"YOU JUST CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP! 2025 #8

Last year, every Saturday I featured  a post called "Wisdom for 2024" 

This year, every Saturday, I will post a series of unusual personal experiences 

from the past under the title "You Can't Make This Stuff Up."

Sometimes, names or locations will be changed or disguised to protect the guilty! 

Besides, I am retired! What can they do, fire me?

Every time I look at this photo, I am amazed at myself! I am preaching three nights in a row to my relatives, friends and neighbors, both Catholic ad non-Catholic, from all over Meade County where I grew up. I am actually in the Farm Bureau Building on the grounds of the Meade County Fair Grounds preaching a County-Wide Parish Mission for three consecutive nights. The photo above only shows about one-third of the crowd. 

I could never have imagined such an event growing up down there. I was so bashful back then that I could never have imagined myself standing there in front of them like I did those three nights. Second, I could never have imagined such a crowd even wanting to hear me talk for three nights! 

I have always put myself in Jesus' boots in that passage from the gospel of Luke (4:16-17;28-29) where Jesus is practically lynched by his relatives and friends after his first homily in his hometown synagogue. 

He came to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and went according to his custom

into the synagogue on the sabbath day. He stood up to read and was handed

a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. When the people in the synagogue heard (what he 

said) they were all filled with fury. They rose up, drove him out of the town, and 

led him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl 

him down headlong.

By the time I preached this Parish Mission, I had been working on my bashfulness for over sixty years. By this time, I was more scared of no one showing up than I was of being lynched! 

My path out of bashfulness was long and arduous. In the seminary, I basically dealt with my bashfulness by lying my way out of reading in the chapel. When they were working on the schedule, I was clever enough to convince them that I had been on the list a "short time ago." By the time I got to my theology years, just four years away from ordination, I knew I was running out of time trying to avoid public speaking. I had to do something about it, even if it killed me. 

The year before being ordained a deacon, with its expectation that I would start preaching, I was practically in a panic. Luckily, I came across an advertisement for a United Church of Christ program for seminary students who would be willing to work in the National Parks and offer interdenominational campground services on the weekends. It was called "A Christian Ministry in the National Parks." I signed up as its first Roman Catholic seminary student, went to St. Richard Episcopal Church in Chicago for orientation and was assigned to Crater Lake National Park in Oregon where I preached sermons twice each weekend all summer long.  

When I got back to Saint Meinrad Seminary that fall, I realized that our first preaching class was still one semester away. I went into that class, partially "cured" of my bashfulness, and with more experience than anyone else in the class, except maybe a friend of mine who had also signed up with me and was sent to Yellowstone National Park. 

Because of that experience, I learned one very important lesson about bashfulness: the only way to get over bashfulness is to seek out opportunities and force yourself to get up in front of people to speak! That exactly what I did in the years that followed. I sought out opportunities to do public speaking. By the time I retired, I had given hundreds and hundreds of speeches to thousands of priests, bishops and lay people in at least 10 countries! 

Today, the only crowds that still intimidate me are crowds of "hometown" folks!