Marti and I returned to The Diocese of Louisiana and St. Margarets in the Fall of 2011. We had moved to Omaha, NE, following Katrina in Oct. 2005. I had said to friends, “Rhubarb was calling me home.” For those not acquainted with this plant, it grows best north of an imaginary line running across the middle of Missouri. What a delicacy this is when turned into a Rhubarb Custard pie! Also, we have a son, Robert and his wife Mary and two grandchildren in Omaha that were part of the drawing card to return north. I’d grown up in Iowa and Marti in North Dakota.
In the summer of 2011, Peggy, our youngest daughter, her husband Kyle, and their two little ones, Zachary and Hanna came to visit us in Omaha. Zachary, well settled into his Granny’s lap, looked into her eyes and said in a most plaintive voice, “Granny, too far!, TOO FAR! Two of our daughters married Louisiana boys. They don’t move. “Tugs,” two daughters and their husbands and four grandchildren drew us back to Louisiana.
We returned to St. Margarets where I’d been rector, 1986-1989. In the fall of 1989, I introduced an experimental academically based service learning project to LSU and Southern. It was accepted by the two universities the following Spring. A large number of community service agencies provided placement for the students. It became operational in the fall of 1990. I designed and coordinated the program known as “PULSE of Louisiana,” a 501(c)3 organization, for the next five years. The project was based on the PULSE curriculum of Boston College. The aim was to provide a way to deepen not only understanding and caring, but to experience in the process, that we are drawn to be a community whole.
Formal / Informal Education:
Graduate of public schools, Muscatine, Iowa; Grinnell College, B.A.; Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, MA, B.D.; ordained a priest in the Diocese of Iowa, January 1, 1966; annual attendee of the Bernard Lonergan Workshops, Boston College, 1976-1985; 1998. I am an avid reader of the writings of Bernard Lonergan, S.J.; David Ford, Oliver O’Donovan, Richard Rohr and other contemplatives. I have had a life-long interest in wanting to understand what is going on, wanting to see the connections, “distinctions without loss of relation,” and in so doing discovering how we can be a community whole, experiencing in the flesh, the nearness “on earth as it is in heaven.”
