After years of publishing prayers in the St. Charles Herald-Guide, Edna Matherne, 90, finally put her pencil down and died peacefully at her home last Saturday in Des Allemands.
“She reached souls through her prayers,” said her daughter, Mary Dufrene. “She felt this was her ministry.”
Although some may have been skeptical about Matherne’s calling and vision that put her onto writing prayers and getting them published to spread the Word, Dufrene said her mother didn’t hesitate to tell anyone about her vision.
“She was just touched by God and believed the last seven years was her purpose in life,” she said of her fiercely independent and religiously devout mother who continued to pen prayers until the last weeks of her life.
It was 7:30 a.m. in the morning at her home when Matherne said she awoke to a vision of Jesus at the foot of her bed with his hands cupped in prayer.
She announced the vision to her family and told them she couldn’t let go of the image that relentlessly pressed on her mind as some kind of message.
She prayed intently to God for its meaning and two days later it came: She was shown paper and a pencil.From that day on, for seven years, she picked up a pencil and began writing down what she said were prayers told to her by God nearly every night and then she found a way to get them published in the newspaper. Dufrene said she told them that God sometimes awoke her to tell her another prayer.
The last one Matherne was aware of being published, ironically, was entitled, “Our Days Numbered.”
From the day of her calling, the prayers flowed. Even after death, an envelope with two of them arrived at the Herald-Guide.
There is still a drawer full of them to be published in Herald-Guide Executive Editor Ann Taylor’s desk.
“She is the definition of persistence,” Taylor said. “I don’t think she missed a week. It didn’t matter, if she was in the hospital, she was writing. She just wanted to reach people with God’s message.”
And she did.
Known as “Nana” to many people, Dufrene said she was often approached by people who told her they looked forward to seeing her prayers or was told, “Tell Nana her prayer touched me. I read it every week.” One of Matherne’s sitters told her, “That prayer was for me – that’s exactly what I’m going through” and others told her the prayers lifted them up.
Matherne was also considered a “prayer warrior.”
Dufrene recounted if anyone asked her mother to pray for them or talked of having difficulties, she’d start praying. These were good deeds for her as a happy homebody who couldn’t go to church anymore because of her health and loved to be with her family.
Her whole life she’d been a religious woman even when life challenged her as a child growing up as a pioneer family in Bayou Gauche. Later, Dufrene said they were one of the last families to live on a houseboat in the area’s watery reaches.
In a historical account of Bayou Gauche, Matherne explained how they lived in Comardelle Village and attended school in a tiny, two-room schoolhouse through fourth grade until they moved to Bayou Gauche. From there, she took the school boat back downstream to the village to attend school.
“My daddy was a trapper in the winter and a carpenter in the summer, building boats, houseboats, skiffs and pirogues,” Matherne said.
Life was often hard on the bayou. Doctors were scarce and there came a time when she lost her father and several other relatives to tainted oysters when she was 13 years old.Dufrene grew up on the houseboat with a kitchen and two bedrooms. They got water from the neighbors’ cistern yet it was a time she recalled fondly.
When they moved, it was into a house in Des Allemands that seemed like a mansion with indoor plumbing and running water.
Dufrene said her mother “never had much, but she always loved and served God” so when her mother announced she’d had a vision of Jesus, it was real to her.
“I believed her fully and I am a strong Christian with belief in God and I believe God had this purpose for her,” Dufrene said of her Protestant mother. “God gave her another avenue to present his Word.”
Dufrene didn’t doubt this was her mother’s purpose.“If anyone would have had a vision, she would have,” she said. “She read the Bible 22 times. She was very devoted to God. She knew the Word.”
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