Applegater., July 01, 2025, Page 11, Image 11

Applegater Summer 2025
11
THEY LIVE AMONG US
The convent, the writing, the husbands:
Christin Lore Weber talks about her life
BY DIANA COOGLE
Contemplating her 84 years of life,
Christin Weber says, “It feels like my whole
life has been miraculously impossible.”
Well might she think so.
She spent her childhood summers not
with other children but with nature, on
her grandmother’s resort in the Minnesota
wilderness. As a very young child, sitting
on a hillock overlooking the lake, she
learned to meditate.
In winter, in town, she learned
catechism from the Sisters of Saint Joseph.
At four, her religious experiences began. At
nine, influenced by a beautiful book about
convents, she determined to join the Sisters
when she turned 12. Alarmed, her mother
consulted the priest, who provided some
made-up rules—no boyfriends, dietary
restrictions, chores—and told Christin she
could become an aspirant if she upheld
those rules. Christin backpedaled. She
wanted a normal childhood.
But she also wanted to be a nun. After
high school graduation, she joined the
Sisters. Life was difficult at first—strictness,
rules, the ban on family contact—but
became exciting in college, when she was
learning things, meeting people, and doing
art. After graduation, she taught English,
religion, and drama in a girls’ academy, and
then became head of religious education
in a large school in Saint Paul. She also
met and became friends with Father
Patrick Kelly.
It was the era of Vietnam and Vatican
II. Rebellion was in the air. These were
Christin’s protest days—marching,
preaching, and discussing Vatican II with
her students.
When she was 32, Christin left the
convent. Leaving was as difficult as
entering. The
beautiful parts of
that life—the deep
friendships, the
diversity in age and
temperament of
the Sisters, the 50
acres of woods and
farmland they lived
on, the bonfires at
night; lying on the
ground, looking at
Sister Mary Christopher (now Christin Weber, left) and
the stars, listening
Sister Stephen Marie in a wheat field at the Convent of the Sisters
to a story—were
of St. Joseph in Crookston, Minnesota, circa 1959.
left behind.
Christin suffered
Caring Community: A Design for
from depression, guilt, removal from
friends, and having to learn to live Ministry launched her career in 1983,
but her breakthrough book, she says, was
on her own.
Pat Kelly had also left the active Woman Christ, a book of feminist theology
priesthood. Two years after Christin describing Christ as “the mergence of
the Divine with the human in all of us.”
reentered the world, they married.
“Our marriage was like a halfway Though it was widely read by women,
house,” Christin says, “between the some theologians, including a bishop,
rejected it.
convent and life in the world.”
Her most-read book is Finding Stone: A
After ten years together, Pat Kelly died,
Quiet Parable and Soul-Work Meditation.
unexpectedly, of cancer.
Six weeks after Pat’s death, Christin’s Her first novel, Altar Music, was an LA
high-school sweetheart, John Weber, Times Best Book of the Year in 2000.
called. Though he was working as a traffic Her favorite of her books is No This
controller in Oakland, California, and she But This, a novel of reflections on “the
was in Minnesota, he stayed in touch. They everyday mysteries of a woman’s life.”
Her latest is Observances: A Memoir of
married a year later.
“This marriage was my initiation into Poems, written to and in response to
writers who have influenced her life
the world as it is,” Christin says.
By this time, she had written a (my favorite).
After living in California’s East Bay,
thesis for a Doctor of Ministry degree
on psychological pastoral theology. then Port Townsend, John and Christin
Recognizing her writing talent, John moved to the Applegate. In 2008, John
Weber offered to be her patron and give died of the cancer that had plagued him
since 2003.
her the freedom to write.
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Christin Lore Weber
Two years after John died, Christin
read John Sack’s book, Yearning for the
Father. Recognizing correlations with her
own studies, she contacted him. After
many deep discussions and realizing how
much they enjoyed each other’s company
and intellects, they married in 2011.
John moved into Christin’s Applegate
home, Casa Chiara, where they live a
“semi-cloistered, hermitage-like writing
life,” meditating daily and enjoying
the peaceful, oak-savannah hillside of
their home.
The Minnesota wilderness, the convent,
the teaching and writing, the husbands—
it’s no wonder Christin feels like her life
has been miraculously impossible. The
only way to make sense of it, she says, is
to write about it. “A thing is impossible
till I find the words for it,” she says. “Then
I get it.”
Diana Coogle • diana@applegater.org
Editor’s note: Know someone we should
feature in “They Live Among Us”? Contact
Diana with your suggestions.