‘Wonderful’ school community helped lead art teacher through her final steps to the Catholic faith
Mary, Star of the Sea art teacher Stacey Taylor stands in front of an art project the kindergarten class did for Lent this year. (HCH Photo | Anna Weaver)
By Anna Weaver
Hawaii Catholic Herald
Stacey Taylor has made her art class mobile at Mary, Star of the Sea School in Waialae-Kahala due to COVID-19. Instead of students coming to her art room, she wheels her “art cart” between classrooms, tooting the purple horn attached to it as she goes.
The fun spirit she brings to her teaching comes easily when working in such a great school, Taylor says. She has been instructing full-time at Star of the Sea since January 2019, and sent her son and now her daughter there.
“I feel so supported and loved here and it’s just such a wonderful community to be a part of,” she said.
That community played a big part in her decision to become a Catholic this year. She will receive the three sacraments of initiation at the Easter Vigil April 3 at Resurrection of the Lord Parish in Waipio.
Her RCIA sponsor is Stephanie Conching, a Resurrection parishioner and Star of the Sea religion teacher, who remembers noticing how emotionally moved Taylor got during church-related events at the school like altar server installations or students becoming Catholic.
When Conching went to talk to Taylor about something related to Catholicism, she was surprised when Taylor told her, “I’m not Catholic yet. I’m a wannabe Catholic.”
“So I’m thinking, how is it that you are such an amazing person, so supportive of the faith and not a fully participating member?” Conching said. “And it was just kind of like she hadn’t been asked yet.”
So Conching asked, and Taylor started the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults at Resurrection.
“She is such a joy of a person that I think that people are drawn to her,” said Conching. “Kids at school find her a listening ear.”
Stacey Taylor and her art cart in front of the statue of Our Lady Star of the Sea at the school of the same name in Waialae-Kahala. (Photo: Anna Weaver)
Searching for stability
Stacey Taylor’s own childhood started in Northern California where she grew up with her brother. Her grandparents had a big part in raising the siblings since their father struggled with alcoholism and their mother had drug-addiction issues.
While she was not brought up in a particular faith, Taylor remembers going for a while to a small Christian church with her father’s second wife and getting a children’s Bible she liked to read. In high school, Taylor would sometimes go to Mormon services with one friend and then Mass with someone she was dating at the time.
“I was always searching for something that wasn’t within my reach as far as some kind of stability,” she said.
Stacey eventually met her husband, Bill, and they married at age 23. He was a rescue swimmer with the Coast Guard. It was the Coast Guard that brought the couple to Hawaii, where Bill decided to retire from the military in 2016. Stacey also had a prior connection to Hawaii as her grandparents regularly took her there as a child.
The Taylors struggled to have children for several years. Stacey says that ultimately, she saw the intervention of God in the births of son Hayden, 16, and daughter Kathryn, 13, both of whom were conceived in the wake of family health issues.
She was intensely involved in caring for both of her grandparents before conceiving Hayden. And it was shortly after caring for her dying mother that Taylor became pregnant with Kathryn. She would later care for her father at the end of his life.
Taylor believes that her kids were “lessons to me and gifts to me for doing things that were hard for me.”
“I think that my selfless service of caregiving and being there for them and doing what needed to be done and putting all of them first … it was such a huge part of being gifted my son,” she said, and later her daughter.
Left, Taylor is shown pre-pandemic, assisting students in class. (Photo courtesy Star of the Sea School)
Watching over her parents and grandparents, she saw other signs of God. Her father loved nature and has a special affinity for frogs. After he passed, Stacey was sitting outside his home and looked over to see a small frog sitting nearby.
“To me, that was like God telling me, ‘He’s here with you, I’m here with you.’”
She also saw a sign in her grandfather’s death. In his final days, a candle was kept burning by his bedside as brighter light hurt his eyes. Taylor and her brother left the room right before he died, and came back to see that he had passed and the half-burned candle had blown out.
When Star of the Sea students make altars remembering their families for Dia de Los Muertos, Taylor makes one too for her family and shares the frog and candle stories with her students.
“I feel like every step, it’s been one little thing leading me here. It’s been my journey,” Taylor said.
Catholic path
That included arriving at Star of the Sea. School principal Margaret Rufo recalls giving Taylor a tour of the campus when she was looking to enroll her son several years ago after the Taylor family transferred to Oahu following a Coast Guard assignment on the Big Island.
“I remember her being very passionate about art,” Rufo said. Eventually, Taylor volunteered to teach a jewelry-making elective to middle schoolers. When the full-time art teacher had to leave mid-school year, Rufo asked Taylor to step into the role.
She describes Taylor as a vibrant, enthusiastic and dedicated teacher who cheerily greets students every morning and knows all their names.
“We question where she gets all her energy in the morning,” Rufo joked.
Taylor has enjoyed going to weekly school Mass, something that helped her grow in knowledge of the Catholic faith.
She likes how Star of the Sea’s priests, particularly Blessed Sacrament Father Francisco “Frankie” de los Reyes, interacts with the children at school Masses and brings the liturgy to their level. She says Deacon Jose “Joe” Ancheta at Resurrection of the Lord Parish has a similarly upbeat approach to the RCIA classes he teaches.
The part of Mass that most strikes Taylor is the prayer before Communion when the congregation says, “Lord, I am not worthy for you to enter under my roof. But, only say the word, and my soul shall be healed.”
“That alone made me want to be able to take the host,” she said. “Being raised the way that I was and coming from a broken family and not feeling worthy and having an alcoholic abusive father … the fact that someone would find you not worthy and still want that [healing] for you is so powerful to me that every time I go to Mass and hear that, I’m like, ‘I want that too!’”
As the Easter Vigil approaches, Taylor gets more and more excited at the prospect of receiving all three sacraments of initiation including Communion. While her husband and children aren’t ready to become Catholic, they are supportive.
Conching has been going over patron saints with Taylor that she might want to choose for her confirmation name.
“She is so emotionally moved by her experience that it makes me feel more appreciative of my faith,” Conching said. “We cradle Catholics sometimes take for granted what we have.”
