The Respect Life Committee is pleased to announce that St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church will be blessed to have a “Weeping Rachel” statue permanently on our church grounds.
The statue is located between the Parish and School in the outdoor gathering space. The dedication and blessing of the statue will occur after the 9 am school Mass on Wednesday, September 13. Please join us as we officially welcome her to our community to provide comfort and hope to any man or woman who has lost a child under any circumstance. The dedication will occur just days before the Feast Day of Our Lady of Sorrows. Please pray that this statue will provide comfort to many and will broaden our scope of how our church can embrace all respect life issues.
Please read below to learn more about the talented and faithful artist, Sondra Jonson, Creator of the Weeping Rachel Statue:With clients from the U.S. and Europe, Jonson puts everything she has into her art, whether it's a life-sized piece like "Rachel" or smaller pieces. Her work has been commissioned from the White House to the Vatican, for prisons, churches and parks, in secular and liturgical themes. But no matter what she makes, Jonson is meticulous in her work. "I can't just throw it out there, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do my best," she said. This means what she creates takes time, with life-sized pieces taking almost a year to complete. Although some artists today don't follow standard aesthetic principals, using the theory of "anything goes," for Jonson, it's an intense emotional as well as a technical undertaking. "It's not like I'm making a widget. So much of your heart and mind goes into a piece," she explained. Such as one of her most popular sculptures, "Rachel." Based on Jeremiah 31:15-16. "Rachel mourns her children. She refuses to be consoled because her children are no more," this sculpture is her most collected and widely-known piece. She started the first life-sized Rachel in 1998 and completed in 1999. Now, there are 10 bronze pieces of "Rachel" and eight resins. The sculpture is unusual as it recognizes and honors how women grieve the loss of a child, due to miscarriage, abortion, addiction or other circumstances. Jonson said she was constantly praying while creating "Rachel." "I didn't want to make women feel worse. My prayer while making Rachel was to help me do this so it's helpful and not hurtful." "It's hard to acknowledge grief," she continued. "But if we don't address it, it gets buried." Jonson described the Rachel she depicted in her sculpture as mother with nothing left, the empty blanket a symbol of her loss. This represents her complete emptiness to God, Jonson said, "and only when she comes to that place, can God heal her." "I pray every day for the loss of a child through any circumstance," she said. "I feel so deeply for all women who lose their babies through any means or situations."
