The great educators of American youth may not be the pastors or principals, not the parents or the teachers, but with all due respect to these important individuals – the real educators may just be the school janitors.
I remember the janitor from my elementary school, Ss. Joseph and Paul, although I honestly don’t remember his name. I’m not really sure I ever knew his real name. I always called him Yogi Bear and he always called me Booboo. All the other kids called him Yogi Bear, too; and all the other kids had the same name I did. However, I knew in my heart and in fact that Yogi knew me personally, and that my name meant something very different from all the other Booboos.
So what about the education I received from the school janitor? Volumes could not hold these treasures.
Yogi Bear had a watch, a beautiful gold pocket watch with delicately detailed black hands. It was more than a watch, however. It was a tool. The school ran on it. Mass began by it. Important people may have set the times when things would happen, but they nevertheless happened by Yogi’s watch. He set the classroom clocks and the one in the principal’s office, too. The principal’s important timepiece determined many grave events, but its importance depended on a higher source. Sister Dorothy Marie may have taught me to tell time (or was it my mother?), but Yogi Bear, the school janitor, taught me about time itself, and the sway it held in people’s lives. I learned about time from the timekeeper.
Many privileges and responsibilities came my way in my education; patrol boy, president of the C.S.M.C., student receptionist. There was no task I approached with more awe, however, than those reverent occasions when Yogi Bear handed me the rope (me! imagine!) to pull the Angelus bell. As we awaited the famous watch to tell us just the right moment, Yogi gave me my instructions: the right tension, not too hard, let the rope slide for the second ring before pulling again. Wait. Rhythm is important. I, Booboo, made mistakes, but Yogi Bear had confidence in me. I learned from him that I could have confidence in myself. It might be odd, but I grieve for the boys and girls of today whose churches’ electric chimes deny them the opportunity to learn the mystical lesson of ringing the church bell. Honestly, I still feel its weight and response.
Yogi was a quiet man. He had his own niche in the boiler room, and I suppose I envied him that spot. Niches in boiler rooms are fertile ground for the seeds of contemplation. Yogi moved at his own pace, but always seemed to be working. He was kind to me, always ready to share his knowledge, but perhaps more importantly, his experience. Yogi didn’t necessarily teach the lesson, he was the lesson. He was nobility of character; he was humility – humility in touch with his own intrinsic worth. He was patience and calm.
Yogi shared important, lasting things. He knew about boys and pocket watches, boys and church bells. Gladly would he learn, and gladly teach; but he wasn’t the teacher. He was the school janitor. – T.R.
written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 8, 1987
Saturday, March 21, 2009
What happened to courtesy?
Courtesy does not come to us naturally. It’s artificial, learned. It’s a lubricant in society that eases our relationships with one another. It’s artificial, but it isn’t phony. I believe it’s a necessity in an ever shorter supply.
Having been brought up in Kentucky, one might say I have been influenced by the southern traditions of high congeniality. Huck Finn’s “Yes, ma’ams” come to mind; and I do indeed still say yes, ma’am. The night they drove old Dixie down was a night no doubt duly accounted for in Divine Providence, but good manners began to die, too; and I’ll call that a shame.
Courtesy is right and important. St. Paul says in Philippians, “…Let all parties think humbly of others as superior to themselves, each of you looking to other’s interests rather than to his own.” If I push in ahead of you, grunt when you speak, in general fail in civility, much less pay deference to you dignity, I have done more than abrogate courtesy, I have harmed you. That makes it a moral matter.
I’m not talking about knowing which fork to pick out of a line of forks at a state dinner, but the common greeting, the consideration and respect we as individuals owe to one another.
Something grates against my bones when I hear a youngster respond to a teacher with “yeah.” Something goes to war inside me what a failure to hear is rejoined with “what?” Something wrinkles my brow when overfamiliarity occurs where unfamiliarity exists.
Words are, too, important. It does matter that people say please, that people say excuse me, that people beg people’s pardon. Addresses like Mr. and Mrs. and Ms. and Father and Sister and Brother and Bishop all matter. Children do need to learn to say thank you, and not just grab the candy and run. Courtesy is tightly linked with words – they are tools of respect; they erect it where it did not stand.
There are times of course, when words are obnoxious. Someone obstreperously butting into a conversation would do well to keep silence. There’s a time for reverent quiet; there’s a time to make noise.
It’s true, manners can be carried to ridiculous extremes. The French, in their précieux period, were loath to refer to teeth, for example, considering the word too earthy. They preferred “the furnishings of the mouth.” They disliked “feet,” preferring “les petites souffrantes,” the little sufferers. Sometimes discourtesy can be disguised in preciosity. A friend one filing through the college cafeteria line told one of the cooks: “Madame, this fare is a gastronomical felony!” To which she replied, “Why thank you!”
Courtesy, for all its sometimes culturally affected oddities, nevertheless has a certain core value, an intrinsic place in any time period. For all the funny distortions that can occur, we need cultural mechanisms for getting along. For sure, the gentility of the South is gone. Going, too, I’m afraid are the sentient good manners of the North, East and West.
Lord, thank you for giving us one another. Lord, please guide us in our ways. –T.R.
written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 1st, 1987
Having been brought up in Kentucky, one might say I have been influenced by the southern traditions of high congeniality. Huck Finn’s “Yes, ma’ams” come to mind; and I do indeed still say yes, ma’am. The night they drove old Dixie down was a night no doubt duly accounted for in Divine Providence, but good manners began to die, too; and I’ll call that a shame.
Courtesy is right and important. St. Paul says in Philippians, “…Let all parties think humbly of others as superior to themselves, each of you looking to other’s interests rather than to his own.” If I push in ahead of you, grunt when you speak, in general fail in civility, much less pay deference to you dignity, I have done more than abrogate courtesy, I have harmed you. That makes it a moral matter.
I’m not talking about knowing which fork to pick out of a line of forks at a state dinner, but the common greeting, the consideration and respect we as individuals owe to one another.
Something grates against my bones when I hear a youngster respond to a teacher with “yeah.” Something goes to war inside me what a failure to hear is rejoined with “what?” Something wrinkles my brow when overfamiliarity occurs where unfamiliarity exists.
Words are, too, important. It does matter that people say please, that people say excuse me, that people beg people’s pardon. Addresses like Mr. and Mrs. and Ms. and Father and Sister and Brother and Bishop all matter. Children do need to learn to say thank you, and not just grab the candy and run. Courtesy is tightly linked with words – they are tools of respect; they erect it where it did not stand.
There are times of course, when words are obnoxious. Someone obstreperously butting into a conversation would do well to keep silence. There’s a time for reverent quiet; there’s a time to make noise.
It’s true, manners can be carried to ridiculous extremes. The French, in their précieux period, were loath to refer to teeth, for example, considering the word too earthy. They preferred “the furnishings of the mouth.” They disliked “feet,” preferring “les petites souffrantes,” the little sufferers. Sometimes discourtesy can be disguised in preciosity. A friend one filing through the college cafeteria line told one of the cooks: “Madame, this fare is a gastronomical felony!” To which she replied, “Why thank you!”
Courtesy, for all its sometimes culturally affected oddities, nevertheless has a certain core value, an intrinsic place in any time period. For all the funny distortions that can occur, we need cultural mechanisms for getting along. For sure, the gentility of the South is gone. Going, too, I’m afraid are the sentient good manners of the North, East and West.
Lord, thank you for giving us one another. Lord, please guide us in our ways. –T.R.
written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 1st, 1987
Thursday, March 19, 2009
On being a misfit
One of the things I hear my Bishop say with regularity is that Catholicism is counter-cultural. He has spoken of the counter-cultural choice young men and women make when they enter religious life. He emphasizes the counter-cultural lessons taught in Catholic schools. He makes a point that our faith, the core message of our evangelization, is counter-cultural.
Just between you and me, I haven’t meditated very deeply nor very often about being counter-cultural; but I guess the Bishop has said it often enough now that he has my attention. As I spend a few ergs on the subject, I don’t find the fruits of contemplation altogether pleasant. What I hear the Bishop saying is that who we are and what we do don’t mesh very well with society.
Catholics, it seems, spent the better part of the last 200 years trying to fit into the American mainstream. Now we’re affluent (statistically, anyway). We’re well educated. Studies indicate that people actually like having us for neighbors. We made it; we’re in.
Now that we’re in, however, good golly, Miss Molly, it looks like the thing to do is to get out – and particularly while the getting is good. More properly the expression is: be in the world, but not of it.
Now I don’t want to be putting words into the Bishop’s mouth, but what I hear him saying is that good practicing Catholics are a bunch of misfits. He would never say that, probably, but that expresses for me what “counter-cultural” means.
Perhaps the popular connotation of misfit evokes images of green whiskers and opium dens. Misfit is a harsh sounding word that makes people uncomfortable. Even so, is seems a verbal shock helps me to get the idea.
The idea is that nobody can follow both God and Mammon. To that assertion comes a round of qualifications and denials – not necessarily “O yes you can,” but “You can’t have too many clothes or too much money,” or the running assumption that acquisition of wealth is devoutly to be wished.
The gospel of the modern world is relativism: you do your thing and I do mine and moral standards are what I say they are. The Catholic Church rejects that idea, no matter what the degree of acceptance Catholics have found. And while the Church repudiates the simplistic yes/no codes of scriptural literalism, the Church also rejects that there’s no such thing as right and wrong. Right and wrong still do exist.
The key premise of the best-seller The Closing of the American Mind illustrates the position well:
Americans have becomes so relativistic that not to have a moral position has become a moral position. Somehow it’s become immoral to have convictions, because that means that I’m asserting that I’m right, which means that somebody else is wrong, and that’s not right. Don’t laugh. This hogwash is becoming a deeply ingrained American value system.
So, we Catholics have made it into the American mainstream, and look what we’ve found. We know that to authentically practice this faith of ours we now have to be misfits again.
Perhaps we can assert enough moral influence to change all that, but I suppose I’m skeptical. I appreciate the way the Bishop lets us in on the truth of the matter. “Counter-cultural”: that says it nicely. – T.R.
written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on October 25th, 1987
Just between you and me, I haven’t meditated very deeply nor very often about being counter-cultural; but I guess the Bishop has said it often enough now that he has my attention. As I spend a few ergs on the subject, I don’t find the fruits of contemplation altogether pleasant. What I hear the Bishop saying is that who we are and what we do don’t mesh very well with society.
Catholics, it seems, spent the better part of the last 200 years trying to fit into the American mainstream. Now we’re affluent (statistically, anyway). We’re well educated. Studies indicate that people actually like having us for neighbors. We made it; we’re in.
Now that we’re in, however, good golly, Miss Molly, it looks like the thing to do is to get out – and particularly while the getting is good. More properly the expression is: be in the world, but not of it.
Now I don’t want to be putting words into the Bishop’s mouth, but what I hear him saying is that good practicing Catholics are a bunch of misfits. He would never say that, probably, but that expresses for me what “counter-cultural” means.
Perhaps the popular connotation of misfit evokes images of green whiskers and opium dens. Misfit is a harsh sounding word that makes people uncomfortable. Even so, is seems a verbal shock helps me to get the idea.
The idea is that nobody can follow both God and Mammon. To that assertion comes a round of qualifications and denials – not necessarily “O yes you can,” but “You can’t have too many clothes or too much money,” or the running assumption that acquisition of wealth is devoutly to be wished.
The gospel of the modern world is relativism: you do your thing and I do mine and moral standards are what I say they are. The Catholic Church rejects that idea, no matter what the degree of acceptance Catholics have found. And while the Church repudiates the simplistic yes/no codes of scriptural literalism, the Church also rejects that there’s no such thing as right and wrong. Right and wrong still do exist.
The key premise of the best-seller The Closing of the American Mind illustrates the position well:
Americans have becomes so relativistic that not to have a moral position has become a moral position. Somehow it’s become immoral to have convictions, because that means that I’m asserting that I’m right, which means that somebody else is wrong, and that’s not right. Don’t laugh. This hogwash is becoming a deeply ingrained American value system.
So, we Catholics have made it into the American mainstream, and look what we’ve found. We know that to authentically practice this faith of ours we now have to be misfits again.
Perhaps we can assert enough moral influence to change all that, but I suppose I’m skeptical. I appreciate the way the Bishop lets us in on the truth of the matter. “Counter-cultural”: that says it nicely. – T.R.
written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on October 25th, 1987
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