More about Sister Jane

Since I first posted about Sister Jane, I have talked further with her legal personal representative and her family, and reached a point where I can tell more of her story and how her life affected mine.

Sister Jane was Jane Mary McDonald, a professed nun in the Order of the Sisters of the Holy Cross. She was born in 1951. She was from Manchester, New Hampshire. She joined the Order as a postulant in 1972 when she was 20. In 1975, she met Sister Jeanne Wilfort, who had been in leadership positions in Holy Cross in Edmonton. Sister Wilfort was involved in a movement called PRH (Personality in Human Relationships) originated in France by a priest, Father Andrew Rochais. She came to New Hamphire to give a presentation. Jane didn’t know it, but the presentation was an introductory PRH workshop, now remembered by the American PRH organization as part of its early history. Sister Wilfort was encouraging younger nuns to come to Edmonton to study her approach to living the professed Religious life. From my perspective, PRH seems to be a personal growth movement, perhaps a cult, operating on the fringes of Catholicism. Under the influence of Sister Wilfort and other leaders of the Order, it seems to have had an influence on the Sisters of the Holy Cross.
Sister Jane came to Canada in 1975 and spent a year in Edmonton. During that time Sister Wilfort was working within the Order to set up a new spiritual community under her leadership. While she was not able to open a separate Holy Cross house, she was able to organize support to set up a communal living arrangement under the name of Maissons du Croissance or Homes for Growth. Homes for Growth was supported by Holy Cross and the Oblate Fathers. It was supposed to be a spiritual community and a retreat center offering services to other clergy and spiritual seekers. The first Home for Growth was in Lorette, Manitoba. The program grew and opened more houses later. Sister Wilfort later developed her own programs and grew apart from the main PRH movement in Canada

Sister Jane came to Manitoba in 1978, and stayed here for the rest of her life. She was a resident of the Lorette commune for about a year. It was during that time that Jane had the sexual experiences with Sister Wilfort that I mentioned in my first post about Sister Jane. Since most of the Holy Cross sisters in Manitoba were connected to Homes for Growth, Sister Jane had a hard time ending her connection to it. Since most of the Holy Cross sisters in Manitoba admired and supported Sister Wilfort, Jane became estranged from her Order. She took a job with the Salvation Army at one of its shelters for a few years. She founded her drop-in, Chez Nous, in 1987 and worked there until she was diagnosed with breast cancer in January 2000. Through most of the year, Jane was under intensive treatment to manage her cancer. She went into remission in the fall.

Jane contacted the Superior General of Holy Cross in 1998 and 1999, and disclosed her experiences. The Superior did not take agree to take any steps to discipline Sister Wilfort or to assert any control over Homes for Growth.In December 2000, Sister Jane brought her story of sexual abuse and exclusion from her Order to James Weisgerber, the Archbishop of Winnipeg. He expressed concern about the direction the Homes for Growth movement had taken. He said had been concerned about PRH in Western Canada since his experiences with that movement as priest in Saskatchewan and as Bishop of Saskatoon. He listened to her respectfully and took her story seriously. He gave Jane financial support to make a trip to Ireland. But he said he had limited authority in Canon (Church) law to take action against Sister Wilfort for sexual abuse or to curtail the activities of Homes for Growth. He may have reported the matter to the authorities in the Vatican responsible for independent Religious Orders, because the Vatican appointed a retired Superior of the Grey Nuns of Montreal to visit Winnipeg and investigate the story. Jane never saw the report of that investigation.

By the spring of 2001, Jane was depressed and suicidal. She got help and started counselling with Cynthia Jordan, a psychologist, and Vicki Frankel, a social worker. After a few months of therapy, she began to consider leaving the Order, and seeking compensation for the sexual and emotional abuse she had experienced. That’s when I got into the story. I satisfied myself that Jane had been receiving good treatment from qualified, competent and ethical professionals, that her memory of abuse was genuine, and that the abuse had caused significant emotional harm. I started court proceedings but Sister Jane’s cancer came back before we had a hearing in Court, and she died in July, 2003.

I was uncomfortable that the Church’s designated episcopal authority had been unable to adjudicate Jane’s allegations against Sister Wilfort and Holy Cross internally in Canon law. I was uncomfortable with the way Holy Cross presented itself within the Church when it was questioned about how it was handling Jane’s claims. The Order and the lawyers for the Order treated Jane confrontationally in the legal proceedings, but defended their stance by blaming Jane for seeking civil justice and taking the matter to Court, and for not forgiving her abuser. Holy Cross treated Jane like any ordinary corporation treats a whistle-blower – it tried to discredit her within the Order and the Church while avoiding public discussion of the story. In another sense, she was treated worse than a whistle-blower because her willingness to take her grievance against Sister Wilfort, Holy Cross and Homes for Growth to Court was portrayed within the Church as an immoral attack on the Church itself and an abandonment of her religion. A whistle-blower loses past workplace associates. Jane lost spiritual sisters.
I have been left with questions about whether the Church’s Code of Canon law is adequate to secure the safety and financial security of clergy and professed religious who raise legitimate grievances against other members of the clergy. I have also been left with other questions about the meaning of religious freedom. The government and the public courts should not be attempting to regulate belief and theology, but the members of Churches and religious movements should be able to find justice within their religious institutions. It seems to me that the government has a fundamental role in securing the safety of members of churches and religious institutions from exploitation and abuse.

Working with Sister Jane led me to examine the way in which the Church responds to intellectual and emotional trends in the world. I am old enough to remember the excitement and fear that came from John XIII’s movement to open the windows, and to remember the debates about whether the Church had to become “relevant”.

Sister Jane caught the message of the politics of equality and reform through liberation theology and devoted herself to service to the poor.
Sister Wilfort caught the message that religion was an affective or emotional subjective experience. She used her power in the Order to create near-cult of self-actualization and personal growth. Her story illustrates the risk of corruption in locating religion in the affective realm of impulses and feelings – the risk in committing acts of self-gratification and abuse in God’s name.

The Church hierarchy has been much more harsh toward liberation theology than to cults and sects. Pope John Paul II, an old Cold Warrior, has been suspicious that liberation theology represented the penetration of Marxist teachings into the Church. At the same time, he is an advocate of bringing back traditional prayers and devotions that touch the feelings of the faithful. The Church has had a hard time teaching against affective New Age cults while it promotes tradition-based affective practices.

My anger and frustration over the Church’s response to Sister Jane’s story nearly led me out of the Church. My admiration for Jane’s honesty and devotion to her calling has helped me to stay.

Starting Over

Starting Over is a self-help book by Thomas A. Whiteman and Randy Peterson, published by Pinon Press in 2001. I found it at McNally Robinson, a Western Canadian chain of bookstores.
Whiteman is real licenced psychologist with a Ph. D. degree from Bryn Mawr, a real university. I don’t take that for granted in the authors of self-help books. He is an entrepreneur, with a counselling practice in Pennsylvania, called Life Counseling Services and a connection to Fresh Start seminars. The book is founded in the working experience of a qualified professional. The appearance is that Whiteman has the experience and the ideas, and collaborated with Peterson to produce a book so I will generally refer to Whiteman as the author.
Since the public, the publishing industry and the counselling professions have been influenced by “recovery”, humanistic, transpersonal and transformational psychology, even qualified professionals often spout pop psychology nonsense in self-help books. While Starting Over is not entirely free of pop psych jargon, it seems to be well grounded in common sense. There is some God-talk in the book and I wondered if this was intended to be useful to evangelical Christians who might have religious problems with the divorce process. I confirmed that later when I Googled Thomas Whiteman and Fresh Start Seminars. Whiteman seems to have developed a Christian-oriented version of his principles through his work with Fresh Start, which is noted at the Fresh Start Web site and other sites like JCSM. In “Starting Over,” he presents his advice in a less religiously oriented manner. His ideas are not particularly religious or faith-based but he makes the effort to help an evangelical Christian accept divorce and accept the idea of remarriage.
Starting Over is for people who did not expect or initiate the end of a relationship. It starts with survival, and tries to get to starting over. It emphasizes taking responsibility for one’s recovery, accepting that recovery is going to be a long, painful process, and that healing requires forgiveness and justice.
Chapter One addresses taking responsibility, which requires consciously recognizing that the marriage is over and taking deliberate steps towards starting over. Divorce isn’t an agreement. If one partner wants to leave, it happens. The writers encourage people to believe that there is a natural healing process which will happen if we take responsibility for working to start over.
They use the theory or image of Five Stages of Grieving in Chapter Two, and through the next few chapters. As I posted last week, the Five Stage theory is only a rough model of the process of grieving for death and dying. I doubt that there is scientific evidence that divorcing people – either the ones who leave or the ones left behind – go through all five steps in any order. Whiteman basically takes the idea of Five Stages and redefines the Stages in terms of divorce. He says that people will slip quickly through the first three stages of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, and Depression and then often slip back and forth between stages before they finally feel better and reach Acceptance. He also says there is a vital extra step.
He defines Denial as a response to emotional shock, in which a person will deny the reality of the situation and will, as a result, be unable to be open to change and to entering into new relationships. He suggests that denial may often last only a few days, although in some cases it last for months or a lifetime. He explains that Anger is natural and legitimate. He suggests expressing anger in legitimate ways, and in framing the issues and identifying anger as a response to perceived mistreatment. He says that it is important to re-examine our perceptions of the breakup as a way of reducing and resolving the anger. He advises avoiding confrontation that will escalate the anger, redirecting energy spent in anger to more constructive projects, and resolving the anger by altering perceptions of the original injustice.
His discussion of Bargaining is brief and to the point. Bargaining with oneself or the ex in the hope of reconciliation is tempting and risky. Usually the other spouse is not open to it, and often the other spouse has an agenda and will manipulate you. You may sell yourself out by being weak in the hope of leaving the door open to reconciliation. You may also bend yourself out of shape by trying to change yourself to please a spouse who will be unhappy with life, no matter what you do. His advice for Depression is to expect it, tolerate it, avoid addictive behaviour, and to get help if it lasts too long or becomes too intense. He explains Acceptance as the end state where you have stopped obsessing about it, and move on with your life. I think he has perhaps taken that Stage out of order, to try to conform to the popular model. He introduces an important sixth step in Chapter Two which he discusses at length in Chapter Five. He advises that we need to aim for forgiveness. More on that later.
Chapters Three and Four state that recovering from the emotional pain of marriage breakdown can take, usually, two years or longer. Progress through the stages is a climb up a slippery slope. Anger and depression will recur. I think he also says that even after passing through the stages, you may need more time and some work on a healthy self view and healthy connections before you should start a new intimate relationship. Whiteman counsels avoiding intimate relationships for a couple of years after a breakup because you will be too fragile and needy and your judgment will be impaired – you will be either too vulnerable or too defensive to succeed. He counsels avoiding rebound relationships. People enter into rebound relationships to prove that they are lovable – to themselves, to the ex who left them. Often a rebound relationship is with a person with the same character as the ex, and has the same weaknesses as the original relationship. Sometimes the rebound relationship is with a person who exploits your vulnerability and need.
Chapter Five discusses forgiveness. Whiteman explains that he does not counsel forgetting the other party’s actions or excusing the other party’s misconduct. Forgiveness is not earned or deserved. Forgiveness is an authentic release of animosity. Whiteman is very careful to explain that forgiveness is not a matter of taking the moral high ground and saying that you have forgiven the other person. He advises that you have to see the person with new eyes, to assess the person realistically and to stop being angry. He suggests that the process will vary, depending on whether the other person wants forgiveness, and whether there is going to be any kind of ongoing relationship. These are not simple terms and concepts. The idea that the other person will want forgiveness means that the other person must be willing to meet and hear your grievances and acknowledge that he or she has harmed you. An ongoing relationship doesn’t mean a reconciliation. It may refer to custody and access arrangements with the kids, working in the same company or profession, going to the same Church, belonging to the same clubs and organizations, or just being in the same circle of friends.
He suggests that it is appropriate, where the other person is open, to discuss each person’s the grievances in neutral language, and resolve the animosity – even if there no ongoing relationship. If there is going to be a relationship, but the other person acts as if you as if you are entirely in the wrong, it is still possible to state your views, be heard and move on. His view of the importance of forgiveness may reflect an underlying theological approach to psychology, but his view is also logical and supported within conventional scientific models of pyschology.
Chapter Six is about Self View. He puts forward some of the standard ideas about developing a positive outlook and taking care of oneself. He refers at one point to the slippery concept of self-talk, and he lapses into some jargon in this Chapter. Mainly, he puts himself at a distance from the popular ideas of entitlement and self-esteem. He advises that we should develop a balanced view of ourselves as valuable people in a community of valuable people. We shouldn’t feel deprived or denied if we have not enjoyed great achievements, and we shouldn’t demand praise or flattery for slight achievements. We should take care of ourselves and respect others. We should examine ourselves and let go of emotional baggage that contributes to an incorrect or unfair self-appraisal. As with all advice in self-help books, the advice in this Chapter can be taken selectively, but Whiteman does his best to be clear and helpful.
I can deal with the rest of the book quickly. Chapter Seven encourages participation in wider communities and discourages isolation. It warns that we need to look at the explicit and implicit message we get from our friends and to discount the messages that support an unhealthy self view or unhealthy behaviour. Chapter Eight encourages supporting and helping others.

Sunscreen

My friend Stephen Katz offered my some support and advice in a private email message in the form of a quote from the Sunscreen song. I may have heard of it, but I didn’t think I had ever actually heard the song or read the lyrics.
The story of the Sunscreen column, the Sunscreen speech and the the Sunscreen song is interesting. It started as a newspaper column by Mary Schmich, written and published in Chicago June 1, 1997. It was titled “ADVICE, LIKE YOUTH, PROBABLY JUST WASTED ON THE YOUNG”. It began to circulate on the Interet, but it was generally misattributed as speech by Kurt Vonnegut, to the graduates of MIT. It was turned into a 1999 hit song by Baz Luhrman.
I found the text of the column, and Luhrman’s musical version.
It’s cute and funny, and wise and sad.

Five Stages

During a recent conversation, the question of the stages of grief came up. I wasn’t sure if there were supposed to seven stages or five. The five stages of grief are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance, in the system suggested by the Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. I read it many years ago. I remembered her effort to find a pattern of meaning in the emotions of terminally ill hospital patients. I remembered the theory sounded a bit fuzzy. The stages had been the central theme of the 1979 movie, All that Jazz, which I had seen when it was released in theaters. (The movie has attracted mixed reviews).

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Bike Restoration

Several times last year, I told my friends that I was going to get my road bike back on the road. On Saturday morning, looking at a long ride on pavement to Lockport on Sunday, I decided to go forward with the project.
The bike is a Kuwahara Apollo. I bought it around 1979 or 1980. I rode it actively for a few years, but my cycling dropped off after 1982. It has a high quality Chrome-moly frame, and good wheels and components. The basics to get it roadworthy were new tires and tubes. 20 years of sitting in the basement had dried out the rubber and made the old ones pretty unreliable. The tires had seen some wear too. In view of the prevalence of sharp stones and other road hazards on Winnipeg roads, I went into the mid-market for tires and bought Armadillos. I bought new tubes, and a spare to carry on trips.
The next item was a seat post. The bike came with a short post and I had extended it past the safety mark to get proper leg extension. I’m not sure why I didn’t take care of this when I bought the bike. New alloy seat posts are cheap – but they tend to be pretty long to match the geometry of modern frames which call for long seat posts. A quick cut with a hacksaw and I had a post that was properly seated in the frame. I got a rear rack. I carry a rack pack or panniers with spare tubes, a few tools, lights, snacks, headband for cold weather, rain cover for helmet etc. I will not be racing this bike – I will be using it for long rides on pavement and I want to be safe. I looked at the brakes. Shimano calipers. Nothing wrong with them but the brakes pads were worn and the rubber was probably dry. However fiddling with brakes can get time consuming so I decided to leave that task for another day.
The drive train seemed fine. The gear teeth were in good shape. Twelve speeds doesn’t sound like enough in the modern era, but it is. I had wondered about changing the shifters to modern indexed shifters. The front shifter had been tricky all along – it didn’t hold in the outer position over my big front ring. As I read about it, I learned that there is a simple adjustment to a tension screw to fix this.
The pedals were built for clips and old fashioned bike shoes with a grooved cleat. They had little posts on the inner and outer edges to hold a narrow racing shoe. That made them hard to use with the bike shoes I have now, and hopeless with any kind of general purpose shoe. So new pedals were required. And while I was at it, I might as well get clipless pedals. Gooch’s bike shop has a sale so I saved a little there. I got Shimano pedals with a platform on one side and cleat locks on the other. I spent a few hours replacing the tires and tubes, repacking the wheel bearings, cleaning and lubing the chain, installing the rack and installing the new pedals.
The bike felt good on the Sunday morning ride our Sunday morning ride to Lockport. I had to shift in the saddle a bit to get comfortable and I thought of making some adjustments but by the end of the ride I was comfortable again. I realized quickly that I need to replace the brake pads. The brakes worked but wailed like pan pipes played by a goose with a sinus condition. The cloth tape on the handlebars is frayed and uncomfortable and needs to be replaced. The water bottle cage was pretty shaky. I can add a second cage to the seat tube if I carry my tire pump strapped to the top tube with velco straps. These are all small and simple repairs. I may want to get a longer front stem. The cost of parts adds up, but it is a good bike and I don’t want to buy a new one when I already own a good bike.
There is no doubt that a road bike is more efficient for a long ride. As Steve has posted, it was a windy day. The road bike allows or forces a rider into a dropped position, and the thin tires (23 mm) offer far less rolling resistance that touring (35 mm) and mountain bike cleated fatties.
Complaining about the wind, and the narrow shoulders and the ignorant drivers on Henderson Highway is part of life. I complain during the rides and I will probably complain about it in the future because I will take that ride again. Lockport is a nice ride on a sunny Sunday.

Teenage gigolos

N. calls me about once a day. He calls collect from Edmonton and I accept the charges. The number shows up as a local number. It might be a cell phone, but some long distance calls show up as local calls in call display. He called me on Friday morning at work. He knew the number.
He seems to have a good memory for some things. His mom always believed him when he used bad memory as an excuse for broken promises or unwillingness to accept directions and rules. I always thought he was pretty clever and that he had a problem of attitude, not a problem of ability.

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Save the Mallrat

N. seems to have arrived in Edmonton. He called me collect this morning and the collect caller notification was from Telus. He wouldn’t give me an address because he said he thought I would send the police. He said a friend had provided some money for the bus but had ditched him in Edmonton before they could a place or get jobs. He wanted me to send money through the MoneyMart stores because he needed food and a place to stay. He said the shelters were full and he was on the street. He said it was a loan until he got a job. He said his life and future were in Edmonton.

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The New Mallrat

This morning I talked to n.’s worker who confirmed n. had not been back to the hotel or had any contact with the agency since Tuesday morning at 5:00 AM. He’s definitely gone. The worker said n. had been clear about his priorities. He wants to live his life with no rules. He would like someone to financially support his freedom.

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Butterflies and Wheels

Butterflies and Wheels combines some heavy critical writing with some very funny features. It defends science and reason from junk science and post-modernist critiques. It is heavy on references to atheist and skeptical sites, and generally anti-religious, unhappily tending to equate religion with fideism, fundamentalism and superstition. It is strong in writing and critical thinking.

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On the street again

On Saturday morning (April 24) I awoke to find that someone had gained access to my garage and had tried to steal my vehicle – a disreputable ’93 Explorer. I mentally kicked myself for not arming the car alarm, and for leaving the passage door into the garage unlocked. The yard is pretty secure, with the gate to the outside lane locked, a high fence and lights on sensors. Enough to deter thieves, but it was still careless to leave the car and the garage unlocked.

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