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A Handmade Display of Lenten Devotion
Paxton church's parishioners have a big hand in a piece of Lenten art
By Paul Wood News-Gazette Staff Writer

The handmade mural behind the altar at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Paxton.

PAXTON - You've got to hand it to the parishioners at St. Mary's Catholic Church. All of their hands had a hand in creating a unique piece of religious art.

Their handprints and other manual labor, some 250 hours of it, went into a Lenten mural of Jesus Christ.

It now has a place of honor on the wall behind the altar of this small, comfortable brick church.

(Old bricks from the old Augustana College were used to build St. Mary's in 1910.)

For the 40 days of Lent, the paper and polyvinyl chloride pipe construction, 21 feet high by 18 feet wide, serves as a graphic reminder of the parish's chosen Lenten theme:

"Father, I place my life in your hands."

The artwork is made up almost entirely of hand tracings of the parishioners, much as small bits of stone or glass make up the coherent image of an ancient mosaic.

It seems too bad that the striking mural of a suffering Jesus-an 8-week-old baby's handprint serving as a single teardrop-will be torn down after a few weeks. The wall will be restored to white plaster.

Parishioner Floyd Woolridge saw a similar mural in a Wauconda church about two years ago.

"I was just really impressed, and then I thought: We could do that," Woolridge says.

He contacted Connie Ellis, who had coordinated that project, and with her samples and advice, was able to convince St. Mary's to take on a mural for Lent.

Last October, the parish had artists submit several drawings. Paxton-Buckley-Loda High School senior Ben Grice adapted his winning entry from a portrait of Christ he found in a book.

"At first they didn't tell me what they wanted me to do," Grice says.

"But once we arrived at the final drawing we were there every Wednesday night and every Sunday to get it right."

Grice, who hopes to study art education at North Central College or Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, says a color slide of the finished work is "definitely going into my portfolio."

But for a long while, all he had to show for the work was a great deal of goo.

"My hands were getting sticky all the time from all the glue," he says.

After testing the dimensions of the image by projecting a transparency on the area behind the altar, parishioners set out on their winter work on the mural in a heated shed owned by Wendell Watson.

The frame was constructed from three-quarter-inch polyvinyl chloride pipe. Six pieces of 36-inch-wide brown craft paper were glued together, then crumpled up and ironed out to add texture.

Hoopeston Area High School art teacher Becky Prina coordinated the work.

All of St. Mary's parishioners were asked to trace their hands. The same was asked of those at St. Joseph's in Loda, the oldest Roman Catholic church in the immediate area.

Eight-year-old Kasha Stevens ended up cutting out more than 600 hands. Eventually, more than 6,600 hands created the mural.

Woolridge and the Rev. James Heramb wanted to make sure they didn't miss anybody. Parishioner Kathy Brooks volunteered to visit parishioners who couldn't make it into church on Sunday.

"I decided we needed to get the people in the nursing homes," she says.

"We wanted every one who was a Catholic, and that meant a fair number of people who couldn't get in for Mass."

Brooks asked activity directors at area nursing homes to let her visit with residents, and she also developed a list of shut-ins at their homes.

The oldest parishioner Brooks contacted, she says, was a 95-year-old lady who did not warm immediately to the task of immortalizing her hand.

"She kind of hesitated at first because she had a lot of arthritis in her hand," Brooks says, "and she didn't want it to be crooked. We cut around her hand so that it satisfied her."

Gathering all the handprints took about two weeks. Then there was a job of getting the mural from the shed to the church, which finally took place in Kevin Bachman's semi-trailer truck.

There was another 60 hours of work in actually getting the mural up on the wall.

"It pretty much ran our lives for a while," Woolridge says.

Heramb hopes the Lenten mural, even though it is temporary, will have a lasting effect.

"It will be our spiritual goal to put ourselves in the hands of the Lord," he says.

"Seeing all those hands up on the wall is one way to remember that."

A detail photograph of part of the mural at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Paxton, showing the intertwined hand cutouts