We kept our Christmas decorations up this year until the Baptism of the Lord, the 2nd Sunday of January. Our final Christmas holy hour was celebrated three days before the baptism on that last week of the Christmas season. We still find it hard to understand how so many take down their decorations just as the Christmas season begins. It must be because the Christmas decorations go up so early which preempts the entire Advent season which is one of the most beautiful liturgical seasons of the year, as we wait with Israel for Emmanuel to come.

The liturgical clothing of baptism is the pure white robes the catechumens receive as they emerge from the baptismal waters. Jesus blessed his Baptismal feast this year with one of the largest snow storms we’ve seen in these parts in years. All our priests managed to drive home from our weekend parishes and get back to the monastery that Sunday before the storm hit.

On October 11th, our Father John Magdalene and our caretaker’s son Robert were involved in a terrible auto accident. They were returning from a shopping trip in Robert’s truck. They were hauling in our trailer a couch for the Marion House and two mattresses for the monastery, and were just a few miles from home when the truck failed to make a curve in the road and veered off their shoulder of Arch Street into a steep ditch and ran into a tree. A road repair crew working on the opposite side of the road witnessed the wreck and called 911 immediately.

When the emergency crew arrived on the scene, they were unable to extricate the two bodies, and had to cut off the roof of the truck to get them out. The “fifty year old passenger” (John is actually sixty) was the worst and was airlifted to Baptist hospital. When Fr. John Michael arrived at Baptist trauma unit, he found Father John a bloody mess. His face was covered in blood, he was bleeding from the mouth, and his hands were caked in blood. His left leg was broken, left shoulder dislocated, lungs damaged, and heart unstable. The nearest church, Christ the King, was called. Their newly ordained assistant, Fr Jason Sharbaugh came over to anoint him.

After all x-rays were taken and the shoulder placed back in its socket, Father was moved to Coronary Care where he stayed for ten days. He was put on a respirator to take care of his breathing. On the day after the accident he was in so much pain despite all the morphine and stronger stuff they were giving him, the doctors suggested putting him into a coma so his body could get some rest and begin the healing process. Pulmonary problems prevented the operation on his broken leg that was scheduled for the 15th. We took the scheduling of his badly needed operation as a sign from Saint Teresa as October 15th was her feast day, and were sorely disappointed when respiratory distress caused the operation to be postponed. The operation was performed on the 22nd, and Father was moved into Intensive Care where he remained for almost two weeks.

The doctors took him off the paralytics at the end of the month, but he failed to come out of the coma. An MRI showed no brain damage. On November 3rd he was moved from Intensive Care to a Long Care unit. When the nurses on that floor saw him still in the coma, they told us, “This is such a tragedy!” It appeared that even if he came out of the come he’d be paralyzed from the neck down. On November 12th, as John’s sister Paula was getting ready to return to Kansas, John grasped her hand, and moved his toes. His lung collapsed on the 20th, but on the 26th, Thanksgiving Day they were able to take him off the respirator and we heard him talk for the first time since the coma. He went into respiratory distress on the 29th when the tube that had been inserted into his collapsed lung came out. That afternoon he asked Fr. Raphael, “Am I dying?”

His tracheotomy was removed on December 8th, the Blessed Mother’s feast day. He was moved on that day from Baptist Hospital to Baptist Rehab. There he made such great progress, the local ABC television affiliate did a Christmas story on him. This was picked up nationally by CNN and can be found at: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2010/12/28/ar.priest.recovery.katv
CNN mis-spelled his last name, placing the phonetic spelling meant for the announcer on the caption: Sin rum for Suenram. Father was released from the Rehab unit on January 5th and is now back home at Marylake. We moved our upstairs chapel down to the refectory (still decorated for Christmas) so Father can attend our community prayers. This picture shows John with his four pronged walking cane concelebrating Mass with Frs. Marion and Raphael.