21 APRIL 2023
Father Terrance Klein, pastor of Saint Joseph Parish, celebrated the funeral Mass for Geraldine Menges. A former State Regent of the Daughters of Isabella, many members of Circle 477 were in attendance.
Chance and Committment |
Geraldine Menges |
Father Terrance Klein |
21.IV.2023 Saint Joseph |
Isaiah 25: 6, 7-9 Romans 14: 7-9, 10b-12 Luke 24: 13-16, 28-35
Our lives are composed by the interplay of chance and commitment. None of us can control everything that happens to us, but all of us determine for ourselves how we will respond. And that’s where chance gives way to commitment, to a decision about who we want to be even before events come crashing in. Or, as Geraldine herself used to say, “If you want something bad enough, it will happen. Good always overcomes evil.”
I love to ask how couples met. Sometimes the surviving children don’t know. Geraldine’s kids did. She was working as a candy striper at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Wichita, where Jerry also worked. They were friends, so when Geraldine landed a date with another guy, she asked Jerry if she could borrow his car. Evidently, Jerry’s feelings had already outgrown mere friendship because Geraldine’s date discovered her picture in the glove box of Jerry’s car. That blew her chances with her date, but it opened the door for Jerry. She was already the love of his life, and he leapt.
In the many years that followed, every eye would turn their way when Jerry and his bride danced. As hard as it might be to imagine life in Ellinwood before the Menges migration, it happened back in 1953 when the Sisters of Saint Joseph invited Jerry to work here in their new hospital. That’s the chance that changed history, though the job didn’t last long.
That’s where we come to the question of commitment. Jerry and Geraldine both believed in working hard, one might almost say, in never sitting still. Jerry took on one business opportunity after another, and Geraldine was there to keep his books. It makes you wonder, with nine kids, how she found time for anything else, but she did. Geraldine read a book a day, played bridge, played the piano and the organ. She sewed clothes for her children, made wedding dresses for her girls and their friends. She crocheted and knitted them sweaters and Navaho blankets, a different color for every child and grandchild. And if things did go wrong, Geraldine doled out Toll House cookies to the kids, scotch to Jerry, and Old Charter to herself. She quickly taught the kids how to mix the drinks for their father and her.
One might think Ellinwood wouldn’t see much of Geraldine, given how busy her home life was. On the contrary, she served on the Ellinwood City Council and on the Saint Joseph Parish Council when the parish center was being built. And Geraldine led many of the organizations she served, and more than once. She was an officer in the American Legion Auxiliary and the Saint Joseph Altar Society. Geraldine was a proud Daughter of Isabella and twice served as their State Regent. As a kid, I can remember seeing Gerry wear the broach that came with that office. I thought she was Queen Isabella!
However you feel about having children, chance has probably visited your home when you have nine of them. Mark claims his was the only planned birth. But Geraldine was never overwhelmed by chance. She was committed. As her children put it, she was a wonderful mother, someone they and the grandkids sought out when they needed someone who would listen. Often enough, they didn’t even need to talk. She knew what they wanted to say.
Chance and commitment. Together they explain the course of our lives. To think of Geraldine produces the most wonderful, gentlest of glows. And what else explains the triumph of commitment over chance in her life than Geraldine’s faith? Not sure how we can ascertain this, but she may well hold the local record for the number of rosaries prayed in life. Again, Geraldine didn’t just pray them. She led them, Sunday after Sunday here at Saint Joseph. She offered them for her children, and she encouraged them to pray the rosary.
I will miss Gerry, because she had a way of ministering to me while I was trying to do that for her. She’d take both my hands as she leaned in to confess her sins. She thanked me profusely for everything I did. She inspired me when I visited her after the death of her children. I remember her saying when I came directly to her home from the hospital in Hoisington after Mike’s death, “Thank you Father. You’ve told me the only thing I needed to know. He died with all his sacraments. Thank you. I am at peace.” This past Sunday, I cried my way through my prayers with her. She told me she loved me, and I could hardly continue.
To Gerry’s large family. I’ve always boasted that you are my fourth parish. You know so well what you’ve lost, but the faith she shared with you tells you that you haven’t lost anything. After a long life crowned by her commitments, she joins her own in heaven with the Lord Jesus. But never think that she takes her loving eyes off you.
We Catholics pray for our dead, asking the Good Lord to purify them and take them to himself. But we also pray to our dead. They’re the ones who introduced us to God. Over these many years, you’ve often asked Gerry to pray for you. Don’t imagine that she will stop interceding for you now.
Chance will have its way with all of us. But commitment is stronger. If it were only a question of our own commitment, we might indeed fear chance, but it isn’t. In the end, the commitment Christ made to us in our baptisms is what counts. Saint Paul told the Romans:
None of us lives for oneself,
and no one dies for oneself.
For if we live,
we live for the Lord,
and if we die,
we die for the Lord;
so then, whether we live or die,
we are the Lord’s.
Remember those disciples on the road to Emmaus. Could chance have treated them any worse, killing the man they thought had been the Messiah? But he was there for them in the Breaking of the Bread. He was their Risen Lord Jesus, right where he had promised to be, where two or three of them had gathered in his name. That’s still where we find him and where we find our Geraldine.
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