How is it that only death brings me to blog these days? I must look at that.
The last time I felt inspired to write was the day I released to spirit my beloved Barney, the Lion Hearted. Now I have learned that yesterday my dear friend and mentor, Father Frank Schuele, made the great journey back to spirit.
What can I say of Frank that does justice to the inspiration he was in my life? He was truly “a man in whom there was no guile” as Jesus said of Nathaniel. Frank was a deep, thoughtful, well read renaissance man.
To whit, I’ll never forget the evening I came out to him as a lesbian woman. We sat and talked after dinner and he listened well, as he always did, as I explained that tortuous journey many of us who were raised Catholic experience when we finally come to accept and celebrate our authentic selves. He began asking me questions about this or that author and when I didn’t demonstrate an acceptable level of familiarity Frank said, “Well, you may be a lesbian but you’re not a feminist!” He promptly marched me into his personal library, grabbed a brown grocery sack and filled it with the likes of Mary Daly’s “Beyond God the Father”, Adrienne Rich’s “Of Woman Born”, Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” and even “Beginning with O”, the erotic lesbian poetry of Olga Broumas. By the time I returned to Kansas City six months later, I was a transformed woman, fully a feminist who had now read quite a bit! Frank was delighted.
Frank’s exposing me to the work of the great feminist authors of the day was part and parcel of his unfailing support of me as I found my true spiritual path. In the years following the Second Vatican Council, as the reactionary forces regained control of Frank’s beloved Catholic church, driving out the likes of Matthew Fox, Hans Kuhn, Leonardo Boff, and therefore, myself, Frank understood all too well why I had to follow the Earth based Goddess spirituality that was my true home. I so regret that in the nearly two years since the election of Pope Francis I didn’t take more time to sit and listen to Frank’s feelings about this blessed turn of events and what it meant for our broken world wherein the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider and our sacred Mother Earth is ever more rapidly destroyed. Frank, the election of Pope Francis must have given you such hope.
Above all, I regret that I didn’t better honor my own psychic abilities. A few months back I had a dream in which Frank came to me and said he wanted to talk. Knowing how frail he had been for so long, I should have called him that very day.
If ever there were a man who understood and embodied Rumi’s great quote, “There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again”, it was Fr. Frank Schule. Thank you, Frank, my brother in Christ Consciousness, dear friend, mentor, booster. So many times you encouraged me to write, and today, for you, I do. You encouraged me to find my own way home to Spirit and indeed I have.
As we sing in our eco-feminist tradition of witchcraft, “in love may he return again.”
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