Iowans seek 'the way' in spiritual walk on a wooded bluff - News Article Locations on Waymarking.com

ST. DONATUS, Ia. – On a steep bluff here a path winds upward through tall cedar trees that carpet it with blue berries.

People here call this path "the way."

Fourteen brick alcoves line the way, 250 feet apart, and each houses beautiful lithographs depicting what Christians believe was Jesus' path to Calvary. The Outdoor Way of the Cross was the first of its kind in the U.S., constructed in 1861. Every Good Friday, hundreds gather for a great procession about two-thirds of a mile up the hill, carrying a large cross and their own hardships and joys.

The life of Jesus was incomplete until he crowned it by his death, Clarence Enzler wrote in 1970 in his popular meditation booklet, "Everyone's Way of the Cross." "Your fourteen steps will only be complete when you have crowned it with your life."v That is why the people come. They relive what they believe Jesus went through before Easter on a spiritual pilgrimage of prayer, but they also rejuvenate their power to endure, and to remember what is good in others and what can be good in themselves.

They come for the beauty of nature and Easter's promise of new beginnings, said the Rev. Michael Podhajsky, who Friday led his first Outdoor Way of the Cross since joining the parish last year.

He called the experience of watching "so many people" packed on the path making their way up the hill "very powerful."

"It really is in many ways very edifying, very inspiring to see so many people who come here to experience the stations, so many people who really out of love and devotion want to unite themselves to our Lord," he said.

The Stations of the Cross are a devotional that goes back centuries. Shrines were built to bring the holy places to the people after Christian prayer was prohibited in Jerusalem in 637 A.D. They became the forerunner of constructing stations, usually small statuettes of Jesus' path to his death, along the walls of Catholic churches in America.

In the relatively new state of Iowa, a Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier Weninger, came to St. Donatus, 10 miles south of Dubuque, and in 1852 erected a 50-foot cross on the bluff behind the cemetery. During a ceremony, he urged Iowans to construct stations on the hill similar to the outdoor shrines common in Europe, according to local historian Mary Pat Breitfelder.

The Luxembourg families that settled there, led by the Rev. Michael J. Flammang, took to the task, and within 10 years had painstakingly constructed the 5-foot-by-5-foot alcoves of brick, lugging the materials up the steep bluff with horse and buggy. Inside the arched entrance, they hung framed lithographs and covered them with glass.

Flammang was a celebrated figure in the community and a go-getter who, until his death in 1883, organized the people into a spiritual force in this tiny town near the Mississippi River. He is buried at the cemetery at the base of the hill.

Some of the 135 residents here, living among the 18 preserved structures that date back to the area's settlement, are descendants of the Flammang family. John Flammang, 60, is the priest's great-great-nephew. Parishioners say he's a spitting image of Father Flammang, as seen in photographs that hang in the church hall. John Flammang climbs the hill every Good Friday.

"It's like reliving Jesus' way up with the cross before he gets crucified," said Flammang earlier this week on a windy, bright spring day while climbing the hill. "It's also a feeling of pride. The whole community comes together to go up here."

He stops at the first station, where Jesus is condemned, and the second, when he takes up the cross. There is weight to carry, and for Flammang it is his own mortality.

"You've got to have some meaning in life, got to know there is something after," he said. "Every year, it's like starting over again."

There are only 130 families left as members of St. Donatus Catholic Church. Like many small communities, they share a priest and celebrate Mass every other week. Traditional devotions of all kinds have waned in modern times, but the stations are in a slower decline, said the Rev. Podhajsky.

The older people carry on the tradition, urging the young to follow.

History is all around to aid them. The church at the base of the hill was first built in 1860 and restored after a fire. The brass chandeliers date to its beginnings.

Locked away is a relic of St. Donatus, a sliver of his bone encased in a cross. St. Donatus was the protector from lightning and storms. Perhaps it is fitting. A storm in recent years toppled a tree on the Way of the Cross path and crushed the alcove on the 12th station. But the valuable lithograph had been previously removed for evaluation of its condition and was spared.

It's not hard for many here to make mystical connections. They willingly marvel at the great condition that the lithographs maintained for nearly 150 years, before they were recently taken to the State Historical Society of Iowa and replaced with replicas.

The senior church members also show youngsters by their example. They carry a lifetime of memories up that hill every year.

"The older kids in school always got to clean the path and have a hot dog roast afterward," said Bonnie Theisen, who still helps take care of the hillside, 55 years after those school days. "We always looked forward to it every year."

One man in his 90s tries every year to make it up the hill, even if it is hard, she said. He made it halfway last year.

"One year a little bitty old woman told me, 'I'm gonna make it up this hill one more time,' " Theisen recalled. "I nearly had to drag her up. I think we had her by both arms and were lifting her, but she made it one more time."

To discover why it is so important, it takes a trip to the top of the bluff. Along the way, the calls of robins and red-bellied woodpeckers can be heard in the wind.

Earlier this week, a group of eighth-graders from St. Mary's Catholic in Sterling, Ill., were making their way up the hill. They reached the third station, where Jesus fell on his path, and they were reminded to willingly accept their weaknesses. They jumped, when a tree branched cracked loudly in the wind.

At the fourth station, they listened as Jesus met his mother, and were reminded that one day they will watch the pain of those they love. At the fifth station, when Simon helps Jesus, they were told to feed the hungry.

At the seventh station, they were asked to persevere in doing good, and at the eighth, they learned of gentleness in the face of ridicule.

A boy leaned down at the ninth station and gently felt the foliage of a lamb's tail plant. "I have never seen one of those before," he said, as he was reminded upon Jesus' third fall that "your will is yours."

St. Mary's religion teacher Karen Payan's mobile phone range at the 11th station, as Jesus' feet were hammered to the cross and the children were told to accept sickness and agony.

Payan was taking a call from her daughter in Illinois about her grandson. She said he got E. coli from eating at a restaurant last year and was in intensive care.

Up through the 12th station, when Jesus died, and the 13th station, where the students prayed to accept the deaths of loved ones all around them, and to the last, when Jesus is buried, they were asked to bear it all and do right through his example.

A soft-spoken student named Jacob Rude said the message was clear out here in the Iowa woods: "I should be the best I can, just like him," he said.

At the very top of the bluff is the Pieta Chapel, painted bright blue inside, built in 1885 with money that Father Flammang left for it.

The children knelt to pray before the Pieta statue of the fallen Jesus draped in the arms of his mother, Mary.

On the way down, Payan quietly shared with a visitor what it meant to her.

Her grandson had been in a coma for eight weeks after he got E. coli last year. He had made it out of the toughest of times and had turned 5. But he was still in intensive care, getting daily dialysis for his damaged kidney while awaiting a transplant.

When she saw the Pieta, it reminded her of her daughter holding her grandson, who had been clinging to life.

With beauty all around, it made her consider what it would have been like for Mary, what it was like for her own daughter, and how so many before have managed to keep walking forward.

"So seek me not in far-off places," wrote Enzler in his "Way of the Cross" booklet, which the teacher carried with her. "I am close at hand. Your workbench, office, kitchen, these are altars where you offer love. And I am with you there.

"Go now! Take up your cross and with your life complete your way."