EVERETT — Katherine Hopke didn’t know what to expect when she first brought her kids to volunteer at a candle store run by nuns in Stanwood about 20 years ago.
Hopke, 59, has been an Orthodox Christian since sixth grade. Even so, interacting with the nuns at the Convent of the Meeting of the Lord was new for her.
She was nervous at first. As it turned out, working alongside the nuns would prove inspirational.
The nuns’ example “just kind of simplified things for me,” Hopke said. It drove home a “bigger purpose” for living: loving others and putting faith first.
When the nuns retired in 2018, Hopke felt she had to save the candle business. She took it over, renaming it Golden Light Beeswax Candles at the nuns’ request. Now, she runs the online store from her home in Everett.
The business is busy year-round, but especially during the fall and winter months, Hopke said, with a particular uptick around Christmas.
Over 20 years ago, the nuns who would form the Convent of the Meeting of the Lord came to Stanwood from Brookline, Mass.
In Washington, “we needed to find a way to support ourselves that would also allow us to work quietly and ‘pray without ceasing,’ which is the heart of our monastic calling,” Mother Thecla, the convent’s abbess, wrote in an email.
The transplants from Massachusetts had experience making “tapers,” or long, thin candles, at the convent in Brookline.
In Stanwood, the nuns wanted to try making tealights and smaller votive candles. Finding wicks that would burn well for beeswax candles in those shapes was difficult.
The nuns conducted trials by making candles with various wicks, lighting them to watch how they burned.
They’d answer questions like “was the candle burning correctly, was the flame not too high or too low, and was it pooling correctly?” Mother Thecla wrote. “Was the wax too dense for the wick to burn cleanly and brightly? What was the color and natural fragrance of the wax?”
It had to be bees
Acquaintances advised them to use wax made from paraffin because finding a wick that would work for beeswax tealights and votives “wasn’t possible.”
They tried that briefly after a lavender farm offered them a contract to make paraffin-based lavender scented candles. The process made Mother Thecla severely ill.
“We quickly learned from experience that paraffin is a petroleum product and very unhealthy to burn,” she recalled.
After that experience, the nuns went back to beeswax for good.
Through the testing process, they found a German-made wick that worked. The nuns named their shop Quiet Light Candles.
For Hopke and the nuns, candles are more than just a light source. Candles are a connection to their faith.
Orthodox Christians traditionally light a beeswax candle as a prayer when they enter a church, Hopke said.
“In our understanding, the purpose of life is to little by little become a vessel of God’s grace,” Mother Thecla explained. “Candles represent this, for by lighting one candle from another, the light is never diminished but continues to grow and spread.”
Running the shop in Stanwood allowed the nuns to connect with the locals. They would spend weeks setting up for Christmas, Mother Thecla said.
“The shop was a place of joy for us,” she said.
Leaving the business in 2018 was a difficult decision for the nuns.
“Keeping up with the candle production, mail order, gift shop and the acreage of the property meant that two things were being neglected — our health and our prayer life,” Mother Thecla wrote.
After praying about it, they felt God “was instructing us to ‘lighten the ship,’” she said. So they sold the business and downsized, moving from Stanwood to Camano Island.
When Hopke took over, she kept the patron saint of Quiet Light Candles: St. Phanurius.
For Mother Thecla, Hopke carrying on the nuns’ tradition is “wonderful.”
“We put our whole hearts into Quiet Light Candles daily for about 15 years and it was sad to close,” she wrote, “but Katherine and her family stepped in and said, ‘This is part of our story, too, and we want it to continue.’”
