Remembering Sister Andrea

Sister Andrea Dumont, the longest-serving religious in Thompson by far when she retired back to Ontario in mid-June to live with other members of her order in a residence in Toronto, at the insistence of her general superior, has died at the age of 86.

Originally from St. Catharines, Ontario. and a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto, Sister Andrea arrived in Thompson in 1991 and spent 29 years working here.

Her parents, William Dumont and Orienne Gauthier, were from Quebec.

Sister Andrea graduated as a registered nurse from St. Joseph’s Hospital School of Nursing in Toronto in 1955. She worked as a nurse in Windsor and then at the emergency department and in the nursing service office at St. Joseph’s Hospital before seeing a notice from the sisters seeking volunteers for some missionary work, Thompson Citizen editor Ian Graham wrote May 28 in a nice piece on her impending retirement (https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/news/thompson/after-29-years-in-thompson-sister-andrea-dumont-returning-to-toronto-1.24143006).

Sister Andrea entered the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto in February 1956, and received the habit in August 1956. She made her final profession in August 1961 and celebrated her diamond jubilee in June 2016.

Sister Andrea spent 14 years in Guatemala until the mission closed and after returning to Canada lived in Grand Rapids, Easterville and Thompson, where the main focus of her work was in adult education, which included training lay presiders for times when there is no priest available, organizing and instructing in the various ministries, sacramental preparation and RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults). There are no parochial Catholic schools in the area. As well as Guatemala, the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto at one time also had foreign missions in Hong Kong, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nicaragua, Honduras and Haiti. They continue to serve in Honduras and Haiti.

In April 2015, she received the St. Joseph Award, the highest honour Catholic Missions in Canada bestows for outstanding missionary work. The Catholic Missions in Canada was founded in 1908 as The Catholic Church Extension Society of Canada. The organization comes to the aid of isolated missions across the country where a lack of resources makes it impossible to maintain a Catholic presence without outside financial help.

Sister Andrea’s order also included some of the same sisters – a fact I only learned here in Thompson years later – that taught some of my high school classes from September 1971 to June 1976, when Sister Conrad Lauber was principal, and Sister Dorothy Schweitzer taught me several English and math classes  at Oshawa Catholic High School (now Monsignor Paul Dwyer Catholic High School). Both Sister Conrad and Sister Dorothy, so it turned out, happened to be good friends of Sister Andrea.

About 10 years ago, I asked Father Eugene Whyte, then pastor of St. Lawrence Church here in Thompson, and a member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, about the prospects of a particular sister soon retiring. Without missing a beat, Father Eugene’s deadpan reply was, “Nuns don’t really retire, John. Ever.”

I wasn’t quite sure then that was quite literally true, but pretty darn close, I thought as I caught Father Eugene’s drift.

For my Catholic friends, it will come as no surprise for me to say there are at least two other truths in addition to non-retirement about Catholic nuns, always worth remembering: you don’t want to incur their wrath and you can never say “no” to a request from a sister, which usually is stated more in the form of a direction assuming compliance, than an actual question. Such, of course, was the case in my relationship with Sister Andrea.

In November 2010, I had Ryan Flanagan, a new reporter at the Thompson Citizen, which I was editing at the time, write a story on charitable organizations who sold homemade goodies at community events as fundraisers for their many good works. One of his stops that crisp fall Saturday morning was the St. Lawrence Pastoral Centre, where Sister Andrea and other volunteers were making their famous perogies for the upcoming Catholic Women’s League (CWL) Annual Christmas craft sale and raffle, scheduled to be held a few short weeks at St.. Lawrence Parish Hall, and the premier fundraising event of the year for the CWL.

Sure enough, Ryan, would wind up writing, “Among the guidelines are that the event must be registered with Public Health at least 14 working days before it begins, that the event operator must maintain a list of all vendors including contact information, and that any food qualifying as ‘potentially hazardous’ must be prepared and packaged in an approved establishment. Foods qualifying as ‘potentially hazardous’ include antipasto, cabbage rolls, chocolate (unless it has been heated as an ingredient in, for example, chocolate chip cookies), coleslaw, pastries filled with cream or custard, dairy products, fish, garlic spreads, homemade soups, meat or meat products, perogies, pickled eggs, pumpkin pie or any pie with meringue, salsa, ungraded eggs, and whipped butter. None of these foods can be sold unless they were prepared in a facility that has been approved by the province as a food handling establishment” (https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/news/thompson/strict-public-health-rules-in-place-for-volunteer-groups-food-and-bake-sales-1.1368718).

I found myself in Sister Andrea’s “if-looks-could-kill” deep freeze for several months. The gradual thaw came a few months later, as Father Eugene made a point of being extra nice to me (no small feat perhaps, as Father Eugene’s opinion of the media wasn’t so very removed from Sister Andrea’s in general, as I recall, from our many conversations) when Sister Andrea and I were sharing the same space, such as reaching extra far to shake my hand when he was processing at the beginning of mass and I was standing near the end of a pew, perhaps suggesting to Sister Andrea that despite apparent evidence to the contrary, I might not be quite beyond redemption.

Sister Andrea, of course, forgave me in time, which is what sisters do. Within a couple of years she was swapping movie lists with Jeanette and I.

She may have also had the last laugh, as it were, a few years later, although she was also may have just been being practical and solving a problem on the fly on short notice. Or a little of both maybe.

In May 2013, The Christophers, a non-profit organization founded in 1945 by Maryknoll Father James Keller, were in Thompson to offer a Christopher leadership course. The ancient Chinese proverb – “it’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness” – guides the organization’s programs. The name of the group is derived from the Greek word “christophoros,” which means “Christ-bearer.”

The Christopher leadership courses teaches participants speaking skills to organize ideas an think on their feet; conquer shyness or fear of public-speaking; speak with conviction and “captivate” their audience; and effectively express themselves in business, socially, in the community and in the larger world.

The New York City-based Christophers emerged in the wake of the Second World War, with the rapid dawn soon after of the Cold War, as periodic historical suspicions of Roman Catholic loyalties in the United States re-emerged in the public conspicuousness. In response, a number of Roman Catholics began to find new ways of commending the Church to the public, including the new medium of television. The most popular and influential television presentation was The Christophers, a weekly half-hour program aired on ABC beginning in 1945. The Christophers, as Keller, from Oakland, California envisioned it, would have no formal organization, no memberships, and no dues. “The reason for this somewhat unusual formula,” he explained, “was to focus attention on personal responsibility.”

The wrap-up to the Thompson Christopher leadership course seven years ago was to be held on Saturday, May 4, and was to feature a keynote speech from Archbishop Sylvain Lavoie, who had just recently become the most recent archbishop emeritus of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas.  However, plans changed at the last minute, and His Grace was unable to keep the speaking engagement.

Sister Andrea telephoned me around mid-afternoon on Friday, May 3 in my office at the paper. And that was how I came to fill in with less than 24 hours notice for the archbishop – a sad disappointment I’m sure to unsuspecting participants – as the keynote speaker for the wrap-up session.

I’m not sure, but I could swear I saw a grin on Sister Andrea’s face, as I mercifully finished up, and heard from somewhere above me a good-natured celestial “got you.”

The last time I wrote about Sister Andrea until today was in an email I sent to Thompson Mayor Colleen Smook May 30:

“I was thinking about the departure of Sister Andrea next month back to Toronto, after being recalled at the age of 86, after 29 years in Thompson  by her religious order, the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto, and it occurred to me that I could think of no one any worthier to receive a Key to the City of Thompson than Sister Andrea. I also know it is an infrequently bestowed honour, but having known several of the previous recipients over the last decade – Dr. Alan Rich, when he departed for Swan River in 2014, and provincial court Judge Murray Thompson, and his wife, Linda Webstob, when they moved to Winnipeg the same year – left me thinking  Sister Andrea would be in good company with those keyholders of high character and purpose, and vice versa.”

I don’t know if the City of Thompson has ever awarded a Key to the City posthumously, but I think, if not, Sister Andrea would still be a good candidate for one, after touching so many lives, Catholic and non-Catholic, during her 29 years of service in Thompson, Manitoba.

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Your best life: Life in Christian cinema is often a game of Friday night high school football

 

The problem with sports being a metaphor for life is not that the claim is inaccurate: sports truly is a metaphor for life. The problem is the terrain of what constitutes a metaphor for life is a vast landscape. Within sports, virtually everything can and is described as being a metaphor for life.

When it comes to comparing values and ideals taken from sports and applied cinematically to life, I have a fondness for golf and high school and college football movies. While I don’t play golf (at least not yet) I did play a bit of high school football some many decades ago.

There’s strong evidence that sport strongly reinforces certain personal characteristics such as responsibility, courage, teamwork, mental focus, persistence, humility, commitment and self-discipline.

While there are all kinds of things that can rightly divide secular moviemaking from films made by Christian genre movie producers, high school football is the game field they both play, often scoring box office touchdowns on. Perhaps in no small part because Friday night high school football is in some ways best thought of as a secular religion south of the Mason Dixon Line. High school football teams usually play between eight and 10 games in a season, starting after Labor Day. If teams have successful league seasons, they advance to regional or state playoff tournaments. Some schools in Texas play as many as 15 games if they advance to the state championship game. Most high school teams play in a regional league, although some travel 50 to 100 miles to play opponents.

Among my favourite golf movies are Tin Cup from 1996, starring Kevin Costner and Rene Russo; The Legend of Bagger Vance, with Will Smith, Matt Damon and Charlize Theron, released in 2000; and Seven Days in Utopia, released in 2011, starring Robert Duvall and Lucas Black, based on the book Golf’s Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia by Dr. David Lamar Cook, a psychologist who lives in the Hill Country of Texas, where the book and movie are set.

As for American high school football movies, Ranker, the social consumer web platform launched in August 2009, designed around collaborative linked datasets, individual list-making and voting, which attracts 20 million unique visitors per month, in fact, has a category simply called “The Best High School Football Movies.”

Ranked number one is Friday Night Lights the 2004 film directed by Peter Berg, which documents the coach and players of the 1988 season Permian High School Panthers football team in Odessa, Texas and their run for the state championship, based on the 1990 book, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H. G. Bissinger. The film won the Best Sports Movie ESPY Award.

Number two on Ranker’s list is Remember the Titans, made in 2000, and based on the true story of African-American coach Herman Boone, portrayed by Denzel Washington as he tries to introduce a racially diverse team at recently but voluntarily integrated T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia in 1971. It was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

In 2006, Alex and Stephen Kendrick, who are both associate pastors on the staff of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, made Facing the Giants, their second Sherwood Pictures movie, about high school football and resilient faith. While the movie is admired and often still shown 11 years after it was made at Christian church movie nights, secular cinema critics have been less effusive in their praise.  Still, two scenes stand out for me, and are widely available on YouTube. The first is lineman and Shiloh Eagles team captain Brock Kelley’s 100-plus yard blindfolded “Death Crawl” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sUKoKQlEC4) with his 160-pound teammate Jeremy Johnson on his back, and soccer kicker turned placekicker David Childers’ 51-yard game-winning field goal in the Eagle’s 24-23 victory over the Richmond Giants (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uCj5_a3nbw).

When the Game Stands Tall was released in 2014. It stars Jim Caviezel, best known for portraying Jesus in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, here playing Catholic De La Salle High School Spartans’ football coach Bob Ladouceur (with Laura Dern as his wife, Bev Ladouceur), and telling the story of what comes after the record-setting 151-game 1992–2003 winning streak by De La Salle, a Catholic boys’ high school in Concord, California, just east of San Francisco. The movie is an adaptation of the 2003 book of the same name by Neil Hayes, then a columnist with the Contra Costa Times.  The movie was filmed in Louisiana.

Released a year later in 2015 is Woodlawn is also a true story and in some ways a faith-based version of Remember the Titans, although Woodlawn is set slightly later (two years) and is situated in at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham, Alabama in 1973, a decade after Birmingham had Bull Connor as commissioner of public safety in 1961 when the civil rights “Freedom Riders” bused to the South, and where on Sept. 15, 1963 a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church, with a predominantly black congregation that served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured.

Woodlawn opens with a prologue set three years earlier on Sept. 12, 1970 where legendary University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, the Crimson Tide’s iconic fedora-wearing legend, well played by Jon Voight, tries to ease tensions by inviting John McKay and his University of Southern California (USC) Trojans team to play at Legion Field in Birmingham, marking the first time a fully integrated team had come to play Alabama in the South. The Crimson Tide had one black player at the time. The game was a 42-21 Trojans rout.

Cut to three years later, when Woodlawn High School becomes integrated, with football coach Tandy Gerelds, played by Nic Bishop, welcoming the arrival of such talented black players as Tony Nathan, played by Caleb Castille.

Hank Erwin, played by Sean Astin, just sort of shows up at Woodlawn High School, introducing himself as a “sports chaplain” and asking to address the team. Tandy Gerelds reluctantly agrees. In his impassioned speech Hank asks the players to “choose Jesus” and, much to the coach’s amazement, most of the players agree, including Tony Nathan, who would go onto become a tailback for Alabama and later the Miami Dolphins. Erwin’s sons, Birmingham brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin, directed Woodlawn.

To understand the somewhat enigmatic self-proclaimed sports chaplain Hank Erwin, it is helpful to know something of the “Jesus movement,” which began on the west coast of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, spreading primarily throughout North America, Europe, and Central America. Members of the movement were often called “Jesus people,” or “Jesus freaks.”

Its predecessor, the charismatic movement, had already been in full swing for about a decade. It involved mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics who testified to supernatural experiences similar to those recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, especially speaking in tongues. Both these movements were calling the church back to what they called early Christianity and recovery of the gifts of the Spirit.

TIME magazine had a 1966 cover asking “Is God Dead?” They had another cover story in 1971 on “The Jesus Revolution.” And just one year later, in June 1972, more than 80,000 high school and college students gathered in the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas for Explo ’72, organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru) to celebrate the person of Christ and mobilize youth to take the Good News to friends and family when they returned to their hometowns. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, led the initiative and Billy Graham, now 98, and the most important Christian crusade and revival evangelist of the latter half of the 2oth century, preached at it. And Hank Erwin was there for it.

The dramatic tension on and off the field is elevated by events such as Nathan refusing to shake Alabama governor George Wallace’s hand during an awards dinner, citing Wallace’s opposition to school integration, and Tandy getting in trouble with the local school board because of the team’s religious activities, including Hank Erwin getting the microphone plug pulled while delivering the Lord’s Prayer before the history-making 1973 game that attracted 42,000 spectators (another 20,000 were turned away), only to have the thousands of spectators spontaneously recite it for him.

Peter J. Leithart, a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and is president of the Theopolis Institute, wrote in a review in September 2015, after an advance screening of the film in Birmingham, in the Catholic journal First Things that “the acting is good, especially Jon Voight as Bear Bryant, Nic Bishop as Woodlawn’s coach, Tandy Gerelds, and Caleb Castille who plays Nathan in his first film. Technically, evangelical films have come a long way.”

Caleb Castille was originally hired as a stunt double for the British actor who was picked to play Tony Nathan, but visa complications left the Erwins scrambling to find a last-minute replacement. Only then did they discover Caleb’s audition tape.

Caleb Castille won two national championship rings with the University of Alabama before he sensed God was calling him out of football to pursue an acting career instead. His father, Jeremiah Castille, played with Tony Nathan on the 1979 Alabama Crimson Tide national championship team.

Still, Leithart was left dissatisfied by Woodlawn. “I think there are a number of reasons for that dissatisfaction, but at base the problem is theological (ain’t it always).

“Evangelicalism is a word religion. I’m a big fan of words, but even talking pictures aren’t fundamentally about words. It’s no accident that the hall of fame for directors has a large share of Catholics (Fellini, Hitchcock, Scorsese), Orthodox (Tarkovsky, Eisenstein), and sacramental Protestants (Bergman, Malick). This can’t be the whole story, of course, since aniconic Judaism has produced some of the world’s great filmmakers. But there’s something to it: Evangelical films over-explain, over-talk. They don’t trust the images to do the work.

“I suspect a more sacramentally oriented evangelicalism, an evangelicalism more attuned to types and symbols in scripture, would make better films.

“Evangelicalism is also a conversionist faith. The key crisis of life is the moment of commitment to Christ. In Woodlawn, most of the characters convert early in the film, necessarily so because the story is about the effect of the revival on race relations. But that means that the line of character development is flat. The really crucial character development has taken place in the moment of conversion. The main exception is Coach Gerelds, and not surprisingly, it’s Coach Gerelds who ends up being the dramatic focus of the film, the character whose emotions and motivations we get to know best.

“Theologically speaking, character development is ‘sanctification.’ A conversionist form of Christianity places less emphasis on sanctification than on conversion and justification. In films, that translates into drastic oversimplification of human psychology. For evangelicals, there are only two sets of motivations, as there are two kinds of people: Saved and unsaved. While that is ultimately true, it is not the whole story.”

Woodlawn, distributed by Pure Flix Entertainment, owned by David. A.R. White, raised in a small Mennonite farming town outside of Dodge City, Kansas, brothers Kevin and Bobby Downes, and Michael Scott, did impressively better perhaps with the very secular Rotten Tomatoes, which is by no means always kind to either evangelical or high school football films, and is the leading online aggregator of movie reviews from a mix of professional critics and its community of users, with an overall score of 77 per cent, and an audience score of 82 per cent (earning a “full popcorn bucket”) meaning the movie received 3.5 stars or higher by Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes users. Rotten Tomatoes noted under “Critics consensus: No consensus yet.” Rotten Tomatoes is part of Fandango’s portfolio of digital properties.

Next up for me perhaps is the college football movie from 2006, We are Marshall, which depicts the aftermath of the Nov. 14, 1970 airplane crash that killed 37 football players on the Huntington, West Virginia Marshall University Thundering Herd, along with five coaches, two athletic trainers, the athletic director, 25 boosters, and a crew of five. New coach Jack Lengye, played by Matthew McConaughey, arrives on the scene four months later in March 1971, determined to rebuild Marshall’s Thundering Herd and heal a grieving community in the process (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU4QBR-V79I).

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