For 20 years, Mary Rice wrote bulletin articles on the Scriptures for St. Priscilla Parish; her children secretly saved them
LIVONIA — For 20 years, Mary Rice’s columns on the weekly Scripture readings from the liturgy graced the bulletins of St. Priscilla Parish in Livonia.
The reflections were down-to-earth, tangible ways to relate stories from the Old and New Testaments to the lives of suburban parishioners.
Now, the 99-year-old Rice has even a wider audience to reach, as her columns have been published in a book “The Word of God as the Breath of Life,” the title taken from the column’s title — albeit after a little clandestine work from her children.
“I didn’t know this would turn into my first book, but my son, Ned, and my daughter, Colleen, saved my columns just to put it all together,” Rice told Detroit Catholic. “I didn’t know they were doing this, the sneaky kids. I didn’t know they were saving those articles. And the ones they didn’t have, the church supplied from their records.”
Rice, one of the first women to graduate from SS. Cyril and Methodius Seminary in Orchard Lake with a master's degree in religious studies, enjoyed writing the bulletin columns, which helped St. Priscilla parishioners dig deeper into the treasures the liturgy had in store for them.
“Mom was a student of biblical Scripture for many years, and she eventually became a teacher of the Bible study courses,” Ned Rice said. “She had all this information about Scripture, and at some point she thought, ‘You know, every week we have these readings, and there’s more to the readings that people realize sometimes.’ So it's almost kind of like a Paul Harvey-style, ‘Here’s the rest of the story.’”
Rice’s interest in Scripture began when she read an article in the Livonia Observer about Margaret Hess, the wife of the pastor of Ward Presbyterian Church in Livonia, who was leading a Bible study course for women.
“I had never gone to a Bible class before, so I went there and was mystified by the whole thing,” Rice said. “Margaret told me about her whole life, how she was an atheist when she met her husband, and how he brought her into the faith and she became a very renowned teacher of Bible studies.”
Rice's attendance at the Bible study inspired her to pursue teaching, becoming a director of religious education at several area parishes, including at St. Maurice Parish in Livonia, St. Damian Parish in Westland and St. Mary Parish in Wayne, before eventually winding up at St. Priscilla.
“Mom was a teacher in public schools for many years, and she also had a way of making the students understand the lessons by making them hands-on with with something physical, something tangible that would help mom’s lessons stay with the students much longer,” Ned Rice said. “When she was a DRE, she brought the whole scene with things like visual aids and props — things like perfume for a lesson about Jesus' feet being washed with perfume.”
Mary Rice said her experience as a mother of seven children — five boys and two girls — helped spark her creativity.
“I would take them up to the tabernacle to speak about the Eucharist. Or sometimes we’d go to the cemetery in Plymouth off Ford Road, where they have this large tabernacle, with a figure of the high priest, and I would relate it to the Scripture describing the tabernacle and relating it to the Temple,” Mary Rice said.
Rice recalled one particular lesson about the yoke of God's law, using an agricultural yoke to make the lesson more tangible.
“I said to a friend of mine, 'I’m going to find a yoke in the toy store or something,' and she said, ‘Don’t do that, I’ve got one in my garage,'” Rice recalled. “She brought it to my class, and one student remarked how he used one of those when he was growing up in Italy. It was doing things like that, experiential things, to get the lesson across.”
Rice put that same creativity into her columns, taking stories from Scripture and making them relatable, often incorporating anecdotes from her own life in her writing.
The columns were a hit in St. Priscilla's bulletins, and are still talked about to this day, Ned Rice said.
“I take Mom to St. Priscilla's as often as I can, and every time we go to Mass, the same thing happens after church,” Ned Rice said. “People come up to mom and say, ‘Mary, when's your next column?’ And she hasn't published for a while. There was another person who took over the column, who is very good. But people still remember Mom's work.”
Rice received her own immersion experience five years ago when she went to the Holy Land on a pilgrimage organized through St. Mary Orthodox Church in Livonia, where she visited Bethlehem and the site of the Nativity.
“I couldn't believe it, and I just kept saying to myself, ‘I can't believe I'm here,'” Mary Rice said. "It was so wonderful. We didn't do a regular tourist trip. We did a tour of churches. But I kept saying to myself, 'Am I really here? Am I really where Jesus walked?' It was wonderful, being right at the places I’ve been writing about all those years.”
Rice hopes the experiences she shared in a decade's worth of bulletin columns will be a spiritual guide for those looking to get more out of the Sunday readings, leading them to their own Bethlehem experience.
“I tried to include a little humor and personal experiences with my darling perfect children; I tried to make it homey, I guess," Mary Rice said. "It forced me to listen more carefully, see more carefully, and to think more about what I was reading. They were thoughts I wanted to share with the parish, and now, thanks to my kids, there is a book for people to enjoy.”
