GREAT BEND, KAN. -- In the passionate, philosophical 19th-century novel The Brothers Karamazov, set in a small provincial town in Russia, Dostoevsky’s fictional characters often visit a nearby monastery seeking solace and guidance from the contemplatives there, renowned for their prophetic, mediating and healing abilities.
In Great Bend, located in central Kansas, Dominican sisters have a similar relationship with their town, offering spirituality, a holistic health center and Heartland Farm, an agricultural enterprise that models simple living and ecological practices.
Dominican women have been ministering to the people of the Great Plains for over a hundred years, arriving first to Great Bend in 1902. Recently their congregation merged with six others in the Midwest to form a new congregation, the Dominican Sisters of Peace.
Heartland Spirituality Center is located on 18 acres of the Dominican Sisters’ motherhouse. Heartland Center for Wholistic Health operates from a storefront building in downtown Great Bend, while the farm is 13 miles west of town in nearby Rush County.
“Some say we’re the best-kept secret in central Kansas,” said Dominican Sr. Renee Dreiling, Heartland Spirituality Center staff member. “We get single and married people from all faith traditions, 30 to 40 a month, who come for retreats and spiritual direction. People hear about us by word of mouth.
“We try to provide an oasis where retreatants and others can experience hospitality, serenity and personal growth.”
The center offers a two-year program for spiritual direction, SpiritLife, as well as individual spiritual direction and pastoral counseling to anyone requesting it.
“The people who come to us for direction and counseling are looking for some connection with God,” Dreiling told NCR. “They often don’t know how to find that relationship with God that gives purpose and meaning to their lives. They are not learning how to build that relationship in their churches.”
Often they are in discernment of some kind, wanting to make some decisions about their life’s direction, or they want to share their journey with God with someone else, she said.
“In direction we often encounter attitudes about God that are not correct or helpful,” said staff member Sr. Jolene Geier. “For example, a person can’t be happy because they feel they’re not perfect and feel profoundly unworthy.”
Staff member Connie Burkholder added: “Most directees are in midlife. We often talk about images of God, who God is for people, or whether it is okay to be angry at God. We sometimes get gay men and women who are in the process of coming out, or women who were sexually abused. We hold them in the spiritual direction relationship while they are processing.”
Burkholder is an ordained minister in the Church of the Brethren.
“Most people are praying people,” said the center’s director, Sr. Louise Hageman, “so it often only takes a nudge to get them deeply involved in a spiritual life.
“What are our true values in an anything-goes, postmodern kind of world, where we are so divorced from creation, so taken up with consumerism? We help people find their charisms, their God-given gifts, their enthusiasms, the places where they are called and gifted,” she said. “What gives your heart passion and how does it meet the needs of the world? This is often the central question in spiritual direction.”
Staff member Brenda Black added: “The sisters being here in the same building is a real asset for retreatants. The sisters’ community holds them in prayer while they are here.”
The ecumenical spiritual directors’ training program offers courses in the history of Christian spirituality, methods of prayer and meditation, tools for inner exploration like the enneagram and Meyers-Briggs, discernment and lifestyle issues like spiritual charisms and vocation.
Another of the center’s resources for spirituality is an Internet site, Shalom Place (shalomplace.com), which offers programs and retreats on tape, a daily E-zine, an ongoing discussion group and a place to register prayer requests. The site is maintained by staff member Philip St. Romain.
“When people deepen their spirituality here,” said Hageman, “it puts flesh on God’s activity in the world.”
Healing touch
“Who else would you expect to be on the vanguard of holistic healing?’ asks Dominican Sr. Anita Schugart, director of the Heartland Center for Holistic Health. “After all, who started the hospitals in this country?”
A former hospital administrator, Schugart said she had experienced the current health care system as more of a “sickness system.” With the threat of a swine flu pandemic, for example, “the emphasis has been on a vaccine rather than building the immune system,” she said.
The center’s ministry consists of giving massages, chiropractic treatments and nutritional supplementation. “Scripture tells us how Jesus healed by touching those who were ill,” Schugart said. “He stretched out his hand and touched the lepers and they were made whole.”
Schugart said that healing touch is an important part of the center’s ministry, that touch can heal the mind, body and spirit. “We have placed a great emphasis on the mind and tend to neglect the body until it screams for help through pain and illness.”
Massage helps people get in touch with both body and soul; it’s one of the most ancient methods of healing, she said. “We’re fragmented in society today and the more we can have our spirit and body working together in harmony through touch the more we are brought home to ourselves.”
During a sabbatical, Schugart attended a six-month program at Dr. Jay Scherer’s Academy of Natural Healing in Santa Fe, N.M., to learn more about natural healing and to be trained in its techniques.
“Our medical model today is more oriented toward disease or specific maladies rather than working toward a whole, healthy person,” said Schugart. “The more technology we live with today though the more we need each other’s touch.”
The center’s staff includes Barbara Koester, Jessica Williams, Jackie Koelsch and Dominican Sr. Cecelia Ann Stremel.
Koester offers Swedish and Trigger Point, soft tissue sculpting, aromatherapy, raindrop therapy and hot stone massage.
“Massage can be a prayerful experience,” Koester said. “So I see my work as more a ministry than a profession.
“Part of our ministry is just being present as the body heals itself, a body which is sacred. The word holy is within the concept of whole. Being able to assist when emotions are released by the touch of massage, it’s sometimes spiritual direction and massage together.”
The center gets many referrals from area chiropractor Amy Antle and Andrew Hefner, a natural health acupuncturist.
Stremel, the center’s receptionist, told NCR: “People come in with all kinds of aches and pains and they often say, ‘They told me this is the place that will finally help me.’ ”
“People come looking for fixes, but they go away with much more,” said therapist Koelsch.
Another treatment given is homeopathy. The idea behind homeopathy is that a remedy can cure a disease if it produces in a healthy person symptoms similar to those of the disease. “In other words, small doses of onion -- which makes our eyes water -- could essentially cure runny eyes during allergy or cold season,” said Schugart. “Homeopathy stimulates the immune system.”
The center hopes to build awareness in the community that health and prevention of disease are more important than waiting for disease to take over.
Often when a sister answers the phone, Stremel said, “we get several moments of silence, followed by ‘Uh, is this Sister, as in Catholic nun?’ Then they say ‘Does the church let you run a business like this?’ But we’re hardly an X-rated business.”
Heartland Farm
In the midst of fields of mown wheat, milo and corn, an extensive windbreak of cottonwood and other kinds of trees shelters a cluster of houses, outbuildings, barns and a large silo with stained glass windows in its sides and a skylight for a roof.
A sign made of old barn wood identifies it as Heartland Farm.
Located 13 miles west of Great Bend, this 80-acre homestead was acquired by the Dominican Sisters in 1987 and now serves as a home for four sisters and two families.
Sr. Terry Wasinger lives there full-time along with two other Dominican sisters, Mary Ellen Dater and Jane Belanger, and St. Joseph Sr. Virginia Pearl. Larry Hesed, a Mennonite, came in 1988 with his wife Laurie and three children. Another Mennonite couple, Jared Gingrich and Shana Goering, live there now as well.
Wasinger explained the origin of the farm: “Sr. Betty Jean Goebel, who grew up in Wichita, visited Genesis Farm in New Jersey, also run by Dominican sisters, then with this vision for ecological education in mind, she became the first sister resident at the farm.”
There are two straw-bale buildings, one of which is a hermitage and the other an art studio with a pottery room, a spinning room, and a room for massages. Behind the barn is a large organic garden. Nearby is a four-bedroom guesthouse.
Farm residents use solar energy; stick to whole food nutrition; recycle and compost; dry and can farm-grown organic food; practice home childbirth; live below taxable income -- all evidences of a radically simple lifestyle.
Taken all together it’s a healing mix of creative arts, holistic bodywork, and closeness to nature. “The farm exists for healing of the earth, healing of self and others,” Wasinger said.
The farm has 15 alpacas. Indigenous to South America, the alpaca is raised for its soft fleece. This fleece is sheared once a year, yielding roughly five to 10 pounds. After only minimal preparation, it is ready to be spun into yarn for knitting, crocheting, and weaving, or used to make felt for creating hats, cloth or moccasins.
“We got involved with alpacas because they don’t harm the land; their hooves don’t dig up the soil,” Wasinger said. “They require a small amount of acreage. They are easy to feed in winter. We started with a foundation herd of just three alpacas in 2003: Marshfellow, Serendipity and Miss Daisy. Now we have 13 more. Their gentle, humming ways, beauty, wonderful fleece and inquisitive nature have added value to our farm. They are being raised for their wool and for their organic compost, as well as for show and breeding. We spin their fleece, sell roving and yarn, and knitted and crocheted garments.”
On the farm there is also a labyrinth and solar walk-in greenhouse. “Our 32-acre pasture has mowed walking paths and two ponds. The straw-bale hermitage is powered by a solar panel. A creek is spanned by two wooden bridges, and a wonderful ancient ash tree has a swing on it. The pastures are great munching places for our alpacas.”
The 80 acres of certified organic vegetable, herbs and flower gardens, and cropland, pasture, creek and ponds are a place for experimental, experiential learning of small-scale, sustainable, organic agriculture and animal husbandry.
In solidarity with farmers almost everywhere in rural America, residents all work outside the farm either full- or part-time. Wasinger works evenings as a nurse in Great Bend. Their incomes are pooled in a common fund for the farm’s support.
“We meet every Monday after sharing our noon meal together, and plan who’s cooking for the week. We build into our life some structures for accountability to one another.”
Inside the farm’s silo is a prayer space with a Chimenea stove and benches. The shed skin from the resident bull snake adorns the gravel floor. Thirty feet up through the skylight one can see the wind-driven clouds of the Great Plains passing over.
It’s clear the Great Bend, Kan., Dominican Sisters have carved their distinctive niche here in America’s heartland.
Rich Heffern is an NCR staff member. His e-mail address is rheffern@ncronline.org.
