Finding the greatest in the least


	Catholic Herald photo/Julie D. Kelemen Duluth Benedictine Sr. Annella Wagner shows off scrapbooks that Sr. Devota LaVoi made to help a fellow sister cope with advancing dementia.

Another Benedictine sister with Sr. Devota LaVoie, Sr. Annella Wagner, explained how Sr. Devota continued to allow the Holy Spirit to shine through her retirement.

Sr. Annella said: “After she came back to us here a year or two ago, she would pray the rosary every day. She’d pass them around, and she’d collect them. She also did this with Sr. Rose, a sister who had Alzheimer’s.”

Sr. Annella gently lifted and laid out a half dozen or so large and small scrapbooks, cradling them like newborns, to show them off. She explained that Sr. Devota “would make these books, and then she would do it for Rose and explain the pictures to her.”

Sr. Rose would follow along, quietly engaged, she said, sometimes helping to make the books, other times simply watching Sr. Devota turn the pages and read the inspirational messages for her.

The scraps and the books that contain them are a visual compendium of neatly cut-out pieces of religious greeting cards and other normally cast-off bits of beauty – a piece of ribbon here, lace there, hand calligraphy of an essential Gospel verse nested in the center. In the Lenten hues of purple, Easter’s bright spring colors, Christmas reds and greens and other shades of the rainbow, the gentle consideration and regard the sisters had for each other on the scrap-booking projects shines through.