“Blow in my ear and I’ll follow you anywhere.” Funny that Sharon Simone would say that to Pat. How prophetic.
I wanted Kathy to meet the Simones. After all, I’d never even thought of dating a girl from Grosse Pointe, and here I was getting serious about one. I wanted her to know the simple kind of people I admired, so if I was the wrong number for her, she’d know right away. Pat greeted us in beat up pants and an undershirt. I don’t mean a tee-shirt, I mean a good old sorta white crew neck undershirt. I don’t know if I looked at Kathy’s face, but I figured that she’d get to know the real Simones for sure. They had two kids, Patrick and Dotty, because they were Catholics who took ‘em as they came. (Four or five more would come eventually.) Pat was an engineer for the city and Sharon was Mom. I think we had spaghetti or something simple like that. They loved the dickens out of Kathy, and she loved them too. I breathed a sigh of relief, and in less than a year we were married and moved in next door to Pat and Sharon.
Pat was a paragon of sensibility and practicality. Sharon was, well, not. She was all emotion and joy and worry and enthusiasm. It wasn’t long after we had moved in that Sharon began telling us excitedly about "prayer meetings" on Wednesday evenings. Pentecostal Catholics, she said; they called it “Charismatic Renewal.” I was of two minds on it. I didn’t wanna get weird, but I noticed that even sensible, practical Pat found it “interesting” and “worth trying out.” It was pretty clear that the prayer meetings taking place in the catholic school basement found parishioners being of two minds, as well. Some thought it was a bunch of holy rollers; others thought it was something that came out of Vatican II, and the pope calling for renewal of the church, to “open a window and let in the fresh wind of the Spirit.”
The Jesuit pastor broached the subject elegantly. “By their fruits you will know them.” The “Prayer Group” was no bunch of holy rollers. They were . . . we were . . . serious-minded and responsible parents and professionals, teachers and engineers, young and old. So the “Fruits of the Holy Spirit” that we’ll walk through these next nine days in this blog are not just a list of esoteric words to be regurgitated as dogma or creed. They are way-points on our journey that let us know we are going the right way, the way that delights our hearts because it is our true way, the way to our own becoming and fulfillment.
FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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