Cover
story For
many, environmental action is returning to roots
By ARTHUR JONES
NCR Staff
Age is no barrier to caring for the
earth or for nurturing the awareness that spirituality is somehow bound up with
the environment. And for many U.S. women religious, such instincts might have a
direct line to their orders earliest days in this country.
In 1998, from La Crosse, Wis., Sr. Helen M. Gohres wrote to
Sisters of Earth saying, I am an 80-year-old Franciscan Sister trying to
improve my awareness of earths sacredness and learn how to take good care
of our marvelous planet. Later that year, with Mary Walter Heires, also a
Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration, Gohres attended the Sisters of Earth
gathering in Sinsinawa, Wis.
Since then she has been trying to raise money to bring Joyce
Johnson Rouse, a young singer, composer and activist to Catholic schools in her
area. Gohres, a former music teacher, heard Rouse in Sinsinawa.
Joyce is a member of Musicians United to Save the
Environment, and her mission is to heal the planet one song at a time,
said Gohres. Her melodies are good and catchy, her lyrics delightful, and
yet they teach a lot about earth.
Heires told Sisters of Earth, I am a retired volunteer
sister at our home for nonindependent living sisters. I feel devoted to the
earth and nature, and enjoy alerting the sisters I take out in wheelchairs to
the beauty of our lawns and the changes that take place daily. The
present-day nursing home was a functioning congregation farm when Heires and
Gores were postulants.
In the 19th century and the first half of this century, many U.S.
religious orders had farms to feed themselves even before they established
schools, hospitals and orphanages. The sisters had to produce on the
farms, said Washington, D.C.-based Sr. Kathy Erard, an Adrian Dominican.
They were not paid salaries.
Times changed, but the sensibilities have returned full force.
Erard who works for the North American Coalition on Religion and Ecology
on the presidents Million Solar Roofs Program said
that at their Michigan motherhouse, the Adrian Dominicans are marking the
jubilee by letting their land lie fallow for three years. Allowing the land to
lie fallow is, with crop rotation, a traditional method for rejuvenating
farmland.
Rethinking the use of land surrounding motherhouses is an
important starting point for many sisters today.
For seven years, Mary Gayle Brabec of the Sisters of Charity of
the Blessed Virgin was rural life director for the Louisville, Ky.,
archdiocese. She left that position to discern ways for more conscious land use
around the orders Mount Carmel motherhouse in Dubuque, Iowa.
In Smithtown, N.Y., Sister of St. Joseph Mary Lou Buser has
started an organic garden on the motherhouse grounds as a model for teaching
neighbors.
In Oldenburg, Ind., Michaela Farm, an environmental education
center, combines spiritual renewal and organic food production on land the
Franciscan sisters acquired in 1854. At its peak it supported 500 sisters,
supplying meat, produce, milk and fruit.
In 1991 the sisters decided on a revitalization program, and today
Franciscan Sr. Anita Brelage wants to include people other than members of
religious communities in developing sustainable development human
communities.
In addition to local programs, the farm runs free six- and
nine-month internships where students swap work on the farm for the skills and
scholarship to handle organic farming, the land and its needs.
Sisters by the scores, after a lifetime in schools, hospitals,
mission and social service work, are finding unique ways to live out their new
religious ties to earth, nature, creation.
Sinsinawa is where Sisters of Earth member Miriam Brown, a
Dominican, directs the ecumenical Churches Center for Land and People.
Its programs support earth care and rural ministry, and the center is a voice
for rural concerns in churches and society.
In Busby, Mont., Franciscan Sr. Marya Grathwohl facilitates
earth-through-storytelling retreats. In their photocopied directory, she told
other Sisters of Earth, Im learning to live committed to earth and
all beings, and hope to enhance that commitment.
In Louisville, Ky., Sister of Charity of Nazareth Phyllis Hannon
directs environment seminars at Spaulding University. In the same city Ursuline
Sr. Mary Jo Grammig works on her congregations environmental
subcommittee, which sponsors workshops and circulates a newsletter.
Theres word of activities outside the United States, too.
Sisters of Earth includes Mercy Sr. Kathleen Gibbons who runs an ecology and
environment center in Portumna, County Galway, and Sister of Charity Ellen
Donovan, a registered massage therapist and Reiki master, who is a founding
member of the Nova Scotia Coalition for Ecology, Ethics and Religion.
Sisters of Earth has a handful of non-professed members.
One is Eleanor Rae of Ridgefield, Conn., founder of the Center for
Women, the Earth, the Divine, which offers retreats. Rae said that there is
an understanding today that the environmental crisis is very, very real.
And people generally are looking to traditions in their Christianity to deal
with it.
Author of Women, the Earth, the Divine (Orbis) and coauthor
of Created in Her Image, Models of the Feminine Divine, Rae says,
It struck me [at the Sisters of Earth 1998 Sinsinawa meeting] that so
many sisters were working within their own communities on earth-centered
spirituality working there to be the yeast. The Sisters of Earth
concept, explained Sr. Mary Lou Dolan, founder of the Earth Literacy program at
St. Mary of the Woods College in Indiana, has its origins in the early 1990s
work of Sister of St. Joseph Mary Southard, an artist, and Jesuit Fr. John
Surette at Spiritearth.
Dolan, a former cellular biologist who joined the Boston twosome
in their work in Millis, Mass., explained that Spiritearth focused on a
contemplative stance toward earth spirituality as opposed to an action stance,
trying to see the spiritual dimension present in the earth.
She said that in 1994, Southard and Sister of St. Joseph Evelyn
Sommers, who describes herself as trying to become an earth
contemplative, decided: Why not call a meeting to see how many
people are out there doing this kind of work? Dolan typed up the first
flyer; the initial gathering, at St. Gabriels Monastery, Clarks
Summit, Pa. was held. The Sisters of Earth were organized, and six years later
plans are underway for a late summer West Coast meeting in 2000 their
first in that part of the country.
National Catholic Reporter, July 30,
1999
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