Margaret Rose Realy isn’t really an artist, she insists, even though her paintings of flowers, clouds and the Sacred Heart hang in houses all over the world. She isn’t a natural author, either, even though she’s written four books: “A Garden of Visible Prayer,” “A Catholic Gardener’s Spiritual Almanac,” “A Garden Catechism,” and “Planting with Prayer.”
“The only reason I did it is because God asked me to,” she said.
Listening to God is one of the few things Realy, 70, will admit to being skilled at. She is, in some ways, a professional: She’s a Benedictine oblate, associated with a local monastery in Michigan, who has lived an eremitic life marked by silence, solitude and prayer for many years. Realy follows the rule of St. Benedict, which she calls “a gentle rule.”
The silver-haired, soft-spoken woman whose chronic health struggles have made it harder and harder for her to move seems like mildness personified. She is a master gardener and says that working among flowers has brought her closer to God. Her gardens are a form of “gentle evangelization.”
But do not mistake Realy for a sentimentalist. Her docile manner veils a soul on fire with passion, courage and fierce trust.
Realy speaks quietly of her physical pain, and just as quietly of her harrowing personal history of abuse and neglect; and she speaks of her desire to see her abusers again in heaven.
“I can’t wait to know who God really meant them to be, who they were supposed to be,” she said. “I still want to love them, and I still want to know that love, and give it.”
Beauty and grace are like seeds that God has planted in even the darkest and most tormented souls, she said. It takes a terribly strong conviction to refuse forgiveness from God.
“I don’t think hell is as full as we might like to think it is.”
Again, do not mistake Realy for a pushover. Many of her paintings are sweet and simple depictions of the beauty of nature. But some, like her Sacred Heart series, are a disciplined exploration of something she didn’t understand and didn’t want to face.
“I was highly repulsed by some of the older Sacred Heart images, this graphic, gory mass. It was beyond my ability to connect to it,” she said.
The images were so gruesome, they pushed her away from Jesus. So she pushed back. She prayed, pressing the Lord for an explanation of this distressing devotional. He told her to paint.
She obediently began to depict the Sacred Heart, but “bound up in nature,” intertwined not only with thorns but with vines and buds.
“I was drawing the Sacred Heart in a way that wasn’t frightening. Drawing closer to what it means to have a heart so sacred (that) our Lord was willing to let it stop beating,” she said. “It was drawing closer to the heart of Jesus for me, who has experienced much violence in my life.”
Realy’s post-traumatic stress disorder used to make the sight of a crucifix intolerable. Now she embraces it. That turn marks the time when she began to converse with the Lord “casually, personally.”
She does say the Rosary and other formal prayers. But she also simply speaks God.
“And I listen, of course,” she said. Using something like the Gestalt “empty chair” technique, she is ready to hear answers that aren’t verbal.
‘What am I supposed to do now?’
Her faith began to grow many years before she took up a paintbrush, in a physically active season of her life, full of backpacking and canoeing. The beauty of the natural world drew her to the Lord, and she returned the favor by throwing herself wholeheartedly into gardening and teaching others how to do it.
But her physical challenges began to mount, until a debilitating bout of pain and inflammation landed her in bed for five days. When she got back on her feet, she headed to adoration to hash things out with God.
“I sat down in a pew, and said, ‘Lord, you made me a gardener.’ I was crying, ‘I can’t do this anymore. You know I can’t do this. What am I supposed to do now?’… Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.
