Lost Things, an Update

Steve found the print by Mary Lum. He didn't so much find it as take it down from where I'd hung it on one wall in Catherine's room, which was going to be my office but when that didn't work he moved his office in there, and put it on another wall. Where my hanging pottery vase by Lisa Carlson had been hanging. I walked in and saw it and said, "Hey, where did you find my Mary Lum print?!"


I guess we can say that chaos still reigns, more or less. But also, most things I lose, I do eventually find.

Jan Richardson, artist and writer

I'm adding a blog called The Painted Prayerbook to my blog list. It's written and illustrated by Jan Richardson. This is one of her collages at left, called "All Souls." She lives in Florida and is an ordained Methodist minister, but mostly she's an amazing artist and a wonderful writer. She's a member of a Methodist Benedictine monastery called St. Brigid of Kildare Monastery that has its home here in St. Joseph at the residence of Mary Stamps. Mary also works at Saint John's School of Theology, and is kind enough to always forward me the Savage Chickens cartoons when they're about poetry. Last winter Mary forwarded me a few of Jan's books to see, and I immediately bought two-- one on Lent and one called The Intimate Apocalypse about the book of Revelation. The images are amazing, and the text is rich and well-written. This is a woman who does not need an editor-- every word counts. She also must be living right because I know she has a busy schedule, and keeps herself fed and clothed and traveling as a freelancer, and yet she also lives a life that allows for regular, meaningful meditation on spiritual things, and time and inspiration to make consistently gorgeous and complex art. Last year she had a blog during Advent, and it looks like she will do it again this year. I plan on reading every entry.

I met Jan this past summer. She was in town and we met at Bo Diddley's sandwich shop-- halfway between our two monasteries (which are about 6 blocks apart). I'd been an advocate of a book she'd written that was out of print and that I thought Liturgical Press should publish. But I was no longer in a position to help (I probably never was, actually) and so we were meeting as two artists. Well, it was either a week before my wedding or a week after it. I had started my new job less than a month before. "Overwhelm" does not begin to describe my state of mind. And I was not able to talk at all about plans for my own writing in the future-- I had none.

Jan was quite generous about listening to what was going on in my life. And I was of course very interested to hear about her projects. At the same time, that meeting was a sign to me of how quickly things had turned on their head. I was not in the same place I'd been when we'd exchanged e-mails less than six months before. She also had experienced major life changes in that time. Yet I couldn't help feel that whereas mine had thrown me into chaos and unsettled me, she was calm and steady.

It might be why I am looking forward to reading Jan's blog this Advent. There is a calm, a centeredness, and a thoughtfulness. And the art is always astonishing and beautiful. If for nothing else, visit her web page, http://www.janrichardson.com/ and look around at the collages and charcoal.

Michelle Bachmann 2

The chorus for Barack Obama is loud enough that I don' t feel the need to add my voice. I'm truly happy about it, and it does feel a little different in this country already. But I'm also anxious about whether or not he'll be able to keep this vibe going. The threat of harsh economic times hasn't become a reality yet, and so it feels as abstract as everything else, including "hope" and "change." I'll be so happy to start seeing things get undone-- troops coming home (though will they be deployed again right away to Afghanistan?) and wiretapping stopping, and Guantanamo closing... at the same time, it seems like there could be a lot of bad stuff that will be uncovered about how our country has behaved in the past eight years. I hope I'm wrong, but the rock is soon to be overturned and we're going to see what was under it (dare I say, Cheney?).

I'm also very aware that I live in the "red" part of the country. Not even a red state, but Stearns County, a red county despite its city, St. Cloud. The New York Times election map shows Stearns County voted for McCain, and somehow Michelle Bachmann got re-elected, which is a bitter pill to swallow! The news about the city council and the mayor of this town, also is not good.

After going to the wrong polling place, I found out that I live in the township. So my ballot did not even give me the option of voting for council members or mayor. And these people might decide in the next coming years to put a road right through our house. That was a bit deflating! Especially since the candidate that did win for mayor won by only 50 votes.

So as with all elections, it's a mixed bag. I am truly looking forward to the kind of leadership I think we will see from our president in these next years. I am looking forward to having this very real family in the White House. But I am also glad the speech last night in Grant Park had the sober tone it did. I heard for the first time what I've been waiting for a leader to say-- that hard times are here and we're going to have to be in this together. That not just the president but we ALL have some hard work ahead.

Catholic Schools / Public Schools, part 2

Today I was interviewing one of the Sisters who is celebrating her 60th Jubilee next year, S. Ruth Nierengarten. For about a decade she has been curator of the Haehn museum, but she's retiring now, on the advice of her doctor, at age 83, and plans to return to watercolors and charcoals, as she said, "as long as my eyesight and dexterity in my hands hold out." But most of her working life was spent in education, every grade at all kinds of schools. When she was leaving my office, I asked her if it was true that before Kennedy elementary opened in the 1960s, all the children in St. Joseph went to the Catholic school.

"99.98%!" she declared. "That's what I was told when I came back here." This would have been the 1940s, and she said the figure she heard at the time was that St. Joseph was 99.98% Catholic. In fact, she said, there was a bit of a scandal when one of the local men wanted to marry an Irish woman. This was a German Catholic town. And yes, in the 1930s and 1940s, every child went to the Catholic school.

I've done a little research, in the Sisters' histories, two books on separation of church and state, and in a book called They Came to Teach about Sisters of several Catholic orders who staffed the parochial schools of Minnesota, cowritten by one of our nuns, Sister Ann Marie Biermeier. According to these accounts, in the mid and late 1800s, there was a fierce battle over public and Catholic schools. It was part of the attempt to Americanize German and French immigrants. Parochial schools, it was believed, kept the immigrants from becoming American, from assimilating to their new-- Protestant-- country, and the very Protestant curriculum of the public schools.

The first Benedictines came from Pennsylvania to St. Cloud, Minn. in 1857 expressly to teach German immigrant children. But when they arrived there was a battle underway about how to staff the schools and what kind of schools to have. The decision was made to have public schools and not to hire Sisters as teachers. In their second year they did find employment at a parochial school in St. Cloud, where they taught for five years, but the pay was abysmal and their situation was precarious. Then they were hired at the district (public) school in St. Joseph in 1863, but the history reports that they were used to instructing girls in a convent-like setting and "were ill-prepared to teach the young boys, many of whom were larger and stronger than their teachers." They were not hired back the next year.

The next information I have about St. Joseph is in the sesquicentennial history written for the Catholic Church of St. Joseph in 2006. It talks about the building of the current school in 1926. The first school met in a two-story frame building in town that had been the public school. So there was a public school in St. Joseph, though I'm not clear about who taught in it. But throughout their history, from the Civil War forward, the Benedictine Sisters had come to St. Joseph to teach, and by all accounts they found places to teach. They prepared each other to take the teacher accreditation exams to be able to teach in the public schools, and they also taught in the parochial schools. And as time passed they went to classes and into whatever programs were available to them for furthering their own education and preparedness, and opened their own colleges for teacher training (in St. Joseph, a normal school was run by the Sisters from 1915-1924). A common story I'm hearing from the older Sisters is of spending their summers getting degrees in education or advanced degrees in specific subjects over the course of 12-16 years, while they continued to teach in the local schools.

It does seem that Sisters provided most of the teaching in the area public schools in the latter half of the 19th century and first part of the 20th century. According to the order's history, With Lamps Burning, "While the parochial scohols were multiplying, many predominantly Catholic and Lutheran settlements in the state continued the old custom of employing Catholic sisters or Lutheran teachers as instructors in their district public schools. In the St. Cloud diocese alone there were at one time as many as fifteen district schools employing Benedictine sisters. This system received its first setback in 1904 when the Minnesota attorney general declared that the wearing of the religious garb was prohibited because the teaching of any distinctive doctrine, creed, or tenets of any particular Christian religion in the public schools is forbidden by the state constitution" (179-80). However, Sisters continued to teach in the district schools, avoiding teaching religion classes and removing from their clothes "any specifically religious symbols that might be interpreted as promoting a particular religious belief." But here was the Attorney General's opinion: "I beg to say that a person clothed in the garb of a 'Sister' of the Catholic Church may not legally be employed to teach in the public schools. Such employment is contrary to the spirit and provision of hte Constitution of the state prohibiting the teaching of any religious doctrine or belief in the public schools, and guaranteeing freedom of religious belief" (letter from W. J. Donahower, Attorney General, May 25, 1904).

This was not, however, the first setback. The ambivalence and controversy over public and Catholic schools extended to Archbishop John Ireland, the first archbishop of St. Paul. In the 1890s he sold two struggling Catholic schools in Minnesota to public school districts (for $1 each), with the condition attached that religion no longer be taught in the schools, but also the provision that the nuns be retained as teachers and paid their same salaries. This policy caused an uproar among Catholic parents who had paid to build and staff the schools so far and now weren't getting the religious education they'd hoped for their children, but was upheld and approved of by the Vatican. It was covered by The New York Times, which retains the articles in its online archives.

At the same time, the attorney general's position is like the head scarf argument. Because a woman teacher wears a head scarf to class, that doesn't mean she's promoting Islam or proseltyzing the students to become Muslim.

And of course the Catholic schools couldn't be stopped either. If a church opened one, the parents sent their children to them in droves. By S. Ruth's account, there were more than 60 Sisters living in the convent attached to the Catholic high school in St. Cloud when she taught there in the 1940s and 1950s. In addition to the work, she remembered having great fun, with "Protestant and Catholic parties" serving soft drinks to the Protestants and beer for the Catholics, and also a production of Amal the Night Visitor, and games, such as one that had the Sisters stand at a board with only their noses peeking out, and the contestants had to identify them on that basis. "That's very hard, you know."

(I have to admit it sounds like the Halloween party the Sisters had on Friday night, which featured a variety of costume contest categories, including "Most pre-Vatican II, most post-Vatican II, most eco-friendly, and "The Rule." S. Dolores reportedly came as a gyrovague, a group warned against in the Rule of Benedict as hedonistic and who wandered from monastery to monastery without commitment [i.e., freeloaders]. At contest's end, she announced, "OK, I'm OUTTA HERE," to everyone's delight.)

Last Sunday we went to the monthly church breakfast prepared by the Knights of Columbus. It was my first time inside the St. Joseph lab school. The breakfast was $7.00, just like at the Chamber of Commerce lunch at Kennedy school. But for that price we got four kinds of sausage, eggs, toast, waffles with several toppings, and orange juice and coffee. The man who sold us our tickets was named Cletus Walz. I know another Cletus, Father Cletus, though he didn't choose that name, it was assigned to him when he entered St. John's Abbey almost sixty years ago. The floors were a gorgeous poured concrete, dark mottled gray with red splotches like dried blood here and there and with an inch of shine on top. There were some amazing pre-Vatican statues that were salvaged from the church when it was renovated, and also at the back an impressive case on the wall with the names of current and past members of the Knights of Columbus. Little children from the few big families left were circulating, serving juice and clearing plates. And in the back Paul, who is almost finished with that log cabin, and who is the head of the local chapter of the Knights, was making waffles.

Kennedy School

This year a new elementary school opened in St. Joseph. It is the one thing that breaks our otherwise unobstructed prairie views. The lights at night are like a little shopping center in the distance. It bothers Steve more than it has me. I figure development out there is inevitable. If anything, the school has a lot of land (75 acres) and so the development might be limited. I don't mind people building schools so much.

We rode out to see it on our bikes in September. There's a nice bike path, making a long loop past the few remaining farms south of downtown. Steve's chief complaint is that it more or less is a death knell for the Catholic school, the St. Joseph Church Lab School (K-6) (Steve did the illustration on their home page). The truth is, the lab school isn't exactly thriving. Old Kennedy Elementary, which was across the street from the Catholic School, monastery and college, had overflowed into several temporary buildings to handle overcrowding. The town itself is growing, and fewer parents are sending their children to Catholic school.

I was at the new school again last week for the St. Joseph Chamber of Commerce meeting. I went to represent the Sisters, meet the people who run the local newspaper, and I thought maybe meet some other businesspeople as well. The other people at Chamber, however, weren't that friendly. I asked people their names and where they worked, and they stuck to the basics, and didn't inquire of me in return. It also cost me $7.00 for a school lunch that consisted of "beef dippers," a dixie cup of shredded lettuce, a scoop of au gratin potatoes, and a slice of pumpkin bread.

Still, when we took our places at the shiny library table with our brand new navy blue trays in the sunny library, two men started talking to each other. One, the insurance guy, asked the other, a construction guy, if there had been an elementary school in St. Joseph before the old Kennedy was built in the 1960s.

"Nope," he answered.

"Just the Catholic school?"

"Just the lab school. All the kids in town went there."

"Huh?" I said. "Where did the public school kids go?"

"There weren't any public school kids."

"Do you mean they were bussed to St. Cloud or another school?"

"No, they were all Catholic. There weren't any busses. All the children who lived in St. Joseph went to the Catholic school."

"So did the federal government subsidize the Catholic school then?"

"No. Everyone was Catholic."

"That's not possible," I said. "I mean, the federal government had to provide some option for public school."

"No, there were no public school children in St. Joseph."

"That's not really possible," I said. I mean, that school wasn't built in the 1920s, when it might have been the case, but the 1960s.

"I lived here then. It is."

"So if you weren't Catholic, you should live somewhere else, huh?"

"People just knew it. It wasn't an issue."

I thought about following up with a statement about the federal government deciding not to educate the children of St. Joseph, MN, but decided not to bother. It did strike me as odd that I was there representing the largest provider of Catholic school teachers in this area for the last 150 years.

Anyway, at that point it was time for the principal to show us all the fancy new technology in the room. She talked about what a good deal they'd gotten on everything, since prices went down after the bonds passed. Since it was a matter of "use the money or lose it," they were able to get all sorts of smart technology for the classrooms. And implement all kinds of additional "green" initiatives in the school. In fact, you can read about it on their website, or watch the clip she showed us that appeared this fall on CNN Money. I think the frugal, unassuming, mostly German Catholic Minnesotans in the room were a little taken aback. It's all nice, they agreed, but a little embarrassing. It was also hard to take the talk she gave using the PowerPoint projector on why we need to vote on a levy for more money for schools. I got it, and it also began to answer my othe question. The school district is huge, and includes St. Cloud (so yes, students in St. Joseph could attend St. Cloud schools). We would be voting to improve education mostly for St. Cloud students-- which I'm all for. (In the principal's PowerPoint, the argument she made was that if the levy didn't pass, the district's boundaries would be redrawn and students from other areas would be bussed into our shiny new school. She said this would make class sizes larger, but I didn't see any classes that day that weren't swimming in the new spaces.)

Next we got up and embarked on a tour of the school, which included a lot of information about the excellent architecture and design, another demo in a science classroom of the microscope/Elmo and deluxe sound system with wireless microphone in front of about a dozen quiet seventh graders. There was also a Hazmat emergency shower in the back of the room-- which looked way more tempting for mischief than any fire extinguisher.

But back to that public/Catholic school question. Because St. Joseph has no middle or high school to this day, Catholic or otherwise. The students have several options, including large Catholic schools in St. Cloud and three different high schools in the district, one suburban (St. Cloud) and two rural (Albany or Holdingford).

However, there was indeed a time when this town had a public (district) school, and all the teachers were nuns. So anyone would think it was a Catholic school, but it was a public school. Steve has an elaborate spiel on it, that he got from research for an article he wrote in a parish booklet a few years ago. I'm tracking down the sources, but meanwhile wanted to post this near my piece about Jon Hassler. I'll return to it, though, when I have a better picture of the situation.

It is true, to this day, that public school students are "released" during the school day to attend religious instruction at the Catholic schools in the area. I first heard about this from a coworker at the press who lives in a very small town called Eden Valley (pop. 954). She talked about teaching religious education and how the public school children who are Catholic walk down to the Catholic church during the school day for religion classes. This arrangement also still exists in the town I used to live in, Cold Spring (pop. 3000), where the Catholic elementary school children take a bus to the Catholic school for religious instruction during the school year. The middle school children can walk over, because their building is next door to the church, the former Catholic high school.

Phillies Win!

I was happy to see the Phillies win in front of that tough crowd last night. (I mean, when Tampa Bay hit that homerun to tie it up in the 7th, the silence was eerie. I didn't see the homerun ball get thrown back on the field, but I presume it was rejected by the fans. But seriously, not a single Tampa Bay fan in that stadium? More likely-- smart enough not to cheer.)

It made me think of my grandmother, who was a huge Phillies fan, and tough as nails. I can still hear her yelling at Mike Schmidt to get his act together in her living room on August afternoons. I don't have any poems about the Phillies, but I did write one in 2005 after the White Sox won the World Series and my father was out East in New Jersey burying his mother. So here it is...


I Imagine My Father after the Funeral:
a poem in 14 innings


My father buried his mother’s ashes
and that night stayed up late to watch
the White Sox battle fourteen innings
until after 2 a.m. to get a runner home.

It was the World Series, Game 3,
and he’d waited as long as anyone,
but now it seemed, like so much else,
he couldn’t remember why he’d wanted it.

Seventeen pitchers and runners left stranded
on both sides, the bases so far apart
and no spaces at all in that infield
even if you could make contact.

He was glad it was not the Phillies
his mother used to curse on the screen,
no praise at all when they won,
another beer, the power off.

Baseball will break your heart, the long haul.
He watched the wide face and white hair
of the former First Lady in the stands
beside her son, rooting for Houston.

Everyone at the funeral was proud of him
for having done what was right
when she had never done a single thing
but wrong by him, but still he was her son.

What dogged loyalty even she inspired,
when there was no money to be willed,
not even a Cadillac or the cubic zirconium
she won for S&H from Publisher’s Clearing House.

From the bench and bullpen are called
relievers and pinch-hitters one by one,
looking wild-eyed and young and stupid,
on the edge of moments great and small.

The ball flies so fast and strikes the mitt
so hard—how can anyone make contact?
How can anyone hope to send it straight
or curved or fast or any way and hit the mark?

It was the last duty, and though his name
had been the one she had remembered
longest, his face had made her smile at the end,
was that love, or even what he’d wanted?

When the unlikeliest of pinch hitters approached,
the replay showed the great surprise of that contact.
What part is luck when you’ve prepared
your whole life—is this what is meant by grace?

The funeral dinner was pre-paid and pre-planned,
so they ate well and his half-sister said what a waste
but still she signed every paper
willingly that didn’t cost her anything to sign.

It was my mostly quiet father who had yelled
until I learned the one cardinal rule of baseball:
never take a third strike. With two strikes,
good pitch or bad, go out and meet it, or miss, but swing.

Actually my father went to bed after the tenth,
no one to watch the game with him.
The game, he said, it started so late, and lasted
so long, it felt like it might never end.

Jon Hassler, Last Catholic Novelist?

Jon Hassler was a novelist who lived and worked in this area for his whole career, and whose novels are more or less set in this area (fictionalized) and the other places he lived-- Brainerd and Bemidji. He died in March of this year after a long illness. I never met him, but my father-in-law was his classmate at St. John's University (MN), and he taught for a long time at the college. One of the things I've been doing these past two years as I've contemplated what it means to be a writer in Central Minnesota, to cast my lot with this place and this people, has been reading his major novels, considering what they have to say about this place, about Catholicism, and about the Catholic imagination and Catholic writers.

A wonderful appreciation considering this question by Andrew Greeley appears in the current issue of America. In it is the following paragraph:

"It may occur to the reader how many of the authors I have mentioned are products of the (German) Catholicism of Minnesota centered in St. John’s Abbey (which includes such Celts as Coleman Barry and Eugene McCarthy). The Jesuit sociologist Joseph Fichter once remarked that the centers of creativity in American Catholicism seemed to be concentrated in a triangle that reached from St. John’s to Chicago to Notre Dame. St. John’s pervasive and unique influence on the church in this country, in particular, demands more intense study. The environs and culture of Staggerford, Rookery College, the Abbey Press, Bad Battle River, Pluto, Ostrogothinburg (St. Cloud?) the Clementine Fathers, Godfrey Diekmann and Lake Wobegon seem to demand more coordinated and more intense investigation. Perhaps they are also a challenge to Minnesota Catholicism to understand itself while there is still time. I have suggested on occasion to the monks of St. John’s that they are far more important and indeed far better than they think they are."

Many of the names referenced will mean nothing to people outside this culture and place, but like my crash course in S. Thomas Carey, I've had crash courses in Godfrey Diekmann (by his biographer, Kathleen Hughes, RSJ, who was a scholar at the Collegeville Institute with me) and many of the other topics. I live more or less in Staggerford, work at Rookery College, and for the past two years worked at the Abbey Press. This is the heart of Garrison Keillor country, and Keillor often references nearby high schools like Avon and Albany in his monologues. My favorite restaurant is Fisher's Club, an old set-up club of which he is part-owner. You can get very good Beebop a Reebop Rhubarb Pie there, and Powdermilk Biscuits with ice cream. Not to mention the best ribs and walleye in the county.

Eugene McCarthy was a novice at St. John's Abbey for 9 months, and graduated from the prep school and the University. His legacy here is large. I heard Mondale eulogize him at St. John's abbey at a memorial service after his death last year. He was remembered at that service not just as a statesman but as a poet. I believe it was his son who read several of his poems.

In this place, it is sometimes difficult to think about what is yet to be. Especially in the context of the monastery. Three Sisters died this past week, including S. Glenore Riedner who was 106 years old. We are expecting two more deaths by Christmas. Also, Brother Dietrich Reinhardt, until recently the president of Saint John's University, was in the past few weeks diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma-- in his lungs but also in his brain. On Sunday I went to Mass at the Abbey, after a discussion about being an oblate the night before with friends. I found myself in tears, seeing Brother Dietrich up in the choir stalls, gray and fading, but also for the other amazing people I know, Brothers and Sisters, and who I will face losing in the coming years. I don't have much experience with old people-- all my grandparents lived far away. To have bonded with this many people over 70 this quickly and significantly-- adds a certain complexity.

It is hard to think about what is yet to be, but it is also hard even to think about what IS NOW. I know that there are artists in the area, and I know that I myself am reaching toward something. I know that this place feeds artists and writers, still. I am a writer who for the past few years has been transitioning to a place that is much larger than myself. In some ways it is larger than the other places I've lived-- including Chicago, Southern California, New York. In those places, one could get caught up with a "scene," or strive to belong to a group that was "making it" in the arts. There was a lot in the way of social interaction and development based on shared ideas. It was certainly easier to build a community of artist and intellectual friends. But this place shapes people. This place rushes up to meet you, and then takes a very long time to absorb and get to know. There is something more going on here. I'm afraid sometimes that I've come too late to live deeply into it, to find the stories I want to tell in my writing and become the person who can tell them.

I can't tell you the number of astonishing things that happen to me around here. One I have yet to write about is an encounter I had last week at the St. Joseph Chamber of Commerce luncheon at the new school. That is what I had planned for my next essay, but then this essay in America appeared. Jon Hassler.

My own impression of Hassler's novels is that they are really enjoyable, very readable, but ultimately they don't rise to the level of greatness. They're episodic, character-driven, solid regional literature. They don't have the depth or brilliance of a Flannery O'Connor or James Joyce, or even the significance of Graham Greene's work. It surprises me that people who are not Catholics, or not Minnesotans, would take much interest in them. I admire greatly his ability to find and develop characters like Agatha McGee and Father Frank Healey. There are things about the books that have stayed with me. I think I most admire that he was able to write novels rooted in place and his Catholic identity, assemble a body of work that is consistent. I think it was that he was able to accomplish his life-- get published, have confidence in these characters and his own writing, keep doing it-- that I'm interested in most. The fact that Loyola University Press has brought out two of his large novels in their Loyola Classics series, claiming they rise to the level of "masterpieces of Catholic fiction from some of the greatest authors of the twentieth century" strikes me as hyperbolic, especially in the case of Hassler (yes, I know it's marketing text, but still). I'm even surprised that Greeley would put him in the company he does or make such great claims for him.

I spent a large part of my year at the Collegeville Institute trying to get people to explain the "Catholic imagination" to me. Reading Catholic authors, poets, essays, criticism, the famous work by David Tracey that Greeley mentions on "the analogical imagination." Catholicism, he claims, is special because it is embodied, and it is image-based. It shapes the imagination by action of ritual, by association with all the religious imagery. Well yes, ok.

Hassler is dead. And McCarthy. And B. Godfrey Diekmann. S. Thomas Carey. And Sister Mariella Gable, a poet I never heard about until Greeley's article but now have to go find. And in a way an entire way of life is coming to an end before my eyes. I have a strong symbol of it in the new public elementary school behind our house. (About which, more later.) The challenge, though, is to be part of what is now, even if it is an autumn of sorts. And to be a part of what is to come. Because there are still a lot of us artists left out here. Some of us Catholics. I'm paying attention.

You can read the whole article about Jon Hassler by Andrew Greeley in America online here.