A small wooden box filled with handmade rosaries and prayer cards now stands beside a new walkway and benches on the grounds of St. Peter Claver Church in St. Inigoes, Maryland, offering parishioners and visitors a place to stop, sit and pray.
The prayer garden, created by Lindsey Jahn, a recent graduate of St. Mary’s Ryken High School in Leonardtown for her Girl Scout Gold Award project, honors Venerable Mother Mary Lange, the foundress of the Oblate Sisters of Providence who is being considered for sainthood. Founded in Baltimore in 1829, the community was the first religious congregation of Black Catholic women in the United States.
The dedication also highlights Mother Lange’s place in Maryland’s Black Catholic history.
In 1924, the Oblate Sisters of Providence began staffing St. Peter Claver School, and the sisters continued serving there until the last elementary class graduated in 1966 and the school closed. St. Peter Claver School provided a first-class education to generations of Black students there, which paved the way for their academic and professional achievements as adults.
For Jahn, the project to create a prayer garden honoring Mother Lange began with a desire to give something back to a parish community that had helped form her faith.
“For the Gold Award, it’s about addressing a need in your community,” Jahn said.
As she considered possible projects, she noticed that other churches had outdoor places where people could pray and reflect. She wanted to create something similar at St. Peter Claver, where she and her younger brother participated in the parish’s religious education program and received Confirmation.
The project added a walkway, benches, a sign and a wooden prayer box while leaving much of the surrounding landscape untouched.
“We wanted to keep the church’s natural grounds, because it’s already really pretty,” Jahn said.
The prayer box began as a kit designed as a small free library. Jahn and members of her Gold Award team assembled and modified it, removing the shelves and painting the structure themselves. They also made the rosaries placed inside for visitors to use.
The work drew on skills Jahn has developed during a Girl Scout career that began when she was 5 years old as a Daisy. A member of Troop 319 in the Lexington Park area, Jahn said Girl Scouts became part of how she learned practical skills, leadership and service.
“I grew up in the organization,” she said. “It definitely helped me in many different ways.”
She learned to sew through Girl Scouts, and a Girl Scout book series was the first series that sparked her interest in reading. Selling cookies even helped her learn multiplication and times tables.
As she grew older, the lessons expanded beyond badges and activities.
“It also taught me leadership, like how to initiate this project, perseverance, and it showed me different ways I could give back to my community,” Jahn said.
Her mother, Kay Jahn, eventually became her troop leader. Jahn remained involved through the Ambassador level.
Service also became an important part of her years at St. Mary’s Ryken. Jahn participated in orchestra, student council, honor societies and pit orchestra for school productions. She was also involved with the school’s Xaverian Brothers Sponsored Schools (XBSS) Stewards and served as an intern with the Caritas Resource Center, an outreach ministry that assists people in the community with food, furniture, clothing, books, toys and other needs.
Jahn helped run the food pantry and took part in efforts to furnish homes for people getting back on their feet.
“There’s nothing quite like that,” she said of the Caritas Resource Center. “That’s probably one of my favorite things I’ve done.”
Jahn said St. Mary’s Ryken also played an important role in her spiritual formation.
“I really loved the community overall and how faith is incorporated into the school,” she said, adding that her years at the school and in religious education helped her grow in her faith.
Her Confirmation saint is St. Kateri Tekakwitha. Jahn first encountered St. Kateri’s story as a child while researching a saint for a religious education parade.
“I started reading her story, and right then and there, I remember telling my mom, ‘When I hit eighth grade, this is who I want my Confirmation saint to be,’” Jahn said.
She said she was drawn to what St. Kateri “was willing to give up for her faith.”
Fran Hawkins, secretary of St. Peter Claver Church, said Jahn’s project has already made an impact on the parish and expressed hope that its influence will continue.
“We have certainly been impacted, and hopefully generations to come will be impacted by her story and the result of putting her faith in action to benefit not only our church, but the greater community,” Hawkins said.
Now Jahn is preparing for another chapter. This fall, she will be a freshman at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia, where she plans to study communication sciences and disorders with the goal of becoming a speech-language pathologist.
The prayer garden will remain at St. Peter Claver, offering parishioners and visitors a place to sit, pray and reflect.
For Jahn, creating it was a way to return something to a community that had been part of her own faith formation.
“I wanted to give back to St. Peter Claver, especially because they were a community that gave back so much to my family and me,” she said.
