We invite readers to send short stories about the ways in which their lives have been personally blessed by the life and work of priests and religious in our diocese.

By Karina Fabian

Sister Noel Bruch is a birdhouse builder, honorary great-grandma, and former owner of the most colorful outhouse in the West. For her, it’s part of the wonder of serving God as a Sister of Charity of Leavenworth.

Sister Noel joined the Sisters of Charity after her first year at St. Mary College in Leavenworth. She’d been raised in a strong Catholic family and had been drawn to religious life in high school, so it was a natural choice for her. She spent her first 16 years teaching in parochial schools, and in 1966 was assigned to be a house mother in Topeka, Kan. She loved the experience.

“I got to be a mom. I had 14 boys, ages 3-14. I cooked, sewed, kept house. It was 24-7 and I really, really thought I’d be there forever. Later, it became a home for treatment of kids with severe emotional problems. Many of the kids got therapy and in order to take care of them, we had to have therapy, too. It was a very good thing for me – emotionally disturbed kids don’t let you get away with anything,” she said.

Some of her kids are still in touch; their kids call her “Gramma Noel” and she’s even become a great-grandma.

In 1977, however, she left the bustle and noise of a busy household to do something completely different – a sabbatical year isolated in the woods.

Her father was a nature lover and she had grown up playing in the six acres of woods that abutted their farm. Now, she wanted to seek God in the beauty of the wilderness. A friend told her about a rustic cabin outside Butte with no heat, no running water, not even an indoor toilet. The SCL had no plans to improve it, since it was built over a spring and was sinking.

“Sight unseen, I came, with an old Ford Falcon my parents had given me loaded with half-full cans of paint, a sewing machine, fabric, and tools that my dad had made. My goal there was to find God in the wilderness and also to do artwork and crafts.”

Her first job was to fix up the outhouse – she fell through the rotted floor. She also painted it with the bits of paint and it soon became known as “The Rainbow Room – Fanciest Outhouse West of the Mississippi!”

She experienced days so cold the toothpaste froze in the tube, built a coal bin herself, cleared streams, indulged her hobby of collecting wild mushrooms, made nature crafts, and came to know God in new ways.

“I made a directed retreat during Holy Week, and I prayed a mantra that came to me: ‘Be with the spring’.” The spring was her heritage, as her family farm was on a natural spring. Spring was her new home, the dilapidated old cabin with the gorgeous knotted-pine walls. Spring was the season, with its rebirth – and relief from the hard cold winter. “Spring was the source, and the source was God,” she said.

After her memorable year, she went to work in home health care in Helena, which later developed into hospice care. She became the first hospice chaplain there. She later worked for 21 years in adoption for Catholic Social Services of Montana and was instrumental in bringing open adoption to the state, where birth parents can keep in touch with their children. She’s still in touch with many of the 250 kids she helped place.

She retired in 2002, and now builds birdhouses to raise money to build a new mission in Peru as well as volunteering with the home visitor department of the Lewis and Clark County Health Department. She tutors kids and also models how to play with children for troubled families.

She said, “In the experiences of coming to Montana, I was able not only to find God in the wilderness but to continue the tradition of the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, who have had a presence here in Helena since 1869. I am proud of that legacy.”


Published in the Montana Catholic, Vol. 22, No. 7, July 21, 2006.