By Patrick Downes
Hawaii Catholic Herald
The Hawaii Catholic Herald is losing one of its beloved voices. With this issue, Kathleen Choi ends her column “In Little Ways.”
She explains her decision in her final column, right, so I won’t repeat it here. I respect it and understand it. Nevertheless, it’s a sad development. She will be missed.
We run other columns, of course, but Kathy’s was ours, a unique, local, personal, laywoman’s take on our Catholic faith. Her self-examinations of her relationship with God nudged her readers to be more patient, forgiving, thankful, hopeful, faithful.
She made it look easy, like she was having a conversation with you over the backyard fence. But it’s not easy to write 50 dozen words every two weeks on a new subject with an original approach that draws in the reader, allowing him or her to look at a topic in a fresh way.
It’s also tough to write, as she did, in such a personal manner. How do you be engaging and intimate without sounding self-absorbed? It’s a delicate balance. But she could do it.
And then, because this is a Catholic newspaper column, she had to get her theology right. That means research and reporting about often complex concepts. It also means seeking understanding and acceptance when she finds a particular Catholic teaching difficult to swallow.
To be honest, Kathy did not get much guidance from me. She didn’t need it. She did quite well without my two cents. I may have recommended a topic a couple of times and made a few suggestions, but that was it. She simply is a better writer than I am.
Lessons in writing
And we rarely meet. I see her perhaps once every two or three years, if that. Our communication is email and the occasional phone call. But it works. Her writing quality has never depended on me. It’s consistent and consistently good. In fact, the columns of this retired English teacher also served as lessons in good writing.
She didn’t write fancy, but each word was the correct one. Consider the opening paragraph of this column from April:
“My husband and I got married when he was 22 and I was 18. He still had law school to complete, but we thought we could manage. He would work summers, and I would find a full time job that only required a high school diploma. We started well. Then our secondhand car died. Then I got pregnant and was hospitalized for hyperemesis. In just a few months, we were flat broke.”
Short sentences. Short words. (Except for “hyperemesis,” which the reader does not need to know the meaning of, just that it sounds worthy of a hospital stay and a little alliteration.) The writing is direct, plain-spoken, yet filled with tension and apprehension. You can’t wait to get to the second paragraph. And the third.
In this particular column, Kathleen used her personal brush with poverty to lead us through a broader look at the topic and our civic and religious responsibility toward the poor and needy. Her final paragraph leaves us with a typical non-judgmental Choi challenge.
“Good people may debate which antipoverty programs are most effective. What we can’t do is ignore the fact that too many Americans can’t afford food, shelter or medical care. Not if we want to remain a free county, not if we hope to see heaven.”
Kathleen’s writing helped us see jaded issues from a fresh perspective.
One of her early columns opened with this provocative sentence: “I know a woman who refuses to attend Mass until the church ordains women.”
Her column proceeded not to defend the woman, or even to defend the church. Instead, it was a defense of women themselves who, she explained, have more real power and authority within the Mystical Body of Christ than they may realize.
For example, she wrote, women technically can’t preach, but her column reaches far more people than any priest at the pulpit. She then gave a half-dozen more sensible examples.
Before Kathleen started her column 27 years ago, she wrote a few news pieces from the Big Island. I rejected her first submission. (What was I thinking?)
As a relatively new Catholic at the time, she called her column “A Convert’s View.” If that were her only vantage point, it would have been a fertile one. But Kathleen’s “view” turned out to be much richer than that. Besides being a former Protestant, she was also originally from the Mainland (Detroit), in an interracial marriage to a local Korean, a mother and grandmother living on a neighbor island, a laywoman and teacher who had a debilitating chronic illness. Not many columnists could match those categories.
More than one column
As she settled into the Catholic faith, she changed the name of her column to “In Little Ways,” honoring the humble manner of the great St. Therese of Lisieux.
She wrote other things for the Herald. For a while she anonymously penned a second column, one of parish tips and quips called “Parish Scope,” authored by her nom de plume, Guy N. DePugh. Both the column’s title and the writer’s name were puns, evidence of her gentle wit.
Kathleen also wrote a book review column for Christian-themed novels called “Tell Me a Story.” Every review was a positive one, because she did not want to waste time and ink reviewing a book she could not recommend.
She won eight national Catholic Press Association awards for her columns. Judges described her writing as having “an admirable freshness.” Some of her pieces have been published in other Catholic publications and selected for reprinting in The Catholic Journalist newspaper.
I will miss her bi-weekly 600-words of wisdom, delivered with care, kindness, humor, thoughtfulness and intimacy. I have no one to replace her and I am not going to try. But at some point in the future an intriguing topic may arise that would benefit from the Choi touch. And then I might find myself on the phone again to the Big Island, “Hi Kathy, this is Patrick. Remember me?”
