Baptism and First Communion

Hello Again – well I finally have time to write up our First Communion services here on Andros. As with most things here, there were complications. One surprise was to learn that the Baptists here don’t baptize their children as infants, but wait till they are 12 or 13. They have a Christening Service to name the child as an infant, but the baptism is something they do later. One of the children in our program has a mother who is Catholic and a father who is Baptist. He is now in our RCIA program, converting to Catholicism. We learned that his daughter, who has been attending Mass weekly and has been in our CCD classes all year, was christened as a Baptist but never actually baptized. So, the week before First Communion we had a baptism.

She is a sweetheart of a girl and when we talked about her baptism she told me she was afraid of getting wet in front of everyone. I told her it wouldn’t be a big mess, but she was still afraid. I taught her that fear is not from God, but usually from the evil one. I showed her that whenever an angel appears in the bible the first thing they say is usually, “fear not”. I asked her, who would be the winner if she felt afraid of baptism – the devil or Jesus? She understood that and promised that whenever she felt afraid she’d ask Jesus for help.

Well after the baptism she pulled on my sleeve and said, “I wasn’t afraid, I was the winner, I beat the devil”. What a great kid. Here is a picture Ginni took of her being anointed with Chrism, and another with her God-mother after the Baptism.

First Communion weekend was a busy one. We were joined by Fr. Pio Galumalemana, a native of Samoa who is now the pastor of a parish on Nassau. Fr. Pio flew in on Friday night because all day Saturday we did First Penance services at each of the three churches, followed by the Saturday evening Sunday liturgy at the AUTEC base.

We began at AUTEC for a 10AM First Penance Service, then 12 noon for St. John Chrysostom’s First Penance, then hit the road for the drive to Cargill Creek where we had a 3PM First Penance Service there. Ginni and I had created a program starting with song, prayer, a scripture reading (the prodigal son), and a short reflection, then individual confession and a closing prayer – very simple. A nice touch we added was a box filled with sand and candles. After each child came out of confession they lit a candle. The image of going from darkness to light was great.

After hearing confession from 20 children in 3 different locations, as well as some of their parents, Fr. Pio had a full Saturday – but it wasn’t over. Now we drove back to AUTEC, where we started, and celebrated the Sunday liturgy – with 3 of our 20 kids receiving their First Communion.

Fr. Pio invited them up around the altar during the consecration. Here is a pic of us around the altar praying the Our Father.

AUTEC has a neat tradition of having the First Communion children barefoot. You can see that in this pic where the children have brought up the gifts and Matthew is on his way back to his seat.

Here’s the history of that tradition. A few years ago, as they were preparing for first communion one family could not find dress shoes for their children. They’re usually in sandals or barefoot on the island and the AUTEC store doesn’t carry children’s shoes. Off base, none of the local stores had shoes the right size either. The priest at the time suggested, “Well, if you can’t find shoes, have them go barefoot, its fine with me and they go barefoot all the time here anyway.” While a nice suggestion, the children were embarrassed to go barefoot while all the other kids would be wearing shoes. The problem was resolved when all the other children, to help them out, decided to go barefoot too. The next class thought this was really cool and they decided to go barefoot too, and a tradition was born.

Here is a pic of all of us at AUTEC after First Communion.

The next day was Sunday and the first service was at St. John Chrysostom. There were 6 children receiving First Communion here. With so many at this parish we had them do the readings, bring up the gifts, and the Prayers of the Faithful.

Fr. Pio invited them up around the altar for the consecration and here we are surrounding the altar with Fr. Pio and our class picture.

After St. John’s we hit the road again for Cargill Creek and our First Communion service at Christ the King parish. Here there were 11 children, from age 7 to 14 – and here you can see Fr. Pio with the children flashing there First Communion Certificates.

Our service at St. John’s and Christ the King was complemented by an electric keyboard (2 in Cargill Creek). Laverne Lockhart was one of the players and here you see him with his new daughter Josephine. JoJo will be baptized at Christ the King next weekend, but that deserves a post all by itself.

See you in Church!

Fire in Fresh Creek! Bereavement at Sea.

Hello again - well its been a busy week (aren't they all).

This week we are in the final prep for First Penance and First Communion for 20 children. Spread out over 3 churches we have children from 8 to 15 years old. But, as you can tell from the title of this blog - while that may have been the plan for our week, and it is where we spent the bulk of our time, something else took center stage.

Early Tuesday morning I went downtown to order flowers for Mother's Day (a simple corsage for the Mom's of the parish). On the way I noticed a field was being burned - a pretty common site here on Andros, but this was right next to one of the largest buildings in town. A few hours later we were working in the office on the CCD lesson for that day when we heard alot of commotion outside. When we stepped out of the office and looked toward town, this is what we saw.

Well we hustled down the hill toward the fire and it was clear that this blaze was out of control and there wasn't much we could do but provide moral support for the locals dealing with this horrific fire. The only business still operating in this building was a liquor store and we made a line of people to get cases and cases of the stores inventory out of the building. We were able to save alot but the heat grew and eventually much was left inside. Over the liquor store were four apartments. Occupants were throwing their belongings down to others in the street and they were able to save most of what they owned and nobody was hurt.

This was the largest building in Fresh Creek, a two story complex of three buildings. The end of the building facing you had four apartments on the second floor and the first floor had a small fish and tackle shop that'd been closed for years - and the town liquor store. In the next building was an open patio with a common roof/attic, and the furthest building was a disco/nightclub that had also been closed for several years. All together, however, they made up a city block and this fire was intense.

A major concern of mine was the grey roof you see in the forground of this pic. That is the home of one of my parishioners. The little black line to the left of the peak of the roof is not a beam in the burning building, it is Hugh, my parishioner, standing on his roof with a garden hose.

The fire burned for hours and the US Navy base sent its fire truck to help with the blaze (our town has no Fire Department). Their large truck was too large to get over the Fresh Creek bridge so all they could send was the pumper. The fireman told me that they almost had it under control but they ran out of water and had to go refill their tanks. When they returned it was too far gone and all they could do was watch it burn itself out.

I was really rather concerned for Hugh who owns the home on the corner in this pic. Throughout the most intense heat, with flames shooting 30' into the sky, Hugh stayed on his roof with a garden hose, soaking it down to prevent its catching fire as well. All anyone could do was watch the drama play out - in the end Hugh saved his home, but the entire block this building took up was a total loss. Here are a few better pics of Hugh on his roof towards the end of the blaze.

You can not imagine the impact this has had on the town. This was the largest building in town and its gone - but for many, the fact that this was the only liquor store in Fresh Creek was the biggest concern - both a comical and sad commentary. Once the fire was out, and the building had cooled so you could get close to it there were crowds of young men trying to get into the building and get bottles of rum that hadn't been saved or burst in the flames. Police were on the scene but I saw several armloads of bottles being carried home, and the next day saw a few with bandaged arms and hands who had scorched themselves trying to pick up the hot bottles. Pretty sad.

With the fire burning itself out, there was not much more for us to do so we headed off to the AUTEC base for our scheduled 3:00 CCD class. When we came home all that was left was a smoldering hulk, with young guys still trying to rummage through the wreckage to salvage a bottle or two.

The next day I got a call from the Navy Base that one of the sailors at sea had just been informed his wife had died and they were taking him off the sub to send him home. He'd be arriving at the base around 10 - could I get there to provide him some support until they could get him on a plane? So I went from the flames to the frying pan.

He was a young man and it was a sad story. They'd dated for about a year and had only been married since December, five months. Suffice it to say all I could do was be there for him as he called home, heard the details of her death, cried, and began to grieve as only a young husband could for his new bride. Its times like this I wish the Navy could afford a full-time chaplain but I was glad I could be there to help. His name is Bruce and if you could keep him in your prayers I am sure he'd appreciate all the spiritual help he can get.

Speaking of prayers, keep us in your prayers too - we need it!

Fishing In The Bahamas

Well I have been remiss in not blogging my first real fishing trip while here so this is it.

After Easter, but before Fr. Martin's departure, one of the parishioners in Cargill Creek offered to take us fishing and we took him up on it.

Jim Johnson is a local Bahamian who has a boat and offered to take us out. Fr. Martin and I met him at the dock in Behring Point and off we went. This is a pic of Jim at the helm as we cleared Cargill Creek and headed out to sea.

When we first arrived on the boat there was another man on the boat, his name was Christian and, after we had cleared the Creek and were out in the ocean Jim stopped the boat and Christian donned a snorkel and mask and slipped over the side. We weren't sure what or why this was happening until Christian slipped below the surface of the water and came up with two big conch shells. Now these were not the pretty pink conche shells you see in the tourist shops. They were dirty and covered with sea grass - conche in the wild.

We trailed Christian for what seemed like 40 minutes and he kept handing us conche after conche and (since I'd given Jim $50 for gas) I was beginning to wonder if we'd ever actually toss out a line for fish. Turns out this was part of Jim's plan - conche was bait.

With a boatload of bait off we went to fill our coolers with fish. We caught several variety but by far the most common was the Bahamian Porky. Isn't he cute? Let me tell you, once we fileted this little cutie it was great white meat. What a fish-fry!

One thing about this fishing trip is that while I used my 9' Ugly Stick and fancy Daewoo reel with all the bells and whistles, Jim and Christian basically used a spool of line, a rust nail for weight, and a hook - regardless of what equipment we used, we all caught fish - you can guess who caught more (I think the secret was their rusty nail sinkers).

Nothing better than a drop line and knowing when to yank it.

Suffice it to say we had a great day and weeks later, Ginni and I are still eating fish from this one fishing trip.

Undocumented Aliens - and a car inspection

I was driving from Cargill Creek to Fresh Creek and was waved down by someone wanting a ride. This is not an uncommon occurance driving the Church van, people wave us down for rides often. This time however, the person was wearing a police uniform. Not to worry - he just needed a lift to the Fresh Creek police station for work so off we went.

During our conversation he told me that in North Andros the immigration office had asked the police to assist in a sweep for undocumented aliens in the North Andros bush. In the Bahamas, this means Haitians.

Haitians arrive on Bahamian shores in a variety of ways, usually the stop in the Bahamas is a short one, with the US being their preferred destination. However, some set up house by squatting on the plentiful, but remote, land in the interior of Andros. North Andros has been home to Haitians in the past. I even found a Baptismal register for the township of Mastic Point where a section of the register was set apart for 'Haitian Baptisms'.

Anyway, as part of this conversation the policeman told me where they did the sweep and that they found cottages all throughout the bush where a small village had sprung up. When they arrived people scattered but they did arrest about 40. I found out that all of them, when asked, claimed to be Catholic and its giving me qualms of conscience. Where these people were is not that far from Mastic Point, where we have been asked to come and start holding services for new Catholics that have moved in. Time will tell, but this is a new dimension to what might happen if we start ministering to the undocumented aliens of North Andros.

On another, lighter topic - the Church van needed an inspection sticker - and when I looked into that, it also needed its registration renewed. I also knew that my tires were getting threadbare (the roads here do a number on tires in a short period of time) so I started by going to Rev. Hinsey'[s Garage and got myself some new tires to replace the bald ones, then I felt I was ready for the inspection.

In the Bahamas to do this you need your insurance policy as part of the process so, after digging out all the appropriate forms I headed off to the Police Station to get it done. I went into the Administrator's Office and we paid the fee for the inspection and registration and she gave me the new stickers for the windshield and license plate, and then typed up the new registration. She then gave me everything I needed and sent me off. I asked where I should go for the inspection and she looked up at me, blinked twice, and said, "Does everything work on the car?" I said yes, and she said, "Well then your all set - here's the inspections sticker". I was done.

I guess its not always that easy, but when its the Church van, maybe it is.

A week on Nassau

With the Easter holiday behind us, and this being a school vacation week (and thus a CCD vacation as well), Ginni headed off to Massachusetts to deal with our son Mike's move to Sag Harbor NY to be with his brother. Mike's departure will be good for him since he'd had his fill of working in public access television, and his brother needed his help - so new horizons and new opportunities for Mike.

Meanwhile we still own our home in Massachusetts and now we need a renter for the apartment Mike had been renting. So my saintly wife hit the road to help with the final clean up, move out, renovate, and clean up yet again effort - all the while advertizing, interviewing, and running credit checks on potential renters. Time will tell how this plays out.

While all this is going on in the States, I am still here plugging away. With the Easter school vacation I have no CCD to prepare for, making life much, much easier. An added plus, however, is that the following week was the annual Archdiocese of Nassau Clergy Retreat. Consequently, I cancelled CCD for two weeks and for this second week I flew to Nassau for the retreat.

Once more I flew GlenAir, and once again I was in the co-pilot seat of the 5 seater. We arrived safely, despite the white knuckles on this tiny plane, and headed out to the Emmaus Center for the retreat. Now I must tell you that, since I had worked at running a retreat house for 7 years in Wareham, whenever I visit another retreat center I am pretty observant. Suffice it to say this was very nice. The food was fantastic, and there was always more than we could eat (although we tried to eat it all).

The retreat director was Fr. John O'Grady, a diocesan priest from Albany. He is also a world-class scholar on St. Paul and, with this being the year of St. Paul, our retreat had a Pauline-focus. Fr. O'Grady has taught all throughout Europe, studied with guys like Karl Rahner, just to name one. I have come to realize that one of the benefits of being in this Archdiocese is that our Archbishop was sent to the very best theological schools in the world and is very well connected.

With that said, the retreat had more of a bible study format than a retreat - but I did come away with a few gems. Fr. O'Grady, as a bible scholar, loves words. Words are important in scripture study since, to truly understand the text, you need to understand the meaning of what was intended in the original Greek or Hebrew. So, the word I came to appreciate much more on this retreat was PEACE.

Lets start with PEACE. In each of the resurrection appearances we are reading during Easter Jesus begins by saying PEACE to the disciples. In Hebrew peace is Shalom - now I knew that, but Fr. O'Grady explained that a more accurate translation would be 'may you have the very best of everything'. So if I were to say Shalom to a farmer, I would be saying 'May you have the best of everything, may your cows all have triplets, may your harvest fill 2 barns, may you have the very best of everything'. So Fr. O'Grady explains it like this, and I get it, but then it occured to me that each of us is a multi-faceted individual, I am Deacon, Father, Husband, . . .

When someone says Shalom to me, they are wishing me the very best of everything - they are wishing the very best of every aspect of me - the very best of everything as Husband, as Father, as Deacon, and the list goes on until every facet of my-self is covered. Whew!

But it doesn't end there, when we pray, when we hear at Mass the words, 'May the peace of the Lord be with you' - what we should hear is 'May the Shalom of God be with you' - think about it in the context I just described - May the SHALOM OF GOD be with you. May the very best of God be with you - isn't that incredible! Peace. Shalom.

Good stuff, huh.

I returned on Saturday, just in time for the 6PM liturgy at the Navy Base. Having had very little time to prepare a homily I was a bit concerned until I read the Gospel and realized the first thing Jesus says in this Gospel, when appearing to the disciples once again is - Peace. I had a homily ready to go without having to write down a single word. God is good.

The Triduum & Easter

Well after having experienced a Bahamian Palm Sunday we moved on to Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter.

St. John Chrysostom hosted a combined Holy Thursday celebration for all three churches we serve. There had been very little planning since I wanted to see what they have done here in the past and Fr. Bill Martin has been coming here to celebrate Holy Week for over a decade. Knowing that, I still wanted to try to set up some of the preliminaries - such as what 12 people would have their feet washed on Holy Thursday. Unwittingly, I created a bit of a stir when I told people I'd try to get that done early. People kept saying that members would be hurt they couldn't get their feet washed, and I kept saying, "Who? Tell me and I'll include them." The response was, "well, we don't know, but if they want to come up and they can't they'll be hurt". I went around and around on this one until someone explained that instead of 12 people, Fr. Bill always opened it up to the entire church and whoever wanted to have their feet washed could. I was amazed that they were this open, and a bit concerned that Holy Thursday could run into several hours if everyone came forward, not to mention the logistics of how many towels, how many pitchers of water, basins, etc. we'd need. I'd been told not to worry about it - they'd use a common basin and clean water from the pitcher, tossing the dirty water if we needed to - we didn't need to use a clean basin for everyone since their feet were dirty anyway.

Well, as it happened we had a low turnout but all 3 churches were represented. At the invitation people came up to the sanctuary where a long bench had been prepared. Fr. Bill started at one end and moved right on down the bench, using a common basin for all and changing towels every 2 or 3 people. All in all it went rather well. One thing that I changed this year that seemed to go well was reposing the Blessed Sacrament. In prior years Fr. Martin would simply process out to the Sacristy with it, but the people had no opportunity to worship there. This year, since Fr. Martin was living at the Navy Base I converted the priest's apartment attached to the church into a small adoration chapel and installed an old wooden tabernacle I found in storage and cleaned up. It felt perfect and we processed out of the church, singing our way through the parking lot, and into the chapel - incense and all.

After the service I helped our sacristan strip the altar and do what set-up we could do for the Good Friday service. When we were done, however, someone turned off the main power switch to everything, rather than the switch to the ceiling fans. An easy thing to remedy except whenever we lose power, we lose our internet. Our router is a bit sensitive to that and this was no exception, so for the rest of the Triduum we had no internet (those no internet telephone to wish happy Easter to our friends and family).

Good Friday was a marathon, the first Good Friday was at 10:30AM in Cargill Creek. Now I realize that Good Friday shouldn't be a morning celebration, but when you need to do 3 of them you adjust. The second service was at 12:30 at AUTEC and we barely got there in time for that, followed by a 3PM service in Fresh Creek for the third service. Then there were Stations of the Cross at 6:00.

What spiced this up a bit was that at the third service, the one in Fresh Creek, we have no music since our drummer has become unavailable. Consequently Ginni had pulled out her guitar and was planning to lead a few of the songs. As we read the passion (in 4 parts to include the laity), and as Ginni is worrying about what to play and when, there was a huge crash as one of our parishioners passed out and fell to the floor. Now our floors are tile and a risk of his being hurt from the fall was very real. Coincidentally, the Doctor was in attendance, as was my wife the guitar-playing nurse. All thoughts of music were replaced by blood pressures and pulses, and get a cold drink, and let's sit him up over here, and ... Once it was clear he was up, and we had a Doctor and a nurse, we resumed reading the Passion and our healthcare team took over. The Doctor called the clinic and they called in the nurse practitioner while Ginni and Leonard, another parish volunteer, took him to the clinic. Suffice it to say they missed the rest of Good Friday services.

Holy Saturday was silent, until the Easter Vigil that night, and I liked that. It's Holy Saturday, Jesus is in the tomb, and we wait, expectantly - there is an anticipation to Holy Saturday that is, well, Holy.

The Easter Vigil was at St. John's, then Easter Day we did a service at the Navy Base at 8:30 and in Cargill Creek at 11:30. The Christ Candle I found in storage was good, but had 2 cracks in it that made it rather unsteady. I patched it up as best I could so I thought it'd work, but it made inserting the 5 rosettes into it during the candle blessing a bit tricky. Fr. Martin sang the Exultet (I will try to do it next year). We had no RCIA or baptism candidate (that too will be different next year since we already have 2 in RCIA formation with 3 others considering joining us). All in all, the Easter Vigil was wonderful, but we did miss what we have come to enjoy so much at St. Timothy's in Norwood.

Anyway, the Vigil was over around 10PM, we showered and got to bed and were up and out for the 8:30 service at AUTEC, then the 11:30 service in Cargill Creek. We were joined by vacationers from one of the local fishing lodges - from Italy!

Arriving home we weren't done yet. Once home we did our communion calls to those who couldn't make it to church due to illness. While tiresome after the services we had just led, it was special to continue serving in this particular way - bringing the Body of Christ to those too ill to celebrate the Risen Christ.

We were rewarded however. For Easter, the US Navy served lobster tail in the dining hall. Somehow we were able to drag ourselves back to the base and have Easter Dinner with them.

All in all, we put in alot of hours and we can see several things we think we could improve on for next year - but this first year we needed to learn their traditions, their methods of celebrating the resurrection, and so we did. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead on ANDROS - AMEN!

Palm Sunday

Hello again, I thought I would share our Palm Sunday celebration with you. As I said in my last post we are blessed to have Fr. Bill Martin visiting us from Palm Sunday, through Holy Week and Easter. It is a blessing for me to be able to sit back and see how Holy Week is celebrated here. Fr. Martin has been coming to Andros for Holy Week for over 10 years so I am watching and learning.


The first thing to understand about Palm Sunday here is that palms are everywhere AND they are a bit different from the single stalk that we use in Boston. Here everyone gets an entire branch of a type of palm that you can really see being used in the bible story of Palm Sunday to blanket the street before Jesus as He entered Jerusalem.



All three parishes had a palm blessing service and an enterance procession. This is a pic of the blessing and procession at St. John Chrysostom in Fresh Creek. Fr. Bill Martin visited us from Vermont. A retired Air Force Chaplain he stayed at the AUTEC Navy Base while with us and led services on Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Easter.







The procession at Christ the King in Cargill Creek was a bit different from the others in that, down the road a piece, there is a tiki hut so we started there and processed down the street into the church. Rather impressive I must say.









Each church read the passion in four parts, with the people included in the readings. Every time the crowd shouted "Crucify Him" I literally got the chills - every time. I don't know why but that one line of the people shouting Crucify Him really struck home with me this year.



Suffice it to say Palm Sunday on Andros was a wonderful experience for Ginni and I and we are looking forward now to Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and the feast of feasts - Easter Sunday. I am sure I'll have much to say after what will be both exhilarating, and exhausting Triduum.