Patrick Jamieson, Victoria, BC

I knew Sister of St. Ann Eileen Curteis primarily as a poet. Initially at the Diocesan Synod Arts Festival in the late 1980s at Queenswood. Queenswood was where she successfully practiced and taught Reiki healing. Rumour was that Reiki was what kept Queenswood booming, drawing hundreds of practitioners to the retreat centre when others such Catholic places were folding, and Eileen was at the centre of it all.

Her poetry readings and even her funeral were testimony to how far afield her work drew, far beyond the usual Catholic audience in a region where religion per se had little conventional appeal. She, like Bishop Remi De Roo, held an appeal far beyond any institutional limits. They represented a movement of the spirit designed to renew the church, but it was rudely cut short when traditionalist bishops succeeded De Roo after 1999.

Bishop Roussin had little trouble admitting how Reiki treatment spooked him, to use his own term. Rather than explore this prompting from his own unconscious to grow, he reacted violently and Queenswood’s days were soon numbered.

Such is often the fate of artists and poets like Eileen, to be misunderstood like prophets such as De Roo. While her congregation supported and encouraged her as best it could, her last comment at Mount St. Mary’s when we sat together for Sunday liturgy, before we lapsed into pre-mass preparatory contemplative silence, was how she still disliked the big bad institutional church, with a knowing smile and twinkle in her eye.

At the time, I thought she might be simply acknowledging my bad boy attitude typified by much that has been in ICN over its four decades especially since Remi De Roo’s retirement 25 years ago. But now with her passing so unexpectantly from my perspective, it underlines the prophetic nature of her spirituality.

Recently when in Regina one of my daughters treated me to a Reiki treatment from a friend who has a practice there, while I may have had one treatment by Eileen back in the day, close friends of mine such as former ICN editor Marnie Bultler became a trained practitioner under Eileen’s tutelage. Marnie considered herself an intuitive healer along the lines of Caroline Myss. Whenever I experienced something untoward going on in my personal health, it was always to my best friend Marnie to whom I turned for guidance, to good effect.

2.

Eileen’s poetry was her art and part of her transformative journey. Poetry today is largely a local and regional affair with very few national poets emerging. Eileen outdrew any other poets in my experience her on Vancouver Island, filling the chapel site at St. Ann’s Academy, once the diocesan cathedral building.

She drew by the magnetism of her person and personality. To encounter Eileen, slight in stature physically, was to be embraced by a sweet and loving presence. She embodied the healing that was at the centre of her life and Christian ministry. Lori Dueck met her for the first time the last three years and was enchanted and inspired by who she encountered in poetry, manner, art and Reiki experience at the hands of Eileen. It was quite inspirational to witness this process of transformation at the hands of a master

3.

Eileen and I only occasionally encountered each other directly. It was largely what I call a symbolic relationship. We knew what the other symbolized in the world and acknowledgement came quickly and readily. I enjoyed most introducing people to her and registering their benefits and reaction. Her sudden death after an apparently successful heart procedure at. St. Paul’s hospital in Vancouver was a shock, since there was something eternal about her personae. She suffered certain physical health limitations her whole life and the fact she survived well into her eighties might well be seen as the persistence of the spirit. Certainly I see her that way. Eileen Curteis Rest in Peace.