St. Jude's Chapel is found in Madison, NC. Like St. Jude's Hospital for Children, this little place is not owned by the Catholic Church or any church for that matter. There are no services held here, except may an occasional wedding. It was built in 1991 by the Baruito Family as a thank offering for the matriarch's surviving cancer. Made of cedar and only twelve by fourteen feet with a capacity for eight people, it is a charming place.
Having never visited St. Jude's Chapel, I only stumbled across the photo online and had to zoom in to read the name on the outdoor sign. My immediate response to the scene was to be reminded of my first year in seminary when I had a class titled Ascetical Theology (the life of the soul with God).
The only thing I remember from the course was the assignment we were given the first day — to describe the chapel of your own dream-design. I was delighted with the topic and remember my essay well enough. I described a wooden chapel that I came upon in a dense forest. "Then the trees of the forest will sing for joy before the Lord, for he is coming to judge the earth." 1 Chronicles 16:33.
The dream chapel would be low, with a little sheltered entrance inviting intimacy, like this one. It would have a wood-shingled roof, reflective of the forest, and a small tower or steeple holding a single bell. My seminary years pre-dated the building of St. Jude's Chapel but turns out, are reflective of my own 1974 idea — the black iron hinges on the single front door, the low rough stone foundation and the few steps out front, as if the place had sprung up out of the ground!
There were thirty three men in that seminary class and unfortunately we never spoke to each other about our imagined dream place. A missed opportunity. We'd have learned more about each other from that conversation than from just about anything else we ever talked about. Right or wrong, I imagined their essays depicting great urban or suburban churches - maybe contemporary round churches with wide meeting spaces, rows of pews and parking for everyone, perhaps with a school and convent attached and a covered walkway between church and rectory so Father would never have to get wet. One priest said to us: "Boys, someday you'll build a church. My advice is, always have the light switches inside the front door so you never have to stumble around in the dark." The only light I imagined in my chapel was sunlight through small windows or candle light.
And while this essay has stayed with me for 48 years, it wasn't until years later that I realized, the chapel of my dream wouldn't accommodate a congregation. "For God alone my soul in silence waits; truly, there is my hope. God alone is my rock and my salvation, my stronghold, so that I shall not be shaken." Psalm 62:6,7. The picture I created was not a place so much as a state of mind.
I would have been glad for a subsequent conversation about the imagined chapel, but the assignment was never returned. Every time we met for class I hoped that the priest-professor would return the paper with comment — that there would be a response. At some point I surrendered the hope and imagined the papers were just thrown in the garbage. A missed opportunity. On the other hand, maybe not. In hind sight, the priest might have said to me, "Are you sure you belong here, maybe you belong in a monastery seminary." I don't know how I would have handled that.
Years later, I drove across the state of Pennsylvania to spend some days with a community of hermit monks in Ohio. After spending a few hours talking with the prior he said, "It's clear to me that you don't have a vocation to this life, but it's also clear to me that you don't pay enough attention to your contemplative aspect." What's that? Obtaining Christ's clean heart of the gospel, waking up to the things of God in Christ, looking to follow the path of becoming the real and full human person God dreamed me to be.
