An army of volunteers collected more than 4,000 stuffed animals for Ronald McDonald House. Here’s why

Six years ago, John Quinata looked at his 16 middle school students at St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church in La Mesa and thought about the teddy bear his daughter got when she was 3 years old.

She had to have oral surgery and when it was finished, the dentist gave her a little brown teddy bear. She went home and climbed in bed with it.

“My daughter is 28 years old now,” Quinata says. “She’s been away to college. She’s moved several times and each time she’s gone some place, that bear has gone with her. To this day, he sits on her bed. Clearly, that made an impact on this child’s life.”

So he persuaded his class to launch a stuffed animal drive for San Diego’s Ronald McDonald House, which provides housing for families with children being treated at local hospitals.

The students collected 150 brand new stuffed animals.

The next year, they nearly doubled that amount.

As word spread, folks from other faith groups offered to pitch in — and more participants meant more donations.

This year, a record 4,000-plus stuffed animals were collected by an army of multifaith volunteers, community groups and businesses.

“I am stunned,” says Quinata, who also heads an independent outreach called Our Father’s Grace Ministries. “I don’t have words.”

But there’s more to this story than the numbers.

Much more.

Think about his daughter, who carried her teddy bear around for 25 years. Now add a philosophy professor who still has his childhood Pluto and a grandmother who remembers her packing list for college: skis, books and a well-worn stuffed koala bear singed from a close call with the fireplace.

It’s not just them. Surf the web and you’ll see a parade of evidence to the almost sacred ability that stuffed animals have to create a sense of comfort and joy. A little girl battling leukemia sits on her daddy’s knee, gleefully clutching a brightly colored stuffed lamb. A father recounts how his ailing son lit up when a hospital nurse gave him a stuffed animal.

Since the first modern stuffed animal debuted in 1880 (a pin cushion shaped like an elephant) to the arrival in 1902 of teddy bears (inspired by a newspaper cartoonist and President Theodore Roosevelt) and what is now a jungle of plush animals, there seems to a kind of spirituality imbued in them. It is as if they can transmit a sensory experience of peace and purpose with every hug.

What gives them this superpower?

Quinata has a hunch.

“I teach there are five literal signs here on earth that proves the Holy Spirit’s presence — fire, water, wind, the rainbow of color and the smile on everyone’s faces,” he begins. “When you hand a little stuffed animal to a child and say he’s yours to keep, there’s an instant joy on their face. And to me, that’s the Holy Spirit proving to us that he’s there.”

Protect and personify

Robin Gephart, who helps connect Quinata with local congregations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is the grandmother who packed up her singed koala and headed to Brigham Young University in Utah 42 years ago.

“I’m leaving home for the first time in my life,” she remembers. “What can I take with me that feels like home?”

Gephart admits we may not be able to intellectually explain their attraction. But she, too, has some ideas.

“It’s as if we are hard-wired that when we see big head, big eyes and little body, we want to hold it, protect it, love it.” Think kittens, puppies and human babies, she adds. All this feeds into “our own God-given gift of the ability to feel comfort, feel joy, feel nurtured, feel protected.”

Lisa Patton, a Baha’i and another of Quinata’s organizers, remembers she always had stuffed animals as a child. “I just always liked having a little companion with me,” she explains.

They represent what is good in the world. “They don’t get sick,” Patton points out. “They’re always smiling. They’re just happy and they are fluffy and they are clean.”

There suggests there is another plus: “It helps kids be a little more nurturing.”

Is there more to it?

To help answer that, Peter Bolland, a philosophy professor and department chair at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, begins with the importance of touch.

“It’s a bridge too far to say they become angels or deities,” says Bolland, who did his undergraduate work in religious studies and is a frequent speaker about spirituality issues. “But something in our mind-body system is ministered to by touch, and those animals, the way they are designed, they intersect with whatever evolutionary programming we’ve received.”

So why do we name them?

“Once you’ve experienced that rush of comfort and love and safety and non-judgmental acceptance, then you want to personify it. This is a primal, human thing. Since the beginning of religion and mythology, we humans have personified everything. The thunder becomes Thor (in old Nordic religion) and fire becomes Agni (the fire-god of Hinduism) and they have personalities.”

This nonjudgmental acceptance — aka unconditional love — isn’t just good for the recipient. “Because we’ve experienced that,” Bolland says, “maybe we have a shot at extending it to others.”

By the way, he is the one with Pluto stowed safely away in a plastic bag.

Multifaith effort

Across the street from the Ronald McDonald House is Rady Children’s Hospital and Chaplain Ryan Sey, who offers these thoughts on the subject: When the storms of life are raging, stuffed animals are an anchor for the youngsters.

“There is a reason our EMTs and fire departments keep stuffed animals in their cars,” Sey says. They bring a “tactile touch and sense and smell that is comforting.”

And something else: “There is a sense that they are never going to leave me. They are never going to change. They are always going to be there.”

Back at the Ronald McDonald House, CEO and president Charles Day picks up one of the stuffed animals and reads the opening words of the hand-tied card attached it: “A gift of love, hope and prayers.”

Part of the beauty of that message, he says, is this: “There is a mom and dad knowing they have got support in the community.”

As for the child, he’s witnessed firsthand the impact of these wonder workers. “That stuffed animal is in one arm and that other arm has an IV,” Day says.

A half-dozen faith groups participated in this year’s drive, which culminated last month. While the project started in a Catholic classroom, Quinata says there is no one theology being promoted. His own outreach, Our Father’s Grace Ministries, is interdenominational.

Gephart, from the Latter-day Saints, and Patton, from the Baha’is, share that commitment.

“So many congregations will say, ‘Let me stay with my safe people. They know how I think,’ “ says Gephart, who is the San Diego coordinator for JustServe.org, a nonsectarian website established by the Mormon church to match volunteers with local needs.

“But that doesn’t help us learn to love our neighbor,” she says. “We have to know them to love them.”

These drives have given the youth at the San Diego Baha’i Center an important, hands-on experience with other faiths, says Patton, who also is a former president of the Interreligious Council of San Diego.

“You can learn about another culture, another faith, a different ethnicity, but when you actually experience something positive, you connect heart to heart,” she says.

As the new stuffed animals await making their own heart-to-heart connections, Quinata offers another thought about their spiritual prowess.

“They just accept and love everybody,” he says.

He pauses and smiles.

“Kind of what God does.”

Dolbee is the former religion and ethics editor of The San Diego Union-Tribune and a former president of the Religion News Association. Email: sandidolbeecolumns@gmail.com.