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By Rebecca Rackoczy, Special To The Bulletin
CUMMING—It’s a warm spring day and goats are lazily
sunning themselves in their paddock. Butterflies swoop over the pasture. The
peace of the day is broken by the sporadic grinding and roar of trucks and cars
on nearby Dawsonville Highway, racing to their destinations.
But if the rural calm is lost on those busy commuters, it
doesn’t faze Sister June Racicot, OP. On this 18-acre oasis of farmland
amidst encroaching suburbia, she has helped develop a place of restfulness and
calm, a retreat called Cedar Hill Enrichment Center, where women come seeking
solace and spiritual rest, and where she and Sister Kathryn Cliatt, OP, help
them find their way with guidance and spiritual companioning.
For Sister Racicot, Cedar Hill represents an evolution of the
temporal workings of the Holy Spirit, the end product of a decades-long journey
of working with families in rural Georgia. It is also a continuing evolution of
sorts for her own spiritual journey that began a half century ago, more than
700 miles north, when she took her vows as an Adrian Dominican nun. In June,
she celebrated her 50th anniversary at the motherhouse in Adrian, Mich.
Growing up in Michigan, Sister Racicot says she was drawn to the
Dominican nuns while attending school. “The sisters were filled with so
much joy,” she recalls. But the idea of becoming a nun didn’t present
itself until her senior year of high school when she realized it was her
ultimate calling. From then on, she says, she didn’t look back.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, teaching was the chosen, and often the
only path, for women Religious. Sister Racicot followed, teaching in Chicago,
Florida and Alabama. In the early 1960s, she was a school administrator and
superior in Montgomery, Ala., where the bus boycott began the nation’s
unsteady progress toward racial integration. With Gov. George Wallace and other
Alabama officials, like Birmingham Sheriff Bull Connor, bitterly opposing
integration, it was a painful time for Montgomery, the capital, and its
citizens.
“It was a difficult time,” Sister Racicot recalled.
“Many parishioners who considered themselves good people, who gave much
time to the church and to their community, were really confused.”
The vision of an equal and integrated society wasn’t
something they fully grasped, she said. “It was a whole way of life for
them, and people were telling them they were prejudiced . . . They
couldn’t understand what was wrong.”
Her own school was not integrated that year, but after the march
from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, two black students from the neighboring
military base were enrolled.
The period was not without soul-searching, but Sister Racicot says
she was more of a listener then, not a do-er. More than 20 years later in 1987
she did participate, marching with the Rev. Hosea Williams and thousands of
others in Forsyth County, Georgia, who protested against the Ku Klux Klan, as a
witness against racism and for increased integration in the county.
In 1968, inspirations coming from the Second Vatican Council
allowed nuns to branch out and pursue their ministries in new ways. Sister
Racicot chose to leave school administration to teach her first love, English
literature, to high school students in Tampa. It was during that period that
she began reexamining her original call to the order, and sought a way to
“serve the poor and look at social justice issues.”
Already in Florida, she joined several other sisters, including
Sister Cliatt, in her search, which led them to look again at the Deep South
where she had spent much of her teaching career.
“We wrote an outline of ministry, and looked at what
(personal) gifts we had, and sent our proposal to four bishops” in
Atlanta, Savannah, Raleigh, N.C., and Charleston, S.C.
They had an interview with Atlanta Archbishop Thomas Donnellan and
also interviewed in Greenville, S.C.
They got the call to come to Atlanta. The sisters met with the
heads of each department in the archdiocese and asked what they felt the
greatest need was. While each department had its own list of concerns, they all
boiled down to one area. “They told us there was very little outreach
outside of metro Atlanta,” she recalled.
The women, originally four in number, shifted their focus to
Forsyth and Hall counties, and went to live there, starting the seeds of what
would become a large rural social service agency that would impact thousands of
citizens. It was July 1975.
But their objective would take time. While both Forsyth and Hall
now are considered suburbs of Atlanta, (Forsyth was named the fastest growing
county in the nation two years ago) there weren’t many Catholics in the
county in the 1970s and ‘80s. Just three families in the area were
Catholic, and they trekked to a parish 20 miles away in Gainesville. Cumming
became a mission, and in 1977 became Good Shepherd Parish. A small house on
five acres was the site where a priest would come once a month.
But just because there was a dearth of Catholics, that didn’t
mean there wasn’t any work for the nuns. “Catholic Social Services
and the archbishop told us to work with the poor, and the poor here were not
Catholic,” she said. But providing that help would prove a challenge
At first, they were viewed with suspicion, Sister Racicot
recalled. “Our biggest challenge was walking in the county as nuns,”
she said.
Father Alan Dillmann, now retired, then pastor of Good Shepherd
Church, recalls threats by the Klan, which at the time had a strong presence in
Forsyth County, and “trucks going by the house at night with their lights
out. It was scary.”
Adding to the nuns’ handicap were itinerant volunteer workers
who had come before. “They were used to people coming into the county,
writing their masters’ theses on Appalachian poor and then leaving,”
said Sister Racicot.
Pride also stood in the way of many people asking for help, she
said. So the sisters didn’t tell the people they needed help; they asked
for help themselves.
“When we would go into the hardware store we told them we
were building our own furniture and we asked for advice.”
Building their own furniture, planting a large garden and raising
goats, they stayed in the house that doubled as a church and converted the
carport into a chapel.
They began seeking donations of clothing and food and opened a
thrift store in a small building nearby. Social workers from Gainesville would
refer clients for help in clothing and assistance to the sisters.
“Slowly the word got out that if you needed help, people
would say, ‘Go up to the place and see the sisters, they’ll
help,’” recalled Sister Racicot. The name, ‘The Place,’
stuck, and it is still referred to as such.
The Place became the center of the sisters’ outreach
programs, offering everything from emergency funding for people who needed to
pay utility bills, to empowerment programs, to outreach to what was then a
fledgling Hispanic community.
In 1977, the archdiocese moved the sisters to a farmhouse, where
they still are, on the current Cedar Hill property. But while clothing and food
were immediate needs for the community, there were other pressing issues. By
the late 1970s, established and accepted as part of the community, the women
were approached by the wife of a man who had heart problems and needed health
care. The couple had limited funds and could not find affordable health care.
And so the George E. Wilson Clinic, named after the man who needed
help, was born.
“They put their heads together and approached the federal
government for a grant and received a small grant. It was a grass-roots
effort,” recalled Linda Howell, the chief financial officer of what is now
called Georgia Highlands Medical Services, Inc.
The first clinic was housed in a doublewide trailer and staffed by
a volunteer doctor and nurse. Today, a 19,000-square-foot facility stands in
Cumming, serving more than 8,500 patients a year, with a staff of 33 employees.
About 40 percent of those served are below the poverty line. It still operates
under the premise started by the sisters,
that anyone can have medical care, regardless of ability to pay.
It is funded and operated partly with grants and federal funding, United Way
funding, insurance co-pays and lots of community support.
“The nuns single-handedly started this clinic with just a
dream and a prayer,” said Howell. “This has really grown because of
them. If everybody did as much for a county, it would be a better world.”
Another project took shape at the same time the clinic was getting
off the ground, recalled Sister Racicot. “We asked for anyone interested
in helping house abused woman and children to meet at the Shoney’s.”
Twenty people showed up. The attendees of that original meeting
formed a core group of advisors who would help the sisters put together Family
Haven, a shelter for abused women and children. Then there was Sojourners
House, an emergency shelter for families.
There were also projects that grew from efforts to help the senior
citizens of the county, including Good Shepherd Place, run by Catholic Housing
Initiatives, Inc.
“We didn’t start anything unless it was a need voiced by
the people,” said Sister Racicot. But there were obstacles. The operation
of centers like The Place and other programs that grew from their initiative in
the middle of an area that beforehand had no such programs, let alone programs
operated by nuns, was an adjustment for both the community and the women who
held on to their mission, noted Steve Brazen.
Now executive director of Senior Connections, which serves senior
citizens in DeKalb County, Brazen met the sisters in 1978, as a program
assistant, and later director of the Catholic Social Services Secretariat, what
CSS and Catholic Charities were then called. Also during that time, the
sisters’ growing ministry, formally called Rural Social Services, was
re-established on Pirkle Ferry Road.
“Sister June was — and is still — a very calm,
reflective person,” said Brazen, but she had an ability to deal with
crises. “When someone would come (frantic) when their trailer burned down,
June could calm them down. She had an ability to deal with crises and cut down
and get to the bottom of an issue. She could step back and raise the question,
‘What does this person really need?’ . . . and listen and not just
funnel them off to such and such a program.”
Brazen noted that both women exemplified “a great deal of
integrity and did what was just and right, whether it be with staff, client or
any relationship they had.”
The gradual acceptance of nuns in this largely Protestant and very
close-knit community was uplifting for them, said Sister Racicot.
“Eventually, we were so accepted, we were free to be who we were,”
and not stereotyped into cubbyholes of what a nun should be or do.
That acceptance gave the sisters the courage to begin another
project. In 1992, Sister Cliatt was elected to a leadership position within the
order and was required to travel. And in 1994, after more than two decades of
working with the poor, Sister Racicot took a sabbatical to reflect on the next
direction of her career.
“I stayed here, but did a number of different things,”
Sister Racicot said. One of those “things” was developing a spiritual
retreat. “A group of mothers from St. Pius High School called and asked if
they could meet on our property for a prayer retreat, and asked if Kathryn and
I would help direct the retreat.”
Then a group of Presbyterian women asked if they too could come to
the farm. The word got out that the farm was a place of quiet. Just like The
Place was where you went to get temporal assistance, this was “the
place” to regain spiritual peace.
The two sisters began a feasibility study on retreats and found
that at that time there was no spiritual retreat center for women within a
100-mile radius of Atlanta. And so, Cedar Hill Enrichment Center was born.
They approached Archbishop John F. Donoghue with a request to buy
the land and house where they were living; instead, they were given the
property in full.
Cedar Hill has now become a place where women come to reflect on
and renew their Christian spirituality through special programs and sometimes
through monastic contemplation in small hermitages on the property.
“We want them to discover and renew their relationship with
the Divine,” said Sister Racicot. Last year, she became a certified
massage therapist, in an effort to continue her belief in caring for the mind,
spirit and body.
Tricia Harrell was one of those St. Pius mothers who first
approached Sister Racicot. Today she serves on the board of directors for Cedar
Hill.
“Sister June is so well-balanced. She is a model you would
hope for in a woman Religious — she upholds the tradition, but is also
open to new traditions. In a gentle, loving way, she helps women discover their
potential . . . and helps you uncover what you can do in the world.”
Although no longer directly involved in the projects and programs
they helped create, the legacy of the sisters here is still apparent, and
continues with the spiritual direction they provide for women of every
socioeconomic status. Their influence in the community is still here too. When
they began the task of expanding their facilities, the Forsyth Rotary Club came
and put a new floor down in the goat shed and helped convert it. They also
bulldozed and cleared areas for parking and pathways in a former pasture.
“By virtue of the fact of their persistence and their work
with people, they dispelled a lot of prejudice and became part of the
community,” noted Father Dillmann. “They planted a lot of seeds, and
the things they started are still ongoing with the local community.”
For Sister Racicot, no doubt the next years will be filled. She
has gone from ministering to the physical needs of the community to helping
meet their spiritual needs. And even though she is still going full steam,
retirement has already been mentioned to their board of directors, and both
sisters are beginning to mentor others who will take their place at Cedar Hill.
But Sister Racicot doesn’t intend on leaving this rural community, which
has been her home now for 26 years.
“It is my hope to stay right here in an advisory capacity and
continue to minister at Cedar Hill.” |
