A Father’s Day Tribute

Sunday is Father’s Day, and in honor of the occasion, I’m sharing an article I wrote about Dad in 2005 when I was a columnist for a local newspaper.

In many ways it felt like Dad was a remote figure when I was growing up, in part because I was one of two girls in a family of many boys, but also because he was caught up in what had to have been the all-consuming responsibility of providing for us. He was always busy, whether with his job as a baker or in the evening in his garden or basement workshop.

When I do recall his presence at 828, it is of him sitting on the couch reading the newspaper, for he loved politics and the nightly news, or at the head of the dinner table, where we gathered daily for supper. There he would often share what he’d read in the newspaper, of a superhighway being built that would allow you to drive from Sidney to Dayton in less than an hour or of the launch of the most recent spaceship.

I remember my father as a quiet and unassuming man whose gentle nature has been passed along to his children. Dad died in 1981 when I was 31, and while he seemed on the periphery when I was a child, I feel his influence in my life today.

A Quiet Caring Man

It is Sunday morning, and as I cook breakfast for my family, I slip on a stained white apron that hangs in the pantry. There are other prettier aprons I could wear, one that my mother sewed for me, a colorful print with deep, sensible pockets and another from my sister, Nancy, with a rooster on the front. But I usually prefer the old white one because when I slip it over my head I am reminded of my father, who wore it in his job as a baker.

The apron always hung on a nail in a stairwell leading to the basement. You could always smell when Dad was home from work, as the floury lard that clung to it drifted into the kitchen whenever one of us kids came through the cellar door. When I wear it today, I am reminded of my father, a quiet simple man who died at the age of 66.

With twelve children to support, my father was a very busy man at work and in his backyard garden, where he grew vegetables to feed his family. He was also busy in his basement workshop, where he often went after supper. There he made lye soap from the bacon grease he got at work, mended metal screens ripped by wayward baseballs, or fixed broken toys or the handle of a frying pan, all projects that stretched the family dollar. It is also where he cut his ten sons’ hair. One by one, they’d descend the stairs to his workshop and sit on a step stool under the naked light bulb that hung from a floor joist.

Growing up, I never had much one-on-one time with my father, and because of that I may have minimized his influence in my life. When I remember my childhood, I usually think of my mother as the one in charge, setting the rules, shaping who I became. I know today that that is only part of the picture.

Last week when I was leaving work, I walked by our department’s conference room and saw that the light had been left on. Thinking I was the last person on the floor, I turned it off. While I waited by the elevator, my boss emerged from his office and headed toward the conference room. I hadn’t realized he’d been working there, so I apologized for turning off the light.

 “I didn’t know you were still using the conference room,” I said. “I have a habit of turning off lights that aren’t being used.”

 “That’s okay,” my boss replied as he flipped on the light. “I like light-turner-offers.”

With the approach of Father’s Day, I have been thinking a lot about Dad. Certainly it was he who made me the “light turner offer” that I am. But I have come to appreciate other areas in which he has influenced me, like in my love of gardening and my interest in politics. I also have his quiet sense of humor, chuckling as he once did when something amused him. And today, like him, many of his children are easily identified as Kerbers by their silvery white hair.

To all men who guide and nurture others, some in their own quiet way like my father, Happy Father’s Day.

—Linda

 

 

The Reach of Catholicism

A recent conversation with my friend Kevin turned to the topic of his visiting his sick mother in Cincinnati. It was a busy time for him, and he didn’t want to go even though he likes seeing her. I told him to go anyway because he would be performing one of the Seven Corporeal Works of Mercy, Visiting the Sick. (If you don’t remember or never heard of them, check them out on Wikipedia or elsewhere. There are also Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy.)

Huh, Works of Mercy? Kevin grew up with Catholic school but didn’t remember or never heard of the Works of Mercy. He hadn’t bought into Catholicism like I did; he realized even in grade school that a lot of what the Church was telling him didn’t make sense, and he basically ignored mostly everything it was trying to teach him.
This part of the conversation ended and we both agreed that the Works of Mercy were one of the valuable things the Church taught; I added that I wished I hadn’t considered them another large responsibility when I learned them in the third or fourth grade.

Religion was an important part of our growing up at 828. Catholicism was the central tenet of my childhood, the guidepost of my character and morals.

I became aware of the Catholic teachings/requirements/rules early in life; I don’t remember a time when I didn’t feel the influence of Catholicism. The concept of god was reinforced early on through bedtime prayers – ‘God bless Daddy and Mommy and Danny, et cetera.’ It was also reinforced by our often saying of the rosary, every night in May, every Sunday at church, and many nights during Lent and Advent. And at other times for which I never knew the reason. By early elementary school I had the basics tenets of Catholicism well integrated into my psyche. To me, they were:

God was above us in heaven, all-knowing and all-powerful.

He had his son live and die for us; he died, for our sins, for our disobedience to his laws. The son died in excruciating agony, hanging on a wooden cross.

In the Old Testament there were stories of god punishing his people by putting them to death. The priest and nuns said this was OK and was in god’s plan.

God had certain rules for us to follow, written in a book called the Baltimore Catechism or in the Ten Commandments. But there were additional rules; the priests and nuns knew them and told them to us.

God established the Catholic Church to tell us what his rules were and what would happen to us if we didn’t follow them.

If you broke the rules, you made Jesus’ pain and agony on the cross more intense; I visualized a grimace of pain on Jesus’ face when I thought about my lying or using words like ‘damn’ or ‘shit’. I understand now that this might not have been the Church’s teaching in the 1950s, but I thought it was.

If you broke the rules you could cause yourself dire consequences after you died. I thought this was the worst possible thing that could happen to a human.

 

This was how I perceived my moral/religious situation as a second-grader. It was scary stuff for an eight-year-old boy, and it was the main cause of my grim outlook on life. The effects of Catholicism left me seriously impaired well into adulthood, and only by reading and contemplation was I able to understand that it is important to not believe everything adults tell children.

Even today (at 67) I still feel the tug of Catholicism. But now it usually just makes me smile. And when I remember the good things about it, like the Works of Mercy or Liberation Theology, I’m proud of Catholicism.

--Bob

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Catholic Light”

Muffy Kerber is 828's first guest blogger. She was born in New York City and now lives with George in Murphy, NC, where they own an operate Shoebooties Café. They have five adult children and on June 20 will celebrate their 28th wedding anniversary. 

“Catholic Light”

My husband George has always teased me about my upbringing being “Catholic light” compared to his, and there is truth in this. While we both know the words to a lot of the same hymns, and we both have memories of dropping a little holy water to the floor for the souls in Purgatory before we made the sign of the cross, and of waiting in line for confession as we decided which sins to own up to, there was nonetheless a legitimacy to George’s Catholic upbringing that was lacking in mine.

I think some of this lack of legitimacy came from basic differences in our natures; George’s personality was better suited for embracing Catholicism than mine was.  He remembers learning about other religions and being glad that his religion was the winning one and sorry for people on the losing religion teams. He recalls actively trying to focus on his spiritual side when going through the Stations of the Cross during Lent because to do otherwise would be a sin. I remember being in the fifth grade and learning about other religions and thinking that one winding up the winner couldn’t possibly be true; it would be too unfair.  And my memories of the Stations of the Cross are of continually peeking ahead to see how many were still left, chafing at the slow pace, and wishing Jesus’ journey to the cross would go a little faster.

But the majority of the lack of legitimacy in my Catholic upbringing came from the
differences in the Catholic environments George and I were raised in.  I don’t mean to imply that I wasn’t raised as a serious Catholic, because I was.  My grandmother Minty was a devout Catholic whose world, and her perceived status in it, was sharply defined by the structure and boundaries of the Church.  It was important to Minty that I knew Archbishop Cardinal Spellman had been a guest in her home for Sunday dinner on “more than one occasion”.  She loved to talk about how she had received a “Special Dispensation” from Archbishop Spellman that allowed her to have a cup of coffee before mass on Sunday mornings and still take communion.  Though family lore has it that this dispensation was obtained with the help of a generous donation, it was a very real thing to my grandmother, a special privilege she believed was conferred on her by the Archbishop because it was important to him that she be able to receive communion and he understood that she wasn’t able to function in the morning without her coffee.

My mom was also a devout Catholic.  Her faith is what sustained her through a difficult life, and it was a Catholic faith rooted as deeply inside her as it had been in my grandmother.  I remember Mom talking about how she and her brother would have heated discussions when they were teenagers about whether it was still acceptable to take communion at Sunday mass if you had inadvertently swallowed a little toothpaste in the morning when you brushed your teeth, or would God consider that a breaking of your fast. 

When my brothers and I were growing up, the traditions of the Catholic Church defined the external structure of our lives as well.  We had our First Holy Communion in the first grade and our Confirmation in the fourth. My brothers were all altar boys, and while I didn’t own a nun outfit like the one Linda and Nancy wore when they had been asked to be on a float in a parade, I did have a chapel veil, which looked like a little lace doily that I bobby-pinned to the top of my head when we went to mass.  Financial circumstances forced us to move pretty regularly, but the apartments we rented were always within St. Gabriel’s parish, so we had a semblance of continuity.  Yet being Catholic didn’t permeate our life the way it did the Kerber’s.  Somehow, it never felt like we were a part of the parish community.  I suspect this was because we knew our family didn’t resemble the ones the priests and nuns would brag about.  My parents were divorced and my father was rarely around; my mom was frequently in the hospital; my brothers were experimenting with drugs, and I was fairly invisible.  We were not good Catholic role model material. 

George’s memories of growing up Catholic are quite the opposite.  He remembers his mom insisting that they be active, engaged members of the Holy Angels community. It mattered to her that the parish priests and nuns knew her children personally and thought well of them. She made sure George and his siblings were daily Communicants during the school year, sold raffle tickets for the Parish Picnic, shoveled the walks of elderly neighbors, and excelled in academics. The Kerbers set a high Catholic bar. Who can compete with a personal shrine to the Virgin Mary on the landing at the top of their stairs during the month of May, complete with fresh flowers that each child took turns picking?  What can top saving everyone’s palms from Palm Sunday so they could be burned, I’m assuming to stave off disaster, when the family huddled in the basement during a bad storm? St. Gabriel’s priests and nuns would have definitely bragged about the Kerbers.

But while I concede the intensity of George’s Catholic upbringing as compared to mine, I refuse to accept the “Catholic light” label.  For one thing, I had to wear an extremely unflattering uniform during twelve years of Catholic schooling and George did not.  That alone should confer full Catholic status on me.  But the paramount reason I reject the “Catholic light” label is that I am a true child of Vatican II.  I may not have developed a Catholic faith, but I did develop a strong Catholic conscience, shaped by the ripples of brotherhood, social justice and women’s rights that flowed from Vatican II.  While my high school years didn’t contain much academic success, they did contain numerous philosophical discussions in and out of class about equality and the role of women in society.  My classmates and I planned folk masses, which we wrote our own prayers for and during which, accompanied by guitars, we sang of the more just society our generation was going to help bring about.  These Catholic experiences carved a deep place of fairness and compassion in me; they shaped the essence of who I am today. “Catholic light”?  I think not.

—Muffy Kerber