Sister Kathleen Kaelin is Therapist and Spiritual Guide for the Center for Sacred Psychology and the Namaste Center in Louisville.
Sister Kathleen Kaelin works in a small office in Louisville, Ky., but one of her concerns is whether she has a big enough container.
Not a container for holding leftovers, but one to store the emotions filling the hearts and lives of the many people seeking her help in finding God within themselves.
Sister Kathleen Kaelin is Therapist and Spiritual Guide for the Center for Sacred Psychology and the Namaste Center in Louisville. |
“I just love sitting with people, not trying to get them somewhere, just holding an expansive enough container for them to walk around wherever they need to in their lives,” said Sister Kathleen, an Ursuline Sister of Mount Saint Joseph. “I feel so grateful for the opportunities I’ve had.”
Those opportunities took her from a girl growing up in a strong Catholic family in Louisville to Mount Saint Joseph Academy, then into a vowed life. She’s had a varied career as a teacher, spiritual director, retreat leader, and finally her greatest passion, the Center for Sacred Psychology and Namasté Center.
“I think Kathleen is a seeker, she always has been and is now,” said Sister Rose Marita O’Bryan, an Ursuline Sister of Mount Saint Joseph and an academy classmate.
“She holds truth lightly. That allows other truths to come in,” Sister Rose Marita said. “She’s not a ‘tent down’ person. She doesn’t force her truth on others.”
Sister Ginger Andrews, a Sister of Mercy who does spiritual direction in St. Louis, has been seeking spiritual direction from Sister Kathleen for 10 years.
“Kathleen is a wonderful listener. She listens beyond the words and beneath the words,” Sister Ginger said. “She’s very perceptive of the feelings coming through. It’s a freeing experience to be with Kathleen.”
Sister Kathleen grew up in Louisville attending Saint Denis Parish, one of five children of Julia and Sylvester Kaelin. She left home in 1956 at age 13 to attend Mount Saint Joseph Academy, at the urging of her aunt.
“My aunt thought she wanted to be a nun, and therefore attended the academy,” Sister Kathleen said. “We were taught by the Ursulines at Saint Denis.”
“The Mount was known for the values of faith and education,” Sister Kathleen said. “Many of my cousins and sisters went there, but it was so difficult to leave family.” One of her cousins who attended the academy is
Ursuline Sister Joan Riedley, who also lives in Louisville as a parish minister.
“I cried the first three years, then the fourth year I didn’t want to leave,” Sister Kathleen said. “I’d grown so close to the people there.
“My mom wrote us twice a week about what was going on,” she said. “The values our parents put forth were education and faith. That was the place to go.”
Sister Kathleen joined Sister Grace Simpson, second from left, and Sister Maureen O'Neill, far right, on a poverty immersion experience in Louisville, Aug. 24-25, 2007. They are standing inside the House of Ruth along with Linda Underwood, executive director. |
Upon her graduation from the academy in 1960, she decided to join the Ursuline sisters.
“The reason I entered the Ursulines was a spiritual calling,” she said. “I felt like it was the place for someone drawn to a deeper relationship with God.”
In 1965, following her graduation from Brescia College, she and Sister Rose Marita were sent to small towns in Missouri near St. Louis to teach school; Sister Kathleen at Saint Angela Merici in Florissant, Sister Rose Marita at Seven Holy Founders in Affton. Sister Kathleen’s eight years at Florissant were a special time for her, because the school and parish staffs were so much like a family, she said. She taught religion and English, and was the director of religious education in the parish.
It was during those years that one of the pivotal experiences of Sister Kathleen’s life occurred. During the summers, Sister Kathleen and Sister Rose Marita were sent to St. John College in Cleveland to work toward master’s degrees in religious education.
“In Cleveland, we were exposed to the cutting edge of experts on spirituality, theology, scripture, and church,” Sister Kathleen said. “The pivotal moment for me was when someone on the staff of St. John’s did a pilot course on East and West spirituality. We were doing the yoga diet, exercise, and meditation. That was very rare back then, but a real turning point in my life.”
Growing up in a very Catholic home, a lot of spirituality was rules and regulations, Sister Kathleen said. “This was the first time I got in touch with the real Kathleen and the real God in me,” she said. “It was a heartfelt experience. It gave me a sense of where I was heading for the rest of my life.”
She returned to teach at Mount Saint Joseph Academy from 1973-79. She enjoyed the experience, but the school had changed much since she was a student.
“A lot of the girls had problems with drugs and alcohol, and their parents didn’t know what to do with them,” Sister Kathleen said. “I was teaching all day, and listening to their problems all night. That may have led to my desire to get into therapy.”
From there she spent seven years, 1979-86, as director of the temporary professed, those who’ve made vows, but not their final vows.
It was during these years in the 1980s that Sister Kathleen began overlapping in several jobs.
In 1983, Owensboro Bishop John McRaith asked her to join the staff at the Catholic Pastoral Center, in the office of Worship and Spiritual Life, where she served until 1989. In 1985, she began working in the ministry formation program at Brescia, which she did until 1988. From 1989-91, she was associate director of the Mount Saint Joseph Conference and Retreat Center.
Sister Kathleen and her friend Patsy Beauchamp talk following a Namasté board meeting. |
While at the pastoral center, she worked with the late Father Tony Ziegler doing workshops throughout the diocese on liturgy and spirituality. At Brescia, she worked with Kevin Karl, now a former priest, doing spiritual direction, directed retreats, and spirituality programs throughout the diocese.
Karl, now director of assisted living for the Franciscan Health Care Center in Louisville, said Sister Kathleen is truly gifted.
“She has the ability to see the holy in the everyday,” Karl said. “She helps people find that for themselves.”
Karl said all of Sister Kathleen’s friends know the most important day to her.
“She thinks her birthday is the most special day in the world,” he said with a laugh. “It’s April 2, and she thinks the whole world knows it.”
Sister Kathleen gathers with the Namasté Board of Directors after a meeting in January. Front row, left to right, is Annette Bender, Sister Kathleen, and Patsy Beauchamp; standing is Pat Reno, Pam Ratterman, and Maddie Reno. |
While at Brescia in 1989, Sister Kathleen was teaching a class on peace and justice when a thought came to her.
“I thought I wouldn’t feel right teaching it again without an experience with the poor,” she said. “(My instruction) was all coming out of my head, not my heart.”
She spent a powerful month in Flores Magon, a poor barrio in Mexico, to better understand the people who had so little.
“I had to plan the prayer ritual the first or second week I was there, and I didn’t know a word of Spanish, but that’s how they come to our country,” she said. “All I knew how to say was ‘Donde es el baño?’ which means, ‘Where is the bathroom?’”
Sister Kathleen called those years her “midlife breakdown/breakthrough,” because she discovered “the shadow parts of my life that hadn’t gotten out as yet.”
While at the Retreat Center, she realized many people coming for spiritual guidance were also dealing with emotional problems. She saw advertisements for the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, Calif., and kept sending away for information.
“I wrote up a proposal to get a second master’s,” she said. “I was in my 40s. They’re cutting edge internationally, teaching psychology in a holistic way, that includes the spiritual.”
She concedes some members of the community were skeptical about her plan.
“I wrote up a proposal to show how it helped the community and the church,” she said. “I admit I did that so it wouldn’t look loopy, since ‘transpersonal’ wasn’t a well-known word at that time.”
She headed to California in 1991, where among her significant experiences were a 10-day Buddhist vipassana retreat, along with a Thomas Keating Centering Prayer retreat.
She still calls upon those times these days, as she leads a meditation group on Tuesdays and Sundays. “(The group members) come from such different traditions. Some are Zen, some Buddhist, some Christian,” Sister Kathleen said. “The words are different, but it’s all the same. Some are hungry for what church isn’t providing. They’re looking for where the Jesus story is alive in their own life story and in the global story.”
Sister Kathleen holds onto two quotes that help guide her. For her daily life, she recalls these words from Vince Donovan, African missionary and author: “When you walk with another person, you don’t take them where you’ve been, as exciting as that may be, but together, the two of you go to a place where neither of you have been.”
Sister Kathleen goes over a document with Namasté board member Pat Reno following a meeting. |
“I’m not a therapist who can tell you what’s wrong with you,” Sister Kathleen said. “I’m just providing a safe container so you can listen to where God is taking you.”
The second quote deals with the larger picture, and is from an Aborigine woman: “If you’re coming to help me, you’re wasting your time. But if you’re coming because your liberation is tied with my liberation, then let us walk together.”
“It’s about a mutual transformation,” Sister Kathleen said. She’s going to Jamaica with five other sisters and an associate later this month on a fact-finding mission to see if there’s a need for an Ursuline presence there. She believes her desire to do that is an extension of her Mexico and Guatemala experiences in the 1980s.
“I need to walk around face to face with people in my global family and allow the experience to expand my life,” she said.
Sister Kathleen hoped to stay in northern California for a few years after graduating from the master’s program in 1994, because most of the writers she read came from there. But two days before she was to fly home for her father’s birthday in December 1992, Sylvester Kaelin died. Her mother, Julia, was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, so after a year of discernment, Sister Kathleen decided to start her practice in Louisville in 1994 to be closer to her mother. It was the first time she’d lived in Louisville since she was 13.
She called on her most trusted advisers to make that decision.
“Jesus and Angela Merici have been my two strongest guides,” she said. “I’ve always felt (Angela’s) been with me the whole way.”
She also relied on another guru of hers, Ram Dass, the former Harvard professor credited with making Eastern spiritual practice accessible in the West. Dass was in an ashram in India in deep retreat when his father became seriously ill. He wrote that he decided to come home because he believed he could learn as much from his father as he could from his teacher in India.
“I believed walking my mother through her dementia and death would be as much of a teacher for me. That certainly was true,” Sister Kathleen said. “She’d get frustrated and I’d get the rosary out, and her agitation would stop, she’d come to such an inner peace. She taught me so many things like that. We’d sit and talk and laugh. She slowed my life down.” Her mother died in 2001.
Sister Kathleen was facilitating therapy groups and beginning a private counseling practice from 1994-1997, when she opened the Center for Sacred Psychology in the Ursuline sisters former home at Edenside. She does individual, couple, and family therapy, holistic retreats, solitary retreats and spiritual direction.
Sister Kathleen rests on the porch swing outside her office in Louisville. |
“The love of my life is doing the individually guided retreats, holding a psychological and spiritual container,” she said. In 2001-2002 came the idea for Namasté, which was going to be a hermitage in nature for people who typically can’t afford such an opportunity. Namasté (pronounced “Nom-uh-stay”) is an Indian greeting that means, “The Divine in me greets the Divine in you.”
The project was started with her friends Patsy Beauchamp and Maddie Reno, and 14 acres were purchased in Shepherdsville, Ky. But plans were put on hold when neighbors objected, including some who thought the group was a cult, Sister Kathleen said. The Namasté Board decided to sell the land, but a series of unfortunate events followed that decision. Maddie’s husband died, and the following year, Patsy had a stroke, so the project has been on hold for more than two years.
In January 2007, the Edenside property was sold, so Sister Kathleen moved her office to a small, former house in The Highlands, in which she shares office space with another counselor. She hasn’t given up on Namasté.
“Our energy is coming back,” Sister Kathleen said. New officers have been elected and the board had its second meeting in January. The goal of Namasté is to help people find God in themselves, but rather than spend money on a facility, it may mean outreach, she said. “Most people want a loving listener,” she said.
Patsy, of Louisville, has been a friend of Sister Kathleen for more than 30 years, back when the two taught at Mount Saint Joseph Academy. Patsy taught physical education and health, and proudly points out she was the basketball coach who led the academy to its only winning season in 1977-78.
“She keeps me stable,” Patsy said. “I can always call her if something is bothering me. She was very helpful when my father died. She’s also a lot of fun.” The two have traveled to China, Ireland, and other places in Europe together.
Sister Kathleen and Maddie became friends when Sister Kathleen moved back to Louisville. Aside from Namasté, Maddie is in her meditation gathering and the two are in a book group together.
“Kathleen’s presence opens a sacred space to all who encounter her,” Maddie said. “There is a sense of divine presence with and around her. This is a result of a special gift or grace … and it is her ongoing prioritizing in her personal life that somehow protects that gift,” Maddie said. “Kathleen in her quiet way communicates that she and all of us are carriers or manifestations of divine presence.”
For fun, Sister Kathleen enjoys hiking, walking in the woods, and gardening -- anything in nature.
“One of my most fun experiences was a friend and I visiting what I called the ‘sacred sites of Europe’ -- Earth-based and Christian sites, such as Glastonbury Tor in England, Stonehenge and New Grange in Ireland, my grandfather’s village in Switzerland, walking the labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral in France, and most importantly, walking Angela Merici’s path in Desenzano and Brescia in Italy.”
She says her ideal would be to do just retreat work in a hermitage, but she doesn’t think it’s coincidence that the call to discover Jamaica has come.
“I’ve always felt called by God to carry my monastery through the city,” she said.
And she’ll be sure to bring a big enough container.
-By Dan Heckel
