knew well what that meant. For the next five years, she carried around that frightening knowledge.
Since two of her three original tests had been positive, she saw no reason to take another test. Finally, in 1991, while she was working in hospice care at the Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Centre, she had another blood test, when she volunteered to take experimental medication. By then, tests were more accurate, and it turned out, after all the fear and torment, that she was not HIV-positive after all. The same year that she felt that profound relief, she experienced the killing power of the virus in her own family. Marc Roncallo, the son of Prochilo’s cousin, Angelo Roncallo, and the nephew of her other cousin, Sister Anthony Therese Roncallo, died of AIDS at age 38.
The following year, Prochilo became the HIV-AIDS coordinator at Mercy, which gave her profound insight into the sociological and theological dimensions of the disease. “I was meeting people who, right up until their death, never knew that God loved them,” Prochilo said. “They had never been respected or affirmed.”
When AIDS had run its course and the patients neared death, many of them had no family support. “I would say 50 percent of the people that I see here at Mercy, when it comes time to die, there is no one who comes forward and says, ‘I’ll work with you,’ and there’s no safe place to discharge them to.”
That reality created her idea, and a community of nuns, the Amityville Dominicans, offered her a chance to express it. She had briefly been a member of another religious community, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood. Later, she had become a Dominican associate, a layperson who believes in the community’s goals and shares in its prayers and its works. In 1994, the vowed women of the community invited lay associates to present their ideas at chapter, the community’s policy-setting assembly.
In longhand, at the top of a “chapter proposal form,” Prochilo summarized her idea: “Co-living homes of vowed and lay, where community is formed with end-stage AIDS patients who have nowhere to go and no one to be with them as death nears.”
Unknown to Prochilo, the same need had become clear to a group of Josephites. “My involvement started with the death of a very dear friend from AIDS; he was like another brother to me,” said Sister Pat Ryan, one of the leaders of the Josephite group that was working on the issue. That friend died in 1988. Then, in 1990, cancer claimed the life of her closest Josephite friend.
“It was following that second death that I began to realize that I really wanted to be a nurse, that I had always wanted to be a nurse, and that if I was going to do anything about it, I’d better get moving,” Ryan said. “So the community gave me the green light to go ahead and go to nursing school.” She left behind her 30 years as a biology teacher, moved to Long Beach and studied nursing at Nassau Community College.
Toward the end of nursing school, she was at the community’s motherhouse in Brentwood, walking through its spacious grounds. “I looked at a building out there and said to myself, ‘Gee, that would be a great building for terminal AIDS patients,’ ” she recalled. “And that was the beginning of the idea.”
Soon after that, she had a visit in Long Beach from another longtime friend in the community, Sister Jeremiah Manning. Late that day, as Manning prepared to leave, Ryan told her about the AIDS house idea. Manning had worked with AIDS patients at Catholic Medical Center in Brooklyn and Queens, had seen how they had no place to die with dignity, and had been involved with a plan to buy a house for them. “We never got any place with it,” she said. Now, Ryan was proposing something similar. I think if she had said, I think it stinks; it’s such a crazy idea; forget it,’ I think that would have been kind of the end of it,” Ryan recalled. “But she said, I think that’s a great idea.’ ” So they put together a list of nuns who might be interested and called a meeting.
The first meeting took place at Manning’s home in Seaford. Other gatherings followed, but Ryan and Manning discovered that it wasn’t easy to get across the idea of what they wanted to do. “We didn’t have the vocabulary,” Manning said. “We didn’t have the word picture in our minds.”
That was how the idea began taking root shakily among the “Josies,” the largest community of nuns on Long Island. Through an odd, seemingly providential turn of events, the Josephites connected with the vision that was growing in the second largest community, the Amityville Dominicans.
Without ever knowing each other, Prochilo and Ryan had both been attending daily mass at St. Mary of the Isle in Long Beach, both praying over the same idea: helping terminal AIDS patients. Prochilo had heard that some Josephites were meeting to discuss a home for AIDS patients, and she learned of a coming meeting of the group. But she had a scheduling conflict. Finally, Prochilo and Ryan learned about each other from Sister Frances Monuszko, an Amityville Dominican on the parish staff in Long Beach, who knew both of them and their common vision.
Right outside the church, Monuszko introduced them. “I couldn’t believe it,” Ryan said. “The same thing essentially was happening in two different places, very close to each other, parallel and unknown to each other, and we finally found each other. It was the Spirit moving.”
Even before they met Prochilo, the Josephites had inspected an AIDS house in Pennsylvania, with help from Prochilo’s cousin, Sister Anthony Therese Roncallo. In 1991, Roncallo had attended a Dominican event and heard Sister Mary Headley make a plea for sisters to share her goal of caring for AIDS patients. The following summer, she began volunteering at Rainbow Home, the AIDS house that Headley runs in Wernersville, Pa.
One of the leaders of the Josephite community, Sister Rosalie Carven, had heard of Rainbow Home, and she knew that Roncallo had volunteered there and vouched for it. So Carven, Ryan, Manning and another Josephite, Sister Pat Berliner, made the trip to Pennsylvania. “What we saw visualized for us what we were trying to say that we wanted to do,” Manning said.
But the care providers at Rainbow Home did not live with the patients. What Prochilo brought to the developing vision was the focus on vowed women and laywomen living together in the house with AIDS patients. “That part of it we really hadn’t caught up with,” Manning said.
The vision already had a name, Christa House—a feminine version of Christ, because they thought that most of the patients they would serve would be women, the fastest-growing segment of the AIDS population. The house would be open to both men and women, but they expect women to predominate.
And with the merging of Prochilo’s idea into the ongoing process that the Josephites had started, the vision developed a sharper focus. Still, in the first year, from mid-1994 to mid-1995, some of those who had expressed interest dropped off, and momentum waned.
“There were many times when I really thought it was all going to fall apart,” Ryan said. “The summer of ‘95 was the worst summer, because there was nobody around—absolutely dead. Nobody was answering phone calls. Nobody was home. Everybody was on vacation. I said, ‘That’s it.’ ”
Early last year, Prochilo received a phone call at Mercy from her spiritual director, Msgr. James McNamara, the pastor of Our Lady of Grace parish in West Babylon. She had been telling him repeatedly about the Christa House project, which had become central to her spirituality.
“He said, ‘Are you sitting down? I have an acre of land, and would you be interested for Christa House?’ ” she recalled. “I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ ”
Prochilo told the others about his offer at one of their meetings in Brentwood, and they asked her how much money she thought he’d want for it. Right from that meeting, she went to see McNamara. “I said, ‘How much are you going to ask for this land?’ And he said, ‘Jean, I guess you didn’t understand me. I’m going to give it to you.’ ”
Until the moment when McNamara offered to lease them the land for $1 a year, they had only had a glimmer of a possibility for location: some surplus government land in Bellmore. McNamara knew that could take forever. “As I prayed about it, I said, ‘We have land, they need land, this work is of God,’ “ he recalled. “So I just made the offer.”
The women’s vision had impressed McNamara. He had also experienced personally the importance of giving someone a dignified place to die. His predecessor as pastor, the Rev. Patrick Shanahan, had spent his final days in the rectory. “I was very touched by that experience,” McNamara said.
Behind its parking lot, the parish had 7.7 acres that had been used for parish bazaars and auxiliary parking. McNamara proposed to let Christa House use about one acre, and to sell the rest to the Diocese of Rockville Centre for the construction of senior citizen housing.
Late last April, the group met at the parish with McNamara and looked over the land. By then, Angelo Roncallo had drawn up the incorporation papers. Msgr. Alan Placa, a diocesan lawyer, attended the meeting and advised them on procedures for leasing the land from the parish. Now, the depressing slump of the previous summer was past, and the prospect of getting somewhere looked better. “Once Jim gave us the land,” Prochilo said, “then we had a starting point.”
A month later, McNamara held a parish meeting about the two proposals. They discussed the senior citizen plan first, and parishioners raised serious objections. “The shocker was that here the majority of that audience was over 50, and they didn’t want the senior housing,” Sister Beth McGarvey recalled. “So, we’re sitting there, saying, ‘Forget it. Don’t even mention Christa House.’ ”
But they did discuss Christa House that night, and the parishioners raised few objections. “I was flabbergasted,” Prochilo recalled. That was a high point for the women, but they still had some low moments ahead.
The group knew that they’d need serious money to build the house and to operate it. That turned their attention to Msgr. Thomas Hartman, who runs the diocesan television operation, knows business leaders all over Long Island, and has built a reputation as a prodigious fundraiser. He also has a personal understanding of the issue: In 1995, AIDS had claimed the life of his brother, Gerard Hartman, senior vice president of MCA, the film and video producer.
Last year, Hartman preached at an AIDS liturgy at St. Agnes Cathedral in Rockville Centre. “People who attended that suggested I would be the perfect person for their committee,” Hartman said. So he began attending Christa House meetings.
“It became eminently clear by the third meeting that these were wonderful people who could do the work, and the work was needed, but they couldn’t raise between all of them anywhere near the money that was needed,” Hartman said.
As a result, Ryan asked him if he’d do the fund-raising. “As soon as I heard those words, I heard my brother say to me, ‘Yes, that’s what I want,’ ” Hartman recalled. “She turned to me with a look of relief on her face and said, ‘The committee wants to name this after your brother.’ ” So it will become “Christa House: The Jerry Hartman Residence.”
In the ensuing months, both McNamara and Hartman, who had known each other since high school, started asking questions. “That has been a very healthy process,” McNamara said. “While I respect their vision, I think their vision needed to be challenged within the confines of reality.”
At a meeting at Hartman’s television studios last September, for example, McNamara asked about the wisdom of having eight patients on a first floor and eight women volunteers living on the second floor. Could the women be exposing themselves to burnout by living daily with dying patients? What would happen to the second floor if they later decided no longer to live with the patients? As pastor, McNamara had to ask.
“I think this whole thing needs to be opened up for discussion,” McNamara said at that meeting. Hartman concurred. “I would wonder whether you could really create the community that you’re talking about,” Hartman said. “Living in that same environment, I think you’re asking for a lot of trouble.”
Later, as Hartman began to meet with businessmen to explore fund-raising, they also raised questions. Accustomed to cost efficiency, they wondered whether it made sense to have eight women caring for just eight patients. Instead, they suggested that Christa House should accommodate a larger number of patients. That clashed with the women’s desire to make it a real home, whatever the practical implications might be.
“We’ve had many, many, many meetings on that topic,” McGarvey said. In fact, the core group had been meeting with Sister Helen Chasse, director of Tabor Retreat Center in Oceanside, who served as a facilitator for their discussions of building the Christa House community.
“I was struck by their dedication to the vision,” Chasse said. “It’s one thing to have a vision and to really sense that this is something God is calling you to, but it’s not exactly like you get a blueprint. A lot of what has to be hashed out is the hard work of it, the nitty-gritty. They’re very good at listening to one another and working those things through.”
The women had to listen not only to one another, but to the people they were asking to raise the money. “All of a sudden, these men started coming out with different ideas, and it was as if the whole vision was being changed,” Sister Anthony Therese Roncallo said.
So the women had trouble conveying the core idea. “It’s a hard concept, what we want to do, what our hearts tell us should be done; it’s a hard concept to get across to business people,” Prochilo said. “We don’t make fiscal sense.”
Finally, it was a dying AIDS patient who helped clarify it all. Her name was Melanie. She had first been admitted to Mercy in 1994, and she had poured out to Prochilo a sad story of rape by a relative, then a descent into prostitution and drugs.
“She said, My life is hell, and the best day of my life will be the day I die,’ ” Prochilo recalled. “She didn’t believe that anybody could love her or accept her, because she saw herself as bad.” Melanie wasn’t easy. She threw trays and feces. She cursed and acted out. “She was a difficult young woman, but she had never learned to trust anybody in her life. Why should she?”
But over the course of her 15 admissions to Mercy, Melanie forged a friendship with Prochilo. “That’s my best friend,” Melanie said in a bedside interview. “I trust her.” She had heard Prochilo talk about Christa House, and as it became clearer that she was dying, Melanie asked why the place wasn’t ready. The hospital could do nothing more for her, Prochilo said, but there was no place in the community to place her. As Prochilo recalls it, Melanie said: “You’ve been telling me for two years about this place. I’m dying and I have no place to go. When are you going to get off your fat - - - and get this place built?”
Prochilo told her that they were about to meet with Hartman, and Melanie said that Hartman didn’t need to meet with the women, but with her. So they canceled the meeting, which had been scheduled to discuss the size of the project, and Hartman visited Melanie in the hospital.
“She said to me, I don’t know how much longer I have to live, but I’ll do anything for you to help people know how important this is,’ “ Hartman recalled. Not many days later, Melanie died, at age 34. But she accomplished what she wanted. Hartman left that bedside encounter with a clearer understanding of the Christa House vision.
“We need to keep this small, because we need to make sure that it’s a home,” Hartman said. “The sisters are right, that this should be a place for the poor. If we err on either side, it should be on the side of hospitality.”
As a result of the dialogue between the women’s vision and the men’s practicality, the plan has changed somewhat. It will now be on one floor, not two, to improve the patients’ accessibility to all areas of the building. It will house 12 patients, not eight. The larger number accommodates the efficiency concerns of the business community, but still allows Christa House to be a real home. Instead of eight women living with them, it will be four. The rest of the Christa House community will live nearby. It will be built near McNamara’s rectory, not on the back 7.7 acres. That new location will be quieter and will make it a more visible part of the parish community.
But for all that, the plan is moving. At a meeting in late February, Ryan got approvals for the proposed board of trustees from the principals of the corporation: Bishop John R. McGann and the superiors of the two religious communities, Sister Mary Hughes of the Dominicans and Sister Angela Gannon of the Josephites.
The next big hurdle is fund-raising. The house will be expensive to build, because it will be home to 16 people, which requires 12,000 to 14,000 square feet. It will have to be accessible to people with severe disabilities, and that means toilets in every room, a special therapeutic bathtub with a hydraulic lift, a call-bell system and other features. Hartman said he wants to raise $5 million, to cover the $2 million construction cost and provide a $3 million endowment that would produce enough income to fund most of the annual operating expenses. If all goes well, they hope to break ground this year.
Through all this, the essentials of the vision have survived, and the women believe that is because it is a work that needs doing. “We’ve trusted the Spirit since the very beginning of this,” Prochilo said. “If we’re not there, God’s going to send somebody else. Someone will come and take our place, if it is of God.”
In the hometown of St. Francis
Newsday, September 15, 1996
On our first morning in Assisi, a simple moment at breakfast surrounded us with a Franciscan sense of welcome and dissolved the tension of a 22-hour journey from home that had felt more like punishment than pilgrimage.
As we had approached Assisi the night before at 9:30, after a difficult odyssey of weather delays and missed connections, my daughter Rachel and I had felt anything but peaceful. Still, I had high hopes. Monsignor James McNamara of Our Lady of Grace in West Babylon, who has led several Assisi retreats, had told me: “It’s a place of peace. It has within the walls, within the streets, the spirit of St. Francis.”
Our gloom actually began to lift as we saw the huge, lighted Basilica of St. Francis looming high over the valley. We felt even better when we reached our guest house, announced ourselves on the intercom and heard a friendly welcome from Sister Alessandra, the director, who buzzed us through the massive iron gate and showed us to our room.
The next morning, I awoke at 6:30 to the song of birds outside the window—an appropriate introduction to the hometown of a man who preached to the birds and loved all creation. I walked onto our small balcony and absorbed the stunning view of this walled medieval hill town 80 miles north of Rome: the buildings made of pinkish stone from Mt. Subasio and the impossibly green valley below.
Before me was the dome of the Cathedral of San Rufino, where St. Francis and his follower, St. Clare, had been baptized. Beyond that was the Rocca Maggiore, an imposing fortress that looms above the city as a stark reminder of the pervasive violence that surrounded Francis, the humble man of peace who founded the Franciscan order. To my left stood the Basilica of St. Clare. Above the broad Umbrian valley was an added touch of color: a phalanx of hot-air balloons ascending through the hazy morning air. A few minutes later, I could hear the sisters singing at morning prayer in their chapel.
At breakfast in the brick-ceilinged dining room, we met Sister Sue, who picked up our names immediately and used them often—smiling sunnily and signaling her approval by chirping “Bravo, Bob!” or “Brava, Rachel!” My daughter smiled, too. “She’s Sister Margaretta,” Rachel whispered to me, referring to the unfailingly cheerful nun in “The Sound of Music.”
Sister Sue’s total friendliness had suddenly made us feel absolutely at home.
For me, the trip was a long-held dream come true. My middle name is Francis, and I have always admired “The Little Poor Man” of Assisi, one of the most widely loved saints. For Rachel, 22, it was a college graduation gift and a chance to visit the hometown of a great peacemaker, as she prepared to start her new job as executive director of Pax Christi Metro New York, a Catholic peace organization.
Originally, I had hoped to travel in one of McNamara’s groups, but he had no immediate plans for an Assisi retreat. Nor did his travel agent, Patricia Klugherz at Biblical Journeys in Southampton. So, with their guidance, I made my own plans, accepting McNamara’s key advice: Stay at St. Anthony’s Guest House, run by the Franciscan Sisters of the Atonement.
We started our tour that first morning by hiking 15 minutes down into the valley, to the church of San Damiano. In Franciscan tradition, this was where the story of St. Francis began.
Born in 1182, Francesco Bernardone grew up wanting to reap glory in one of Italy’s incessant little wars. At 20, he became a prisoner of war in the enemy town of Perugia. Many months later, on the way to another war, he had a vision in which a voice commanded him to return home and await instruction. He did.
Praying in the ramshackle chapel at San Damiano, he looked up at the crucifix and heard another command: “Francis, go and repair my church, which is falling in ruins.” Though he later understood that to mean the universal church, Francis thought at first that he was to physically spruce up the chapel. So he spent his energy—and some of his father’s wealth—restoring San Damiano. Later, when Clare joined Francis and started an order of nuns, San Damiano was their convent. Here, Francis wrote The Canticle of Brother Sun (also called the Canticle of the Creatures), the first great piece of literature to appear in the Italian language as it evolved from Latin.
On our visit, the chapel that Francis restored was under repair once again. But we were able to see the refectory where the Poor Clares took their meals, the choir where they chanted their prayers and the dormitory where St. Clare died.
Then we walked back up the hill, passing the large parking lot outside the Porta Nuova. On our way down to San Damiano the lot had been almost empty, but now it was packed. Many tourists, it seems, visit Assisi as a brief day trip—hitting the high spots but missing the chance to wake up to the birds and let the peace of Assisi hug them. We discovered the best bet, for those of us who were staying longer, was to get to the most important places before the crowds rolled in.
At one of those key sites, the Basilica of St. Clare, we visited her tomb and a chapel with the crucifix of San Damiano. The Basilica of St. Francis drew us back several times. We stood meditatively before the saint’s tomb and studied the staggering array of art: a series of 28 magnificent frescoes usually attributed to Giotto and a large Cimabue fresco portraying the Madonna and Child, with St. Francis nearby. His image, based on a description in one of the earliest biographies, is thought to be among the most accurate and is certainly one of the best known. The next morning we took a bus down to the Basilica of Santa Maria Degli Angeli. Inside was the Portiuncola, the crude stone church where Francis and his monks had worshiped—now entirely enclosed within the basilica. A few feet away is the spot where Francis died.
During the week, I occasionally felt frustrated by the crowds and the unexpected night-time street noise, including a disco—a disco in Assisi!—not far from the guest house. We found the trick was to juggle the goals of touring the city and making the experience something like a retreat. Joining in morning prayer with the sisters—and one morning, with the brothers at San Damiano—was a big help. So were the talks that McNamara had given on past Assisi retreats. He had printed out copies for me, and I used them all week, to help me stay grounded in Franciscan spirituality. “When you go to Assisi, the city of Assisi is the retreat house,” he had told me. “People find their places to pray.”
Wanting to see more of the surrounding countryside, one morning I called Anne Robichaud, an American-born educator and guide. I hoped she could give us a brief tour beyond the sites we’d already visited. Like an old friend, she invited us home for lunch. She picked us up and drove us out to her farm in Pian della Pieve. As she prepared pasta with zucchini and tuna with beans, we talked about her life and her favorite subject: Umbria.
While teaching in Italy after her graduation from college in California, she had met a quiet, gentlemanly Sicilian named Pino Alagna, who later became her husband. Pino gave up his job as a chemical analyst to begin working the seven-acre farm that they’d fallen in love with, outside of Assisi. Eventually Alagna built a modern home where they could live while they restore the adjoining older house. Now, with the government encouraging the preservation of farms, he works on other houses to raise money for restoring his own.
For lunch, Alagna returned home from a job site where he’d been working with his sons Keegan, 16, and Mattia, 15. (Their daughter, Giulia, 11, was visiting a friend in Assisi). As we ate, Alagna talked passionately about preserving farms, and his wife translated, adding her own passion.
“We both really love the rural land,” she said. “The real richness of Italy, besides the paintings, is the Italian people, and you can’t know the Italian people without knowing the rural people.”
As we talked, she also gave us some important tourist advice: In addition to the October feast of St. Francis, the best time to visit Assisi is during the festival of Calendimaggio in early May, when the townspeople go medieval and reenact the ancient rivalry between upper and lower Assisi.
On the way back to the village, she drove us to Malvarina, a lovely “agriturismo” or tourist farm, where we spoke with host Claudio Fabrizi and his mother, Maria, who rules the kitchen and creates typical Umbrian meals for the guests. The farm produces olives, fruits and herbs, but its biggest cash crop is now tourist satisfaction. In buildings ranging from motel-like studio apartments to individual cottages in the woods, it has room for about 30. Now, the Fabrizis have added horseback riding as the perfect way to see the region known as the “Green Heart of Italy.”
The next day, Robichaud gave us a mini-tour, including such diverse sites as Broccatelli, a cheese shop in Santa Maria Degli Angeli where we sampled local sheep cheeses; the Hotel Country House in the valley, where you can buy the antique furnishings in your room, and a small castle typical of those where people outside the walled cities once sought protection.
We also drove up Mt. Subasio to the Eremo Delle Carceri. It began as a group of caves outside town where Francis and the brothers would go for greater solitude. Eventually, other Franciscans built a more permanent hermitage into the hillside.
Our brief time with Anne Robichaud had given me a clearer, rooted-in-geography sense of Francis, the man of peace, rejecting the possessions that caused so many nasty wars and instead embracing poverty. It also gave us a much broader view of Umbria than just the art in the churches, which leaves some tourists feeling ACOd, “All Churched Out.”
Later, at an outdoor cafe in the main square, we gained further historical and cultural perspective from Marco Ceccarani, a local professor who comes from one of the oldest families in Assisi. Then we visited the Cathedral of San Rufino. There, on the door of an old-fashioned confessional box, we saw evidence of a more modern piece of history: the nameplate of Don Aldo Brunacci, who helped save many Jewish lives in World War II as part of the Assisi underground and is still hearing confessions today.
The next day, our last in Assisi, we stopped at some churches we hadn’t seen, including the ancient Benedictine Church of San Pietro, whose radical stone simplicity I found more peaceful and monastic than the art-laden showcases we had seen earlier.
On Saturday morning, after four full days in the hometown of Francis and Clare, it was time to pack up and say goodbye to Sisters Alessandra, Rosita, Sue and Marjorie. On the way down to the railroad station, I summoned up my meager Italian skills for a conversation with Marcello Rosati, our limousine driver—about his family and mine, about New York and Assisi.
As he dropped us at the train, his last words echoed what I’d been thinking: that someday I’d be back.
“A la prossima volta,” he said. Until next time
On our first morning in Assisi, a simple moment at breakfast surrounded us with a Franciscan sense of welcome and dissolved the tension of a 22-hour journey from home that had felt more like punishment than pilgrimage.
As we had approached Assisi the night before at 9:30, after a difficult odyssey of weather delays and missed connections, my daughter Rachel and I had felt anything but peaceful. Still, I had high hopes. Monsignor James McNamara of Our Lady of Grace in West Babylon, who has led several Assisi retreats, had told me: “It’s a place of peace. It has within the walls, within the streets, the spirit of St. Francis.”
Our gloom actually began to lift as we saw the huge, lighted Basilica of St. Francis looming high over the valley. We felt even better when we reached our guest house, announced ourselves on the intercom and heard a friendly welcome from Sister Alessandra, the director, who buzzed us through the massive iron gate and showed us to our room.
The next morning, I awoke at 6:30 to the song of birds outside the window—an appropriate introduction to the hometown of a man who preached to the birds and loved all creation. I walked onto our small balcony and absorbed the stunning view of this walled medieval hill town 80 miles north of Rome: the buildings made of pinkish stone from Mt. Subasio and the impossibly green valley below.
Before me was the dome of the Cathedral of San Rufino, where St. Francis and his follower, St. Clare, had been baptized. Beyond that was the Rocca Maggiore, an imposing fortress that looms above the city as a stark reminder of the pervasive violence that surrounded Francis, the humble man of peace who founded the Franciscan order. To my left stood the Basilica of St. Clare. Above the broad Umbrian valley was an added touch of color: a phalanx of hot-air balloons ascending through the hazy morning air. A few minutes later, I could hear the sisters singing at morning prayer in their chapel.
At breakfast in the brick-ceilinged dining room, we met Sister Sue, who picked up our names immediately and used them often—smiling sunnily and signaling her approval by chirping “Bravo, Bob!” or “Brava, Rachel!” My daughter smiled, too. “She’s Sister Margaretta,” Rachel whispered to me, referring to the unfailingly cheerful nun in “The Sound of Music.”
Sister Sue’s total friendliness had suddenly made us feel absolutely at home.
For me, the trip was a long-held dream come true. My middle name is Francis, and I have always admired “The Little Poor Man” of Assisi, one of the most widely loved saints. For Rachel, 22, it was a college graduation gift and a chance to visit the hometown of a great peacemaker, as she prepared to start her new job as executive director of Pax Christi Metro New York, a Catholic peace organization.
Originally, I had hoped to travel in one of McNamara’s groups, but he had no immediate plans for an Assisi retreat. Nor did his travel agent, Patricia Klugherz at Biblical Journeys in Southampton. So, with their guidance, I made my own plans, accepting McNamara’s key advice: Stay at St. Anthony’s Guest House, run by the Franciscan Sisters of the Atonement.
We started our tour that first morning by hiking 15 minutes down into the valley, to the church of San Damiano. In Franciscan tradition, this was where the story of St. Francis began.
Born in 1182, Francesco Bernardone grew up wanting to reap glory in one of Italy’s incessant little wars. At 20, he became a prisoner of war in the enemy town of Perugia. Many months later, on the way to another war, he had a vision in which a voice commanded him to return home and await instruction. He did.
Praying in the ramshackle chapel at San Damiano, he looked up at the crucifix and heard another command: “Francis, go and repair my church, which is falling in ruins.” Though he later understood that to mean the universal church, Francis thought at first that he was to physically spruce up the chapel. So he spent his energy—and some of his father’s wealth—restoring San Damiano. Later, when Clare joined Francis and started an order of nuns, San Damiano was their convent. Here, Francis wrote The Canticle of Brother Sun (also called the Canticle of the Creatures), the first great piece of literature to appear in the Italian language as it evolved from Latin.
On our visit, the chapel that Francis restored was under repair once again. But we were able to see the refectory where the Poor Clares took their meals, the choir where they chanted their prayers and the dormitory where St. Clare died.
Then we walked back up the hill, passing the large parking lot outside the Porta Nuova. On our way down to San Damiano the lot had been almost empty, but now it was packed. Many tourists, it seems, visit Assisi as a brief day trip—hitting the high spots but missing the chance to wake up to the birds and let the peace of Assisi hug them. We discovered the best bet, for those of us who were staying longer, was to get to the most important places before the crowds rolled in.
At one of those key sites, the Basilica of St. Clare, we visited her tomb and a chapel with the crucifix of San Damiano. The Basilica of St. Francis drew us back several times. We stood meditatively before the saint’s tomb and studied the staggering array of art: a series of 28 magnificent frescoes usually attributed to Giotto and a large Cimabue fresco portraying the Madonna and Child, with St. Francis nearby. His image, based on a description in one of the earliest biographies, is thought to be among the most accurate and is certainly one of the best known. The next morning we took a bus down to the Basilica of Santa Maria Degli Angeli. Inside was the Portiuncola, the crude stone church where Francis and his monks had worshiped—now entirely enclosed within the basilica. A few feet away is the spot where Francis died.
During the week, I occasionally felt frustrated by the crowds and the unexpected night-time street noise, including a disco—a disco in Assisi!—not far from the guest house. We found the trick was to juggle the goals of touring the city and making the experience something like a retreat. Joining in morning prayer with the sisters—and one morning, with the brothers at San Damiano—was a big help. So were the talks that McNamara had given on past Assisi retreats. He had printed out copies for me, and I used them all week, to help me stay grounded in Franciscan spirituality. “When you go to Assisi, the city of Assisi is the retreat house,” he had told me. “People find their places to pray.”
Wanting to see more of the surrounding countryside, one morning I called Anne Robichaud, an American-born educator and guide. I hoped she could give us a brief tour beyond the sites we’d already visited. Like an old friend, she invited us home for lunch. She picked us up and drove us out to her farm in Pian della Pieve. As she prepared pasta with zucchini and tuna with beans, we talked about her life and her favorite subject: Umbria.
While teaching in Italy after her graduation from college in California, she had met a quiet, gentlemanly Sicilian named Pino Alagna, who later became her husband. Pino gave up his job as a chemical analyst to begin working the seven-acre farm that they’d fallen in love with, outside of Assisi. Eventually Alagna built a modern home where they could live while they restore the adjoining older house. Now, with the government encouraging the preservation of farms, he works on other houses to raise money for restoring his own.
For lunch, Alagna returned home from a job site where he’d been working with his sons Keegan, 16, and Mattia, 15. (Their daughter, Giulia, 11, was visiting a friend in Assisi). As we ate, Alagna talked passionately about preserving farms, and his wife translated, adding her own passion.
“We both really love the rural land,” she said. “The real richness of Italy, besides the paintings, is the Italian people, and you can’t know the Italian people without knowing the rural people.”
As we talked, she also gave us some important tourist advice: In addition to the October feast of St. Francis, the best time to visit Assisi is during the festival of Calendimaggio in early May, when the townspeople go medieval and reenact the ancient rivalry between upper and lower Assisi.
On the way back to the village, she drove us to Malvarina, a lovely “agriturismo” or tourist farm, where we spoke with host Claudio Fabrizi and his mother, Maria, who rules the kitchen and creates typical Umbrian meals for the guests. The farm produces olives, fruits and herbs, but its biggest cash crop is now tourist satisfaction. In buildings ranging from motel-like studio apartments to individual cottages in the woods, it has room for about 30. Now, the Fabrizis have added horseback riding as the perfect way to see the region known as the “Green Heart of Italy.”
The next day, Robichaud gave us a mini-tour, including such diverse sites as Broccatelli, a cheese shop in Santa Maria Degli Angeli where we sampled local sheep cheeses; the Hotel Country House in the valley, where you can buy the antique furnishings in your room, and a small castle typical of those where people outside the walled cities once sought protection.
We also drove up Mt. Subasio to the Eremo Delle Carceri. It began as a group of caves outside town where Francis and the brothers would go for greater solitude. Eventually, other Franciscans built a more permanent hermitage into the hillside.
Our brief time with Anne Robichaud had given me a clearer, rooted-in-geography sense of Francis, the man of peace, rejecting the possessions that caused so many nasty wars and instead embracing poverty. It also gave us a much broader view of Umbria than just the art in the churches, which leaves some tourists feeling ACOd, “All Churched Out.”
Later, at an outdoor cafe in the main square, we gained further historical and cultural perspective from Marco Ceccarani, a local professor who comes from one of the oldest families in Assisi. Then we visited the Cathedral of San Rufino. There, on the door of an old-fashioned confessional box, we saw evidence of a more modern piece of history: the nameplate of Don Aldo Brunacci, who helped save many Jewish lives in World War II as part of the Assisi underground and is still hearing confessions today.
The next day, our last in Assisi, we stopped at some churches we hadn’t seen, including the ancient Benedictine Church of San Pietro, whose radical stone simplicity I found more peaceful and monastic than the art-laden showcases we had seen earlier.
On Saturday morning, after four full days in the hometown of Francis and Clare, it was time to pack up and say goodbye to Sisters Alessandra, Rosita, Sue and Marjorie. On the way down to the railroad station, I summoned up my meager Italian skills for a conversation with Marcello Rosati, our limousine driver—about his family and mine, about New York and Assisi.
As he dropped us at the train, his last words echoed what I’d been thinking: that someday I’d be back.
“A la prossima volta,” he said. Until next time