Holy soap! Bathing with holy water

It’s said that the call to contemplative life is often unexpected. Some women have always wanted to become nuns since they were little girls, while others are caught by the desire to enter the convent and serve God while leading secular lives — as lawyers, journalists, secretaries or doctors.

For this group of nuns, the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration based in Clyde, northwest Missouri, the desire to spread love and prayer became so powerful that one of the sisters turned her passion for crafts into another calling to help the monastery and its charities.

The Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration are a contemplative order whose main mission is prayer. Sr. Cathleen Timberlake, who lives in a monastery in Missouri, was so enamored of handmade soaps that she received as a gift and thought that if some people can make soap, she could do it, too. So she researched online and began crafting wonderfully fragrant batches of soap. But something was missing: she wanted to bring her life as a nun into what her hands were creating.

In an interview with Indie Business TV, Sr. Cathleen says, “When I started to make soap almost nine years ago I found myself wondering how I could integrate prayer, which is our main work, together into my newfound passion, which is soapmaking. Inspiration came to me and I decided then and there to add some holy water to each batch of soap and to pray for everyone who would be using it.”

Yes, the soaps made by Sr. Cathleen and the Benedictine sisters have holy water in them — and love and prayer from a woman who has devoted her entire life to serving God.

“Praying for all of you who use my soap is an obligation that I take very seriously,” she says. “The life of prayer that I have been called to in my vocation flows in and through my life as a soapmaker. Our life of prayer bears fruit in joy-filled creativity. We also write books, record music, and make soap, candles, lotions and salves, so that, as St. Benedict said, “In all things God may be glorified.”

Though they were successfully selling the soap, they needed more people to know about their products and their apostolate. In the fall of 2009, web designer Mark Singley, his father Bill Singley and partner Chance von Spiessbach began a project to help market the handmade items by Catholic monasteries and sisterhoods.

Mark, who used to work at Tiffany in New York, and his partner brought together their years of marketing and promotion expertise to create and launch a website for the nuns. Now, the site www.holywatersoap.com showcases the wonderful holy water soap and makes the products available to a global customer base. The site is also linked to the order’s website monasterycreations.com, which carries the products of the entire order of the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, not just Sr. Cathleen’s monastery in Missouri. 

The products on the site can be shipped anywhere in the world and make for great pasalubong especially this coming Holy Week. This is not a backyard industry either — the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration are a member of the Handcrafted Soap Makers Guild.

Just what kind of fragrances do the nuns make? They have lilac, lime vanilla, rose, honey almond, dogwood, orange, ginger, peppermint, water lily, summer blossom, Christmas Memories, patchouli rose, rosemary mint, morning dew, woodland bay, fresh lemon, cucumber melon, African musk, magnolia and lily of the valley among the 40 scents in the collection.

The soap looks wonderful, too, with that unmistakable hand-milled, uneven look and packaged with a red seal, which is a replica of the order’s emblem when the nuns profess their first vows. The website also carries lotion, salve, and candles — all handmade.

“When we tell folks that we are marketing holy water soap, their eyes light up with delight,” says Mark. “And we are finding that until we tell people that they can purchase beautiful soap from nuns that contains a bit of holy water and a prayer, they cannot believe such a thing exists. Each bar of soap is handcrafted and blessed. And the proceeds go to expand the good works of the sisterhood.”

Sr. Cathleen relates to Indie Business TV that for some people the soap is not just an everyday hygiene product. One of her sisters in the community whose brother had died of cancer used the frankincense and myrrh soap to perform a final ministry for him when he passed away, while another wanted to bring in lavender lotion into the delivery room so her child would be bathed in that scent when he was born.

Indeed, cleansing can be an act of prayer itself.

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To order holy water soap by the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, log on to www.holywatersoap.com.