Hellos and Goodbyes

I hate goodbyes. The older you get, the more there are -- or the more you notice them maybe. Time marches on, though, because the earth turns its back on the sun every day, and it's all good; our darkness is someone else's light. Most goodbyes also mean hellos in some way or another.                                            

Living near Omaha, which is a hub of the CMRI (Congregation Maria Regina Immaculata), we get the privilege of meeting the new seminarians to the priesthood here and the postulants to the CMD (the Sisters of the Congration Mater Dei) and getting to know them at least a little bit (they're very busy!). We grow close to our pastors, and the Religious teachers of the school, and we get to know the school children -- especially the boarding girls who live right down the road from us. It's a grace and a pleasure to make friends with so many wonderful Catholics! But, the flip side of that is that most of them are only here for a time -- and then move on. It's pretty sad!

We miss our own children and family, of course, who live in far-flung places (Kevvy and his family in Germany, Paul and his family in Minnesota; Dominic and his family in Denver; Fr. Philip and our two young minor seminarians in Idaho; and Sr. Antonia in Arizona), but we have the added, continual burden of also missing our far-away former-boarder-kid friends -- all over the world! And the priests and sisters who get reassigned! It's always rather jarring to the whole Omaha parish when our long-familiar, beloved Religious move away, but we let them go knowing that our loss is someone else's gain. Big time.

So it was with a bittersweet pang that we "sang out' Fr. Timothy Geckle this week at a Bon Voyage. party with the Mater Dei choir members. If you know the Davises, you know we're all about the choir. And so is Fr. Geckle, our friend of -- goodness, half his life, I think! How we'll miss him in every way -- not the least of which is hearing his voice at High Mass or benefitting from his conducting the choir (a tremendous talent of his!). His fellow priests and the seminarians and we parishioners, his friends, will miss his wisdom and his humor, and heaven knows the school children will cry to lose him as a teacher. And we'll all just miss the twinkle in his eye. 

But, we trust him to you, Sacred Heart parish with every confidence that you'll appreciate Father as much as we do: all those admirable attributes, plus the consecrated hands that will bring Our Lord down upon the altar daily now in beautiful Mountain View, Arkansas. Our goodbye equals so many Divine Hellos there.