1878: Nine Days of Prayer At Loretto Chapel
The Loretto Chapel In Santa Fe, New Mexico, Which Is Often Open For Visitors
In the early days of the American Southwest there was little in the way of religious education and schooling for most Native American tribes living in the area, or for the European settlers either, in cases.
In the mid 1800's the Southwest could also be a rough and dangerous place. The 'Gunfight at the OK Corral' happened in 1881, to give one famous example. So, conflict resolution was a pretty rudimentary science there at this point in time.
There were outlaws there as well as everyday people, all trying to start a new life on the frontier. There were shootings and knifings, robbery and rape, rustling and rowdiness. I'm sure that it wasn't so common or so horrible as a Hollywood Western might depict, but all of these things did happen there. One reason for this was that there was a shortage of the knowledge of Jesus in that corner of the land just then, and to such places, the Lord sends those who will go.
For the job of reforming a rough, tough place like that, you might expect the Lord to send a pretty rough, tough man. But in accordance with God's habit of making everything he sends be completely ample for the task it is sent for, it was seven women who answered God's call.
They were some of the Sisters of Loretto, a religious order in the U.S state of Kentucky. A newly assigned Bishop of this American South West area, a man named Jean Baptiste Lamy, began writing letters to various religious organizations back east pleasing for teachers and preachers to come out to the New Mexico area and serve God by teaching locals, especially American Indians. The spirited Sisters of Loretto from Kentucky were the first to pledge to come. Seven of them started the difficult journey hoping to bring education and Christianity to the wild Southwest frontier. They weren't the very first who made such treks to the American Southwest, but the area was still very wild and untamed.
Cholera took hold of their group on the trip west. It killed one of the Sisters and made it necessary for a second Sister to return home sick. It seems like God always wants his servants to be strengthened by the facing and overcoming of great adversity. Maybe that is something that God knows is necessary, or maybe there is a spiritual war going on, and the enemy provides the adversity. Or maybe it is so the servants of God can have a crown to wear one day because they weren't provided with smooth sailing, but they sailed in faith none the less. Whatever the case, the remaining Sisters were not deterred.
In 1852 they had started their trip to Santa Fe, (a city in what is now the State of New Mexico in the USA), and, after arriving, the funds were arranged to build the school they had intended, and a convent where they could live as they worked. Later waves of Loretto Sisters made the trip also. In 1862 some sisters were trapped and had to hide in wagons when some Native American warriors raided their little wagon train. The sisters huddled under freight and such all night, separated from their escorts until morning, and they prayed they would go undiscovered where they hid. They did, in fact, remain undetected, because a fairly large store of wine was found in one of the other wagons and this satisfied their raiders, who took it and left. But one of the scared, huddling sisters named Sister Alphonsa reportedly died of fright during the night.
The happy Sisters who saw the completion of those initial buildings named them 'Our Lady of Light Academy'. But it was not until 21 years later, in 1873, that they were able to realize their dream of constructing a beautiful little chapel adjacent to the school.
Under the authority of the Catholic Archbishop of the time in that area - still Jean Baptiste Lamy - the work was commissioned. The Architect, P. Mouly, was the same man who had supervised the building of the school 20 years earlier, and with a crew of skilled and able Mexican carpenters the chapel's construction progressed well.
The 'Our Lady of Light ' Chapel is considered quite beautiful - it was fashioned after the pattern of a famous chapel in Paris called the Sainte Chapelle. It has European-style stained glass windows, and many beautiful old-world touches in its design. But when it was nearly finished (all but the stairs going up to the choir loft) tragedy struck.
The Architect had apparently been paying too much of the wrong sort of attention to a married woman in the area - at least in her husband's opinion. So, the husband shot him dead.
They laid him to rest, then addressed the problem of how to finish their church's construction. They needed only the stairs, but a problem was discovered: there was a flaw in the architectural drawings and plans. The stairs that were designed on the plans were far too large to be fit into the space that was available for them. Part of the structure would have to be torn down and rebuilt to accommodate a normal sized set of stairs.
The Sisters, who had waited for so long to see their chapel completed, could not bear the thought of doing that.
They consulted carpenter after carpenter, but though men came out and sized up the situation, none found a way to fit an adequate set of stairs into such a tight area. A simple ladder could have been used, but it seemed inappropriate to the Sisters, who wore dresses, to use a ladder to ascend to the choir loft.
They, being women of God and believers in the power of prayer to Jesus, decided to pray that God would send them a carpenter who could accomplish this task within the space that was available. They decided to pray a Novena (a nine-day continued prayer sometimes undertaken by Catholics for a special purpose) to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus and to the Catholics, the Patron Saint of Carpenters. They resolved to dedicate nine days of focused prayer and meditation to the problem, asking that the Lord provide them with an answer to their situation.
The days passed, and the Sisters prayed with faith and dedication. Yet on the eighth day, the problem still remained. So their prayer continued.
On the ninth day, a visitor arrived. He did not appear to be too impressive. He was an old man, an old man who came to them on a mule. He would like to do some work, he said, for some food.
The Sisters could not have held out too much excitement on seeing who it was that had come to their door - an old man wishing to work for food - but they could not help but mention that they were facing a carpentering problem.
The old man was encouraged to hear this, because, as he told them, he was a carpenter. And it was true, for he had a container with him in which he had three tools, according to the account that survives today. He had a hammer, a saw, and a T-square.
The old man looked at the area where the stairs needed to be, and then he told them that in exchange for food and lodging, he would be willing to build the staircase that they needed.
Because they had prayed, and because it was to Jesus, and because the man said he could do what the other carpenters had told them could not be done in so small a space, they had faith and accepted his offer.
He soon enough told them that he would need some tubs of water to soak wood in. They provided him with these. He doesn't seem to have needed anything too much else from them, though certainly they must have provided the wood if it was not already on hand. Not much else is known or remembered of the project or the man. Some say that the work took about 3 months, then one day the old man was done.
He called the Nuns together to show it to them, and simply told them "You have your staircase." it is said. Then he soon left without fanfare and asked for no pay. No one really knows who he was. When the Sisters inquired in town, hoping to invite him to a celebration because of the completed construction, no one remembered the man spending time in town.
The Loretto Staircase
Who was he? That has become a topic of research for the curious in these intervening years. There are some who think they have figured it out, but the theories vary, and it may just remain a mystery.
What the sisters didn't seem to be aware of initially is that this incredibly beautiful spiral staircase - so graceful and elegant, so strong and sturdy - was to become a puzzle that would last for a century and a half and still counting.
It did its job quite well and safely, but how it managed to support the weight was quite an unknown. It looks unsupported - or perhaps it's better to say that it supports itself. But in a way that was strange and unfamiliar to all who came to look at it. Spiral staircases were common enough, but this one has no central support.
There is no post running from floor to ceiling in the center of the spiral to bear the weight of the structure itself or of those who go up and down the stairs. In fact, when the old man left, it did not even have a banister to hold onto with your hand as you climbed or descended the stairs, which frightened the Sisters quite a lot.
The 22 feet tall stairs make two full 360-degree spirals and utilize 33 steps (which as chance would have it is the commonly believed age of Jesus at the time of his crucifixion.) There is not a screw or a nail to be found in the structure, it is said. Only wooden pegs. And the underside of the stairs is cased in their full width with a beautifully finished smoothly spiraling sheet of nicely grained and polished imitation wood as well. Articles that I read say that the woods used are not native to New Mexico. A careful scientific study of the wood finished in 1996 by an acknowledged wood expert named Joseph Easley from Missouri found that the wood is an unidentified species of spruce which falls most closely between a Sitka Spruce and an Engelmann Spruce, yet is neither. Engelmann Spruce tend to grow very high up near the tree line, and therefore are not commonly harvested for timber, anyway. And Loretto chapel is a very long way from Alaska. Since it was wood of an unidentified type, he even suggested it be given the common name Loretto Spruce, and the scientific name Pinacae Picea josefii Easley, which you will note contains the man's name! He probably found this to be the wood-study of a lifetime. In short, it took some very specialized materials, knowledge and some amazing craftsmanship to build this staircase.
You can find some pretty good quality photos of these stairs if you do a simple search of the internet.
A banister - quite fine and a nice match with the stairs - was added to the staircase by a local carpenter so that the Sisters felt safer using them. But when first built, it was just this strange set of steps spiraling upward, built by a mysterious carpenter in some unknown way.
As time has gone by and they have become a little bit famous, an ever-growing list of carpenters and architects have looked at the stairs and pronounced them unique. Scale models have been built to experiment with the way that the stairs support themselves. The concept works. But for these stairs to have been built where they were and when they were, by someone that showed up on the 9th day of a nine-day novena of prayer for that very thing...it couldn't seem more from God than if they had been lowered down from heaven!
Whatever else they are or are not, these stairs are certainly a testament to what can happen when Christian women rely with faith upon Jesus and pray for His help with what they cannot find a way to do themselves. The mysterious and very special stairs at the Chapel of Our Lady of Light stand as a beautifully answered prayer in a world that prays too little.