Where is the Mission? | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: Where is the Mission? | Previous Challenge Entry
By Nancy Kaye
02/04/09
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WHERE IS THE MISSION ?

Bishop O’Grady was a man of vision. Before Vatican II he had started using the laity’s gifts for the betterment of British Columbia, Canada. The territory was considered a missionary diocese not because it was poor but because it was so spread out. It went from Williams Lake north to the Yukon border and from Prince George west 450 miles to Prince Rupert. In the early days of the Frontier Apostolate many of the volunteers were construction workers who built the Catholic schools in communities through out the diocese. I was with them in their 22nd through 25th year and there were about 150 volunteers, many teachers, house parents, cafeteria crews, school bus drivers, secretaries, maintenance and vehicle repair, staff for an alcohol transition house and home for handicapped kids.

We who were missioning with the Frontier Apostolate in central British Columbia, Canada would ask, “ Where is the mission?” I thought that the mission was some place or some task that was difficult or impossible for me. The school bus drivers who had to get up at 4:O0 a.m. and heat the busses up for an hour in the 40-degree below zero weather were surely where the mission was. Others would ask of me, “How can you work with alcoholics? I never could. That’s where the mission is.”

Most of us lived communally in 2-6 bedroom houses that the diocese owned. Several of the houses were named after the rivers… Nachako, Babine, and Frazier. When we moved to a new house, which the diocese had purchased, it had a garden that was ready for the picking. We named it Jezreel, which is a fertile plain in Palestine. Others didn’t like that name because they thought it sounded too much like Jezebel.

Fr. Lobsinger was a priest who was stationed out of Fort St. James and he was a pilot who would minister to the remote Native Indian bands. I had arranged hospitality for a family that had missioned for him in a very isolated area. One summer evening, when I was visiting Camp Maurice, I was having dinner when Fr. Lobsinger tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I hear you like to fish.” “Yes” I replied, He told me when I finished dinner to come with him. We went down to the river that connects to Lake Stewart where his floatplane was parked. He checked on a big wall map for several lakes and we got into the plane. As we were taxiing in the river preparing to take off, he/we said an Our Father and a Hail Mary and away we were above the lake. He set the plane down on a remote lake where there were no roads and sent me out on a pontoon with a fishing pole. The lake was thick with trout and being early evening they were biting. He nudged the engine into a slow troll and as the sun was beginning to dip in the late summer sky he said we’d better get back before dark. We did, with a nice string of fish. Father Lobsinger later became bishop of Northwest Territories. Several years after he was killed when his plane crashed. I can’t think of any other way he would have wished to depart the planet.

Speaking of fishing I also ice fished in the winter. Some of the men from the transition house were building a cabin and invited a friend and myself to Frazier Lake. It helps to have a chain saw to make a hole in the ice. Then it takes patience and a little jigging. The fish are a bit sluggish in the winter so you’re not quite sure if you have one on your hook until you get it to the top. A good bonfire on the shore helps to warm you in between catches.

I realized I had learned a new vocabulary. I now knew what the bush, block heaters, snow dumps, frost heaves and rotten ice were.

One day I passed Julie driving school bus in downtown Prince George. I was driving the alcohol transition house van. There was a wave and a nod as the vehicles passed each other and I knew, “Here is the Mission”.
And so “Where is the Mission?” becomes learned in a most intimate way in the most ordinary of circumstances and the slice of life lived with my fellow Frontier Apostles lives deep in our hearts.

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