Tag Archives ⇒ Ireland

Introducing Gregory Kelley Heiland

January 5, 2011
· Martin Kelley

Bothering babies to make them make cute faces is fun!

On Tues­day, Dec 28 my love­ly wife Julie gave birth to our third son. After some dither­ing back and forth (we’re method­i­cal about baby names) we picked Gre­go­ry. Every­one is hap­py and healthy. Vital stats: 20 inch­es, 7 pounds 9 oz. The broth­ers are adjust­ing well, though Theo’s first response to my phone call telling him it was a boy was “oh no, anoth­er one of those.”

Francis is now also a big brother! Proud brother

That’s 5yo Fran­cis (aka “lit­tle big broth­er”) and 7yo Theo (“big big broth­er”) meet­ing their new sib­ling at the hos­pi­tal. More pics in the Gre­go­ry! and Gre­go­ry in the Hos­pi­tal sets on Flickr.

As you can see, we’ve basi­cal­ly bred triplets spaced over three years apart. As fur­ther evi­dence, here’s Theo and Fran­cis in their first pics (links to their announce­ment posts):
blank Brotherly love

As I men­tioned, we’re method­i­cal about names. When we were faced with Baby #2 I put togeth­er the “Fall­en Baby Names Chart” – clas­sic names that had fall­en out of trendy use. It’s based on the cur­rent rank­ing of the top names of 1900. blank“Gre­go­ry” does­n’t appear on our chart because it was almost unused until a sud­den appear­ance in the mid-1940s (see chart, right). Yes, that would be the time when a hand­some young actor named Gre­go­ry Peck became famous. It peaked in 1962, the year of Peck­’s Acad­e­my Award for To Kill a Mock­ing­bird and has been drop­ping rapid­ly ever since. Last year less than one in a thou­sand new­born boys were Gre­go­ry’s. While we rec­og­nize Peck­’s influ­ence in the name’s Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry pop­u­lar­i­ty, Julie is think­ing more of Gre­go­ry of Nys­sa [edit­ed, I orig­i­nal­ly linked to anoth­er ear­ly Gre­go­ry]. Peck­’s par­ents were Catholic (pater­nal rel­a­tives helped lead the Irish East­er Ris­ing) and were pre­sum­ably think­ing of the Catholic saint when they gave him Gre­go­ry for a mid­dle name (he dropped his first name Eldred for the movies).

The spiritual discipline of sailing in circles

December 10, 2007
· Martin Kelley

An inter­est­ing image in meet­ing yes­ter­day. “CS” rose after the break of wor­ship to share a sto­ry from a old Quak­er jour­nal he’s been read­ing. The min­is­ter in ques­tion was in Eng­land at the time and felt a strong lead­ing to vis­it Friends in Ire­land. Being duti­ful he arranged pas­sage in a ship head­ing west and board­ed it think­ing he would soon reach his des­ti­na­tion. But the winds did­n’t coop­er­ate. The cur­rents did­n’t coop­er­ate. In an era before diesel engines and jet fuel the ful­fill­ment of trav­el­ing inten­tions were depen­dent upon out­side forces: wind, cur­rent, trails, weath­er. The poor Quak­er’s ship went around in cir­cles for a week and final­ly end­ed up in the port it had departed.

We expect today that when we set out to accom­plish some­thing it will get done. But there are always unex­pect­ed cur­rents to con­tend with, unco­op­er­a­tive winds, sand­bars and shoals and God may well be involved in these blocks. Our duty as peo­ple of faith is to get on the boat. We might not get to our Ire­land and that may not be the real pur­pose of our lead­ing. Maybe our job is to learn to catch fish from the boat. Per­haps our faith­ful­ness in appar­ent fail­ure is a les­son for the dis­be­liev­ing sailors on board. And maybe the les­son is for us, to remain faith­ful in the mys­tery and con­fu­sion of God’s roadblocks.

The mod­ern impulse is to win, to accom­plish, to neu­tral­ize dis­sent, problem-solve and suc­ceed. As Friends, we’ve inher­it­ed some of this atti­tudes and often want to take our spir­i­tu­al lead­ings and run with them as if
God’s part is over. We set up com­mit­tees, write mis­sion statements,
hire staff: we lock our ship’s course in a par­tic­u­lar direc­tion, crank
up the engines and plow ahead. These can be use­ful tools, cer­tain­ly, but some­how there’s a les­son for us in that lit­tle boat going around in circles.