Celebrating a Life of Hope
Celebrating 95 Years of Trina Paulus
On August 26, 2026, family, friends, readers, and members of the Hope community came together to celebrate Trina’s 95th birthday—and a remarkable life still very much in motion.
Her 95th birthday celebration became more than a single day. It is now a gathering place for memories, photographs, messages of love, and reflections from people whose lives have been touched by Trina and Hope for the Flowers.
Explore Trina’s Story
Trina has lived a wonderfully full life. Explore the chapters that interest you most, or continue reading from the beginning and follow her journey in her own words. 🦋
A life of Radical Sharing, Freely Chosen. Meet Trina Paulus…
Born in 1931 in Cleveland, Ohio, I am the oldest of four. We lived in Cleveland Heights in an ordinary house, but with an extra-long backyard ending in a ravine with a stream at the bottom. My father, Clarence, grew up on a small Ohio farm. He became an electrical engineer and worked his entire professional life for the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company. My mother, Alice, was the daughter of the local general store owner and lived just a few miles from where my father grew up. Both sides of my family were German immigrants who arrived in New Orleans around 1840. My father’s family bought 120 acres in Ohio sight unseen. They traveled up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, then took the Erie Canal as close as they could get to their new land.
Visits to “the country” were very important to me growing up. I especially loved working on the farm and experiencing all the wonders of cats, chickens, pigs, calves—and outhouses! My uncle Ernie always used horses or mules. Machines appeared only for collective efforts like filling the silo. I was there and helped during those great community experiences of harvest and butchering. I feel blessed to have had such a background. Animals, growing food, harvesting, and canning were a natural part of life. Some of my first watercolor paintings were of this farm. I think I had the best of both city and country. That blend of high culture and simple rural living continued through my Grailville years on a 300-acre farm. It troubles me to see food and farm policy often being made by people who have never really worked or lived on a farm.
We were a religious, practicing Catholic family—Mass together on Sunday, Catholic schools, and parents who practiced everything they preached. One of their greatest gifts was never speaking badly about people of any race or culture. We lived on a street of many faiths, though at that early time there were no other races represented. My parents gave us a spirit of openness, and they did not fight with each other. We prayed together before meals and at night.
I took this all in and by 12 had made some big decisions about serious involvement in my faith.
At about 8, I discovered yellow clay in the ravine behind our house. Unlike the soil from mud puddles, it did not crack when I made sculptures from it. Soon I was taking the bus to the Cleveland Art Museum and then the Cleveland Art Institute for Saturday and summer classes in ceramic sculpture with Edris Eckhardt. When I was 12, she hired me as her assistant and trusted me to fire the class kiln.
At Beaumont, a Catholic girls’ high school, I discovered the “Catholic Action” movement and quickly became involved in a citywide group. In the years just after the Second World War, some of us discovered Catholic wartime heroes from Europe. I read books such as Henri Perrin’s Priest Worker in Germany and learned about student and worker movements. Here in the U.S., these became the YCS (Young Christian Students) and YCW (Young Christian Workers). These groups used a simple system: first—Observe, second—Judge by the Gospels, and then Act to fix things that violated Jesus’ message of universal love. I was going to Mass each day across the street from school at the Carmelites. The example of cloistered women I never saw, who had left everything for God, was sealed into me. I was also winning awards for my sculpture. The question of boys and first love was there too.
THE GRAIL-Grailville, the Lay Apostolate
In the late ’40s and 1950s, Catholics who were deeply committed to serving God and neighbor, but did not feel called to “religious life,” could find lay groups in which to invest their energy. This was a time when the Lay Apostolate was growing as a distinct vocation alongside the priesthood and vowed religious life. There were several important examples of this growing Lay Apostolate. They included the Catholic Worker Movement with Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin; Friendship House with Baroness Catherine de Hueck and Eddie Doherty; and The Grail in the U.S., founded by Joan Overboss and Dr. Lydwine Van Kersbergen, who established Grailville. These were the movements and centers that helped prepare the way for the theological and liturgical renewal of the early 1960s. Pope John XXIII famously spoke of throwing open the windows of the Church to let in fresh air and the Spirit through the Second Vatican Council.
By the time I graduated from high school, my dominant passion was to live and bring spiritual values wherever I might be in the world. I understood that to do this well, I needed a deep spiritual formation. As a woman who wanted to live in the heart of the world rather than in a convent, I felt there was only one place for such an experience. I gave up two full college scholarships to go to Grailville in Loveland, Ohio, near Cincinnati, to be trained for this calling. I have not been sorry!
My life at Grailville is a story in itself. I think I always had a worldview shaped by peace and justice. That vision was certainly nourished by belonging, as I still do, to The Grail, an international women’s movement. Because I was helping build the art center and our art production program, I stayed at Grailville much longer than most who came for “the Years School.” I experienced how community can help talents flourish. I had the privilege of using my particular gifts to contribute to the needs of the whole group without owning anything myself. “Having nothing, yet possessing all things.” 2 Corinthians 6:10.
My religious, artistic, and justice leanings gradually evolved into an understanding that without a vibrant Earth, none of the other work made sense or could succeed. While I remained active in other areas, I came to focus mostly on Earth issues, which also deepened my sense of the sacred. Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, and Genesis Farm helped me understand “The Great Work” we humans are called to as part of creation.
Just a few notes about the period from 1949 to 1969. During that time, I developed the art center at Grailville and, with a team, created our national art production and distribution program. I attended Ohio State University in 1951 and again in the mid-sixties—what a difference!
My journey then took me through Europe to Alexandria and on to Akhmim, a 4,000-year-old city in Upper Egypt. There, with an international Grail team, I helped nourish an embroidery cooperative among young girls.
At the end of the 1967 Six-Day War, I was evacuated to our International Grail Center in Paris, where I stayed for two years. That included 1968, when the Western world was alive with talk of revolution.
The International YWCA eventually brought me back home. Soon afterward, I signed a contract with Paulist Press—no relation!—to polish my simple Theology of Hope, written for the Grail Movement during Vatican II. Change had hit the Catholic Church like a whirlwind. It was certainly more than just an open window!
The Birth of Hope for the Flowers
I found the manuscript of my book in a closet at the Paris Grail Center and began carrying it with me. I had no idea I would ever have a contract to publish it. But wonderful things like that happen, and I was asked to polish and update it a bit.
By then, however, my experiences in Egypt and Europe—of poverty and “revolution”—had changed me. That original task was never finished. Instead, Hope #1 evolved into an even “simpler” book, Hope for the Flowers. This became a two-year work, begun in a tiny room in Hartford, Connecticut. A wonderful counselor there helped me—for free!—navigate the culture shock of returning to the U.S.
After a year and a half of very simple living, I ran out of the $500 advance, the additional $500 for hand lettering the book, and the $600 I had saved from my YWCA time. I was then offered a place to stay, also for free, with the founders of Global Education Associates in East Orange, New Jersey. Though very poor, I made my first tax protest of $4.50 against the telephone tax imposed to help finance the Vietnam War. (Great little story.)
After I delivered Hope for the Flowers to the publisher, complete with all its laboriously hand-separated colors and screens on different paper layers, I went to St. Meinrad, Indiana, for six months. There, I helped Abbey Press set up production processes for our Grail Art line and my statues, which they had purchased when Grailville stopped producing them.
Hope for the Flowers was published in September 1972. Three weeks later, I went back to Akhmim, Egypt. While I was there, Hope for the Flowers won the Christopher Award for the most inspirational book of 1972.
I came back to the U.S. in March 1973. Again, my life was about to change. On October 1, back in East Orange, New Jersey, I received my first royalties. This was my first real money ever. Later that same momentous month, at the age of 43, I gave birth to my son. How providential to have money along with a baby! I struggled with a marriage that ended and raised my son mostly alone. I studied appropriate technology for simple living, solar energy, and natural healing. I became a suburban mom and assisted at my son’s Montclair Coop school. At the same time, I was dealing with movie offers and becoming ever more educated politically and environmentally. (This, of course, is the short version.)
In 1980, I returned with my son from a year in Hollywood. I rented a room and then bought a house in Montclair, where I have lived ever since. Around the same time, Abbey Press stopped making my statues, so the rights returned to me. I began producing some of the nativity figures in my basement.
The computer became an important tool. My son and I started with a Commodore 64—a brilliant design—then moved on to a TRS-80 and an IBM 286. With a broken ankle keeping me down, I bought my first Mac, a used UMAX. It was great, and I resisted moving to the USB system and OS X for as long as I could. Eventually, I let go and bought my first brand-new computer, an iMac. Now I have a MacBook Pro, and I love being in touch with people around the world through email and Zoom.
Activism and Care for the Earth
I am mostly known now—and have been for several decades—for my justice, peace, and environmental work rather than my art or book. When my son went to school in Steamboat Springs, I discovered the Rockies and the West. I spent six months living on a mountain Permaculture site and came to love the positive vision of this movement. I eventually became vice president of the fledgling nonprofit CRMPI. I believe we need to demonstrate the positive solutions that are already at hand.
We have much to learn from the Indigenous wisdom of peoples around the world and from approaches such as Permaculture and Agroecology. These ideas were powerfully reflected in the Global Report on Agriculture, released in April 2008. My work at the United Nations has also focused on food, particularly through the Commission on Sustainable Development meetings in New York. I serve on the Board of the Northeast Earth Coalition, my local environmental support community. NEEC brings together many things I care deeply about—growing food, protecting pollinators, caring for the Earth, and sharing food with neighbors who need it.
The Earth and God are just waiting for us to get wise and act for the common good. I dare to believe that a loving Other is at the heart of the world’s beginning. It’s a world that can work if we do our part. We humans are free to choose whether to heal or harm, to love or be indifferent. Choice is at the heart of the message of my book, Hope for the Flowers.
I take particular pleasure in “composting.” I gather organic materials such as leaves, grass, and food scraps and let trillions of microorganisms transform the mix into food for the next generation of plant life. I think this is one of the most important things a human can do—renew the fertility of the soil so the cycle of life can continue! I learn and gain joy from movements like Permaculture and from local groups all over the world. Their efforts to save seeds and grow local organic herbs and food suggest the sharing world that Hope for the Flowers calls for. And then there is the wonder of what we can do to support each other, wounded healers that we are. We can offer compassionate listening, gentle touch, and just plain love! Radical sharing, freely chosen.
After some decades of trying to balance intense struggle with the positive, I feel that at this age and time of life, I am called to focus again on the message I was given through Hope for the Flowers. The global connections of the Internet, together with the way Hope for the Flowers has spread around the world, give me a small but important opportunity to say something further. I’m working on sequels and foreign translations to expand its message.
Let me get on with this task! I am trying to lay down much of my overt action fighting what is wrong and focus instead on the potential of a Hope for the Flowers movie and new books. Pulling back to get this work done is really hard for me. Maybe, for me, this is my latest and necessary cocoon.