Thursday, 12/1/16
Every time we have Our Lord’s
parable about a house built on rock I tell the same old Korea story. The Korean
War began in June of 1950 when the Reds crossed south over the 38th
Parallel that divided South Korea from North Korea.
After three years of warring,
the border between the two nations, marked by a Demilitarized Zone was just about back where it began. The
Reds owned land ten miles south of the 38th Parallel on the west
side of the country over by Seoul, while our Marines had won back one county
north of the 38th Parallel along the Sea of Japan.
in May of 1954, when I was
twenty-six, I was sent to that county we had won back from the North, and there
I made friends with two twenty-five-year old North Korean old Catholic boys
whose names were Peter and Paul. They had slipped south through the fighting,
and they had married two local gurls.
They wanted to build a house
with two eight-by-eight rooms that they could share with their wives. So. we
sunk nine big boulders into holes we dug for the house’s corner posts, and I
helped them put together the little house’s framework. I was helping Paul
thatch the roof while Peter was taking his wife back to her hill village to
have their baby.
In the beginning of June, Paul
and I had just finished thatching the roof, when we were hit by a typhoon that
took out the bridges over all the rivers up and down the coast. The other half
of the hill our church and rectory were built on slid away, taking the police station below us
right out into the sea.
The village of Peter's wife
was washed away, and his Teresa had her baby as she clung to a pine tree high
up the hill side.
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