Fr. Michael: Hi, I’m Fr. Michael Denk. I’m here at St. Matthias in Parma, Ohio, and I am delighted to have Father Norm Douglas as my guest today. We are continuing the series I am calling, “Praying with Priests”. We’re going to learn some wisdom from Fr. Norm Douglas about his experience of prayer life. As always with these interviews, they’re just very candid and open and you get to hear kind of like behind the scenes of what it’s like for a priest to pray with God. So, welcome Father.
Fr. Norm Douglas: Hey, it is great to be here with you knowing you through these years and having this great connection.
Fr. Michael: We have a good connection. His first assignment his was Saint Barnabas in Northfield, and that was my first assignment of Saint Barnabas Northfield, so we had a similar experience of going to a wonderful parish of people and getting to be like a puppy dog at that first assignment.
Fr. Norm Douglas: So fresh and at the same time this coming June it will be 50 years for me, but what I love and its grace from God, it’s still fresh.
Fr. Michael: Fifty years.
Fr. Norm Douglas: I’m an old guy.
Fr. Michael: Wow, that’s amazing. How old were you, and when did you get ordained?
Fr. Norm Douglas: Twenty-seven.
Fr. Michael: That’s almost the minimum.
Fr. Norm Douglas: Almost. Well yes, in the old days you could maybe get it at 26. If anybody needs to do the arithmetic, this next week I’m 77, and still loving it and still working.
Fr. Michael: A lot of guys retire at 75.
Fr. Norm Douglas: Talk about prayer, you know as I prayed about this, at 75, I could have retired. A lot of my classmates, there were 26 of us ordained. Big class and still about 16 alive and in Ministry and just about all of them did retire. They help out at parishes on weekends, but they can avoid administration, avoid all the headaches that you might get, but for me the prayer was, this has been my hobby for 50 years and I love it and still do and still have the energy and everything and the grace from God to be able to do it.
Fr. Michael: And it’s use it or lose it, I think. Some of the guys retire. There’s something about keeping it going.
I want to start off asking just about your first memories of God and I also want to say that we have a very interesting thing with Father Norm. He is a convert to the faith, so I don’t know how that works or where your spirituality or what your relationship or teaching was of God, but try to think back as far as you can. What was your first experience and thought of God?
Fr. Norm Douglas: A couple things. First, I belong to Disciples of Christ denomination in North Akron. I lived near there. I went on my own. My Mom was uncomfortable. Partly, she was a single parent and she felt self-conscious, but she encouraged me that I would go to church. I went to that church every week from the time I was about six until about fourteen when a lot of people established their independence from God; that was me.
Anyway, going back, I know I loved Sunday School. I remember because you had Sunday School before church and there were things you did and little stories and everything. But probably the moment that is significant for me, different than a lot of Catholics the way they grew up, I was baptized in third grade. Their tradition believed not in infant baptism but be baptized at an older age, but even there the notion was, you should be aware of that you should be ready to make a commitment. The church council, or the board, had to talk about me, because I was only third grade; they usually didn’t have somebody baptized as early as third grade because you’re not ready to make this kind of commitment. I was one who was always into it, able to express myself, had a deep love for Jesus already, and so they had this Board Meeting and they decided that, you know, he’s ready. I was baptized on Easter Sunday in April, 1955, at the age of eight.
Fr. Michael: Wow, you chose to do it. That’s so cool. Do you remember it?
Fr. Norm Douglas: Absolutely. I mean there’s something beautiful about that I appreciate the traditional Catholic from the very beginning, that relationship with the Lord. But remembering that and at that they also have the pool that was behind the altar and so you got in and there was water up to your chest and then the minister would immerse you in the water backwards, holding your back three times, in the name of Father and Son and the Holy Spirit. That was very powerful. The other thing about it was my mom came. My mom, I think, that was her first glimpse that maybe religion could be something positive and good.
Fr. Michael: Really. But you went at six years old, did somebody else take you? Maybe a friend?
Fr. Norm Douglas: Yes, there was only one street, a busy street, and she would go with me and walk me across that street then go back home. The rest of it, there were no worries. I mean I had to walk on the sidewalk. Today we’d be very worried about letting a six-year-old you know go, but back then that wasn’t an issue.
Fr. Michael: Single mother. Tell me about that.
Fr. Norm Douglas: A little background for me. I was born in Los Angeles, CA. My mom and dad had been married for about 13 years, when she would conceive me. Well, they were having some marital difficulties already, in part because a couple years earlier they had a child that died after three or four months, so that was creating a little added tension to their marriage. Well, my mom got pregnant with me and my dad, my biological dad chose to skip town. Years later I found out from Ancestry.com after he died, but she never saw him again. She didn’t know where he went and so she had the baby, me, she was raising me already as a single parent and doing that and doing that well. Then four years, later she met a man, a schoolteacher from Akron Ohio, and they connected and brought us back from sunny Southern California to Akron Ohio, in the month of December. That was not a good omen for my mother to come back. After four years, he had an issue with alcoholism, so she separated from him, which I am really grateful for and raised me on her own.
