This week in
Madonna House saw the end of the directors’ meetings, with most of the local
directors of our various missions leaving today to return to their houses. It
was, as always, a graced time, reflective, encouraging about the work of God in
our midst.
At the same
time, it is a good thing the meetings end, because that work of God is ongoing,
and not getting any slower-paced. The farm is kicking it up into high gear
right now, with the major planting going on. We have about seven acres of
vegetable garden, all of which is planted, weeded, and harvested for the most
part by hand without use of chemicals or heavy machinery. It is a massive labor
of love, out of which comes a large percentage of our food for the year.
Meanwhile,
other summer work goes on. I think I mentioned we are building a new cabin at
our summer family camp Cana Colony, to better accommodate the needs and numbers
of families wanting to come to that program. As construction projects go, it is
relatively simple; the Cana cabins do not have plumbing or electricity and are
a single room shared by the whole family (and yes, we have a waiting list each
year for Cana, which is why we’re building a new cabin!). Last I heard, the
floor and walls are up, and only the roof is needing to go on yet. Meanwhile,
all the other work going into getting that camp set up is happening around the
construction.
By far,
though, the biggest event of the week was our celebration of the 50th
anniversary of our MH mission shop, and I would like to talk more about that
aspect of our apostolate. It is such a simple concept, yet the fruits of it are
so super-abundant.
It all started
when we had an invitation to go open a house in what is now Bangladesh. We
ended up being there for only a few years, but in the process of accepting that
invitation and opening the house, Catherine Doherty came up with a novel idea
for how to fund such missions, and other mission work in what was then called
the ‘Third World’. It happened to be a time of economic prosperity in Canada in
general and in the Ottawa Valley in particular, and so items were coming in
donation that we had never had to deal with before: collectibles, antiques,
jewelry.
At the same time a number of gifted artists had all joined MH in a
short span of time and were producing beautiful works of art and handicraft. Catherine’s
genius was to put the two together—have a gift shop in which all these
beautiful (but ultimately luxury) items could be sold, and send all the
proceeds to the poorest parts of the world, to fund schools, orphanages,
clinics, and so forth.
And so it has
been for the past fifty years. We early on established a policy of giving money
only to individuals we could have personal contact with, people working
directly with the poor who we could trust to use the money directly in their
work. And over the past fifty years, hundreds of thousands of dollars have
flowed through the shops (we later opened a smaller shop which now sells lower
end items, and a used book shop which is a whole apostolate in its own right),
like a sort of holy money laundering scheme, where the excess funds of the
haves of the world spent on lovely things could go to buy food and clean water,
books and bricks and mortar and medicine and so forth for the have nots.
And so we had
a grand celebration of all this last weekend, with a special ceremony of
blessing for the shop on Friday evening followed by a social time for the MH
community, and a gala opening on the next day. Musician friends came from
Ottawa to give a touch of class to the affair.
Accompanying
the 50th anniversary celebration was the opening of an art exhibit, Radiant Light, in one room of the shop
which is a small art gallery, of paintings by one of our MH artists, Patrick
Stewart. His paintings can be found here, and are exquisitely
beautiful renderings of our valley.
There is so
much more that can be said about our shops—I think ultimately only God really
knows the full scope of how much good they have done in the world. They have
been an incredible incentive for MH members to develop artistic and handicraft
skills, and the whole front room of the shop is dedicated to selling those
crafts: pottery, rosemaling, knitting and crocheting and needlework of all
kinds, felting, wood carving, jewelry, and I don’t know what else.
The middle
room of the shop is all the precious items that come in donation, from crystal
and china to jewelry and antiques. It is a place of beauty and light. And then
there is the art gallery, already mentioned, where higher end works are sold.
We often hear
from the staff who work there that a whole other aspect of the apostolate of
the gift shop is towards the customers who come there. People who might never
walk into MH itself, because they are not ‘religious’ or simply not interested,
go to the shops and experience something more than just a nice gift shop. There
is a quality of peace and silence in the shops, a friendly welcome and a
certain spiritual atmosphere that is hard to describe. Catherine always said it
is Our Lady’s shop, and she is the buyer of the goods sold there. Perhaps She
likes to hang around there and make sure everything is as it should be, and it
is Her our customers are meeting. Fanciful? Perhaps, but then again, who knows?
At any rate,
the shops are launched on their busy summer season, as is the rest of MH, and
we rejoice in the work of God going on amidst all our human working.
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