Protected from light but available to visitors in Ann Arbor, Mich., a triptych icon graces the chapel of the motherhouse of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist. What the casual visitor might not know is that the icon was commissioned by a now-deceased parishioner from Church of the Resurrection in Ellicott City.
The story begins in 1985, when Walter Rutemueller was working for what is now the Health Care Financing Administration in Woodlawn and he met a 42-year-old intern, Julie Walton, who had returned to school for a second master’s degree after 15 years of raising a family.
“We were just friends at work, and one of the first things he said to me was that he was looking for someone to pray the rosary with,” says Walton, who is also a Resurrection parishioner. “I said, ‘I’m Lutheran. I can’t say those words.’ Fifteen years later I came into the church.”
Rutemueller was her sponsor.
Rutemueller had been ordained as a priest in the turbulent 1960s but had left active ministry and after a brief civil marriage found himself a single father to a 13-month-old girl, Mindy. His parents in Cincinnati helped raise the child, while he provided for her.
In 2000, Mindy, who had dreamed of a large family, was pregnant with twins but facing medical issues. Rutemueller’s mother wanted to drive to Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré Shrine in Canada to pray for the babies; the family was devoted to St. Anne and St. Joachim.
Walton offered to help with driving and map reading in those pre-GPS days.
Rutemueller visited the gift shop, hoping to find an icon of not just the Holy Family, but of the Blessed Virgin Mary with her parents, but none existed. Upon leaving the shrine, they noticed a path that had the Stations of the Cross, and they prayed it up a hill that ended in an old monastery now being used by a contemplative community.
The gift shop manager there, Ginette Johnson, told them about a local, French-speaking iconographer. With Johnson’s help as translator, they commissioned the icon, which grew into a triptych with the Holy Family and then Joseph with his parents and Mary with hers. Many issues needed to be settled in accordance with the strict rules of iconography in the Greek Orthodox tradition: Should the halos overlap? Can Mary hold red roses or only white ones?
Meanwhile, Mindy delivered healthy twins, and later went on to have three more children. Rutemueller was diagnosed with lymphoma and treated at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. In November 2003, six months after he was declared cancer-free, the icon was complete. Walton and Rutemueller returned to Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré for its consecration.
“We learned that the rector wanted us to process in with the icons at the beginning of the Mass,” Walton said. “Walter would carry the central Holy Family one while one of the Redemptorist priests who came to concelebrate the Mass carried in the one of Mary as a child with St. Anne and St. Joachim. He was so thrilled that this icon had been created that he insisted on being the one to carry that one in. I was given the job of bringing in the one of St. Joseph and his parents.”
Rutemueller had the icon at his home for 20 years. During those years, he and Walton made pilgrimages and religious trips, and were active in making Ranger Rosaries, an outreach which spread from St. Mary in Annapolis to parishes in the Archdiocese of Baltimore and nationwide. Walton is still active in the group at Resurrection, and proud of the support her parish provides through monthly subscriptions, allowing the group to send rosary kits to parishes that can’t afford them.
Rutemueller was diagnosed with renal disease in 2017 and died Feb. 9, 2022. Mindy and Walton presented the icon, which had been such a comfort to him and his friends and family, to the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.
Recalling Rutemueller’s devotion to the Blessed Mother and the Eucharist, Walton noted her friend always said those are the two pillars one has to go between.
Walton tells stories of Rutemueller’s devotion, friendship with Sister Mary Samuel, one of the founders of the order, and her own conversion.
It’s a tapestry that shows God’s plan, even if, Walton says, “from our side it seems like all these loose strings.”
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