Peace author offers free lecture at Motherhouse

The public is invited to a free lecture by Dr. Terrence Rynne on Sunday, July 18, at the Nazareth Motherhouse Auditorium.

The program begins at 2 p.m.

Dr. Rynne will present a reflection based on his latest book “Gandhi & Jesus: The Saving Power of Nonviolence.”

Dr. Rynne is the founder of the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking.

He has served as a parish priest in the Archdiocese of Chicago, on the faculty of the Mundelein Seminary in Illinois and later as a hospital administrator. He retired as founder and president of Rynne Marketing Group, a nationally recognized consulting firm that has served more that 600 leading hospitals and health care organizations, to earn a Ph.D. in theology and pursue his passion for peace.

The Nazareth Motherhouse is the home of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Concordia. Entrance to the auditorium is through the main doors on the west side of the building.

The program is part of the Concordia Year of Peace, and is the latest in a number of activities dedicated to peace and nonviolence.

For information on upcoming Concordia Year of Peace events, go to www.csjkansas.org and click on the “Year of Peace” tab or call Sister Jean Rosemarynoski at 785/243-2149.

Learning while you play

ABOVE: Patricia Gerhardt of the Concordia Year of Peace Committee leads a learning game with a dozen children at Concordia’s Second Street Park before lunch on Monday. The children used plastic foam cups to build “trust towers,” so when Pat read a sentence that would build trust, the children added a cup and when she read a sentence that would harm trust, they took a cup off. This is the third session at the park where Pat and other members of the Year of Peace Committee have provided children’s activities.

LEFT: Not everyone had the same idea about the best way to play with the cups. Sister Julie Christensen, a Sister of St. Joseph and one of several Year of Peace Committee members helping out Monday, was surprised when one of the children decided the cups made a better hat than tower.

July 9, 2010: Jumping into the hands of an angel, by Chato Rael

“I cannot believe what is going to happen,” I think on the ride to the tarmac.

“Are you serious, Chato Rael?” I ask myself.

But it is going to happen, and I am serious: Today I’m going skydiving for the first time. My colleagues, friends and buddies building wind turbines had talked me into this, but ultimately I made this decision myself. So here I am, Jell-O on the way to jump out of a plane.

We finally reached our destination, and I thought of being closer to my dad, who is in heaven. He’s up there. I remembered something he said when I wrecked my pretty good pick up truck: “It’s the nut in the rut, that’s why I wrecked.”

Damn, they ask me to sign a release, and I feel a combination of excitement, pain and panic that indescribable.

“A release?” I ask my friend,             and he says, “If it is your time to go, it’s your time to go.”

“OK then,” I tell myself, “This could be it for one second or a lifetime.”

The instructor reminds me, “Arch your back and bend your knees, this will help you stabilize.  Chew some bubble gum so your ears do not pop.  Watch the altimeter, and when we hit 5,000 feet we can deploy the slow-down.”

“What’s the slow-down?” I ask.

The instructor laughs — it seems to me a demonic laugh — and says, “You don’t want to fall forever, do you?”

The plane takes off like any other plane takes off, as though there was nothing out of the ordinary about this flight. After we’re airborne, my friends stand in the big wide door like little minnows in a fish’s mouth at feeding time, yelling with excitement and anticipation.

We circle and circle and I feel like I am being tickled.  I see the earth nice, warm, and round. This moment in time not everyone can see.  Looking out of the windows of the plane, I now know what a bird can see and all I want to do is flee!

Flee.  Is that not funny? The door opens on the plane and all of a sudden all I want to do is flee.  My heart is a drum in my chest as the instructor tells me to stand and step out.

“Step what?” I ask.

“I think put your foot on the step under the wing and let go of the door!” echoes another jumper.

My mind and body tell me this is not right. Letting go is no easy task for a human body 10,000 feet off the ground.

The only thing I can really remember is to arch my back, bend my knees and watch the altimeter.  We are going to jump on one, two, three.

I’m like a dog hanging out of a car window as the wind blasts my face.  The noise of the plane and wind is loud.

“Daddy, are you here?”

Then all I hear is,

“One.”

“Two.”

And that’s it.  No return.

We are falling, fast, too fast for my kind of blood.  Five thousand feet gone, and there is no account of the time to get here. Then, poof, the chute opens like the hands of an angel.

I know the angel is Frank Rael Jr., my dad. And I know I am safe. I am at peace.

— Chato Rael is a student at Cloud County Community College.

Eulogy for Sister Mare Coleman, Jan. 14, 1921-July 3, 2010

VIGIL: July 5, 2010, at the Nazareth Motherhouse, Concordia

EULOGIST: Sister Bette Moslander

We come together tonight to honor the memory of Sister Marie Coleman, and to celebrate her birth into new and eternal life.  Marie died a little after 6 a.m. on July 3, 2010, here in Cloud County Health Center.

Marie was born, Jan. 14, 1921, in St. Marys, Kan., the daughter of Natalie Dagenais and Oscar Joseph Coleman, the seventh of eight children in the family. There were two other girls, Mary and Ruth, and five brothers, Leo, Claude, Eugene, Ernest and William. Her mother Natalie died two weeks after the birth of William, in the summer of 1922, leaving eight young children to the care of their father.

Oscar moved the family of eight to Abilene, Kan., where he was able to place all of the children in St. Joseph Home, an orphanage, owned and staffed by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Concordia. Living in nearby Abilene, he faithfully and frequently visited the children.  Marie would tell poignant and beautiful stories of her father’s visits and how he brought the children small treats when he visited.

One of the sisters, Sister Anastasia, was in charge of the 40 girls who lived at the orphanage. “I was only a year an a half old when my mother died,” said Marie, “So Sister Anastasia became my ‘mother’ for the first four years of my life. By the time I was 6 she was reassigned and for me it was a terrible loss. I felt abandoned for a second time, by my second mother. I am sure that loss marked my young life in ways I have only gradually, through life, come to fully understand. I began my education in the orphanage grade school and came to love Sister Sylvester, my first-grade teacher, who taught me to love reading and opened my young mind to a love for Bible stories. She also taught us to observe nature and to watch for the birds around the orphanage ground. I remember that she spanked me lightly once for talking too much. Those who know me will attest to the fact that it really didn’t work.”

Throughout her life Marie would often recall incidents of her life in the orphanage and told stories of the sisters she knew as a child and loved because of their kindnesses and tender care. Recently Marie, with the help of Sarah Jenkins, published a small book “The Sisters Who Loved Me,” recounting her days while she was at St. Joseph’s Home and her relationship with the sisters who befriended and educated her.

Speaking of her first attraction to religious life, she recalled Sisters Dechantal and Eulalia, who begged from nearby merchants for food and clothing for the 40 girls and 40 boys at the orphanage. She wrote, “I just knew that I wanted to be like them when I would grow up.”

During the summer months, when classes were out, the Coleman children often spent time with their grandmother, Frances Coleman in St. Marys. There they met the Jesuits from St. Mary College, some of whom became lifelong friends of the family. When Marie was 13 years old it was time to leave the orphanage. She moved to St. Marys and lived with her grandmother so that she could take her eighth-grade classes in the Catholic school, where she was taught by the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth.

The sisters had arranged for Marie to attend Marymount Academy in Salina for one year after she graduated from the eighth grade. She then transferred to the Abilene Public High School and she lived with her father and her sister, Ruth. She enjoyed the life of an ordinary high school girl, going to football games, acting in school stage productions, learning to sing and dance.

She graduated from Abilene High School in 1939 at the age of 18, and almost immediately wrote her letter to Mother Mary Rose Waller asking to enter the congregation, which she did on Sept. 15, 1939. She was received into the novitiate on March 19, 1940, and received the name Sister Mary Natalie, in honor of her mother. She made first vows one year later, on March 19, 1941 and final vows on Aug. 15, 1944. Marie celebrated her 70^th anniversary this year. There are two remaining members of her band, Liebe Pellerin and Viatora Solbach.

Marie was assigned almost immediately after making first vows, to the small parish school in Collyer, Kan., where she taught primary grades. As was true of most sisters, at that time, she acquired her education piecemeal during summer sessions at Marymount, returning each September to the elementary school classroom.  This was her life from 1944 to 1969. During those years she taught in several parish schools in the Salina Diocese, and for a short time in Silver City, N.M., and in Aurora, Ill. In July 1944, her beloved father died, bringing to a close his faithful dedication to his family whom he had raised so well without his wife, their mother. “It was the saddest day of my life,” Marie said.

Marie began teaching in secondary and junior high schools in 1969, having completed her A.B. degree at Marymount in 1955. She acquired a Master’s Degree from Kansas University where she specialized in Secondary Learning Disabilities and was certified as a Reading Specialist. 1971 found Marie in Kansas City teaching learning- disabled junior and senior high School students in the Missouri Public School System.

In 1981, Marie began a sabbatical of nine months, at Mount St. Joseph’s College, in Cincinnati where she re-trained as a Prison/Jail Chaplain and Counselor. Upon completion of her sabbatical she moved to Washington, D.C. where she continued her education in Prison Chaplaincy in an Archdiocesan program at Trinity College. During this period she did field work with the Washington, D.C., police certifying as a Prison Chaplain in 1984.  During this same period Marie was participating in a two-year Spiritual Formation Program under Gerald May and Tilden Edwards, co-founders of Shalem Programs. She deepened her own desire for God and developed a deep foundation for contemplative prayer actively lived out on the streets of Washington caring for “her prisoners.”

She was hired full time by the Bureau of Rehabilitation of the District of Columbia as Counselor, Court Advocate and Custody of Jail and Prison Releasees. This work was done through the Superior and Federal Court System. Marie joined the professional organizations for jail and prison ministers and continued to visit the jails and prisons regardless of where she lived. In the course of her active years working with the prisoners and the releasees, in 1987 she took a one-year course in clowning and became a Certified Clown, taking the name “Delight.”

In 1993 Marie qualified for and received a Social Worker Associate Degree. Marie’s insatiable appetite for more and more learning experiences took her into many fields.  In addition to her commitment to prison populations, Marie had an intense interest in any major social justice issue that was current at the time. She wrote and called numerous offices of governors, legislators, politicians and clergy voicing her opposition to or support of given courses of action they were embarked on. She stayed the course of resistance to injustice wherever she might find it. And one thing I remember about Marie’s commitment to peace and justice is that she was always well informed about the position she would take.

Her health began to decline in the early 1990s following three abdominal surgeries for peritonitis and diverticulitis. After a heart attack and open heart surgery in 1999 and breast cancer in 2002, she would return to the fray undaunted, taking up her work either as a paid minister or a volunteer. Not one to give up, she moved first to Grand Island where she continued to regain her strength. In 1996, finding she needed an elevator. she moved to Medaille Center in Salina. There she took on volunteer work as chaplain at Saline County Jail and as a jail visitor and legislative aide at Catholic Charities. She also regularly volunteered at the Diocesan Office to review and respond to issues relating to federal legislation of significance to the Catholic social justice agenda.

The steadily declining state of her health forced her, reluctantly, to reduce her hours of work but she refused to give up her ministry. Her love and respect for the women and men in the jail was genuine but not ingenuous. She knew well that most of them found themselves where they were through their own failure and crime and many would return to the prison system once they were released or paroled. When the Medaille Convent in Salina closed Marie insisted on remaining in Salina where she could continue at some level her lifelong mission of active and inclusive love for the neglected and marginated. Meanwhile her own health was steadily deteriorating.

Life itself has a way of leading us to the self-emptying that our Maxims call for and to which we find ourselves so strongly resistant. In 2007 Marie voluntarily moved to the Motherhouse where she immediately began exploring Concordia for needs she might be able to attend to, but mostly she was gradually letting go of her own need to be actively engaged in ministry.  Most recently after breaking her arm in a bad fall she moved to Mount Joseph Senior Village in order to receive daily physical therapy. She was making some progress and was determined to return to the Motherhouse and to attend an up-coming reunion of orphans and their families in Chapman, come October.  It was not to be!  Another fall resulted in a severe fracture in her other arm and a bleed in the brain that resulted in her death.

So we come to pay our respects and to share our memories of this valiant woman. A Maxim that reminds me of Marie is Number 7: “In the manifestation of zeal characteristic of your very humble vocation, imitate the fervor of the most zealous and embrace in desire the salvation and perfection of the whole world in a spirit replete with a true humility and a generous courage. This will bring you to wish to do everything for the advancement of the glory of God and the salvation of the dear neighbor.”

And so Marie, we gather here to remember your life, to bless you on your way to that kingdom where justice reigns and where we know you will be at peace forever.

Teacher, author Sister Marie Coleman dies at age 89

Sister Marie Coleman died July 3 at Cloud County Health Center in Concordia.  She was 89 years old and a Sister of St. Joseph for 70 years.  She was born in St Marys, Kan., on Jan. 14, 1921, to Oscar Joseph and Natalie Elizabeth Dagenais Coleman, the seventh of eight children, and was baptized Marie Frances.  She entered the Sisters of St. Joseph of  Concordia on Sept. 15, 1939.  On March 19, 1940, Marie Frances received the habit of the Sisters of St. Joseph and was given the name Sister Mary Natalie.  Later she returned to her baptismal name, Marie.  She pronounced first vows on March 19, 1941, and final vows on Aug. 15, 1944.

In 1955, Sister Marie received a bachelor’s degree in education from Marymount College, Salina, and in 1971 received a master’s degree in education from the University of Kansas.  Sister Marie taught elementary grades in the Kansas cities of Salina, Collyer, Tipton, Pfeifer, Oakley and Cawker City; Silver City, N.M.; and Aurora, Ill.  She finished 30 years of teaching elementary and began teaching learning disabled students at the secondary and junior high level in 1971 in the Kansas City, Missouri Public School System.  Upon finishing her teaching career in 1981, she trained to be a prison/jail chaplain and counselor.  She practiced her prison ministry in Washington, D.C., Mt. Rainier, Md., Grand Island, Neb., and Salina.  In 2007 Sister Marie retired to the Motherhouse.  She remained active in her retirement by writing a book “The Sisters Who Loved Me” telling of her memories as an “orphan” in the care of the Sisters of St. Joseph at the St. Joseph Home in Abilene. Her book was published in May 2010.

Sister Marie was preceded in death by her parents, five brothers and two sisters.  A Bible Vigil Service will be held Monday, July 5,  at 7 p.m. in the Sacred Heart Chapel at the Nazareth Motherhouse with Sister Bette Moslander as the eulogist.  The Mass of Christian Burial will be Tuesday, July 6, at 10:30 a.m. in the Sacred Heart Chapel with the Rev. Jim Dalen presiding.  The burial will be in the Nazareth Motherhouse Cemetery.  Chaput-Buoy Mortuary, 325 W. 6^th St., Concordia, Kan., is in charge of arrangements.

Memorials for Sister Marie Coleman may be given to the Sisters of St. Joseph Health Care/Retirement Fund or the Apostolic Works of the Sisters; P.O Box 279, Concordia KS  66901.

July 2, 2010: One man’s reflection on the nature of love, by Patrick Sieben

Love is just about most remarkable idea in all of nature. It is an expression of affection, commitment, reminiscence, ambition and a host of other concepts all felt within a person and often but not always shared. I would like to share some of my observations through the eyes of a husband, a father, a teacher and an artist:

The nature of love is kindness.

It is all too common to see unkindness around us. Look at the headlines and see the violence and hatred and terrible things people do to each other. Love stands against this. Love is treating all people as family. Love is not hurting others.

The nature of love is respect.

Look around and see how we treat what we have been given. See the vandalism and graffiti and litter. See the self-destructive behaviors. See the pollution of our air and water. Love encourages us to be respectful and thankful for what we have been given. Our environment, our intelligence, and our relationships are examples of gifts to cherished and respected.

The nature of love is generosity.
We have been blessed with much abundance of things and abilities. To love is to share this abundance. One can give of time, talent and wealth with sincerity in making others joyful. The opposite, greed, speaks to a darker side that is filled with selfishness. It is not selfish to cause another to gain.

The nature of love is dedication.

Whether it be God, country or family, love will expose a depth of commitment that withstands the worst trials and tribulations. We all can identify instances in our lives when we have felt disappointed or frustrated. It is the power of love that sees us through the tough times. When we dedicate ourselves through patriotism or marriage or belief in God, we invoke love to inspire a permanence of such dedication.

The nature of love is forgiveness.

Everyone has been wronged is some way by the actions or words of others. In a perfect world this would not happen, but since nobody is perfect, we experience hurt at the hands of often our closest friends. To forgive is the purest expression of love for another. True forgiveness however, must be unconditional and permanent.

The nature of love is honesty.

True love is just that — the Truth! Love is not deceptive or manipulative or evasive. A person shows love in being trustworthy and honest. Look at how much distrust there is all around us. We can find examples in government, in business, and sometimes even in our families. If we act as persons of honor, we show love in our actions and words.

The nature of love is peacefulness.

In love there is peace. This in not to say that peace is the absence of conflict, but rather that peace is achieved when we act with love toward each other in all aspects of life. If we are kind, respectful, generous, dedicated, forgiving and honest, all that we need to feed our soul will come to us. How we believe in God, how we express our patriotism, how we build our families… Those are all ways of demonstrating the undeniable knowledge that love can sustain a confident peace within our hearts.

That is the nature of love!

— Patrick Sieben is the Director of Bands at Cloud County Community College and a member of the Concordia Year of Peace Committee.

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