Transcript of Interview with Gina Loehr about Real Women Real Saints. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com
Listen Now to the audio version of the show.
Real Women Real Saints is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1002655/Real-Women-Real-Saints/
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And today in the spotlight we have Gina Loehr who has a really neat new book called Real woman real saints-Friends for your spiritual journey.
Chris Cash: Welcome Gina.
Gina Loehr: Thank you very much Chris good to be here.
Chris Cash: So, Gina tell me a little bit about yourself and what got you interested in doing something related to the saints like this.
Gina Loehr: Yes, Sure. Well, I actually studied Theology in graduate school which is a sort of a surprising catch for me for my under graduate degree was in theater and I had some plans to go up to New York city and do that whole thing but a series of circumstances led to a conversion and led to me really desiring to study theology and as I was studying I began to realize the significance of the saints. And helping us understand theology, help-ing us understand what the church teaches. I took a couple of courses on some women’s needs in particular and something was planted during that time. I actually graduated with my masters degree in 2001 and it wasn’t until 2007 that I did this book so it was something that was in hibernation for a while but the project was really awesome because I think in exploring the saints we have an opportunity to learn so much of our faith and how we can live it out to practical daily circumstances.
For me my practical daily circumstances are being married to a wonderful man and living on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and we have a little 9 month old baby girl so for me it is be-ing a wife and mother and that is something that many other holy women have done be-fore me and I try to find some of those examples to include them in the book too as guidance for a woman like me who are trying to live this vocation day to day.
Chris Cash: So what was it about the theaters-what were your favorite things about the theater that kind of drew you in that direction?
Gina Loehr: Well, I always loved – from the time I was in high school I acted in my first play. I just loved being on stage there was something that I just thought was very special en-ergy about the way the actress communicate with the audience, about the sort of mo-ment of imagination that comes to life on the stage and I have been drawn to that ever since I first started acting. So, it was actually pretty interesting because I felt a little draw towards it and it was something that I felt I was good and that I had success in and de-cided to pursue that through college because again I felt at home on the stage but what was so interesting was that as you mentioned earlier conversion experience that actually happened in my junior year at college I kind of re-shifted the same energy and enthusi-asm that I had for the stage I found myself shifting into the energy and enthusiasm for sharing the gospel and sharing the faith and I realized that a lots of those same sorts of skills, desires and interests are used in teaching and in speaking which is the path that I ended up going on after I finished my masters degree.
Chris Cash: So, your passion is now been poured-and your talents also into communicating through books.
Gina Loehr: yes, that is how it is manifested most recently although in that interim time be-tween finishing my masters and starting with the freelance writing and that kind of thing I was doing a lot of teaching and speaking so also for me it was the verbal communication that uses the same sort of energies I guess and the passions that I had used on stage but all focused on sharing the gospel and sharing the faith and I think something that has moved my heart in particular is the desire to communicate the beautiful vocation and role of women within the catholic church because actually during my time as a theaters ma-jor in a secular university I was very much immersed in a lot of very feminist-secular feminist ideology that built up a lot of anger and resistance in me towards Catholicism in particular. And through my conversion experience I had a very very surprising turn around where I realized that the church was actually the answer to my feminine parts quest. It wasn’t the problem, it was the answer and through that experience I have also come to really particularly focus on and be passionate about being trying to help under-stand and encourage other woman and in the fact that we do have a beautiful place in the catholic church and that really is where our hearts long to be even if we don’t know it.
Chris Cash: You care to talk about your conversion experience at all?
Gina Loehr: Sure I will be happy to. It was actually very much instigated by my younger brother who is about to be ordained a Dominican priest at the end of May this year. He took me out for coffee one night. I was a junior in college and he invited me out for coffee which was sort of odd because he had never done that before and he did not drink coffee but anyway he took me out to a coffee shop and we were just chatting and what not and then somewhere in the middle of the evening he just got silent for a minute and then he looked at me and said “Gina I feel like I need to tell you something” He said ” I am afraid that the state of your immortal soul is in danger and if you are not going to do something now you are going to go to hell” and that was it he just said it straight out, and he really caught my attention. And then he proceeded to pull out from a little bag
Chris Cash: Hard to ignore a statement like that.
Gina Loehr: Absolutely, exactly. It wasn’t said in a critical or judgmental way, it was very straight forward, concerned of his heart that he was sharing with me and so again it caught my attention, it did not anger me, it did not frustrate me, it just made me say “oh, really that sounds serious”. So anyway he pulled out this 15 page plan that he had con-structed for me specifically and gave me a challenge with this plan he said” Gina, if you reject your catholic faith without having actually having given it a legitimate, authentic, sincere attempt, then you are going to be responsible for that before God at the end of your life. But if you take a year and you read what a catholic should read, you pray when a catholic should pray, you do what a catholic should do. If you love your faith and live your faith for one year directly and intently and after learning and living the faith and then if you should choice to leave then that is another thing”.
So, he gave me a challenge of taking a year and he gave me a plan that had readings, and had prayers and had things like going to Eucharistic adoration which I had never heard of. Things like this and he said will you do this for a year and I said okay. So that was the beginning of this huge huge change in my life. It wasn’t some divine lightening bolt from out high that made me have this heart felt conversion. It was literally just an intellectual, theological challenge from my little brother and thank god the grace was there and I checked him up on it. And I actually started praying every day little things like ” Lord, help me know your will” or “Lord show me my sins” very simple but very profound and through that experience I was able to actually see my life and where was it headed-I was just on this downward spiral that wasn’t some sort of very deliberate conscious re-jection of God but slowly but surely, you know, influence would first put me in, thoughts were taking hold and I was moving further and further and further away from the truth and further away from the love and that’s what my brother made me realize.
So any way, that was the beginning of what has turned out to be a life long conversion process ever since then.
Chris Cash: Sounds very very interesting conversion there.
Gina Loehr: Yes, it was a blessing.
Chris Cash: I think most people, at least most people I know will be pretty belligerent at that kind of statement no matter how lovingly it was said.
Gina Loehr: Yes, that is why I think that it must be great that my brother was praying a lot be-fore he sat me down and you know putting the whole project in the hands of god and I think it must have been those graces that kept me from being angry and you know gave me the openness to respond because obviously I was at a point in my life where I wasn’t with something that I thought was fun but it worked and thank god it did.
Chris Cash: amen to that. So, now you said that what got you interested in the saints was try-ing to spread the word about that these holy woman and these influence that they should have on other women in their life’s can you share a little bit about what got you involved-first off in the set up for this book.
Gina Loehr: Well, I had already been doing some freelance writing for about a year or so previ-ous to working on this manuscript and actually this was an interesting project because other things I worked on sort of come out of my own mind and my own heart that I have put together and taken as a freelance writer that would you be interested in this but with this book actually Servent books teamed me seen some of the writing that I had done and were interested in me as an author and said we would like to do a book on 100 woman saints would you be interested in that project .
So it was unique in the sense that this did not well up from inside of me it was given as an invitation from outside. But what a wonderful gift because it was this opportunity to really dig in and to expose myself, to 100 woman saints, in fact in choosing which saint I was going to use in the book I was exposed to a way more than a 100 women saints.
So, it was awesome for me because it took my knowledge my understanding, my love for the saints to a deeper level. Because I had had my favorites as we all do-you know certain woman that I knew their story prayed for their inner session and those sort of things like Theresa Van Sue (10:46) Theresa Avala, St. Catherine of Seine and some of those that we all know and love but this project helped me to go further and say-ok there is a lot more women out there than the few that I happen to be familiar with who are they? What have they done? What are their stories? And what about their stories. Be-cause this was the particular task for the manuscript.
What about those woman’s stories are particularly relevant-what about those women’s stories stand out to a modern audience to teach us some thing of how to grow and live in earnest spiritual life because the project from the beginning from the initial conception both what servent had proposed to me and what I had said I wanted to do in conjunction with their idea was to offer a book that does not just lift the catalog of historical facts of some women but that offers a guide for spiritual growth that looks at these women’s life’s and says what can we do to take from them and how can we assimilate them how can we learn from this-how can we apply this in our lives which then is why I decided to structure the book according to the cardinal and the theological virtues base, hope, love, prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance and then in order to put each woman in ac-cordance to one of those virtues that she particularly emphasized and showed us how to live. So, that is going to help us unfold.
Chris Cash: Now out of the women that you chose to be in the book do you have a new favor-ite who was someone you did not know previously?
Gina Loehr: Yes, I had about 15 of them there is so many wonderful stories but a couple that I had never heard of upto this point that really stood out to me-one of them is St. Bertilda Varscodain and I don’t know what captivated me so much about this woman, she is not a lay woman or a married woman like myself so in that way she was different. She was religious. However there was something so beautiful about her life because St Bertilda actually had a very difficult and painful childhood. Her father was an alcoholic he was abusive towards her. He did a very good job of destroying her self image and taking away any sense of confidence that this poor young girl had to the point where she was so shy and afraid that people actually thought that she had some sort of mental retarda-tion, some sort of disability which is not the case.
But she was laughed at and mocked. She did not flourish anything she did. Anyway, it was a terrible awful background but what I love about her is that she did not let those scars and wounds turn her into this sort of passive victim who just sat back and blaming the world. Instead, she moved forward, she pursued what she thought was God’s will. After rejection from one religious order, she enters another order and they give her the assignment to go study and become a nurse which was so surprising because she had been a terrible student. She did not look like she had any potential and yet she was given this mission through her vocation to become a nurse and by golly if she did not become the best diphtheria nurse that ever was working with children who had that dis-ease during the era of world war I in Italy and her love and devotion of these children was such that even as there were bombing raids going on in the city where she lived.
She stayed by the beds of those children who were too sick to move to a safer quarters and which was just an incredible companion and she died early I think 33 years old-St. Bertilda Vars Cobain. I loved her story and I had never heard of it and I thought wow, what an amazing woman to overcome that kind of adversity and just give herself so whole heartedly to the mission that God had given her-to serve children.
Chris Cash: Well, and I think that one of the things that we forget about as Catholics is just how vast the communion of saints is and how many wonderful examples there are out there beyond the ones that we hear about the ones that have the significant devotions to them because they are just too many for any one person to even consider devotion to all of them.
Gina Loehr: Absolutely Chris, yes, that is totally true and I think that is so beautiful because I think the communion of saints really manifest their infinite diverse beauty of God-because we are all images of god but how different we are-different skills-different inter-ests-different cultural background-different stories and the communion of saints is just such a tangible reflection of the manifolds of diversity of God’s image reflected in hu-manity. It is awesome, it is awesome.
Chris Cash: It is also nice to see that the communion of saints is continuing to grow and that we have not-that the saints are not just not a bunch of people in robes that lived several hundred years ago. We have modern day saints that continue to be a blessing the world even in today’s time.
Gina Loehr: Yes, I think that is a really important point Chris because I think we do tend to have a sort of a cartoonish or stereotypical idea of about-
Chris Cash: Well, I think it is spread by our holy cards.
Gina Loehr: you are right.
Chris Cash: You know, this cartoonish card with people wearing robes-ok this is what a saint is.
Gina Loehr: right-roll on clouds and they have to carry a crucifix and carry a bouquet of roses all the time. Yes exactly and you know it is not to down play the significance of those saints you have those sort of characteristic stories but there are so many whose lives reflect things that are much more familiar to us and that was part of my goal too with this book. A quarter of the women in my book lived in the 20th century. I wanted to really search and find those role models-you know sainthood didn’t just stop in 1654, it still go-ing on. You know there are still people who very very realistic, very normal people who are living the coined *** (17:00) that is just like we are supposed to be doing. So that is a very important point to emphasis.
Chris Cash: Okay, we are going to take a very short break here to hear from our sponsor but when we come back we will be speaking more with Gina Loehr about real women real saints. This is the catholic spotlight.
Chris Cash: And we are back on the catholic spotlight with Gina Loehr talking about real women real saints. So as you were putting this book together, was there any personal growth that you went through in terms of your learning and your spirituality with these women?
Gina Loehr: Oh-absolutely. In fact there were times when I thought out loud if nobody else ever reads this book it still would have been worth it because it was such an awesome jour-ney for me to meet so different women who loved Christ in so many different ways. It is just such a liberating experience as I was finding all these women, it is so liberating and freeing because I just realized again and again you know sanctity does not have to fit some formula it is something that unfolds in a unique and beautiful way according to the particular life and particular circumstances of the individual. And that’s helpful for me as I am trying to say how do I live out my particular calling? How do I be a holy dairy farmer’s wife? How do I do this – and you realize well, it is something that unfolds in a unique and beautiful way testing your relationship with God and your love for him.
Great, so that sort of awe wrenching screen was very present for me as I was research-ing for all these women and learning about the different lives. And then also I was very focused on trying to find the specific concrete models of lay women, married women, single women, not just women who had entered religious life which is also very beautiful and have plenty to offer those of us who aren’t contemplating religious life there is so much we can learn there. But I also wanted a concrete example and so
Chris Cash: Not everyone can really relate to trying to live up to the standard of Mother Theresa.
Gina Loehr: Well, that is true too, you know. There are certain examples that are-just seem so far beyond our experiences like oh wow-
Chris Cash: there are wonderful examples but at the same point just like I can’t do that.
Gina Loehr: Right, so that is a temptation to think that way not true but we are tempted to think that way and in that regard it is very helpful to also round out our collection of saints who had very realistic struggles, who dealt with the same things that we did. And so a few of the ones that I met that I had never learnt about before really encouraged me in the idea that I am supposed to join their company. And not only spoke to but I can and also for me specifically I was in the vocation of marriage and family and I was particularly moved and struck by some of the married women who I learned about through this process and how they lived their vocation.
Chris Cash: Now, as you were going through you said you had well more than a 100 saints to consider here, did you have a lot of difficulty paring down to the number you needed. Were there any saints that you really struggled with as far as I don’t want to cut them but I really have to?
Gina Loehr: well, there was a little bit of that mostly the ones that I -gosh if I cut them or not were the ones that tend to be a devotion to but there doesn’t tend to be a historically in-formation for. For example, St. Barbara-Okay-I have an aunt Barbara and it would have been cool to include that in the list she goes back way back then-it is actually like, well, we don’t know anything about this woman we think maybe she was a martyr in the early church. So there were some examples like that-well you know, there is not enough here for me to do an exploration of how this woman’s life can help us grow in virtue so I had to let her go. So there were couple like that. But as far as actually making a selection of 100-to be honest it wasn’t that difficult because I was approaching it with a particular question of-okay, who are my examples of prudence or who are my examples of charity as I was reading about the women’s life’s if something stood out to me that well-that really does shows temperament-
She would be really great to include in that sections. Then it was an easy decision and it got put in so in that regard it was kind of – the list almost unfolded on it’s own as I was doing the research so I guess it didn’t end up being too difficult it sort of fell into place.
Chris Cash: And can you talk a little bit about how the book is structured, you already talked about how you divided it up into the different virtues but is there a certain structure that you follow as you are going through each individual saint?
Gina Loehr: Sure, basically the – you know the book is divided into these 8 chapters which co responses to the cardinal and theological virtues and the last chapter is that he devoted entirely to our lady the queen of all saints. But through each chapter there is a – oh, I think about 14-15 women in each section. And the way the entries will work out and they are short.
There are 300-400 words each which was-like Servient had wanted as we approached the project. So I had just given up to make sure that we know the basics of the women’s life and apply it to our own life. But anyway each entry also starts with a kind of specific little reflection and on the virtue that is unfolding and the rest of the entry and so I-there is just a little bit of application there that tries to help make it a little bit more relevant for the reader to see what lesson may be there in practical application.
Chris Cash: Now, did you have a lot of trouble getting some of these saints’ lives down into 300-400 words?
Gina Loehr: Yes. Oh my gosh! That was the hard part of the assignment. Absolutely to try to figure out-oh boy! What is the essence of this incredible woman’s life? It is a real chal-lenge to try to include everything significant without becoming wordy or sort of listing a bunch of facts and trying to make sure that you capture the essence and not being too cut up in too much of the details. That was the real challenge although I have to say with the help of my wonderful editor at Servient books I think we did a pretty good job of giv-ing a nice little bit of a reflection of the woman’s life, but certainly another point of the book is if you see something in this little entry that captivates you go learn more because there is a lot more to learn. Because we cannot include everything in the book that is structured like this. That can lead people to a deeper reflection, deeper knowledge of these women.
Chris Cash: Well, are there anything else that you want to share with our listeners before we finish up here?
Gina Loehr: I would just like to emphasis the importance that the saints are not just models-they are not just historical stories, they are also companions and friends. They are alive and well, interest reading for us and praying for us in heaven and we try to learn about their lives and I think the most fruitful and beautiful part of that whole journey is to actu-ally built what we call a relationship, a friendship with the saints, with these women par-ticularly the ones that stand out to us. And so I would encourage anyone who would read the book to be thinking in terms of expanding your circle of friends and calling upon the inner sessions of these women who have walked the road before us and are now enjoy-ing the incredible eternal beauty of a perfect relationship with Jesus which is what we are all striving to do too.
Chris Cash: Well, thank you Gina we really appreciate you coming on the show today to talk about this wonderful new book real women real saints for those of you out there in the audience who are listening for maybe the first time or think you know someone to share this with please do pass on the information about this book as well as our show you never know what kind of conversion experience you might help someone else to experi-ence if you are willing to step up and say-hey I think you need to hear this .
Please also go on over to the podcast Ally leaves us a vote or review or at itunes or you can leave a review as well this will help us to get in front of more people and spread the word about the show and thank you very very much Gina and God bless.
Gina Loehr: Thanks Chris.
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Transcript of Interview with Gina Loehr about Real Women Real Saints. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com
Listen Now to the audio version of the show.
Real Women Real Saints is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1002655/Real-Women-Real-Saints/