Franciscan Spirituality Center
920 Market Street
La Crosse, WI 54601
608-791-5295

Steve Spilde: Welcome. Today it is my pleasure to introduce Marcia Bentley. This is a pleasure for me because Marcia is a teammate. She serves as one of the leaders for the Spiritual Direction Preparation Program. Marcia is also a personal friend, and so it is a joy to talk to her. And beyond that, I’m excited because Marcia is one of the wisest and spiritually deep individuals that I know. She comes with a great deal of wisdom, and it’s a pleasure to make that wisdom available to a larger audience. Welcome, Marcia.

Marcia Bentley: Thank you, Steve. What a wonderful introduction.

Steve: As I often begin these conversations, I’m interested to hear you describe your family’s religious tradition.

Marcia: Good place to start. My family had a very strong Catholic identity. Both of my parents were born and raised Catholic, went to Catholic schools, never dreamed of marrying anyone other than another Catholic. That was the tradition we were raised in, so we went to Catholic schools. My parents were both very involved with the church. My mom was an organist. Both of my parents taught religious education, so it was really the culture of our family, an identity – even to the point, for instance, Sundays we would get up, have a big breakfast, go to Mass together. Then, Sunday afternoons … Sunday was a family day. We would do thing together. My dad owned a business, so he was busy six days a week. But on Sunday, he would spend time with us, and [those were] some of my most fun memories of childhood of coming home from Mass and deciding what we would do for the day, whether it would be something as simple as going to visit my grandparents or whether we’d go to the swimming pool or maybe parks, or even just sit around the living room and divide up the newspaper, and whoever got the comics first was the winner. It was just a friendly and happy and very nurturing upbringing in the Catholic Church.

Steve: It sounds very traditional, kind of like the image of what people would expect of a Catholic upbringing.

Marcia: Absolutely. And we lived in a neighborhood where so many of our neighbors were Catholic too, that it was just kind of reinforced in an unspoken kind of way. We were Catholics. We had Catholic friends, Catholic neighbors. It’s really its own subculture.

Steve: When you were young, how would you have described your image of God? There probably isn’t another word you would have used as a young person, but looking back at that age, how would you have described that image?

Marcia: Very much how God was taught to us in church and in school from a child’s viewpoint that God was this all-powerful man who lived in heaven, which was above the clouds. We would look up when we prayed to God. But for me, I guess a difference that I hear compared sometimes to other people’s perspective is that God was very loving. God was powerful, but God was loving as well. I think that was an underlying factor for my whole life, that I just trusted in this loving, wonderful God who was always with us.

Steve: What sort of situations would you feel particularly close to God at that stage in your life? Or do you have any particular memories of feeling particularly close to that sense of God?

Marcia: Good question. I guess I just felt close to God all the time. It was just this constant feeling of trust and love. But when I was a young child, I don’t remember this, but I was told that I used to write letters to God and then hide them under my bed because I knew God could see everywhere. So God would read those letters under my bed and no one else would find those. But when you talk about a particular experience, when I was in high school, it was during Lent and there was a tradition in the church where, on Holy Thursday, families would sign up to come to church all night long for a particular hour – kind of like the Hour of Perpetual Adoration that the sisters do. I just remember this one particular time where my dad signed us up for like three in the morning or something like that. We were all roused out of our sleep and had to get dressed and go to church and keep Jesus company for an hour in the middle of the night. It was something new and kind of exciting, and you also had to make sure you didn’t fall asleep in church. I was the first one to walk outside after that experience. I walked out and it was still pretty cold weather, and it was just a clear night. After that wonderful feeling of peace of just being in silence and being close to Jesus, walking outside church and looking up at the sky and seeing these stars, I just had this moment of connection with everything. At the time, I don’t know that I called that “God,” but looking back on it, I would call that just a real experience of being one with God, which was awesome.