THIS CALLS FOR AN IMMEDIATE INTERVENTION
On one of my European backpacking trips, my friends and I were supposed to meet some of the friends we met in Taize to go kayaking down a mountain river in Austria. We were going to meet up and camp out in a campground along side of the river. I was apprehensive about the whole idea, but even more so when I saw the river. Because it had been raining all day, whole trees were coming down the rushing river. In my heart of hearts, I was very relieved by the scene because I knew my fear of kayaking had an excuse. Because it was raining so much by the time we arrived at the river, I knew setting up a tent was out of the question. The hotel either looked too expensive or it was fully booked so the four of us decided to sleep in the car in the hotel parking lot.
Not too long after we fell asleep in the darkened parking lot, we were awakened by a person moving around outside our car. We thought someone was stealing our car because he was standing close to the door handle and digging into his pants pockets, maybe for a knife, a gun our some burglar tool so we all yelled together "get out of here" trying to halt his intrusion! Obviously, he did not know the dark car was full of people and he was only looking for a secluded place to relieve himself! We finally figured out that he was urinating on our car! All the yelling, I believe shocked him into running off urinating in his own pants!
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I remember one particular situation when I was at my wits end trying to lead ten students from southern Kentucky through Paris, France, at the end of one of our Taize trips. They were as clueless as children and hard-headed as adults. We were standing in the lobby of a hotel at which we had no reservations. I was trying to negotiate enough rooms with a staff that refused to speak English, even though I knew that most hotel staff people in Paris were trained to deal with English speakers. I had taken a couple of courses in French when I was in college, but the French have no patience with people who murder their language, especially Americans. While I was struggling to negotiate in French, the students were loudly shouting things like, "I want to room with him!" or "I want to room with her! After several minutes of this chaos and being worn out with them already, I took the handful of room keys, took my own room key out, and threw the rest of the keys at the students! I yelled, "Here! Figure it out for yourselves!" I left them there and went to my room, leaving them in the lobby to fend for themselves! They did figure it out or maybe the hotel staff decided to speak to them in English and help them figure it out! Rested, I managed to get them to the airport the next morning for the trip home!
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Back when I was doing weddings as a young priest in the 1970s, I tried to accommodate special requests and ended up doing things that made even me uncomfortable. Thinking back, I remember putting my foot down at least two times.
One Catholic couple had the nerve to tell me that they really did not want "Bible readings" during their wedding Mass. They said they preferred readings from THE PROPHET by Kahlil Gibran, published in 1923. Born a Maronite Christian, Gibran was influenced not only by his own religion but also by the Baha'i Faith, Islam, and the mysticism of the Sufis.
Another Catholic couple requested a popular Roberta Flack song called "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." It is a nice song that was very popular back in the 1970s. I listened to it with an open mind, but decided to put my foot down as a communion hymn when it came to verse three which began with "The first time ever I lay with you!" I did not think it was a good idea to have someone sing about their pre-marital sex especially at Communion time during a Catholic wedding!
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At the Cathedral of the Assumption in downtown Louisville, we had many street people milling around all the time because we fed them at noon everyday and it had become a panhandler's paradise. I was usually quite patient with them and I even defended them on occasion. However, there was one time I simply had to put my foot down. It was at a wedding. I was not actually presiding at this particular wedding, but I was standing in the back signaling when various members of the wedding party should start down the aisle. Just as the bride started her march down the aisle, one of the street people went up to the bride and tugged on her arm requesting a handout! I had to catch up with the bride and her panhandler and coax him away from her with a strict warning of what I would do if it ever happened again!
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I remember one sad funeral in particular. It was the mother of a middle-aged mentally handicapped man. The two of them lived together and there were no relatives to do wellness checks on them. The short of it was, the mother died and the mentally handicapped man obviously did not want to let her go, so he did not call anyone. It was only when the neighbors began to smell a strong odor coming from the house that the police was called to do a wellness check and found that she had been dead for a few weeks.
I was contacted to do the funeral at the Cathedral. I remember the undertaker pulling me aside as they were bringing her casket into the church. "Father, I don't want to tell you what to do, but we did what we could to seal this casket, but if there is ever a time to use lots of incense, this is it!" We really smoked up the place! It worked! The whole place smelled especially good that day in spite of what could have been coming from the casket!
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