I was born in Providence Rhode Island back in the mid 1950s I am one of three children born into an Irish Catholic family and since I was the oldest son both my Mom and Grandmother both expected me to become a Priest.
I grew up in the part of Providence that is called South Providence, and for the first five years of my life we lived right in the center of South Providence by a Catholic church that was within walking distance from our house. That Church will appear again later in my life as part of God's plan for me. We lived close enough to walk to Mass it was just down the street from our apartment.
Saint Michael the Archangel Parish is the name of my first Parish. I was going there during those early years, with my Mom and We became great friends with the Parish Priest there Father Kevin who would go on to be a VERY pivotal person in my life, he was a former German POW from WW II and his faith and his charisma made a lasting impression on me growing up.
After the first five years we moved to the suburbs out to Warwick, and it was there that I started first grade at Saint Peter elementary school and we also joined the Parish as our new church.
I received my first reconciliation and first Communion and I also was confirmed there and became an altar boy in third grade and this was done in the time when the mass was still in Latin as it was pre-Vatican II. I learned everything that we now say as our responses in our Mass in Latin. It really took quite a bit of time to memorize it all.
I guess almost 45 years have passed since then and yet I still remember the many cold mornings walking up to the church with my mom. It was an important time in my life and my Mom taught me a lot about responsibility and follow through.
We only had one car in the family so we would walk together to the daily mass when I was assigned to serve at the 6:45 weekday Mass, you were given three days in a row as your assignment.
The lessons that I learned back in those days were the lessons that the Sisters of Mercy taught us about the Old Baltimore Catechism back in class and also the examples that the Priests showed to me while I was serving for about six years as an Altar Boy would be the foundation of my Formation from going from being a Boy to being a Man.
I went to that Catholic school for a total of eight years it was from first to eighth grade.We had no coed Catholic High Schools back then so I ended up going to a public high school, which was like a complete night and day difference experience for me no Nuns to make sure that you had completed your work, nobody really knew you there certainly not like you were known back at the elementary school.
We also had a Parish Boy Scout Troop that met each week in the School Cafeteria, friendships that have endured for almost 45 years were began back there and going away to sleep away camp was a rite of passage.
In high school I was very involved in the CYO program or Parrish. I actually used to be in charge of all the dances that we scheduled during the school year, we had a very active CYO group and it was just part of the culture back then of the Parish being the touchstone of most Family Life.
God had a plan that was going on in my life, I just didn't know it at the time.
The retreats that we went on back in CCD classes and also with the CYO were a very important formative part of my teenage years that I remember so clearly. hormones were raging and is was a time of just questioning values, of getting ready to go out into the World, by now the Vietnam War was being questioned and protested on a daily basis on the nightly news and also in the papers.
Watching the war nightly on TV and living through the Assassinations of the two Kennedy's and Martin Luther King had sort of put everything in perspective, for the next period of time in my life.
Everything was in flux,for me the only thing that most of my friends and I who didn't go to college ever talked about was what was your draft number and if you might just be sent to Vietnam.
The next twelve years of my life proved to be a very important time in my life, I joined the Army under a program called Stripes for Skills, and left RI and never really went back. For me the Army was the first time that I ever was really away from home, on my own.
And if there was anytime left yet to grow up it happened super fast there, being in a Multi Cultural setting and not being with a bunch of people that all looked like me and who all talked like me would be a MAJOR turn in my life,
you see (God had a plan for me) I just didn't know it yet.
After I get out of the army I went back to Rhode Island for a short time. I Started cooking at this restaurant that was owned by the Narragansett Indians as part of an apprenticeship that I had secured for myself with the Rhode Island professional chefs Association. There was a Chef who was training me who had lit the spark for me of what a REAL Chef does. I guess looking back it was there that I decided that maybe I should think about becoming a chef as my occupation.
So I had thought for a while back in High School of going to the Culinary Institute of America in New Haven CT.
Well it moved to Hyde Park NY while I was in the Army, and I decided to apply there, the critical thing about this decision was that the only money that I had back then for school was from the GI bill.
I didn't realize until I started at the CIA that the new school was built in an Old Jesuit Seminary called Saint Andrews on the Hudson. It is the place that Teilard de Chardrain the famous Jesuit Theologian and Scientist is buried there in the Jesuit Cemetery located on the Campus.
This time here at the school is a major point in my life's formation at this time and in the FUTURE.
In order to afford school I would have to work two jobs while studying as a full time student. It was a no nonsense time in my life when my Career was more important to me then it should have been.
From the CIA, I headed to Atlanta, Miami, and CT during that time I would get married and have two daughters, as the girls were born I started to get my head screwed back on, my Career was not everything. There were other things to worry about, I started to attend Mass again regularly.
Unfortunately my Marriage was not going all that well, my wife was very unhappy, we moved to FL after the crash of 87 and it was there that I found out that my wife had Ben having an affair with a friend back in CT.
I tried to save my Marriage and was really worried about the affect that this would have on my two daughters, as it turned out my wife had decided that before she had ever married me that it was a mistake, she had no intention of staying with me.
At this point by now I had heard about an Irish Sister of Mercy at the Parish next to mine who did counseling from a neighbor friend she helped people who were going through a crises of sorts, we began to see each other once a week for the next four years.
She led me through the grief process and back to God, he had never left me during that time, all though I thought that he had. The opposite in fact had been happening God was. Actively intervening in my life deliberately as look back now putting folks into my life who would be part of my HEALING.
Sister Mary suggested when we first met that I had a right to be angry, but I did not have a right to hold on to the anger, she suggested that I let Christ take it from me because it was keeping me from God and my children. She suggested that for me to attend a healing service in 1991 conducted by Sister Bridge McKenna who along with Father Kevin traveled all over conducting HEALING masses, my anger over my divorce left me pretty much for ever that night. Christ had taken my yoke from me and now I was sharing his, and it was a lot lighter on me.
I got up and I left that Church a new person, yet I was the same person just a healed person who had been restored to a wholeness.
After that I became involved in Ministry to Children, my girls and I went to Mass every Sunday and I started out with Childrens Liturgy of the Word, and then became a Sixth Grade Catechist for the next eight years.
It was strange that the busier I became with Church and with Childrens Ministry the closer my girls and I became. Every night we read a Scripture story and a story from the lives of the Saints. When I first got divorced my fear was that my girls would grow up to not really know me, but nothing could be farther from the truth. As a single Dad I had become even closer to them them then I could have ever imagined.
Sister Mary toward the end of our time began to challenge me to continue to give back she suggested that I might prayerfully consider the Permanent Deaconite as a Vocation.Truthfully at that time I was not even sure what a Permanent Deacon did or how it could even happen. God in his goodness was beginning to point me to Baltimore.
It was Sister Mary who had suggested it and a couple of friends who had already gotten an Annulment so that they could Married who had suggested to me that I might want to get an annulment, and it was in this process in this DISCOVERY that I came to know the TRUTH of my Marriage.
It was a great time of Healing and of Christ once again directly intervening in my life, gently pointing me in the direction of becoming a Minister in his Church, and allowing me the Grace of meeting someone who would be the "ONE" for me.
I began to volunteer at a restaurant that took reservations from homeless people, it's mission was to restore the dignity that homelessness had taken from them.
I thought I'd be a natural as a volunteer chef, but they very wisely chose for me to be a table companion to the clients. It was a Grace for me to learn Humility from those to whom I was Ministering to.
At this restaurant guests order each day from a Menu, prepared by a Salaried Chef and his assistants, each table seated four and had one table companion for every three guests.
It was there in WPB at Cafe Joshua that I would meet Christ for the first time in the flesh, in the person of one of our clients.
Lawrence was his name and he was a very large man who every day wore the same clothes and to me at first I thought that he just there that he had figured it all out and he was "working the system".
I had never sat with him and I just was going on first impressions, and boy was I WRONG, he spoke to me that first time and was able to in a second convey all of his pain and all of his feelings of rejection over his weight and also over his poor health. His eyes were the eyes of Christ as he described his hurt and rejection.
I also met a another very important person in my life there a recent Graduate from Loyola College, here in Baltimore who upon Graduation had decided to give a year of her life in service to the poor.
A last minute decision on her part changed her mind from going to Denver to work with unwed pregnant teenagers to decide to go instead to Cafe Joshua in WPB she had read the Joshua book by Father Grizzione and that was the factor that she chose her assignment by.
Coincidently I too had read the same book, and it was the reason I chose to volunteer myself at Cafe Joshua, God had at this time intervened in both of our lives and punts together. We became engaged after a year and a half of dating.
Three years later I would move here from WPB and got married to my wife Lisa here in Baltimore, about two and a half years later I would start and finish the CLI it is the first step in becoming a Deacon, after meeting with the Deacon Formation Team I would be accepted into a year of discernment and then into three more years of Formation before becoming Ordained.
Formation was very challenging for us every Saturday at the Seminary, each week a new text book to read and write papers on. Spiritual Direction, daily praying of the Liturgy of the Hours, and all the while at the same time my life was still going on, my two sons were born a year and seven months apart.
Our journey to parenthood would be a difficult and a painful one, Lisa had been seeing a fertility expert, and just could nt seem to conceive.
There were many nights of holding her and asking her to TRUST in the goodness of the Lord who didn't seem to be at the time answering our prayers.
Finally she got pregnant and our hopes were in the clouds, at about seven weeks we went in for our first ultrasound and the embryo was not in the egg as it was empty, we were devastated.
After that we were offered injectable drugs that might have produced multiple
Embryos, and we would have to agree to possible selective abortion, we decided that we could not do this despite our wanting a child so bad, we could not ever decide to make that kind of choice.
It was only after we had completely given up that idea of ever being parents that Lisa got pregnant not once but two more times. Our prayers were answered in ways better then we could ever imagine.
We were blessed with two beautiful boys.
After the birth of my first son a health complication would arise and a perforated intestine with two major surgeries would be a major distraction, to my own life plan. Once again it would be part of God's plan for me, I just needed to learn that for myself.
By then I had been given my service internship as a Chaplain at SJMC, the same hospital where I myself would be a patient.
I was later assigned to SPX and was there for my year of Pastoral Internship, I learned to preach and to proclaim the word of God there.
It was a great experience being there it helped to prepare me for my permanent assignment at Immaculate Conception Church, it's bigger then SPX with a similar congregation. I have been made to feel very welcome since I was assigned there three and a half years ago. I asked to be assigned to ICC because I am good friends with Father Matthew Buening, he and I had met in a Pastoral Spanish Class a few years earlier and I thought it would be great to work with him on my first assignment after Ordination, Fr. Matt was transferred two weeks after I started at ICC.
Among my duties at ICC, I work every Tuesday at GBMC as a Chaplain my job is to do Pastoral Visits to the Catholic Patients that are there staying at the Hospital. I have been there most every Tuesday Morning since I started at ICC, and since our Former Pastor Msgr. Dennis Tinder had his back surgery I have been presiding at a Communion Service that is broadcast to the Patients on their TV's if they would like to watch. I get a lot of the staff there who come to the Chapel for the service.
Working as a Hospital Chaplain in my Clerics enables an instant intimacy with the Patient, in affect you are invited into the suffering of another human being, my job then is to offer prayers and blessings as well as to provide Spiritual and Pastoral Care for the suffering and their families. I also go to Shepherd Pratt and visit the sick who are there, my Ministry to the sick at the Hospitals is one of prayers, blessing and presence.
Also I am part of a group of Deacons who go to BCDC each Friday afternoon to Preside at a Communion Service for the male detainees who are being held while they wait for trials, back when I was in Formation to become a Deacon doing Hospital and Jail Ministry did not seem like something that I would be doing so regularly since Ordination.
I started a tradition of having the Formation team from the Seminary come to my house once a year for a special dinner, we get together for food, wine and fellowship. Well after the first dinner I was asked by Father Patrick Carrion if I would cater his 25th anniversary of Ordination dinner for him.
The dinner that night was the impetus for starting my own business IGT Catering, almost all of my clients are from the Catholic Church in one form or another, everything from Elaborate Parties for the Archbishop to doing box lunches at Saint Mary's Spiritual Center at the original Seminary on Paca Street in Baltimore City.
My catering company is mainly a family business with both of my daughters and my wife working on most of our parties.
My two sons aged five and seven have even helped out on some deliveries and setups, last month we did a welcome luncheon at Saint Mary's at Paca Street for 80 Seminarians from Saint Mary's Seminary and University in Roland Park.
It is there in Roland Park that I had my base client the Provincial House of the US Society of San Sulpice, I was a subcontractor for the first six months there as the Personal Chef for the Senior Staff at the Provincial House, they are of course very understanding of my Ministerial Responsibilities as a Deacon, with funerals, wakes, and my work on the Deacon Personel Board and as the Chair of the Placement Committee for the assignments for Permanent Deacons.
I am not sure that you might remember from the beginning of my Testimony that I am originally from RI, I was invited to the 50 year Anniversary of my Catholic School that I attended from first through eighth grade, I was to be the Deacon of the Mass and then my Mom,Brother and Sister were going to sit with me as they both attended the school as well.
My Mom and I caught the last flight bout of Baltimore on Feb. 5th the day before the big Blizzard hit Baltimore, that night after assisting at the Mass, back on the altar that I used to serve on as an altar boy and having dinner at the Seminary that I had once considered attending to become a Priest forty years earlier I had a major heart attack.
The Lord was once again with me as I arrived by ambulance at RI Hospital within 8 minutes from the time we called the Ambulance.
I had been so lucky that it happened there and not while in was in my big driveway shoveling snow back in Towson, I would have thought at first it was just the shoveling that had me out of breath.
I am not at all sure that the Ambulance would have even been able to make it into my neighborhood and certainly not able to get me to a Cardiac Trauma Center in 8 minutes. I had found Providence in Providence, the most amazing part of my adventure was from my Hospital Room I could see the light in the Steeple of Saint Michaels Church in Providence, fifty years of sprawl had brought the Hospital within eyesight of the steeple.
But really it was much more than that it was 55 years of God watching out for me and guiding me exactly where ever I need to be. Last week Pope Benedict XVI traveled to England to beatify Cardinal John Newman who once said "Almighty God has a plan that is unique and suited to the particular talents and graces that he has blessed each of us with, all we have to do is let him guide us to do the work that he intends for each of us, here in the Kingdom.
Kevin F. Reid
Chef / Owner
In Good Taste Catering
443-570-0395
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