With all the buildings and businesses that have sprouted up around the Rankin Hwy.--I-20 corridor, beautifying and otherwise corporatizing the southside of Midland, it's interesting to think that maybe the most important addition to this part of town is still just a dream in the minds of folks like Luisa Valencia and hundreds of others.
What will do this part of town a greater good is a library bearing the name of one of the most influential people who ever graced this oft-neglected acreage south of Front St.
What's preventing dream from becoming reality, at least right now, Valencia says, is the Midland County Commissioners refusing to allow the library to be termed a "learning center." Librarians are librarians and have degrees in applied library science, but they are often not educators in the strict sense. Supporters were hoping for a learning center, a place where children can receive tutoring; commissioners will approve only a "library."
It is that one item that seems to be at least temporarily holding up the process, but one thing is for certain: When the paperwork is signed and the differences resolved, whatever ultimately springs up at Wolcott and Gist will bear the name of Father Tom Kelley (above), the much loved priest who resurrected southsiders and filled them with not only the Holy Spirit but the feeling of empowerment.
It will be three years this coming February since Fr. Tom died of cancer, but his impact is still felt every day, not just by Our Lady of San Juan Catholic Church parishioners, but by any southsider who ever voted, or who ever drove a kid to school on the southside or had a child bussed somewhere else in this town. Fr. Tom's impact is still there, felt tangibly by the many people who have endured and lived their entire lives in south Midland. And it is felt by many, many others in this town as well.
"He touched the lives of so many people," Valencia told me. "One of the things he loved so much was the children around him. He established several scholarships for children to attend St. Ann's School and receive an education."
There are several things I will always remember about Fr. Tom. One was the fact that he converted the cry room at church into a chapel. One of the traditions in the Catholic Church is called Perpetual Adoration; Fr. Tom wanted the church's cry room to become a 24/7 place of holiness where people could pray and feel the presence of God.
When Fr. Tom called for the cry room to be converted into a chapel, he knew he would have to answer calls of concern -- Where are we going to put the children when they become noisy?, the cries of some people came.
And Fr. Tom's response?
Children belong in church not in a cry room. If they become noisy, it is simply the sound of Jesus in the church.
Fr. Tom rarely came to Mass without a book that he had used as a resource for his homily. He was an avid reader and he soaked up knowledge every waking moment. Books he brought to Masses were often by Henri Nouwen, a man who gave up a comfortable life to become a director of a community of developmentally disabled individuals. Fr. Tom wanted his parishioners to enjoy the knowledge that he enjoyed. He wanted people to learn what he had learned. He was as much a teacher as he was a priest.
Fr. Tom empowered people. People who had been downtrodden and neglected their whole lives, he encouraged repeatedly to vote, to become involved in the process. If it is change you want, he would tell them loudly in Mass, then you have to go out and do something about it. You have the power, you just have to use it, he would tell his huddled masses. Some heard, and unfortunately many didn't. But if he were here today, he would still be preaching the same message.
He was one of the most remarkable men I have ever met. In between saving the community, saving souls and saving pennies for his dream for a bigger church, he helped save my marriage, too.
He had an uncanny ability to appeal to children, whether it be in the foyer of the church welcoming them or saying goodbye to them after Mass, or in his words during his homilies. Our children, in their teens and preteens before Fr. Tom died, actually looked forward to attending church just to hear him, and when you have children who look forward to church because of a pastor's influence on them, you have a human being that God has blessed with a tremendous gift.
His combined impact is such that he is deserving of not only a library to be named after him, but the Midland school board would do well in seeing to it that if ever a southside elementary is approve it would bear his name, too. Second only to assuring people's salvation, an elementary school campus on the southside of Midland is what he worked for harder than anything.
The first time my wife and I ever heard Fr. Tom, he ended his homily with a thought about stained glass.
Each person in the congregation is like a piece of stained glass, Fr. Tom told the people. Some pieces are thicker, some are thinner. Some pieces have one color. Some are multicolored. Some have a greater density, some don't. Each piece is unique, and when you put all those pieces together that's what makes us beautiful as a church community.
And so it is the message even for people involved in honoring his memory by naming a building in his memory: Working together to bring this honor, for it is in the working together that Fr. Tom would be happiest. Because that is precisely the message that he spent so much of his time in Midland working so hard to convey.
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