Thursday, 12/7/17
Let me tell a story about my
help in building a house on rock. It came about in April of 1954, my first
summer in Korea, when I had been sent out to the East coast port of Sok-cho-ri.
I was helping out an old
Irish priest, while he went about re-building a church south of there where I
was to become pastor.
In my first week of watching
over that old priest's church in in Sok-Cho-ri, I was approached by two boys Peter
and Paul, whom the Benedictines up north in Wonsan, North Korea had taught how
to serve Mass. They had escaped south to
Sok-cho-ri, where they were earning pennies running a photography shop.
Peter and Paul had picked up
Catholic wives, and they were all living together in the one-room photography
shop. When Peter's wife became pregnant, they asked me to lend a hand in their
building a two-room house.
We borrowed a cart to carry
up eight boulders from a nearby river
bed, and we dug holes for them and for the
corner posts. With them erected, we
bought spools of Black-Market telephone cable, and we strung it between the
posts, getting mud to stick on it.
When Peter went off to his
wife's village to have her baby, Paul and I tied bundles of straw for the roof. We had just completed
building that little house, when a typhoon struck Sok-Cho-ri, carrying off many
neighboring houses, but leaving intact Peter and Paul'new house, built on eight
large rocks.
When Peter arrived back with
his wife and new baby,we had a grand house dedication party on June 29, feast of Peter and Paul.
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