By Robert R. SchwarzYou've see her on the corner of Northwest Highway and Arlington Heights Road holding up the sign " Bring Our Troops Home" and also as that woman beaming with smiles while giving the mass host at St. James church . And you might have seen her in her Certified Nursing Assistant uniform at a nearby nursing home where she's been giving her best for 12 years to dementia residents. But you probably haven't heard her bitter-sweet life story as an exodus trekker.
It began for Sr. Christine Baty, a 60-year-old nun of the Sisters of the Living Word order in Arlington Heights, Illinois, at age five when a bully who in her Evanston apartment building hit her severely on the head with a spade. The trauma required several brain surgeries and led to petit mal seizures ( a type of epilepsy) . At 20 , her hands became arthritic, which would later cut short her love of piano playing. Then there was the non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. (Today she is a three-year survivor of it)
But the severest challenge hit her on what she expected to be an innocent prom date . Sr. Christine and her teenage companion had just left the dance at Mt. Prospect High School and were on their way to another prom affair. He parked the car and raped Sr. Christine.
She didn't tell police nor her family. "Nobody in those years ever pressed charges about things like that," Sr. Christine said during her interview with this reporter. "You know, back then it was always the girl's fault. " Later, following a priest's direction, she forgave her attacker.
Shorty after she had enrolled in bookkeeping classes ( her father was a CPA and her mother a file clerk ), Sr. Christine, 18 years old , discovered she was pregnant. She considered an abortion. "My mother said, ' if you want, we'll have it done. ' Yeah, I said to myself, that would be the easy way out. But in the end I could not end the life now in me. And I was not in any position to be a mom. "
Sr. Christine moved into a home for unwed mothers, managed by the Salvation Army. There baby Michael was born in February, 1970 and given up for adoption.
Though up to now in our interview , this nun had spoken openly about traumas most humans would never want to mention—unless , like Sr. Christine, it could somehow be told for the common good. Now she took off her dark-rimmed glasses, paused, and lowered her head.
"The last time I saw my child he was five days old. What was really hard was when the lady from Catholic Charities came to pick him up to take him to his adoptive parents. When she walked out with my baby in her arms, she passed my father coming through the door. My father never realized that was his grandson whom he had brushed by that day. I never told him. I guess that as painful as it was for me , it would have been for him."
A Dark Period
Sr. Christine described the next two years as her " dark period." "I had always wanted to be two things: a nurse and a nun. I thought now that my chances of being a nun were thin. I went into a spiritual decline, saying to myself, God couldn't possibly want me—I'm not pure enough." A life of sex, drugs, a bit of marijuana, and rock'n'roll now began.
She married a guitar player she had met in a Chicago bar. They moved to California for a year then returned to Chicago. Her husband , she said, drank a lot, smoked pot, and used LSD. "I knew I had made a terrible mistake." She bore his child and named it Jennifer; but when her husband became physically abusive to Sr. Christine and, fearing he might also harm Jennifer, she left him three weeks later and moved in with her parents.
Sr. Christine would later write this on the Sisters of the Living Word webpage: "Life as a single mom was far from easy. I worked several jobs trying to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. Several times I had to rely on public assistance programs to make ends meet. During this time , beginning in 1974, I began a process of returning to the church. In 1982, during a time of retreat, I experienced very strong desire to make a gift of my entire life to God. For the next 10 years I became increasingly involved in parish ministry, working with faith-sharing groups, scripture study groups , visiting the sick and homebound, and taking on liturgical roles. My prayer life became central to my everyday living , and perhaps because of this, my desire to devote my life to God deepened….I began to wonder if religious life might still be possible for me. Over the next two years I investigated many communities , eventually becoming drawn to the Sisters of the Living Word.
"I look back and see God's handiwork in just about everything. Every time we were getting down to the bottom of the barrel-- how to pay rent, buy food-- something good happened. I learned things about people, relationships."
The Clouds Lift
Jennifer, now 38, is a financial analyst in Naperville. "I'm so proud of her," Sr. Christine said. She is so bright and has wonderful instincts for giving back. " A few years ago Jennifer and some friends formed a not-for-profit agency where unemployed people could come and take what clothes they needed for job interviews.
Seven years ago at St. James with Fr. Bill Zavaski presiding, Sr. Christine took her final vows: poverty, chastity, and obedience." I get my spiritual energy here at St. James, " she said. "This parish has more life in it than any other parish I've been in." Nowadays her goals are simple: "To keep working as long as I can. I love what I do." She also has her eye on opposing human trafficking , where women from Third World countries who have been deceptively persuaded to immigrate to America are then coerced into prostitution or, in some cases, forced to work as virtual slaves.
"Chris is a very dedicated health care professional, " said Sr. Barbara Mass, who has know her fellow nun for 20 years. "It's very obvious that her difficult life has molded her with compassion."
Sr. Christine does, however, make room for fun and recreation. " I love to fish," she said exuberantly. " Give me a boat, tackle box and six-pack of beer—and just let me go." ( She goes after those big Muskies in Northern Wisconsin. ) She admits to being a bookworm—mysteries by Lindsey Davis, whose protagonist is a detective living in ancient Roman times. And now and then she and the two nuns with whom she shares an apartment enjoy what they jokingly label their "holy hour" of watching television's crime program "N.C.I.S."
This nun is made sad by the devaluing of human life as seen in the Sudan famine, and made happy by her faith, prayer, work , and her daughter.
Her hazel eyes flinched once or twice when talking about the baby she gave up for adoption decades ago and whom she has not seen since. She had named him Michael David but his adoptive parents switched it to David Michael. Much later in life, Michael began searching for his birth parents, eventually locating his birth mother. Since then, Sr. Christine and David Michael have exchanged emails and begun planning to meet . David today is a 41-year-old mechanical engineer living in Barrington . He has sent Sr. Christine Face Book-posted photographs of himself . "The physical resemblance between him and me is unbelievable. "
Sr. Christine says the two are building a relationship, yet is quick to add, " But there's nothing inside me that identifies me as being his mother. He is their child."
Then she said something that seem to absolutely still the air around us for a long moment. "I have come to understand that as horrible as it was about my baby coming into being , I was the channel of grace for that other couple who could not have children of their own."
At the end of our interview, Sr. Christine was asked what final meaning she sees in her life. Her words came easy, without hesitation: "I learned that in the worst part of my life God was there with me and has never left me. Even in the car that night—God was with me . God doesn't make things like that happen, but sometimes God allows things like that to happen –because the ultimate gifts that come from things like that are worth it. I would today not change anything in my life, including the bad things."###
© 2011 Robert R. Schwarz
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