Charlie Dittmeier's Home Page
When I got back to Nazareth Home, one of the staff asked if I knew a deaf man had been admitted. I found out it was John. I first met him 50+ years ago when he was a student at the Kentucky School for the Deaf. He became an active member of our Catholic deaf group and I had the wedding ceremony for him and his wife. It was wonderful for both of us to see each other again.
We have had two significant snowfalls here in Louisville this winter (3″ is a significant amount here) and today looked like it was going to be a repeat. A few icy pellets hit me in the face as I bicycled home about 3:00 PM, and then the snow really started coming down. It was all for naught, though, and an hour later there was nothing on the ground.
Last Sunday, the celebration of the baptism of Jesus, was the end of the church’s Christmas season. What these men are doing at St. Boniface Church in Louisville is what happened in your parish after the last mass this past Sunday.
Jan, a reader of my website, commented:
The more I watched the video that day (of Dick Van Dyke dancing at 100 years of age) the sadder I became. I even cried. I cried serious tears. I felt a very heavy dark cloud lingering around me. I finally realized that I was crying for the innocence I once had. I was also crying for the innocence I once saw in my fellow human beings. I am sad for our country, humanity in general and for what I once thought we were as a country.
Pope Leo, the day Jan wrote, commented on the need for the church:
to open up to the world and to embrace the changes and challenges of the modern age in dialogue and co-responsibility, as a church that wishes to open her arms to humanity, to echo the hopes and anxieties of peoples, and to collaborate in building a more just and fraternal society.
Anne Lamott, spiritual writer, wished:
I wish us praying people could pray a fast turnaround—Remember Flip Wilson saying, “I’m about to pray. Anybody need anything?” This isn’t how it works. How it works is each of us doing one small good thing, every day.
Saturday saw a pop-up ICE Out demonstration in Louisville, one of the many that took place across the United States.
Rip Van Winkle, in Washington Irving’s short story, is a Dutch American in the pre-Revolutionary War period who falls asleep after drinking with some shadowy figures in the Catskill Mountains. He sleeps for twenty years and wakes up in a setting that is vaguely familiar but radically different from what he knew before.
I don’t drink and didn’t sleep away my 40+ years in Asia, but I can relate to the feelings of confusion and wonder that must have accompanied Rip Van Winkle upon his awakening. When I left Cambodia, I was returning home but it’s not the home I left in 1983!
So much has changed:
• communications are so different,
• politics are chaotic and without the civility and care for the common good of another era,
• landmarks and establishments on the streets have disappeared,
• even in the church, parishes have been merged and closed and 1/3 of the priests are from other countries.
And those are just some of the changes I’ve encountered. It’s going to take a bit more time to adjust to the American way of life today.
Twice a month a group of Catholic people gather to discuss a book by theologian Dairmud O’Murchu about the union of ecology and theology.
We met today to discuss chapter 6 which is especially challenging to some of the ways of thinking we have grown up with.
I had a wonderful visit today with Judy and Dave Saumweber who stopped by in Louisville for a few hours on a trip to visit another friend on the East Coast. The Saumwebers, from Minnesota, were Maryknoll Lay Missioners in Cambodia when I arrived and are a wonderful couple and wonderful missioners and wonderful friends. I was honored and so happy that they adjusted their route to come through Louisville!
Fr. Nick Rice was three years ahead of me at St. Thomas Seminary in Louisville and was ordained in 1967 and assigned to St. Lawrence Parish. Three years later he was transferred and I, newly ordained, replaced him at St. Lawrence. He was an exceptionally good priest and I started my ministry in the afterglow of his time at St. Lawrence. Later when Nick started Mass of the Air I worked with him to get sign language interpreters for the televised liturgies. Later he set up the deacon program in Louisville and then took positions in national church organizations. In addition to that he was just my good friend. He died last week and today we celebrated his funeral.
I bicycled to work daily in Phnom Penh but cycling there was much different from what it is in Louisville. The cold is one big difference. I had a pair of leather gloves but on the really cold days here in Kentucky, after fifteen minutes my fingers were frozen. People at Nazareth Home and at St. Boniface Church heard me talking about how unpleasant it was, and then they started giving me gloves! But even gloves purpose-made for cycling didn’t work when the temps were below 35º or so. Then some of my brothers and sisters got me a Christmas present of heated bike gloves–and they work! Riding with them in cold weather is heavenly!
I tried all sorts of gloves to keep my fingers warm and tried putting a thinner pair of gloves inside heavy gloves but that didn’t work either. The large gloves on the right, with the blue lights on the cuff, are the ones that gave me relief. They have USB-charged batteries in those large cuffs.