The Roof Leaks
By Fred Owens
The
roof leaks at Holy Cross Church in Santa Barbara. It's a small church,
and not famous like the Mission Church is famous, but the roof leaks. I
know because last month right after weekday Mass, Monsignor Rafael
stepped down from the altar, walked over to the pews, pointed to the
ceiling above the pews and said it, "The roof leaks." Then he pointed to
water damage on the pews underneath the leak.That's all he said. Then
he want back to the room where the priest changes his garments and then
back to the rectory for his breakfast and the day's business.
I
got the monsignor's point. The roof leaks. It needs to be fixed. That
takes money. Holy Cross is running a deficit of $12,000 according to
someone on the parish council. Where is the pastor going to get the
money to fix the roof? I hope he wasn't looking at me.
Holy
Cross Church hosts an almost one-acre fruit orchard on its grounds. The
orchard is tended by volunteers who prune and rake, and tend to
irrigation, and a hundred other chores. The fruit -- apples, plums,
peaches, apricots, bananas, citrus, table grapes, and much more -- is
all donated to the Food Bank so that low income people can have access
to fresh fruit.
This orchard was planted nine
years ago and is just now coming into full production -- some hundreds
of pounds of fruit harvested every year. All at no cost to the parish,
all the work done by volunteers. But now we have to pay for the leaking
roof. Monsignor Rafael wants us to pay the parish $200 per month for
use of the orchard. Kind of a roof tax, in my opinion. I get his point.
If you have a garden that needs work and a roof that leaks, you fix the
roof first. The roof is the priority.
So why
don't they throw a bingo party and fundraiser and get the money that
way? Why don't they ask the archbishop down in Los Angeles to pay for
the roof? Why would our lousy $200 a month make a difference anyway?
Almost
none of the garden volunteers are Catholic. Some of them are devoutly
secular. They will work for hours to keep the trees healthy, but they
won't pay a roof tax to the Church.
It
would help if Monsignor Rafael could improve his social skills. He could
try asking instead of demanding. He used to be the police chaplain for
the LAPD before he came up to Santa Barbara for what is basically a
retirement position at Holy Cross. He loves cops, but we ain't cops,
we're hippies with trowels. So he won't come down to the garden. He just
looks at us from across the parking lot, coming down the steps from the
rectory to walk his dog. He loves dogs, just like he loves cops. Good
for him. But he doesn't love gardens and fruit trees. It's a bad
combination. Trying to get money from the orchard volunteers is like
squeezing blood from a turnip. A lot of our people will just go home. Or
go to other gardens to do volunteer work.
The
garden is called the Mesa Harmony Garden. You can look it up on the
Internet. It's a separate entity from the church, a non-profit with a
board of trustees. I'm one of the trustees. I like all the people on the
board. I like to say that Harmony is our middle name and that is how it
feels. But this is getting stressful, being threatened with
consequences, getting messages from the real estate attorney employed by
archdiocese.
The board met in emergency
session on Saturday and agreed to start paying $50 a week on August 1.
Then we scratched together a list of fund-raising projects. Nobody likes
fundraising. We ran that whole orchard on about $1,000 per year and
most of that was to pay the water bill and the water bill is low because
we have invested hundreds of unpaid hours installing a state of the art
irrigation system that uses water scarcely.
This
is not my first community garden. I've seen this kind of trouble
before. You would think that every one loves a garden, but you would be
wrong.
That's enough. That's enough
for this week. It's like that guy said in the movie, the one where they
have the Marigold Hotel in India. The clerk says to the frustrated
guests who have no running water. He says to them, "Everything will be all right in the end so if it is not all right it is not the end.”
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