A Quark for Sister Pat

This week I got word of a Benedictine nun here in St. Paul who has been trying to figure a way to get a copy of the QuarkExpress desktop publishing program .

Problem is that, like a lot of people vowed to poverty, Sister Pat Collins is shaky in the cash department.

I know what you're thinking. "I work hard for a living. No one gives me free software. And I can make do just fine with a cheaper publication design program than QuarkExpress. What's with this nun, anyway?"

Very well, I'll tell you.

Sister Pat Collins, of St. Paul's Priory in Maplewood, has been doing her community's newsletter for four years combining technologies ranging from 10 to 100 years old. She creates copy on her PC -- a three-year-old 486 machine -- and sends the printout to her printer. The printer then sends her waxed galleys, which she cuts up and arranges, then sends back to the printer. This is old-fashioned analog cut-and-paste, not the digital kind we see in our pull-down menus.

Her printer keeps telling her that if she would supply the copy in QuarkExpress format, they could save hours of time and big bucks. But QuarkExpress lists at $895 ($550 at stores). It is embarrassing for a nun to crave an $895 software program, and that's her problem in a nutshell.

Asking for money isn't what embarrasses her. The newsletter goes out to friends, family members and Benedictine benefactors. They are all asked to make contributions from time to time, to keep the community going, and to help with their various missions around the area.

What's embarrassing is that the program seems like such a luxury, and that she would be its primary user. "Getting awfully fancy, aren't we, Sister?" People won't come out and say that, but you know and I know and heaven knows that's what they're thinking.

Maybe she should give up her idea of modernizing the community newsletter. So the old technology isn't so productive in the 1990s scale of things. Surely Sister Pat takes a broader view of earthly toil than PC Magazine? Didn't some old book say something about earning bread by the sweat on your brow? This QuarkExpress thing is undoubtedly some sort of temptation to the sleazy world of snappy graphics and higher productivity.

Never mind that Sister Pat's time is valuable, too. Or that the newsletter tells the outside world what the community is up to -- teaching, nursing, taking care of folks other folks aren't taking care of.

Or that Sister Pat has been working in the vineyard more than a few summers -- she is retired from a career as counselor at Hill-Murray School -- and someday the community will want some other able person to take on the publishing task, and the job will be a lot more attractive if it's not conducted along 14th century lines.

Sister Pat talked with the shop that sold her 486 computer, about possibly bending their credit rules to get the program today, and she could pay them back, maybe in September, when a new budget goes into effect. And she has talked to the folks at QuarkExpress, who offer a special $250 price for schools. No, she doesn't actually have the $250 today, but she knows she might get it someday, maybe.

Sister Pat could go any one of three ways:

She could graciously accept the donation of QuarkExpress for IBM, on diskette, from either the manufacturer or some wonderful retailer.

She could graciously accept a donation of $250, to buy the program at the special school rate.

She could graciously accept a used set of QuarkExpress from someone who bought it but isn't using it.

That's a lot of gracious accepting, but Sister Pat is used to it. She is a modest person. When a friend came to me with her problem and I called her, she couldn't imagine why anyone would find her situation the slightest bit interesting. I knew then she was a true editor -- perforating an idea the instant a writer uttered it.

But I think she's way off base on this matter. There are two things interesting about her quark quest.

The first is that people with meager resources need good tools to do good work, the same as everyone else. In fact, when the work is important, as I believe her community's is, good tools are even more vital. When people care enough to help other people, all their lives, without asking anything in return, we all benefit. Attention must be paid, and Sister Pat is just the sort to get us to pay some.

Second, I think it is fabulous that Sister Pat has the desire and energy to learn a full-featured, high-end desktop publishing system at her stage in life. She has confided to me that she is apprehensive about the steepness of the learning curve looming ahead of her -- something about "old dogs" and "new tricks."

But she's going to do it anyway. Which is not a bad definition of courage, if you ask me. Thus endeth this Sunday's lesson.

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