Finding healing

By Christina Capecchi The Catholic Spirit

At 67, Bonnie Steele has been on a journey of discovery, converting to Catholicism, earning a college degree after becoming a mother of four, forging a meaningful career, embracing her multiracial background as a Black and Anishinaabe woman and unpacking buried trauma from her mom’s childhood.

“I’m still in the healing process,” says Steele, who is married and belongs to St. Bridget in Minneapolis. “I don’t know that it is ever complete.”

Q Your mom was 13 when she was taken from her family and brought to a boarding school, where she was forced to assimilate and endured sexual abuse, you’ve come to presume. Decades later, she never talked about the experience.

A She didn’t have the tools. I find that, today, we cousins are shedding the tears our parents could not, and we are grieving the losses they could not.

My mom has been gone five years, and I still feel her. The other day I was driving to the res (reservation) and I stopped at a lake where I’d taken my mom. Sitting in the car, I reached over to where she would’ve been and said, “Mom, it’s OK. There’s no more pain. There’s no more sorrow. No one can ever take you from your family again. You’re all together now.”

Q How does it feel to do the healing she wasn’t able to do?

A It feels like a responsibility. One of the things I’ve learned from Anishinaabe elders that I’m close to is that when one of us begins to do the work to heal, we heal the descendants that follow — seven generations out. It can set the tone for the great, great, great, great, great grandchildren I will not see in this lifetime. It paves the way for them and creates a place of peace and beauty and love, to be able to rear families in healthy, good ways.

At the same time, we heal the ancestors who did not have that opportunity. It’s a privilege to do that. There is no more important work. That is the work of our lives.

Q What does healing look like for you?

A Time. It’s being able to bring very painful stories — that others find really difficult to hear and want to rush through — and allow us to just sit with that. Even though I didn’t grow up on the res, my elders gave me an unconditional welcome that, for me, has been healing. They listen without judgment.

Q You started college at age 43, one year after your daughter began. That takes courage!

A More than you can imagine! It was one of the best things I’ve ever done.

Growing up, the people I knew didn’t go to college. My best friend’s house was in the junkyard. As a parent, I’d prepared my kids for college, but I wasn’t sure I could succeed at it. I had huge doubts. I used to sit in the parking lot and cry before class. I would say to myself: “You have to show up for your own life. All you have to do is get in the door. Just get in the door.”

Q Did you receive a warm welcome at St. Catherine University in St. Paul?

A The Sisters of St. Joseph (of Carondelet) greeted us at this open house. They were so warm and friendly. And they are so committed to justice and serving the poor and needy. I was awed. I tucked it away, in my pocket. Later, my daughter was invited to attend the Basilica of St. Mary (in Minneapolis) for Christmas, and she was awed by what she saw. Then she invited me to go to classes with her there. I didn’t realize they were (OCIA) classes at first, but she insisted I come with. I agreed to go to the first three. But I was busy! There were 100 people in the room, and it was pretty amazing. The questions that they asked were so meaningful. They drew me in. By the third class, they had me.

Q You continued along toward the Easter Vigil, but as a lifelong Protestant, you bristled at the sacrament of reconciliation.

A I had been so skeptical. But it was one of those moments in your life where the whole room just drops away. It felt like someone took warm oil and poured it on my head and just covered me, all the way down to the tips of my toes.

Q Do you credit the Sisters of St. Joseph for your conversion?

A Absolutely!

Q You majored in chemical dependency and theology, and in your studies, you were encouraged to explore your identity.

A They gave me the space to discover who I was. I couldn’t get enough of it. I loved every minute. As part of an assignment, I went to Pipestone, where my mom was at boarding school. There’s a little historical building, and they actually let me go upstairs. It took my breath away. They had the dolls that the children had brought with them from home. I looked at those dolls and thought of what they represented — that these children were so young and they were loved and then brought to these horrible places.

Q How do your Catholic values dovetail with your Anishinaabe values?

A They dovetail with my mother’s sense of community and care. She cared for everyone in the neighborhood, all races, from all walks of life. People would come to live with us for a while. I didn’t know that wasn’t normal.

Q She was embracing the best of Catholic social teaching without knowing it.

A Exactly. The Sisters of St. Joseph have that phrase “always moving toward the profound love of God and the dear neighbor without distinction.” That was my mom. We lived five blocks from St. Joe’s Catholic Church in Minneapolis. I listened to those bells ring every morning of my life. Decades later, when I became Catholic and completed my degree, I was hired to work at St. Joseph the Worker in Maple Grove. When I came in to interview, I saw an old picture of the original church, which was the one by my childhood home. Those bells had always been ringing for me.

Q Did you enjoy working there?

A I spent 11 years there as director of pastoral care. It was the most amazing experience to accompany people at the end of life, to enter into people’s lives when they’re at their most vulnerable and transparent. What a gift!

I didn’t become Catholic by accident. There were all these touchpoints in my life.

Not long after I was received into the Church, I made it my mission to find my mom’s mother. Mom had been searching for her her whole life.

I started looking at records in the St. Cloud area, and I found her. She was baptized Catholic. I drove her to the gravesite, and a gentleman who was keeping the grounds let us in the church and looked up exactly where her mother was. Those graves are very old and windblown, so you can’t read them.

I had brought my kids and a friend and we were able to sing and incense the grave and have our own little funeral for her. It felt like she knew we would come. And my mom kept saying, “Now I know where my mom is.”

Q By taking your own spiritual journey, you were able to give your mom the closure she’d always sought.

A Yes.

Q What do you know for sure?

A What I know for sure is that even when we are in pain, even when we feel lost, even when we don’t know how to even formulate the question, God — the one that is the holy Other — can reach into our lives in unexpected ways and provide what we need. And that I know without question, without a doubt.