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Petal a path to prayer
Flower photographer Sister Elizabeth Thoman, C.H.M. created the collection “Healing Petals” as a spiritual ministry to the sick.
FLOWERS ARE “sunshine, food, and medicine to the soul,” observed American botanist Luther Burbank a century ago.
Flowers can also open a path to prayer for cancer patients or anyone in physical, emotional, or spiritual pain, says Sister Elizabeth Thoman, a Sister of the Humility of Mary in Davenport, Iowa, and the creator of “Healing Petals: Images for Prayer & Reflection,” a collection of photographs of flowers in full bloom.
“Healing Petals” combines color, lighting, and composition to draw viewers into each flower with the intention of touching the soul and facilitating prayer.
Personal experience
Thoman discovered the healing power of images as she was recovering from breast cancer a few years
Sister Elizabeth Thoman, C.H.M. was the founder of Media & Values magazine, which she helmed for 40 years, in California and a pioneer in the media literacy education movement in the United States. She is now the membership coordinator for the Congregation of the Humility of Mary in Davenport, Iowa. SEE THE COMPLETE “Healing Petals” collection at healingpetals.org.
ago. “Cancer is not just a physical disease; it also takes a spiritual toll,” she explains. “When I started chemo, friends warned me about its many side effects—losing my energy, losing my appetite, even losing my hair. But nobody warned me about how hard it might be to pray.” Pray with words, that is. “Chemo-brain is real,” she says. “Words become a jumble and it’s hard to concentrate. Just when I needed prayer the most, it eluded me.” One day Thoman picked up her camera and started taking photographs of flowers in her backyard—roses, lilies, pansies, petunias. “The close-up allowed me to see right into the heart of each flower. Wow! My first discovery was that the act of photography itself is a prayer.”
Prompting prayer
As her inventory of images grew, so did her admirers. She now works primarily with hospitals and medical facilities to install flower photos in patient rooms and emergency care centers.
But when you are very sick or in pain, traditional prayer can be difficult. “Praying with a visual prompt, like a beautiful flower photograph on the wall in your hospital room, can provide a profound and positive experience with God.”
She believes that “Healing Petals” is a “ministry of spiritual photography” because of its emphasis on prayer. In addition to taking all the photographs, she has written a series of “prayer prompts”—reflective questions—to accompany her images.
Her hope is that her photographs help others connect to God. “We know from research that images bypass the rational brain and speak directly to the heart,” she says. “If I spend time gazing at a beautiful flower, even a photograph of it, my spirit comes alive! Prayer is possible again.” =
RelatedaRticle: vocationnetwork.org, “Created in community,” VISION 2011.
CELESTE’S DREAM Community Garden is a program of the young-adult spirituality and vocation ministry of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet (C.S.J.) in St. Paul, Minnesota. The garden provides a place to teach and share organic growing methods, create common ground, and invite people into the C.S.J. mission and community. Through the garden, the sisters nurture intergenerational relationships. Gardening together as a group, they share their work and harvest with one another and others. They also donate part of their bounty to a C.S.J. ministry and a local food shelf.
GREY NUNS OF THE SACRED HEART
FOR THE GREY NUNS of the Sacred Heart, eco-spirituality ties together their Catholic faith and concern for the earth—we are called to recognize, appreciate, celebrate, and take care of the cosmos as a place of God’s continuing self-revelation and creation.
Avid gardener Sister Constance Welsh, G.N.S.H. has a deep respect for the earth as a gift from God. After many years in elementary education, she became the groundskeeper at the motherhouse in Yardley, Pennsylvania. “There are many places on Earth where you can feel the presence of God. In a garden, God is present in the soil, in the flowers, in the weeds, even in the slugs and the moles. A garden is as holy as a chapel!” she says.
SISTER CONSTANCE Welsh has been a Grey Nun of the Sacred Heart for more than 60 years. “I can say with delight, I’m glad I made the journey.” CELESTE’S DREAM Community Garden provides an opportunity to realize the mission of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet: loving God and neighbor without distinction.
THE ABBEY of Our Lady of New Clairvaux generates income from the cultivation of walnut and prune trees in its orchards and grapevines in its vineyard.
THE ABBEY of Our Lady of New Clairvaux in Vina, California is home to a community of Cistercian monks who strive for a balance of prayer, hospitality, work, study, and sustainable stewardship of resources in simplicity and openness for the glory of God. While much of a monk’s time is spent in lectio divina, a form of scripture meditation, Brother Guerric Llanes, O.C.S.O. says that the natural surroundings at the abbey also put the monks directly within the “gardens of the scriptures,” to use the words of Blessed Guerric of Igny, a disciple of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the Cistercian order. Llanes continues, “While quietly picking grapes during a summer harvest, my mind finds a leisurely pause, and I recall the words of Christ: ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.’ And then I know I can put all my worries to rest and simply bask in the sweet Spirit of His Word.”
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ing yield for others. It calls us into service. As with plants, this can take many different forms: service to our families, our communities, the poor and needy; service of prayer and sacrifice for the world. When we become the creation in God’s garden that we were meant to be—a difficult getting-your-hands-dirty process— we find peace and fulfillment and joy.
When we plant a garden, we must think about what we want from it and how to go about it, but it really helps to ask God to show us the best way. When I built my first hermitdesires. And ask God what he wants. Ask him how we are to serve in his garden, which is the struggling, wounded, hurting world.
God speaks to us in many ways, but I believe that the best way to hear God is in a garden. After all, God created the first humans in a garden, faced death from a garden, and rose again from a garden. Perhaps Mary Magdalene was not so far off when on that first Easter morning she mistook Jesus for a gardener (John 20:15). =
age, I didn’t know how to tend the landscape and what sort of garden to plant, so I waited through the first winter, trusting God would reveal to me what to do when it was time. And sure enough, it simply became evident to me one day, and in the spring, I created terraced gardens blending the cultivated terrain at the top of the hill into the wild land below.
It’s the same with our calling. We need to think about it, dream about it, talk to the right people about it—and pray to God about it. That’s the most important part. Ask God to help us figure out what suits our needs, our aptitudes, our
