So where is the center of Williston Park? Many say it’s at the intersection of Willis and Hillside avenues.
Others would say it’s that strip of nice retail stores that stretches from Hildebrandt’s east to the tracks.
Then again maybe it’s the suite of professional buildings at 99 Hillside Avenue with all those good doctors. How does one determine the center of things anyway? Maybe you ought to look upward and if you do you will see that there is one building that rises far above the rest. What you see is the steeple of St. Aidan’s Church rising six stories high right there on Willis Avenue.
St.Aidan’s is clearly the spiritual center of Williston Park. It was established in 1928 and over the last 80 years has become one of the most active and vibrant parishes in the Diocese of Rockville Centre. It is run by Monsignor James McDonald and houses St. Aidan’s Catholic School, the rectory, religious education programs for 1,200 kids, CYO sports programs and many outreach programs for the poor and needy.
McDonald was kind enough to grant me an audience last Saturday.
McDonald is a man with an easy smile about him. We sat with a beautiful Irish setter at his feet and I began with the question of the role of St. Aidan’s in our community in the year of 2013.
He told me “St.Aidan’s serves many functions for the town. We serve Mass each day and offer all the sacraments like communion, confirmation and matrimony. We run a school for over 500 children from pre-K through 8th grade and they earn good scholarships to our Catholic high schools.”
He asked me if I were Catholic and I told him I went to St. Kevin’s in Bayside, then a public school for high school and off to Iona College with the Irish Christian Brothers. I still feel that the one big mistake of my life was in not going to Catholic high school.
Our conversation touched upon all the essentials of a parish but as I walked back to my office to write about this I felt I had missed something. All these programs were a good thing but mostly I kept mulling over the comment the monsignor made that St. Aidan’s was the “center of Williston Park.” Was that really true?
The real question I should have asked was “In the year 2013 who was winning the battle for our souls?”
And if I asked, this is what he may have told me, “The battle is a tough one. We all must fight off our impulse to be greedy, to be lazy, and to be selfish. We live in a hedonistic world where we are constantly tempted to indulge in many pleasures and material goodies.
“Let’s all have another milk shake. Let’s sit and watch five hours of television. Let’s buy another hand bag on credit, get a bigger car we cannot afford. We live in a world of instant gratification but this is not what makes us happy at all.”
I would have then asked him ,“Well, monsignor, what makes us happy then?”
He would have told me “Tom, we all need a set of guiding principles like hope, sacrifice, love and courage to become happy. And we need a moral compass to make the right choices and to avoid the temptations that surround us every day. And the church is the only institution that contains and upholds this moral compass and these principles of goodness and decency.”
And if he told me all this, I would have agreed. St. Aidan’s is our town’s spiritual center. We live in a competitive, confusing and difficult world and I can think of nothing nicer than to stop into St. Aidan’s church, sit in the back for a few minutes and get filled up with some peace and some blessings.
You may remember the last scene in the Oscar winning film “No Country for Old Men.” You see the recently retired Sheriff Ed Tom Bell sitting across from his wife as breakfast and talking about a dream he had the night before: “I was on horseback going through a mountain pass at night. It was cold and there was snow on the ground. My father, he rode on past me.
“We never said nothing, just rode on past. He had his blanket wrapped around him with his head down. When he rode past I could see he was carrying fire in a horn the way people used to do. I could see the light inside it like the color of the moon. In the dream I knew he was going on ahead. He was fixing to make a fire out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that when I got there he’d be there.”
Of course we live in dark and cold times indeed. Even in our little village of Williston Park. And it is good to see that St. Aidan’s and this kindly monsignor are carrying the fire up ahead, keeping it warm and just waiting for us to get there.
Tom Ferraro, Ph.D. is a psychologist who has lived and worked in Williston Park for the last 25 years. He can be reached for comment at drtferraro@aol.com
