Hold Your Light High

Editor’s note: Sister Judith Sutera gave this address at the beginning of a procession with lanterns from Benedictine College to Mount St. Scholastica Monastery on November 10, 2023, to commemorate the 160th anniversary of the arrival of the first Benedictine sisters in Atchison.

One hundred and sixty years ago, late on the night of November 11, 1863, a ferry brought seven Benedictine sisters from Minnesota who were headed for their new home on Second and Division in Atchison, Kansas. They were the children of German immigrants whose parents, weary of the prejudice they encountered in American cities, moved to an intentional settlement in Pennsylvania where they could re-create and protect their German culture. The young women, the oldest age 30, had entered the monastery there or in one of the two other places they had lived for a few years before coming to Atchison. Those places had been familiar settlements of their own culture. Atchison was something else entirely.

They were coming to a nine-year-old boom town of 5000 people (already half the size of Atchison today) on the border where the Civil War was being fought. The area was filled with people heading West, including free blacks, Native Americans, and people of various ethnicities, very few of them Catholic. After the Benedictine monks came to Atchison in 1857, they had seen the need of the people for religious education and invited Benedictine sisters to join them here. The sisters would serve a primarily English-speaking Irish congregation who did not share their culture but did share a Catholic faith that was not always welcomed. There were rumors that some townspeople would try to burn down the sisters’ home, so two men accompanied them that night and circled the house all night carrying lanterns to protect them.

Tonight we use lanterns as a symbol of that event. It was not an occasion of happy welcoming by joyous townspeople, as is sometimes portrayed. It was a night that was dark and uncharted, a night that would begin a very long journey, a procession if you will, that has brought us here.

We do not just come to commemorate something that happened long ago. Tonight is only a marker in a journey that continues.

This very night, around the world, there are still countless people who are living in places affected by war, who have lost loved ones or pray for loved ones far away in battle zones. This very night, even at our own country’s border, there are still countless people who are just setting foot into a new home, a place that is unfamiliar and foreign, and where they know that not everyone welcomes them. This very night, in our own cities and college campuses, there are still countless people engaged in disputes and hate crimes in the name of religion and ethnicity. This very night, right here in Atchison, there are still people who feel that they are not accepted for their race, religion, or other differences. We may even walk past the dwelllings of people who may not feel safe in their own home because of differences within their families or domestic violence.

We walk this night to symbolize that we must continue to be a light. There must be a light that we can bring to them at the same time that we honor the heritage of Mount St. Scholastica’s Benedictine sisters. For that is the light that is the legacy of this community of sisters.

Obviously, we’re still here. So you may be wondering how those first sisters survived and persevered. The secret is a very Benedictine practice — hospitality. After weeks of a very public argument in the city’s newspaper by citizens who were for and against the arrival of the sisters, there was to be a town meeting about whether to let them stay. The sisters, instead of being passive victims, did something radical. They opened their doors. They invited everyone to an open house to see the work the students were doing and, even better, offered the visitors a meal. The town meeting was never held.

St. Benedict commands us to welcome everyone we meet as Christ — not just those of our faith, not just those of our culture or race, but everyone. We are to open ourselves to the other. We are to invite them to real encounters. We are to assume that there is nothing to hide or fear. Only when we get to know another will we be able to discover that there is more that unites us in our humanity than divides us, that we are all children of the same God.

Will you walk with us tonight? Will you shine your light to dispel the darkness of violence, prejudice, distrust? Will you help us carry the light that brought us to this city 160 years ago and sustains us into the future?

Hold your light, Christ’s light, high. Let us go forth in peace and joy to love and serve the Lord. THANKS BE TO GOD.