Our little St. Peter’s Church had beautiful stained glass windows. It had a small organ, small choir, but we made good music. Our pastor always believed that we could do big things, even if our congregation was small. Even though it was a task that should be performed by a deacon, he taught me how to sing (chant) the Great Litany during Lent, and it remains one of my favorite service elements of the church year. The significance of The Great Litany is deep: It is the oldest original English language rite, dating to 5th century Romans, it is all-encompassing and focuses prayers for ourselves and for the world, and it is the strongest way to begin “keeping a Holy Lent.”
After the service on Palm Sunday, one of our traditions was to strip all the vestments from the altar, and cover all the icons in the entire nave and sanctuary with purple drapes, to be lifted off on Easter. Our parish was very “Catholic” in a sense – they had a very visible Mary shrine, with many votive candles below her. It is believed that sometime the night of Palm Sunday, one of the purple cotton drapes fell from Mary, and onto the burning candles below. It smoldered and smoked, filling the sanctuary with smoke and keeping the fire as a slow burn. Eventually, the fire slowly spread to the floor and first pews near Mary, but continued as a slow fire, almost like coals or embers, they would say later. The heat within, though was so great as to have melted and distorted the brass candelabras standing on the altar nearby. Late that night, a person who lived nearby was passing by the church and noticed what they thought were some low lights on in the church, and when they peered in a window, saw that there flames near the floor in the corner. They called 911, and the firefighters described the blaze as amazing that it was so hot, yet so muffled by the smoke itself, and they were able to contain it with mostly foam, avoiding lots of water damage, but they had to break out a single stained-glass window by the Mary shrine to get at the source. Opening a main door would likely have caused a huge backdraft and immediate spontaneous combustion explosion. In the end, there was lots of smoke damage, several pews and the floor caved into the basement near the Mary shrine, but a lot less structural damage than the firemen expected to find.
The Mary statue hung on a standard plaster and lath wall, not a brick wall, and immediately on the back side of that plaster wall was the sacristy, a small anteroom where some of the nicest ones of the pastor’s vestments were kept in big, flat drawers, and on top of those drawers, just lying on the top of the table, were the candles set up in preparation for the upcoming Easter services following Holy Week, basically directly behind Mary. Remember that the sanctuary was hot enough to have distorted and melted brass candelabras. Behind a simple wood door and plaster wall, the Paschal Candle lay unblemished. Not melted, not marked, not damaged in any way. We held our Easter Vigil and Easter weekend services at a neighboring church down the street, and we used the Paschal Candle that had been prepped the week before.
Thank you, angels.
October 11, 2002. Early that morning, my wife and I packed up our things and we were headed for Milwaukee. We left before breakfast, thinking that we would eat once we got further down the road. We were going to babysit our grandkids while our son and daughter-in-law flew out on a short trip. We were on a tight schedule, coordinated so that they could leave for the airport in plenty of time. Just before we got on the interstate, I insisted that I just needed a quick donut from the convenience store, even though she didn’t want me to delay us. As we got on the interstate, there was more low fog, as I-43 runs along Lake Michigan’s coastline pretty tight in some areas. A few miles south of Sheboygan, the fog really started getting heavy, we slowed down a lot, and I had to hit my brakes hard as I saw a vehicle in front of me pull over hard and the driver jumped out – turned out he was a local volunteer fireman that had been directed to divert traffic off the interstate. He frantically waved us to get off the highway at the exit ramp. I rolled down the window to ask what was up and he just screamed “Get off the highway! There’s a huge pileup just ahead! Get off now!” We took a meandering parallel way on back roads south and got back on I-43 a few miles later. One of the kids called us, as they knew our morning schedule, and they wanted to know if we had seen the big pile-up. We had not. They said it was all over the news, that there was a big pileup in the fog near Oostburg. People who experienced it said it was suddenly a “wall of fog”, and we can attest to that. In the end, there were ~40 vehicles involved, 10 deaths, and 39 injured in the deadliest traffic incident in Wisconsin’s history. The first responder who waved us off the highway turned out to be our lifesaver that day, but the donut played a part, too. Had I not stopped for the donut, we would have been at that spot 2-3 minutes sooner, and never have seen the first responder.
I had the wonderful opportunity to visit India in 2019. My first stop was in Tiptur, Karnataka, about 3 hours’ drive west of Bengaluru. They speak a language called Kannada there. Hoṭṭe tumbide (sounds like “otay toombiday”) is a Kannada phrase that means “Full stomach”. When I learned the phrase, I had just finished a very filling lunch meal with 5-6 Karnatakan fellows, and while I indeed had a full stomach from the fantastic lunch presentation and meal, they helped me understand that hoṭṭe tumbide had a second meaning or connotation, that one’s life was full, a feeling encompassing gratefulness and peaceful satisfaction, one which transcended the fullness from the meal itself. I found myself feeling that hoṭṭe tumbide feeling, along with a desire to help others experience that feeling. It lent itself well to using it as a general greeting. The locals certainly found it engaging and positive.
My dad did, too, but that’s another story. My mother was what you would call an extremely hard-working, high-achieving champion of her beliefs and her family. I am the 3rd son born to my parents, and after I was born, my parents started adopting. They didn’t stop until they had adopted 13 more – 5 from Korea, 3 from the Philippines, and 5 mixed-race from the U.S. All considered “hard-to-place” kids. Both of my parents were highly involved in the equal rights movement of the ‘60’s in Milwaukee, taking us to picket for our first time when I was only 5 years old, protesting the prohibition of black membership in social clubs like the Elks. She took us all along as kids while she taught English to migrant worker families (some of whom ended up lifelong friends), but most of all, our parents taught us to appreciate other cultures, foods, music, people who didn’t look like us or talk like us. It shaped us all, and I didn’t really appreciate that for many years. She also taught us to live thankfully, with gratefulness simmered into our sauce, and with a song on our hearts and a smile on our face.
“Take things that are light enough to carry and heavy enough to remember.”