One day near Christmas about ten years ago, when I was still editor of Our Sunday Visitor, I received a small package from a nun. She was looking for someone to publish a children’s book she had written and illustrated.
I put the parcel aside, intending to write a brief reply to the effect that we didn’t handle children’s books and suggesting some different publishers. That night, though, I took her book home to read to my three girls, the oldest of whom was seven at the time.
The kids were charmed, spellbound, and all grinning at the end.
It was a simple story of a little field mouse named Wunchy. Wunchy sneezes one day and his parents respond, “God bless you, Wunchy.” But their blessing leaves him cold. “I didn’t feel a thing,” he says. “Now, if God blessed me, shouldn’t I have felt it?”
With that, Wunchy sets out on a quest to find God and to see if, indeed, God did bless him. While on this pilgrimage, Wunchy talks to the sun, to the flowers, to all sorts of animals, even to a large, flat rock. He asks wherever he goes: “Do you know where God is?”
The book never did find a publisher. But it started a friendship I will always cherish.
Sister M. Thaddine Chopp, O.S.F., began sending me her stories to read to my children. With titles like “Some Like It Red” and “The Feathered Friends,” each arrived as a one-of-kind illuminated manuscript, typed on thin sheets, with her signature colored-pencil drawings. Her stories were sweet parables told with a child’s eye for wonder, color, and play.
A story she wrote for my daughter Cecilia’s fourth birthday told of a conversation overheard in heaven the day she was born. Cecilia’s guardian angel was boasting: “God told me he was going to give a wonderful family on earth a baby girl. She was to be beautiful inside and outside!”
Sister Thaddine sent me essays, too, many of which I published in the pages of Our Sunday Visitor. She wrote these, she told me, because she wanted “to make Catholics fall in love with their faith.” Some of her essays had a serene sad sense about them, as if she just couldn’t fathom how people couldn’t see the truth and beauty of our religion.
She was a careful reader of the Catholic press. I sent her an early draft of my book, The Catholic Passion; it came back with lots of polite red ink. She couldn’t abide all the contractions—the “wouldn’ts” and “don’ts” and “that’s.” The subject matter was too beautiful, too dignified for all that, she chided. (She was right, of course, so I took ’em all out.)
Lady Bugs and Luck
We all looked forward to her letters. I’m holding one of them now, from 1998. At the bottom, in bright crayon with brisk lines she’s drawn a crazy bouquet of purple mums with a lady bug crawling up one stem. “Lady bugs bring good luck!!” she adds by way of a postscript explanation.
She sent words of wise counsel, promises of prayers, news from the repetitious rhythms of her days with her dear friends, Sisters Janet, Annette, and Claudiann.
During the long year when my sister’s two-year-old daughter was dying from a rare brain disease, the letters came more frequently.
About a week before my niece died, Sister Thaddine wrote: “I have lived a long time and have experienced many departures of loved ones from this life. It leaves a void and we hurt for a long time but God gives us strength and we are able to go on. . . . If the Lord wants Shannon to Himself just think of this pure, unblemished soul interceding for her loved ones who are struggling here on this temporal globe. . . How Jesus loves her!”
When we went out to visit her convent in Springfield, Illinois, I wasn’t surprised to find that Sister Thaddine looked like one of the winsome characters in her stories—dressed in a long dark habit with a warm smile and a mischievous twinkle in her eyes.
Straightaway she and her friends escorted us to pray in the huge, cross-shaped St. Francis Church, which sits in the center of the convent grounds.
Dedicated in 1924, this church has to be counted among the great unknown treasures of American Church architecture, with unique, exquisitely wrought statues, paintings, murals, and stained glass.
There we knelt—three old nuns, my wife, our then four children and me—before a high altar reminiscent of Bernini’s in St. Peter’s Basilica, fashioned of rare colored marbles imported from Greece and Italy.
Next she took us to pray before the tomb of St. Felicity, the slave girl and mother who was fed to the Roman lions in 203. Her remains are preserved in a marble and glass vault in one of the church’s side chapels. Sister Thaddine told us proudly that the church houses more than two hundred first-class relics of saints, including a relic of the true cross of Christ, said to once have been owned by Pope Pius IX.
It was like we had turned down a side road and left the world behind.
Later that weekend, as the sisters doted on the kids, I walked the quiet grounds with Sister Thaddine and asked her to tell me about her life.
Sheboygan Between The Wars
She was born Pauline Chopp on April 26, 1914 in the north country of Calumet, Michigan, where her dad, a Croatian émigré, worked as a dynamite blaster in the copper mines. She was the third youngest of nine, with three sisters and five brothers.
When she was eight, the mines shut down and the family followed the work to Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
She remembered with nostalgia the idyllic days and ways of the world between the wars. She liked canning tomatoes and beans with her mom, and playing hide and seek in the big cellar where they kept bins of apples and potatoes, and sauerkraut stored in big granite crocks. She recalled how her father and brothers would butcher the pigs every fall to put in sausages and pork for the long cold winter.
Evenings they would play Irving Berlin records on the Victrola or tune-in “The Lone Ranger” on the radio. Often they would huddle around the pot-belly stove and listen as their dad told them tall tales that Sister Thaddine called “whoppers.” She remembered Sunday afternoons, too, soaking in the conversation as the men gathered on her daddy’s porch, sipping homemade elderberry wine and thrashing out the issues of the day, such as John L. Lewis’s struggles to form a mineworkers’ union.
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, her brothers marched off to war and Sister Thaddine volunteered at St. Nicholas Hospital in Sheboygan, which was run by the Hospital Sisters of St. Francis, an order that traces its roots to mid-19th century Germany.
At that time, in her late twenties, she said, “there was something that I wanted which was not in what I saw around me.” In the beauty of the Hospital Sisters’ love for the sick and the dying, in their joyful life together, she discovered what that something was.
Vocation To Love
It has been sixty years since she made her vows and took a new name, Sister Mary Thaddine. In a long career, she earned an advanced degree in nursing education, did post-graduate work in psychology, and trained two generations of young nurses, all while working as a geriatric nurse herself.
She had a particular passion for the poor and dispossessed. In her letters she would remind me of the needs of refugees and immigrants, especially children caught up in wars and dislocations.
The Hospital Sisters, like other American religious orders, underwent a difficult process of internal “updating” and reform in the years after the Second Vatican Council.
We noticed during our visit that Sister Thaddine and her friends seemed to be the only ones who still wore the traditional nuns’ habit. When I asked about the changes, she replied with not a touch of crankiness or complaint.
She admired her order’s continued dedication to poor and to the Church’s teachings. She would have preferred to keep the ommunity life more intact and the world a little more at bay, especially television and modern “conveniences” like the frequent intercom announcements that now rattle the once-silent convent corridors.
But she and her friends, all retired from their active apostolate, exuded the contentment of lives fully lived in the adventure and pursuit of holiness. In her old age, she was dedicated to fulfilling her vocation to love—through prayer, contemplation, and faithfulness to the vows she took so many years ago. And through writing.
Pearls of Wisdom
Her letters stopped coming last Christmas, when, for the first time, she was forced to send a form letter to all her friends and loved ones. “I still try to use the computer but my fingers tremble and fly off the keys and this is bad,” she informed us.
As neuropathy has made her legs too weak to stand and her hands too shaky to type, a degenerative eye condition has left her legally blind. Her dear friends in the convent have begun to pass on. The circle is starting to close.
We get updates from time to time from her devoted niece, Charmaine Chopp Kneevers. And Charmaine recently gave all of us a great gift. She brought together Sister Thaddine’s writings into a book, Pearls of Wisdom: Christian Musings of Life Events (available for $25.50 postpaid from Sonlight Books, 709 N. 8th St., Sheboygan, WI 53081, or toll-free, 888-458-7886).
I was delighted to find that everything is here—the poems, prayers, and stories she sent me (even a full-color version of “Wunchy’s Search for God”), the essays she wrote for Our Sunday Visitor, and much more that I never knew she had written.
Her first published poem is here, written when she was a teenager and printed in a 1928 edition of the Sheboygan Press. Fittingly, it’s a musing on the importance of “A Smile.”
There’s a beautiful litany she wrote to God the Father and Creator (“You who enchanted the skies with dancing birds . . .”) and a lovely Christmas poem that she first sent to us illustrated by a picture of our fifth child, Charles:
He came—a babe—a little child . . .
Our hardened hearts to win,
To teach us love
and to forgive . . .
I can’t imagine what a trial it must be for her—no longer able to read or write, no longer able to pray her rosary while walking the convent grounds hearing the songbirds, feeling the warm sun on her face.
In a letter once she urged me to write more about the beauty and dignity of the human person created in the image of God. “We need people to find value in pain and suffering,” she said. And I know she is offering her sufferings for my children, for yours, for all the children.
It doesn’t really matter that her letters have ceased to come, that she can’t read ours anymore.
She has reached that threshold she always told us was present, if we only had eyes to see—that place where today mingles with all the days before and all the days to come; that place where all the passings, separations, and shadows of our lives unfold in the loving gaze of God.
Even in her silence, I know she is praying that we will come to see the world with the eyes of a child, the eyes Jesus said we need to glimpse the kingdom of God in our midst.
That was the point of the story that started this friendship.
What the little field mouse Wunchy discovered, the refrain that runs through the book, is: “God is everywhere, everywhere. Just look around and see, God is everywhere.”
That’s the secret Sister Thaddine wanted to share. Any more words can only get in the way.
Previouly unpublished.
© David Scott, 2006. All rights reserved.
