By Maggie Beamguard
Insider Editor
Among the modest brick office buildings on Seven Lakes Drive stands St. Mary Magdalene Episcopal Church. Were it not for the white crosses adorning the wide, sloping roof and tasteful signage, one could easily mistake it for another dentist office or pharmacy.
But inside contains a carefully appointed sanctuary where a new vicar, the Rev. Colette Bachand, presides. With a welcoming smile and attentive gaze, Bachand seems already at ease in the church building bearing the name of the oft misunderstood saint.
“I’m very drawn to our namesake, Mary Magdelene,” said Bachand. “Western theology kind of did her a disservice.” History paints a caricature of her as a woman of ill repute while glossing over her committed servanthood and love of Jesus.
“She was a remarkably spiritual follower, dedicated and willing to do the work. She did the dirty work. She held the bloody hands. She stayed by the cross. She witnessed pain. She didn’t run away. She kept going. And she wasn’t afraid of painful places,” said Bachand.
She identifies with the saint’s perseverance. The Saint’s unofficial motto, “just keep going,” echoes through her life’s journey of learning, loss and faith.
Bachand brings this grounded, pastoral presence to her new role as vicar of the Seven Lakes Parish.
“I just utterly trusted: ‘Just keep going,’” Bachand said of her journey here. “It sounds simple, but that trust carried me through every transition.”
A Call That Came Early
Bachand grew up in a French Canadian Roman Catholic Family in Massachusetts. As a second grader in the mid-70s, she heard her first clear call to ministry. The parish priest visited the classroom and announced that he was there to talk to the boys and instructed the girls to put their heads on their desks. But that didn’t stop Bachand from listening.
She heard Father Mark describe the role of altar boy and learning about God and the sacredness of being on the altar. “That’s what I want to do,” she thought. “My fireworks were going off, you know?”
When she got home her mother helped her write a letter to the bishop to seek permission to serve. She no longer has the letter she received back, but she clearly remembers what it said: “Dear Colette, girls are not allowed on the altar in church, but if you’d like, we can get you a job sweeping the church after school.”
The decision stung. “I still hate housework,” she laughs.
At the time she didn’t know she could question such pronouncements. But the call remained strong. “In fact, as a little girl, I used to hold mass in my room with my Barbie dolls and my teddy bears. My brush was a little microphone I used to offer a little homily to my Barbies.”
Call Reimagined
Although Bachand could not serve God in the capacity she most desired as a young person, she believed she could somehow help the world through writing. She attended Emerson College in Boston where she studied creative writing before pursuing journalism.
Her career in journalism spanned 18 years. She spent most of those years with a newspaper called Travel New England where she worked as a feature editor, general editor and manager.
The vocation of writing came as a natural, familial impulse. Her mother’s side of the family are Kerouacs, of novelist Jack Kerouac “On the Road” fame.
Bachand continued to explore spiritual matters while working as a journalist, eventually landing at an Episcopal church when seeking a faith community to share with her two children.
At the age of 42, the old dreams returned. One morning over coffee, she turned to her former husband and announced, “I’m pretty sure I want to be a priest.” He replied,”Well, maybe it’s not too late.”
Ministry in Hard Places
Bachand’s first day at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. fell on 9/11. What started as an exciting morning in her new chapter quickly turned into a day of grief and fear. After a welcome breakfast the students were heading to a seminary orientation meeting when the world changed in a moment.
She remembers gathering in the chapel with her new classmates while they cried and prayed. “There was so much pain that day,” she reflects. “And the invitation of ministry is to just sit in the pain.”
It may not have been the way she would have written her new beginning, but the immediate immersion into collective grief on Bachand’s first day of seminary – without a doubt – shaped her call going forward.
She worked in the parish for several years, she had a heart for chaplaincy and became a hospice chaplain. Through this meaningful work, she encountered families enduring the “long goodbye” as they coped with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.
“That grief is different,” she said. “Nobody in seminary talks about Alzheimer’s let alone geriatric care.”
Her work became personal when her own father was diagnosed with vascular dementia. As a caregiver and a chaplain, she gained firsthand experience in the hard places of ministry. She also grew professionally, gaining skills as a dementia specialist and pursuing a certificate degree in Behavioral Health of Older Adults from Boston University.
In 2017, she traveled the country with the Episcopal Church Pension Group helping equip clergy and faith communities in care of people with dementia. She wrote about her learnings in her book, “Do This in Remembrance of Me: Spiritual Care of those with Alzheimer’s and Dementia.”
Bachand is a certified dementia care trainer with the National Council of Certified
Dementia Practitioners and and has special training with Teepa Snow’s “Positive Approach.” She has been featured on Alzheimer’s Radio network, ourparents.org, and was a columnist for “Outreach NC,” a monthly magazine for adults 55 and over in North Carolina.
Strength in the Broken Places
In 2018, in the wake of a divorce the year prior, Bachand found herself unexpectedly laying on the floor of her parish during coffee hour.
“Someone left their cane sticking out,” she said. “Apparently I took flight. My parishioners said they heard it, but I cracked my hip. There is nothing like the parish rector being taken out of the church on Sunday on a stretcher in an alb, stole and the whole look.”
Bachand found herself sitting in her big, old Victorian home healing from unexpected hip surgery — they had to cut the alb off of her in the emergency room — with bills piling up and wondering what she was going to do.
She describes throwing herself a pity party one Friday afternoon. She decided to check out job listings through the Episcopal church. That is when she saw the posting for a chaplain at Penick Village in Southern Pines.The job description for “chaplain” fit her to a T, kind of like that alb before they cut it off her. She applied and six weeks later moved south, her own cane in hand.
Bachand cherishes her rich years at Penick and the life she has created in Moore County. Her mother and daughter have both moved to the area. She has remarried and lives with her husband, Todd Johnson in Pinehurst, NC.
She has a house on a little pond which affords her a beautiful, sacred space. “I needed peace and quiet to heal.”
The Evolution of a Call
As Bachand approaches her 60th birthday next year, she began discerning what the next decade might look like. At the same time, St. Mary Magdalene Episcopal Church was discerning its own future after years of challenge.
“At the same time they were discerning, I was discerning,” she said. “There was just — trust,” she said. She heard again the invitation to “Just keep going.”
Bachand describes the parish as a “little Cheers,” where everyone knows each other and there is a sense of belonging. Despite its small size, the parish supports numerous nonprofits and remains deeply committed to serving Moore County.
“This isn’t a big cathedral,” Bachand said. “But you know what? We are not spending half of our budget heating and maintaining it. We can do more for others.”
In last year’s budget they supported 10 different organizations, all but two within the county.
“This is a tough time to be living,” she said. “There’s so much loneliness. Faith communities can be places where people reconnect with each other and with themselves.”
As the parish and priest begin doing ministry together, they have been guided by a central question Bachand poses, “Where can we love more?”
Bachand, hopes to bring her gifts for caregiver support and dementia-friendly care to the parish and the wider community of Seven Lakes. She was involved as a champion with the year-long Engaged Brains Project directed by Dr. Karen Sullivan, which provided a year-long public training program to increase dementia knowledge, care skills and support with the goal of changing the culture of dementia care.
The work of the Engaged Brains Project continues in a monthly community circle program at Community Presbyterian Church, 125 Everette Road, Pinehurst, in which Bachand also participates called “Still Us.”
The church would like to bring some of these opportunities to Seven Lakes.
“These are just ways of saying to the community, we want to know what you need, and we want to be here to support and love and care, you know, life is hard, but maybe we can figure it out together.”
For Bachand, love is the way to keep going.
“Love one another, and the rest will take care of itself,” she said. “If we don’t start there, we won’t go anywhere. We just take a hand and walk together.”
St. Mary Magdalene Episcopal Church, 1145 Seven Lakes Drive, meets for worship at 10 a.m. each Sunday.
Contact Maggie Beamguard at maggie@thepilot.com.
