This video entitled “In Service to One, In Service to All” captures the mission of the Knights of Columbus.
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This video entitled “In Service to One, In Service to All” captures the mission of the Knights of Columbus. This version has Spanish subtitles.
It was a time to remember. It was a time to honor. Marco Lutheran Church, in conjunction with Avow Hospice, hosted a Remembering Service Monday evening on Nov. 9. It was a time to honor the memories of loved ones and reflect upon the gift of life through music, song, readings and candle lighting. Two days later, St. Finbarr’s Knights of Columbus hosted a Salute to Veterans pasta dinner. Each branch of the military was honored and prayers were given for those currently serving.
Avow Hospice holds four ecumenical remembering services a year, one in Marco, one in Immokalee and two in Naples. “We are here to add a measure of grace, celebrate their lives and affirm the gift they were in our lives – may you find peace in this program,” said Mary Brodeur, R.N., bereavement counselor for Avow Hospice, in her opening remarks.
Everyone was given a candle. Small boxes of tissues were thoughtfully left on the seats in the sanctuary. The poems that were read and music that was sung evoked memories of loved ones gone—lover, spouse, life partner, parent, sibling or friend. Brodeur read “Remembering You.” The last line of the poem, “I’m thankful for the times we shared and the priceless memories too; for those memories are a comfort now when I lovingly—remember you,” set the tone for the evening.
Craig Greusel, Marco Lutheran Church’s music director, soothingly sang “Love Me Tender.” The music came from the back of the church, so as not to take away from the sanctity of the service. At the reception that followed, Marcia Orsolini said of Greusel’s rich baritone voice, “His singing is phenomenal. It touches you down to your toes.”
The Rev. Kevin Koenig, senior pastor of Marco Lutheran Church, gave the meditatio, using a sand dollar to illustrate the message of loss and hope. He wondered why, when he looked for sand dollars, he only found broken pieces. “God accepts us as we are in our brokenness,” said Koenig. “Yet we continue to look for something whole and complete, something beyond our grasp. People offer us a touch, an encouragement. They help us in our journey towards wholeness. In the broken pieces, there are five little doves inside, but they can’t emerge until the sand dollar is broken.” He held up tiny pieces of the sand dollar that were in the shape of doves.
Each of the doves represents an aspect of bereavement—grief, helplessness, validation, disorganization and a return to wholeness. The five doves put together became a star. “So, out of the broken sand dollar there are five doves that have meaning that become a star – to get the star of hope, we have to open the sand dollar,” said Koenig.
A poem by Nancy Moeller, “We Light These Candles,” was read as the candles were lit. The poem began with: “We light these candles for our sadness,” and ended with, “We want you to know we will always love you.”
Everyone exited in silence, blew out their candle and picked up a sand dollar. Greusel softly strummed his guitar as he led the way to the canal. The path was dimly lit with luminaria and attendees threw their sand dollars into the canal as a way of letting go. As the participants cast their sand dollar into the canal, “Prayer of the Sea” was read. The last line was, “At the end of life’s uncertain course, we hope to rest in thee.”
They next proceeded into the great room, where the Marco Lutheran Board of Human Care hosted a reception and Avow bereavement counselors and chaplains were available. “The service helps people deal with their grief and to have the remembering, without the pain,” said Louis Stickles, who was there with his father Al to honor the passing of their mother and wife. “The people in the service are candles who keep the love alive beyond the portal of death.”
At the conclusion of the evening, Avow Hospice honored Marco Lutheran Church with a Community Partner award. The award is given to institutions that fulfill the mission of acknowledging and caring for families and caregivers who have experienced a loss. A 13-week grief support class, presented by the Marco Lutheran’s grief support team, will begin at 10 a.m., Jan. 7. Please contact Joyce Waidelich for at 793-4601 for information. For information on Avow Hospice visit their Web site at avowhospice.org or call 261-4404.
The Salute to Veterans pasta dinner, hosted by St. Finbarr’s Knights of Columbus, was quite a contrast to the solemn and sacred Remembering Service. Tables were decorated in red, white and blue and patriotic music played in the background. It was the first shared meal of the season and friends were happy to get reacquainted. The dinner was sold out, with 350 people attending.
St. Finbarr Knights of Columbus was chartered in 2007. They sponsor charitable and social events throughout the season and meet once per month from September through May on the first Wednesday. Each year they have raised more than $13,000 for charities. One of their primary goals is to raise funds to support St. Finbarr’s Catholic Faith Appeal. The Appeal supports Catholic Charities, Catholic Family Services and seminarians. Top among the 10 charities they support are the National Wheelchair Foundation, Eden of Florida Autism Services and Collier County Foundation for the Disabled. The Knights are most visible in the community when it is time for their annual Tootsie Roll Drive, during which they collect donations for those with developmental disabilities.
Another aspect of the Knights of Columbus is the KofC Dignity of Life. “We promote womb to tomb sanctity of life,” said Grand Knight Tom Mulvey, a third generation Knight who follows in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. The Knights most recently participated in the Collier County Sheriff’s Office’s Adopt-a-Soldier program. They stuffed food, toiletries, books and other goods collected by the Sheriff’s Office into packages mailed to soldiers currently serving overseas.
“In addition to charitable and spiritual work, the Knights of Columbus are actively involved in patriotic endeavors,” said Mulvey. “It has a long history of helping soldiers. It was the first organization of its kind to provide aid and comfort camps for servicemen in France during WW I. It also was responsible for getting Congress to add ‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950s.”
“The Knights of Columbus exemplify dedication, service, leadership and commitment,” said St. Finbarr’s Administrator, Fr. Fritz Ligonde. “But most importantly, they are men of prayer. The president is such a humble, dedicated man of prayer. He is also president of the Pastoral Council at St. Finbarr’s.”
The Salute to Veterans began with the Pledge of Allegiance. Ligonde gave the blessing and Mulvey read a “Tribute to Veterans.” “We honor and revere these veterans today: those who rest in honored glory, those who still suffer from the wounds of war, and those who, with us, enjoy the blessing of living in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Dear God, we can never thank You enough for the privilege of living in America, where we still enjoy the gifts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Each branch of the military was then recognized, as well as veterans who had received medals. Deputy Grand Knight and former Marine John Borgese, organized the dinner and served as master of ceremonies. He has been a Knight for more than 40 years.
Joseph Kalinowski, charter grand knight of the St. Finbarr Council, was in charge of the music. He also may have been the oldest veteran there, serving in the WW II Navy Aviation Training program, but he never got his wings, as the bomb was dropped on Japan and they didn’t need any more pilots. After his service in the Navy, he joined the New York National Guard. He was called to Germany for the fall of the Berlin Wall, where he served as a radar maintenance non-commissioned officer in charge at the Berlin Tempelhof Airport.
The Carrabba’s Italian Grill on U.S. 41 East near Collier Boulevard catered the event. Managing partner Yvonne Lux and her crew served ziti, meatballs, Caesar salad and bread. Lux recently returned from Afghanistan and Turkey, where a team from OSI Restaurant Partners (the company that owns Carrabba’s, Outback, Bonefish Grill, Roy’s and several other restaurant chains) served a little bit of home to the troops. The Knights honored her with a bouquet of red, white and blue flowers at the conclusion of the event. All left over food was taken to St. Matthew’s House.
Join the community of faith. Worship at one of the greater Marco area houses of worship.
Kathleen Tuttle, a Marco Island resident since 1987, has written articles for various nonprofits for more than 25 years. She is a community volunteer, former science teacher and microbiologist.
April 2007 marked several historic events for the Knights of Columbus wheelchair distribution program.
This was the second year that a contingent of some 25 Knights and their wives traveled from California to Mexico City to distribute wheelchairs on the grounds of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Actually the wheelchairs and the mission of the Knights were prominently featured as a part of the high mass on a Sunday morning, including the first reading being delivered by Carl A. Anderson, Supreme Knight of the global order. This mass was televised to more than 75 million homes in North and Central America, and was presided over by the Vicor General and Rector of the Basilica de Santa Maria de Guadalupe, Monsignor Diego Monroy Ponce.
This event was very special and inspirational on its own, but then came the wheelchair distribution. Monsignor Ponce and Mr. Anderson participated in the hands on distribution of the wheelchairs, as did Mr. Andersons wife and daughter that accompanied him on this, his first wheelchair distribution. It was an emotional and heart warming event. A teenage girl named Funy that received her first wheelchair last year on the altar during the mass, read a letter to Mr. Anderson that described the love and affection she not only feels for the Knights, but that she feels from them. She described the Knights, the Rotarians that serve as the distribution partners and the Wheelchair Foundation as angels.
This event was also the inaugural participation of the brand new Knights of Columbus council located at the Basilica of Guadalupe. An enormous amount of effort went into the coordination of the mass and all of the special events that surrounded the distribution of the wheelchairs, and it was very well handled. Overseeing the activity of the Mexican Knights was William Olivera, State Deputy for Southern Mexico who assisted greatly in the success of the mission.
Since 2001, the Rotary Club of Texcoco de Gante has served as the Wheelchair Foundations primary distribution partner for the Mexico City area, and has coordinated the most efficient and successful delivery of more than 3,000 wheelchairs to date. The Rotarians have worked for two years now with the Knights from California and Mexico to handle all aspects of the wheelchair distributions with the utmost care and professionalism. Ok, truth be told, the wives of the Rotarians are actually the ones that do most of the work, but the husbands lift the boxes and follow directions perfectly. Club President Dr. Daniel Teliz spoke eloquently at the distribution ceremony about how organizations working together to benefit people in need can achieve any goals they may set.
California State Deputy Emilio Moure, Supreme Master Joseph Schultz and State Chaplain Fr. John Grace led the California delegation that included a number of veterans as well as many first time participants in the wheelchair program.
This event brought the number of wheelchairs sponsored by the Knights of Columbus to nearly 10,000 worldwide, and opened doors to an increased level of cooperation between Knights in North America and Knights in other parts of the world. The Mexican councils have now pledged to raise the funds for half of the 280 wheelchairs per container to their local areas, and the Knights in North America will provide the balance. The Rotarians have vowed to continue working with the Knights in the distribution process, and have offered to teach them the proven techniques so the Knights can eventually handle distributions on their own.
The Wheelchair Foundation team is very gratified to see great working relationships between organizations serve as the common thread upon which we all are providing Hope, Mobility, Freedom, Dignity and Independence to those in need.
This article appeared in the Knights of Columbus Columbia Magazine March 2006 Issue. For a printable PDF version of this article, please click here.
Ken Behring went as far as he could by cab. Then he got out and hiked through the Vietnamese countryside, pushing the wheelchair he planned to give to a girl he’d never met before. Finally he reached the little house where she lived with her parents.
“This little girl had never been able to walk,” said Behring. “She lay on a pile of rags in the corner. She was about 7 years old and she had never moved on her own.”
That was before she got a wheelchair.
“It took a while, hut we finally showed her how” to use the chair, Behring recalled. “When she finally moved herself, she just broke into the biggest smile there’s ever been.”
This girl was one of the first people to benefit from Behring’s Wheelchair Foundation – and Behring will never forget her, because she showed him that a wheelchair represents more than mobility, more than freedom.
“We’re showing people that somebody cares,” Behring explained. “That they are important.”
THE WHEELCHAIR FOUNDATION
Founded in June 2000, the Wheelchair Foundation buys up to 10,000 wheelchairs a month. They are distributed around the world with the help of distribution partners including the U.S. government, United Nations organizations, and nongovernmental organizations from the Red Cross to Rotary Clubs, and now the Knights
of Columbus. As of early 2006, the Wheelchair Foundation had distributed or committed to distribute nearly 425,000 wheelchairs – but much remains to be done. An estimated 100 to 150 million people around the world are in need of a wheelchair. Fewer than 1 percent own or have access to one.
These are statistics that Behring, former owner of football’s Seattle
Seahawks, discovered after his first wheelchair donation. He had a habit
of carrying relief supplies on his MD-87 jet when he traveled around the world. In 1999, the supplies he took on a trip to Eastern Europe included wheelchairs. When he saw how dramatically – and immediately – a wheelchair could change an individual’s life, the idea for the Wheelchair Foundation was born.
For every donation of $75 the foundation receives, it provides matching funds to purchase a wheel-chair for $150. The chairs are shipped, 280 at a time in massive containers, directly to the destination nation; at last count, chairs have been distributed in 143 countries at no cost to the recipients.
When he started the Wheelchair Foundation, Behring was no newcomer to philanthropy. He established the Seattle Seahawks Charitable Foundation and has donated tens of millions of dollars to numerous causes. But in some ways, the Wheelchair Foundation has been as big a help to him as it has been to the wheelchair recipients themselves.
“I’ve been very successful in my life in business,” explained Behring. “At that point in my life, no longer was there anything I wanted to buy or anyplace to go. I felt there had to be something else.”
Headquartered in Northern California, the Wheelchair Foundation has an international staff of 25 – including two of Behring’s sons – and a board of advisers that includes the king and queen of Spain, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jerry Lewis and Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson.
A UNIQUE PARTNERSHIP
The California State Council has begun working with the Wheelchair Foundation, even though, as State Deputy Gary Nelson said, it’s “not the most usual thing” for Knights to partner with another organization. But the California Knights are simply following the example of the Supreme Council.
In 2002, Supreme Knight Anderson met a member of the Wheelchair Foundation. By 2003, that meeting had blossomed into a working relationship: the Supreme Council sponsored 2,000 wheel-chairs to be distributed in Afghanistan. In 2004-05, the Supreme Council sponsored 2,000 chairs for distribution in the Middle East, the Philip-pines and Mexico. In 2006, 2,000 more are being distributed in the Philippines, Mexico and Poland.
Also in 2002, the Wheelchair Foundation arranged a meeting with some of the state officers of the California Knights. Don Gentleman, a member of Msgr. Francis X. Singleton Council 10248 in Clovis, attended that meeting. Then a Fourth Degree master and program chair for the state, Gentleman heard about a planned wheelchair distribution in Guatemala. He decided to go along and see for himself what the Wheelchair Foundation is all about.
“Those distributions are so touching. They really yank at your heartstrings,” said Gentleman, now the California State Wheelchair Program chairman.
“One fellow came in. He’d been carrying his wife on his back for 12 years. We put her in a wheelchair, and that man cried like a baby.”
When Gentleman returned to his council and to his work at the state level, he told about his experiences in Guatemala. The California Knights immediately began taking up collections for wheelchairs, but it wasn’t until 2005 that the program began to soar.
The goal for 2005-06 is to donate $96,000 to the Wheelchair Foundation. By early December, about $65,000 had already been raised. In April 2005, a group of California Knights joined Knights of Northern Mexico in a wheelchair distribution in three Mexican cities.
“I am a little amazed at the donations coming in because of the hurricanes and the [Order’s Gulf States Disaster Relief] Katrina fund and all,” Gentleman admitted. “I expected a big, sharp drop, but if anything, we had an increase during that period.”
’MESSENGERS TO THE WORLD’
For Chris Lewis, public education director for the Wheelchair Foundation and son of entertainer Jerry Lewis, the Knights’ partnership is particularly meaningful.
“I’m so tickled, I can’t tell you, about how this has been coming about,” said Lewis, a Knight since 2000. “There are so many like-minded people within the Order who are concerned about improving the quality of people’s lives, and are wondering how they can do it.”
State Deputy Nelson has helped the Knights of California see how they can do it. He asked every KC unit in the state to raise $150 before the end of his term; that means that, with the foundation’s matching funds, each assembly, council, Columbian Squires circle and chapter will fund the purchase of two wheelchairs. Each wheelchair purchased with the help of Knights’ donations bears a Knights of Columbus emblem.
“The thing that benefits us the most is awareness,” said Lewis. “People just don’t believe that you can sponsor the delivery of a brand-new wheelchair for $75. The message that the Knights are carrying to their councils, to their parishes, and outside to the community, is what’s causing so many people to get involved.
“What they have become is our messengers to the world.”
Its not only Knights who are spreading the word about the Wheelchair Foundation. Marilyn Willour, wife of Past State Deputy Ross Willour of St. Columban Council 3926 in Westminster, made a presentation about the foundation at Trinity Episcopal Church in Orange, Calif., where she was the administrator until her recent retirement. “I think people may be tired of me talking about it,” she said with a chuckle, “but I bring up the wheelchairs whenever I can.”
HANDS-ON SPIRITUALITY
A donated wheelchair affects the recipient physically. But the California Knights who went on the distribution trip in Mexico saw very clearly how wheelchairs impact the recipients emotionally and spiritually – and felt how the distribution affected them, too.
Past State Deputy William Przybyla of Redding Council 3978 went to Mexico last year for the foundation’s distribution, and recalls seeing a young man with a spasm condition receive a wheelchair. “To see the father getting tears in his eyes, because now he was going to be able to get his son around – it was very emotional,” said Przybyla. “It didn’t just impact the person receiving the wheelchair; it impacts the family.
“Actually participating in a distribution, you get to see your work come to fruition,” he added. “It really does make you a better person.”
Jim Letcher, Fourth Degree master of the Northern California District, shows a recently produced DVD of the Knights’ wheelchair distribution in Mexico each time he installs new officers for an assembly. “I always get very emotional when I see this movie,” he said. “I talk about how it affects me – how spiritual it is for me to help someone I don’t even know.”
He then passes around a hat so Knights can donate to the Wheelchair Foundation. “By the time the hat comes around, I’ve always had $150 or more,” said Letcher.
The Knights’ partnership with the Wheelchair Foundation may be unusual, but it’s also perfectly fitting, said Nelson, a member of Father Walter O’Brien Council 3518 in San Lorenzo.
“‘In service to One, in service to all.’ This [program] is the ‘all,’” he said.
“It doesn’t matter that they’ve never heard of the Knights of Columbus; what matters is, we can help.”
HOW KNIGHTS CAN HELP
To learn more about the Wheelchair Foundation, go to www.wheelchairfoundation.org. There you can view the video of the California and Mexico Knights participating in the Mexican wheelchair distribution by clicking on “Videos.” To order the DVD from the Supreme Council, contact Columbia magazine at or by e-mail at co******@ko**.org.
To find out how your council can join the Wheelchair Foundation’s efforts to help people in need of wheelchairs, call or e-mail Chris Lewis at cl****@wh******************.org.
Elisabeth Deffner writes from California. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the Los Angeles Times, the National Catholic Register and Catholic Digest.