Funny Church Stories

Telling her story

In late January 2009, Sheila Kay Adams and I sat on the steps of the Trojan Center Theater listening to Alabama’s legendary storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham weave her magic with words at the Pike Piddlers Storytelling Festival.

Wiping tears from her eyes, Sheila whispered, “Every time I hear Kathryn, I think it might be the last time.” Then with a smile, she said, “Oh, hell, I’ve been thinkin’ that for ten years.”

We laughed quietly.

Kathryn Tucker Windham was 90 years old at the time but she, like a fine wine, had gotten better with age. Time was on her side. Maybe we all thought that she would live forever because she had been “forever” in the lives of three, maybe four, generations of Alabamians.

My first introduction to Kathryn Windham was through “Jeffrey” but I wasn’t too interested in ghosts. However, a decade or more later, she introduced me to the art of professional storytelling. I don’t remember who the other storytellers were at her storytelling festival in Selma, but I do remember Kathryn Tucker Windham. In her quiet, unassuming way, she captured her audience and held each one of us, individually, in the palm of her hand.

Over the years, I heard her “speak” and tell many times but it wasn’t until one day at a storytelling event in LaGrange, Georgia that we talked. I was last in line to get a book signed and, with just the two of us there, I mentioned a story that I wanted to share. We had just started to talk when another crowd began to gather around her. “Just write me,” she said.

It took a while and a whole lot of nerve to put a story on paper for Kathryn Tucker Windham to read. But I did and I got a wonderful response from her expressing deep appreciation for the story and gratitude for sharing it.

When I saw her again a couple of years later, she mentioned the “fascinating” story.

“I still think about it from time to time,” she said.

Kathryn Windham would often be at storytelling festivals and other events that I attended but it wasn’t until the Brundidge Historical Society decided to expand what it does in the area of folk life presentations that I had occasion to talk with her again. She was our first choice as a teller but a phone call was for naught. She was booked but wished us luck.

And we got it.

Donald Davis, the dean of storytelling and close friend of Kathryn Windham, made arrangements to help us get our storytelling festival off to a good start. He agreed to come back the next year, 2008, and his friend agreed to come along, too.

Your funny church stories | The Southern Cross

“These animals were known as the holy goats, so perhaps it was not surprising when in church one morning, whilst the rather pompous visiting priest was explaining to the congregation just how the sign of the cross should be made, my seven-year-old niece Winnie rushed up to the altar rail and yelled: ‘It is not Holy Ghost; it’s holy goats’.”

Also from Cape Town came an e-mail from Victor Raynal who wrote: “In the late 1940s, a well-known priest in the Johannesburg diocese, Fr Perron, was preparing to render a sermon at Sunday Mass in Belgravia parish. “Because he was a small man, Fr Perron stood on a stool in the pulpit. Just as he quoted the text of his sermon from John 16:19—“a little while and you shall not see me, and again a little while you shall see me”—the stool collapsed and Fr Perron disappeared from view. The congregation was in an uproar”

From Richard Salt of Craighall, Johannesburg: “My daughter, her husband and two children attend St Phillip the Apostle church in Finchley, North London. When my granddaughter was four years old they we went to Mass on Easter Sunday. At the end of Mass, Fr John invited the children to take Easter eggs from baskets placed at the doors of the church  (they were chocolate eggs with a cream filling). “Annabel took two eggs, one for herself and one for her little brother, Ethan. As she ran down the stairs she called out to her brother: ‘Ethan, I have an egg for you and it is your favourite; God had it!’”

All this reminds me of a lovely story Southern Cross editor Günther Simmermacher once told me about his son Michael, now a young man but at the time of the story still a toddler who had just started to talk. Outside the church entrance stood a crucifix with the bleeding and dying Christ hanging on it. Jesus obviously looked tormented. Michael looked at the statue, and then asked why Jesus was crying. Günther replied: “Because he is sore.” To which Michael responded, with the impeccable logic of a small child: “Then Jesus must eat medicine.”

Rosemary De Gouveia told a wonderful story of her cousin who took her boyfriend, who was not a Catholic, to Holy Mass one Sunday morning. Well Rosemary, I have a similar story to tell of my good friend Daphne Brindle of Rivonia parish, who will never ever talk to me again for publishing this. I was sitting next to her at Mass one Sunday and she also put in a R50 note and then taking change “for the Sunday Times and a litre of milk”.  I have never let her forget it.

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