Throughout my teen years, I expected to be a chef. In high school, I was the first boy to take the advanced foods class (they still had a home economics department in 1972), and I created a small stir on campus when I cooked dinner for Janet, my date for the Christmas Ball. After high school, I joined the Air Force, which made me into a dining hall cook. But being an 18-year-old with a spatula and an ability to serve 400 to 500 troops does not make one a chef. To this day, if asked to cook gravy, I tell friends I can only make eight gallons at a time.
However, my career path began to change at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. My barracks roommate, Mike, invited me to go with the Catholic men’s group to an orphanage in Carlsberg, about 25 miles down the Autobahn. They had adopted the children’s home for some projects the sisters needed done.
At 19 years old, I had no idea what to expect. My only point of reference was a World War II movie in which G.I.s in the South Pacific happened upon some nuns and children, but this was Germany, 30 years later, and nowhere near a remote island.
We pulled up in a light blue Volkswagen bus. Immediately, the doors of the children’s home burst open, and 40-plus children streamed out and swarmed about the bus. I slid open the side door and climbed out, finding a little girl, maybe 6 years old, with straw-colored hair and blue eyes, blocking the path of my six-foot-one-inch frame. She tilted her head back, looked into my brown eyes and extended her arms. With what were perhaps the only English words she knew, she said: “Pick me up. Hold me.”
With what were perhaps the only English words she knew, she said: “Pick me up. Hold me.”
A G.I. is trained to salute and say, “Yes, sir,” so I did what I was told to do, and she remained clinging to my neck for most of my two hours at the children’s home (kinderheim, in German). What began to unfold for me was no Hollywood movie, but the grace of God taking me in a new direction. “I know well the plans I have in mind for you...plans for your welfare and not for woe, so as to give you a future of hope” (Jer 9:11).
Kinderheim Marianum began at the end of World War II as a relocation center for survivors of Nazi slave labor camps, many of whom were from Poland, and many of whom had nothing to return to in their homeland. War had destroyed their towns and their families. When the center transitioned to a kinderheim, the Felician sisters arrived and allowed some of the refugees to stay on as cooks and groundskeepers in exchange for a place to live. In 1974, the needs of over 40 children, ten aging war refugees and three sisters were real, and our Catholic men’s group wanted to help.
As a young G.I., I lacked the skills to organize our group’s efforts, but I knew how to tag along. I brought a normal level of teenage self-absorption and idealism to the fundraiser festival and the Christmas party for the children. My shift work at the dining hall meant that I spent an occasional day off with my buddies. However, there was something in that straw-haired little girl wanting me to hold her that started to direct my focus beyond myself. I began to hitchhike the 40 kilometers to Kinderheim Marianum to help with whatever the sisters asked of me or to play with the children on the football field or to watch movies in the evening.
Best of all was when Sister Lucretia called me to her office for coffee. I had questions about religion and the children, and Sister listened patiently, as if my questions and observations were important, because to me they were. The experience of children growing up without their parents was difficult for me to comprehend, having grown up in the security of my parents who were so committed to each other and their children.
This experience of empathy was my first step into a more adult Christian faith and my first experiences of deeper spiritual reflection.
I was sometimes allowed to stay the night on the sofa in the TV room, where I would get lost in thoughts about the lives of the Polish survivors of the labor camps who surrounded me and the small moments of the days that we shared: I thought of Bruno and how the children would laugh at the load of pepper he would shake onto his food. I thought about Anna in the kitchen who would sometimes suddenly cry for reasons unknown to those around her. I thought of the elderly man whose name I no longer remember, off in a corner of the property, trimming the shoulder-height hedges and talking nonstop to a ghost from his past. I would lie on the sofa in the dark of the TV room and wonder what dreadful nightmare still haunted him more than 30 years later.
I did not realize it at the time, but this experience of empathy was my first step into a more adult Christian faith and my first experiences of deeper spiritual reflection. To this day, when I watch the old black and white newsreels on television with scenes from the Nazi death and slave labor camps, I recall the people I knew who were there.
I was also intrigued with the three Felician sisters and their witness of faith, demonstrating to us how to live a life for someone other than oneself. Now, many years later, when I speak of God as the One-who-is-love, be it in a homily or a catechetical setting, I often think of the three sisters. I know what God’s love is, because I witnessed it in their care for so many children and the survivors of a dreadful nightmare, as well as in their focused listening to this otherwise self-absorbed 19-year-old G.I.
I eventually left the Air Force, arriving home in time for Christmas 1975 and ready for the spring semester at San José State University. A bachelor’s degree in marketing cemented my decision to put aside my ambition to be a chef. I found work in Silicon Valley, first in sales for a computer maker and then in purchasing for a semiconductor manufacturer.
34 years as a priest allow for a perspective no 19-year-old G.I. can have.
The only commonality with my former life as a G.I. seemed to be my ability to fall asleep in front of the TV while thinking about the lives at the children’s home: the three Felician Sisters and their living faith, the Polish survivors of slave labor camps, the children without parents to hold them and the straw-haired little girl who knew what she wanted of me: “Pick me up. Hold me.”
Then, nine years after my reflection began, and after three years in Silicon Valley, I decided it was time for a career change. I wanted to give my life to others the way the Felician sisters had. I wanted to provide spiritual comfort to people who felt displaced. I wanted to honor the God I once had so many questions about. I decided to become a priest.
My 34 years of ministry have taken me to a variety of parishes around Silicon Valley and now to my current role, a special mission assignment on the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico. Sometimes I still feel like that 19-year-old G.I. as I continue to learn about life and faith and continue to think back to the Felician Sisters, hoping, in some small way, to measure up to their witness of a living faith.
Still, 34 years as a priest allow for a perspective no 19-year-old G.I. can have. As a G.I., I was just living my life without much direction until that straw-haired little girl set me on a different path, teaching me the words that echo the heart of so many prayers of our prayers to God: “Pick me up. Hold me.” In fulfilling her request, I was able to see clearly for the first time that both she and I already were in God’s embrace.
