FINDING GOD ON PARK STREET

Kay Perdue Meadows: Noticing God’s Golden Thread in her Life

• Grace Klise, STM Assistant Chaplain • Season 3 • Episode 2

Share episode

 Growing up in a secular household to becoming a dedicated Catholic catechist is a journey sure to be full of unexpected twists and turns.  Join us as alum, Kay Perdue Meadows, takes us through her remarkable journey of falling in love with Christ and seeing the beauty of this world with the eyes of faith, especially as a current producer at Yale Repertory Theatre. 

Raised in an intellectually curious, non-religious environment, Kay discovered the world of theater as a means to overcome her shyness. Her love of stories played out in a new way on stage, cultivating compassion and empathy for others’ struggles and experiences. As she progressed through college and graduate school at Yale, Kay found herself wondering what it meant to let love and self-gift, rather than achievement, shape her life and her goals. This propelled her towards the Catholic Church, where she discovered the ultimate story of creation, redemption, beauty, and love. Not long after, Kay entered the Catholic Church at STM’s Easter Vigil. 

Her transformative visit to a Cistercian monastery and her encounter with the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd program offered her profound insights into God's love and the integration of faith into every aspect of life, from family life to professional endeavors.

Join us as Kay reflects on living out her faith in a secular environment at Yale and the daily practice of surrender that she continues to pursue as a wife, mom, and catechist. This episode is a testament to how faith, knowledge, and human experience can intersect beautifully, offering pathways to spiritual fulfillment and community engagement.


Mentioned in this episode: Yale Repertory Theatre, St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, MA, Catechesis of the Good Shepherd

Support the show

Grace Klise:

This is Finding God on Park Street, a podcast from Saint Thomas More at Yale's yale's Catholic Chapel and Center. I'm your host, Grace Klise, with Zach Moynihan, our student co-host. Thanks for listening to today's episode. Our guest today belongs in the theater. Her confidence to be herself, her bold personality, her colorful hair, her poetic way of seeing the world. Meet Kay Perdue Meadows, a producer at Yale Repertory Theater and a Catholic convert. In this conversation, Kay speaks of the golden thread that God has woven through her life as a shy, book-loving girl, as a student at the University of Chicago, feeling untethered and lost, as a graduate student at Yale, finding witnesses of faith and family life, as a convert coming into the church at STM and today as a wife, mom and children's catechist. In looking back on our life experiences, kay can see God's tender hand in it all, loving her and accompanying her from the very beginning, and continuing to do so today, as she comes to love more deeply and surrender more fully. Let's dive in.

Grace Klise:

Are there any shows, Kay, that you're excited about this season at Yale Rep?

Kay Perdue Meadows:

Yeah, I mean as a producer it's like a little bit my job to be excited about all the shows, but I find oh, I'm going to drop this really quick. Like I find being a Catholic and a person of faith sort of attunes me really well to be able to kind of fall in love with any story. Especially at Yale Rep we really try to choose stories that are told in different ways but we always kind of privilege who's telling the story and whose story is it. And I feel like my work in the theater I really do learn about mankind, which is kind of its goal in a way that like turns the lens on the sort of internal of the human experience, but how it, how it expresses itself in relationship to others. So we start the season with a play called Falcon Girls, which is a new play. It's about like a group of teenage girls who are really into horse judging and are from Colorado and live in a rural community. I mean I don't know anybody who does those things, but this is a really sort of faithful, little raunchy like telling of what it's really like to be like an eighth grade girl in the nineties, which I was, and now I have an eighth grade girl in the aughts. So the play really is kind of. It really speaks to me as like as a mom who grew up during this time thinking about what that experience was for young girls. But it also offers a lens on like an experience I completely don't have.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

And then our second two plays kind of happened at the same time. One is called Macbeth in Stride. It's an adaptation of kind of Lady M's perspective on the Macbeth story, told through essentially like a Beyonce figure. It's a rock musical. It's led by Whitney White, who's this kind of extraordinary, experimental, faith-filled, just really exciting, neat artist who will be here for kind of a brief stint.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

And then we have a show in the season. That's a little close to my heart and how I started in the theater, which is it's a kind of actor- driven ensemble story. So it's developed through a process called Etudes, which is like these little studies that actors do, based on riffing and entering into the story like an existing story. But it's based on a old, old Russian play called the Inspector. That's like kind of known to be like Russia's like most done and beloved play. So a bunch of actors will kind of jump into that and make it their own. And it will be funny, which is what happens when actors kind of get in and tangle at a thing and make it their own. And it will be funny, which is what happens when actors kind of get in and tangle at a thing and make it their own. So I'm excited about those.

Grace Klise:

Yeah, thanks for the promo.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

You're welcome.

Zach Moynahan:

You've worked in the theater world for quite a while. When did that start for you, and what were you like growing up as a little girl?

Kay Perdue Meadows:

Wow, I was very, very shy. Yeah, I basically identified as like kind of a bookish introvert for most of my young life. Yeah, I really loved to read. There's a lot of pictures of me when I would give a book report in front of the class. I loved doing book reports and when I gave a book report in front of the class, I would dress up as a character in the book Not required, that was just extra.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

I was definitely, like you know, the goody two shoes in my elementary school, but I got into theater, I think because of because of being shy and I don't know how. I mean, I love the spirituality of children and I think about my own spirituality as a child quite a lot. I don't know how, but I'm sure it was gifted through the charism of my parents that I wanted to overcome a thing that it felt like was holding me back. I mean, I was so painfully shy but I was so bookish that I had a lot to say and a lot to offer and a lot that I was experiencing internally, which is very common for artists, and I wanted to share it. But I would like cry in front of the class fairly frequently whenever I was speaking. So I think I just wanted to get over that. But theater also offered me a way to speak somebody else's words and take confidence in what somebody else was saying. And you know, many people start as actors. But that is where I continued to explore life, and life in the theater was in acting and I really wanted to. I really wanted to act and I liked the experience of being seen there and being heard and I also was gifted with the compassion to kind of relate to anybody's story and that is a kind of compassion that an actor really even professional actors today like really they really have to embrace. You really have to be able to walk in somebody's shoes and be able to literally like decide what shoes they're going to wear and understand why they do the things that they do and have love and compassion for those reasons and those motivations.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

I love that process. I loved that process as a child. It blossomed me into who I am. I acted. I mean, what was my first show? My first show was in sixth grade. I was in St George and the Dragon and I said the opening lines of the play, which are "room, room, give room to ride, and that was like an annual play that my school did and I played Robin in Robin that year, that same year and then as I got into kind of later middle school and high school, I really kind of found my people in the theater and felt seen and loved there and a place to explore ideas and bring ideas into creative reality and collaborate with people on what could this reality look like and occupy worlds outside of the world that we are in every day.

Grace Klise:

I think of fiction as a way to take us to other worlds, to teach us compassion, to offer perspectives and experiences that are vastly different than anything we might be able to experience. I hadn't made the connection, though, to then theater and acting as something you know. I am thinking back to myself as a child who was painfully shy, love to read, but I never then ventured into theater, and so it's it's really neat to hear that that was a natural progression for you and kind of a way to, as you said, to challenge yourself, to be pushed beyond what you were comfortable with and to discover who you were and who you are, and to be able to share these experiences and ideas and thoughts that you were having. So, yeah, thanks for that picture of young Kay.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

I mean it's crazy, because today I definitely identify as an extrovert. Yeah, most people would call me that, and my family also thinks I'm like a major extrovert. They don't like get why I'm so loud and have so many opinions and I'm always yelling about them. But yeah, it was not always that way. But you know, on the other hand, we always I still love to read, probably more than almost anything else, and I'm comforted by it, and seek a lot of inner life. So you know, we balance our introvert and our extrovert.

Grace Klise:

Yeah, you mentioned that you often think about your own spirituality as a child and now you are really involved in a catechesis program that we'll probably talk about later Catechesis of the Good Shepherd which is really focusing on the spirituality of the child and learning from that. What have you learned about your own spirituality as a child? Yeah, when you look back on it, especially because you weren't Catholic as a young child. So what were your experiences with faith?

Kay Perdue Meadows:

That's what I think about all the time. My parents are atheists. At some point I asked my parents and my parents specifically. My mom said she was agnostic and my dad said he was atheist. My dad is an academic and we were not raised with any religion or faith and that was an intentional decision. And I find sometimes, like people I don't know I'm going to make a big generalization on the air: People of my generation are often stepping away from their faith or they are making the choice not to raise their children with faith. At this generation, they themselves raised with faith and are in a kind of generational tension where their families wanted them, expected them to be raising children of faith and they are deciding not to.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

I think a little bit. My parents were like a generation before. They were like a generation ahead of that. I don't exactly know why, other than any of the same reasons that people today make that choice of, they didn't find it useful in their lives because they were nominally raised with some amount of faith themselves. But they made really intentional decisions that we not be influenced by religion, including I really did not know what the Bible said, what it was about. I had completely no exposure to the Bible and I did not know how rare that is, especially because I came from such a literary household and I knew a lot about literature from a young age and was exposed to the world at quite a young age too. So my parents traveled internationally because of my dad's academic career and we lived in a lot of different places, not like a military person, you know, but we lived abroad significantly in my, in my life experience and I think especially my dad was kind of intellectually interested in exposing me to the religions of the world or more like the cultures of the world, this kind of notion of intellectual I don't know if purity is the right word, but like pure intellectualism that the mind can carry us so far. And you know, I just think he really valued not being brainwashed as an academic. I think he did have ideas about that, about sort of nurturing a pure mind that was not influenced by forces that had other agendas. So we were raised with no exposure really to religion. However, I did go on sleepovers at friends' houses and that is where I learned what religion was.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

I'm raised in Boston and I grew up around a lot of Irish Catholics on my soccer teams and a lot of Jewish families, so I had quite a bit of exposure to going to temple with them after sleeping over. Or my best friend who lived across the street, her family was looking for a new church or they were church shopping, and so I went to a lot of different churches with her, including I went to midnight ass with her. I'm not aware of those things exactly like impressing themselves on me. I mean, I had no idea you were supposed to be quiet at church, you know. So I was kind of like a bad influence, but I was exposed to more of that than I think my parents ever intended. On the other hand, they just they really did have this like openness and this curiosity, like all things are worth being curious about, worth knowing about, worth finding out about. Just it should be all things.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

So I was raised in this very fertile kind of humanist, humanis environment, went to the theater when I was very, very young, traveled beyond just Europe. I lived in China growing up. I spoke Chinese. When I was very young, when I was in eighth grade, we went and lived in Britain and had a sort of whole experience there. And I also have a brother. My brother is two years younger than me and I think one reason why I think about this a lot is that my brother so also raised in this exact same environment.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

There's two things that are very well.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

One thing that's very different about his experience Instead of seeking the theater like I did, he's an athlete, but not in the sort of at the moment, not in the traditional sense, like he's like a mountain climber, like serious, I don't know what you call those outdoor wilderness dangerous, like crazy sports, outdoor, I don't know, outdoorsman, I don't know.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

But he's like not afraid of anything that's out there and he and his wife kind of go on these amazing adventures and he's just I having spoken to him, he found a lot, a lot of what I found in the theater I can, the way he speaks about physical challenge, and he actually would have been a kind of traditional athlete if my parents had let him, but because they're intellectuals they were like could not identify with going to, you know, the football stadium.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

But we have enjoyed quite a bit of talking about the ways in which sports actually offers a kind of spiritual. It has a kind of spiritual property to it and I see that through my son now and even my daughter too. So my brother's very encouraging about them doing sports. But also my brother is a convert to the Episcopal Church and he also converted when he was an adult and it was similar to my experience related to his marriage and meeting his wife and finding a kind of common language in which to engage in what's required of us as human beings in a marriage, and both of us gained religious life and a kind of direct experience of God through that.

Grace Klise:

That's really neat to be able to share that with your brother, even though you know different journeys, but a lot of similarities, obviously, with the shared foundation from your home environment. Just the things you're emphasizing of storytelling, curiosity, exploring the world, meeting people from different cultures and backgrounds. As a Catholic and being able to see that with a Catholic perspective and sacramental worldview it makes sense. But I'm excited to hear more about your journey to the Catholic hurch because we've kind of gotten a sense of what things were like growing up, discovery of theater and acting and coming into the church as an adult. But what did that look like for you and when did that really start, this kind of earnest search and path home to the hurch?

Kay Perdue Meadows:

Yeah, I always have viewed my story of coming into the hurch as being viewed almost in retrospect, that it was always happening from the very beginning and it even sort of offered itself to me this concept of there being a kind of golden thread throughout my life, that where God was always kind of weaving me towards this intended place. And that thread, you know, is part of the tapestry of human experience and I believe other people have that thread, but we don't always know and I would say it's not like I knew while I was in it and my path to the hurch was like definitely involved a lot of confusion, a lot of confusion, a lot of chaos, a lot of, you know, feeling like I was betraying my parents after all, and I still carry that today that I I'm so grateful that God has given me so much. To this day I am seeking for how it can bring me back home with my parents, because I have really struggled with it, separating me from them and not being able to share a language around it. But I came into the church actually in graduate school here I was at the School of Drama, I was studying theater management. I came into the church through St Thomas More under Bob Boulogne. Father Bob, my husband and I came into the church together and in a way I was also newly pregnant, so in a way we also came in with my daughter.

Zach Moynahan:

The more the merrier.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

So you know she was aptized twice. You know that journey started in all this foundational experience. I had a very difficult time going to college. I loved high school. I loved study. I had a lot of like hope in what college was going to bring. I mean, nobody says they loved high school but I like it's just like I don't know. I mean it was obviously a difficult time but I don't know. I just I loved what, I loved learning. I loved when I was learning in high school and I felt like I was doing the right thing. You know, the questions got so much bigger in college about how to tie my love of learning into what the world was and the world felt kind of felt like a splash of cold water, just like a really big world with with nothing to tether to. I felt I had nothing to tether to and I I got, I got lost in there.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

I went to the niversity of Chicago I didn't go to Yale, um, and there's plenty of intellectual tradition there but and there's also lots of people of faith there. But I wasn't looking for those people. That wasn't my language, but I did meet my now husband there in my first year there. He was further ahead in school than I was. We met in the theater. I auditioned for a play he was in and I did not get the role.

Grace Klise:

Did

Kay Perdue Meadows:

No, sorry, he was the director. It was Tennessee Williams Glass Menagerie. I would have been great. I'm going to sound like a romantic but an my husband doesn't think I'm a romantic at all but I really fell in love with him at first sight. He had this like wild, creative mind just wild. Grace is smiling because she knows him and he is kind of wild.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

But I, throughout my time in college, I like I struggled to know how to, to know how to order myself and my emotional life towards the goal of loving somebody. And I don't think that I knew at the time that that in itself was a meaningful act. I think I didn't value that I had met the love of my life, that I had recognized it in the first encounter or that that was something I could order my life around. I was raised from this post-feminist generation. I didn't necessarily have goals to be married and have children. I think implicitly I was actually raised to kind of be powerful. I don't know that that was intentional, but I do think there was a kind of implicit like be a force in the world at all costs. And I think I started to pay that cost.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

So it was a very, it was a quite a difficult time, like how to be in relationship with this person and made a lot of bad decisions and hurt each other and many, many years passed, including after college. We had broken up. We had broken up many times, um but um, eventually we we did get a second try, um, and that was right around the time when I was coming to go to graduate school here and I still had not really figured it out. And it was slowly and somewhat arduously, through the process of leaving Chicago, where I had stayed after school, and coming here to New Haven, re-encountering a person that I felt I was meant to love in this world.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

And it was at that moment that the operation of faith and the kind of doorway of the hurch became even visible to me. So there was a family we were very closely connected with, especially very closely connected with my husband and my now husband, and they were people of faith and they had been kind of a rock for Justin throughout our college time and they live nearby here in New Haven. So these. It never occurred to me that it was their faith. It was like it was their faith. It was like it was just them.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

It was just them it was them living their lives and they were and, and you know, probably at that time I was like maybe I will get married. What is marriage? What is marriage about? What are the marriages that are around me that look like good marriages?

Zach Moynahan:

That looks like a good marriage.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

How do I get that? You know what are they doing. Is that looks like a good marriage? How do I get that? You know what are they doing.

Grace Klise:

It was Catholics who weren't necessarily doing Catholic things but just being themselves in a very attractive way. I was drawn to it and I don't know if I even now could articulate what exactly I was drawn to, but it was something, whether it was this tethering that they had and this sense of why I'm here and what I'm doing and me feeling lost. I just was thinking, ay, as you were talking about being in college and feeling a lack of tether and a lack of home. Probably, I think, of the mission of St Thomas Moore and Zach you are. This is much closer to you than it is to me or to Kay, but when you come to college it can be overwhelming. You also grew up in Boston, um, and coming to a place where there is an intellectual tradition and people from all over the world and, um, I don't know if you can speak to how finding St Thomas More provided and hopefully still does provide, some sort of anchor for you during your time here as a college student.

Zach Moynahan:

Absolutely. I mean, I've talked about this a number of times on the podcast, but so if you've if you've been a faithful listener, bear with me, but I grew up in the Boston area. My dad's side is Irish, my mom's side is Italian, so both sides were practicing Catholics. I went to Catholic school K-8. I went to a secular school for high school.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

Where'd you go? I went to Andover. Oh yeah, my father went there. Oh really, that old place.

Zach Moynahan:

So that was the first time I felt like my faith was being tested, because there wasn't Mass on Fridays anymore or religion class built into my schedule.

Zach Moynahan:

So I had to be a lot more intentional intentional about the faith. And so coming back here and finding Sat Thomas More was almost a godsend in this questioning that's almost inherent to adolescence and growing up and thinking more and more about how I wanted to live my life, what my vocation was, the professional path that I wanted to go down. And I find a lot of resonance with this idea that the people that provide the best model for you of the faith aren't always the ones who wear it on their sleeves explicitly, but you can tell that it just, it perfuses through their personhood. Talk about it all that much for you to feel it. And I found that, with the chaplains, with people I've met in our community, with some of my closest friends that I met at St Thomas More, and so STM became this place where, yes, I was going for nourishment of my faith, but I was also just going for community and to see my friends. It just became so natural to go there and that's what. That's where I found my tether.

Grace Klise:

And it sounds like maybe Kay was a similar experience when you were in grad school, especially with this family.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

Yeah, with this family. I mean, I wasn't quite, I wasn't quite a part of Sat Thomas more during that time. Um, I mean, once I did RCIA I was, but it almost was like RCIA was kind of the last thing this family took me to Spencer, massachusetts, where there's a monastery of Cistercians and that had been like a significant place for one of the couples in this family and they had recommended that I make a retreat there because I had been going to Mass with the kind of matriarch in the family, mostly because I did not know what to do, and that was what she was like why don't you come with me? And that was what she was like, why don't you come with me? And um, and, and I was in a posture of in a way of desperation, just, you know not, not as you know, not so desperate, wasn't living on the street, I wasn't like, but I, but in my soul, like I, I I felt that I longed for a thing that I did not know how to fulfill and that turned me to God and made me see that I didn't have to do it by myself and that it wasn't a matter of my will, because I think I had been trained to think all things were a matter of my will and so that was a big thing to surrender.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

And I experienced that surrender when I went to this monastery, because of seeing the way that the monk's life is structured and entering into that way of life, praying in the cloister at three in the morning, and I really just threw myself in it and observed. In the way that you know, I grew up traveling and observing people, how they do things, and I came to see that what they did made no impact on the world and that it was still very valuable.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

Cistercians, take no offense, we rely on your prayers. But I mean, it was just so clear that God was there and that that God was there that it mattered, and it wasn't about impact in the way that we sort of traditionally look to see or name it in the world, and that really freed me. That, like freed me to feel like there was a loving force that loved me and that I didn't have to do anything to have that love. And you know, I try to surrender to that feeling every day still, but not always effectively.

Grace Klise:

We're all in the same boat with you.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

There is a trap. I'm sure other converts have talked about this. There's just like a trap and conversion of like wanting to go back to that moment. You know, um, because it for, and not everybody experiences that as a moment. I know because my husband different experience um, but I really experienced it as a moment and I do, you know, revisit that moment in my mind, the moment that you're referring to is that at the monastery.

Grace Klise:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, kind of that act of surrender is very counter cultural and probably, speaking for myself, unnatural a lot of times. Yeah.

Zach Moynahan:

I loved hearing you talk about this sort of invisible string that was tying you to the faith from the get-go to your vocation into the married life, and how these puzzle pieces came together over a long period of time and accompanied a long stretch of questioning, confusion, and ultimately landed you here with us. So we thank you so much for sharing your story and being a witness to the faith. It's always so enjoyable to hear how people got here, especially when it's so different from your own.

Zach Moynahan:

I mean Grace and I were both cradle Catholics.

Zach Moynahan:

Um, so. So that's that's what makes hearing this story um so interesting and so and so meaningful um, that we all get to share this community together, no matter where we started, uh, where we, where we end, from where we entered.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

me to convert to Like it felt like. For a long time I struggled with thinking it was like a culture, like it was like a culture that I couldn't really cross over into. Um, so I had to learn how that was not true.

Grace Klise:

Yeah probably just by living into it since your conversion. And what does that look like in the theater world too? Because you knew the theater world before you knew the Catholic world. So living into holding those two together, especially in your day-to-day work here on campus.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

Yeah, I mean that is a little bit. I mean, that's definitely remains a question of the moment for me and I, you know, I tried not to think of it as two worlds. It's one world, it's God's world and God is in all. God is in our world and God is there in the theater, whether the theater, people want him to be there or not. And sometimes I really feel like there's a way in which the theater really I mean this is this is not a controversial thing to say so the, the theater, rails against God. That is true, but there. But what I think is that sometimes the theater's railing you know, lots of poets say this too like the railing against God is actually, you know, it's Job. It's like Job, in the end, it's actually an expression of a faith in God, and I really do try to look for that.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

But it helps me to be able to, you know, dip into a world where we are consciously also acknowledging God's existence, and but, yeah, that I, I desire to see those two worlds come to act as one world, but I don't but I'm careful to think that that stems from my will in any way, you know, but that it's the lens that I can wear, um, and that it's a gift to be able to wear that lens.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

And and I think that's true, you know, it applies to academia too, you know, having been raised in it. There's just such an incredible power on campus of seeking what's beautiful and wonderful about the human experience. I mean, everything that we're studying, ultimately, is about the human experience and that is under God's purview. Whether you know, even with our smarty pants, intellectuals who know everything, you know, we all surrender to that and to that as it's expressed in mystery. And what we cannot know, and the limits of what we can know, cannot know, and the limits of what we can know, and the pushing against, the desire, you know, the desire to know everything, that is that pushing against, and that is a beautiful thing about the human spirit. And so, and I just I love seeing, you know, I see that on campus everywhere, yeah, yeah.

Grace Klise:

Yeah, I do too. It's especially that makes me think of our last question. But before we get to the last question, one way that you very explicitly and beautifully dip your toes into the Catholic world is through catechesis of the good shepherd, and I know that too is wrapped up in your conversion story and who you are as a Catholic, your conversion story, and who you are as a Catholic, as a mom, as a wife. Can you tell us a little bit about why Catechesis of the Good Shepherd is something that you find so beautiful and have dedicated so much of your time outside of work, especially here in the city of New Haven, to the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd program?

Kay Perdue Meadows:

Yeah. So for me that ties into a kind of childhood lens that I didn't have myself. But I especially sought some tools when I had children, and I had children so close to when I had gotten married and so close to when I converted and my husband had converted too. So I was looking for a language to share the faith with my children and, like all young, you know, like all parents, struggled with having children in Mass and like, wondered if, but could not, because I was so new to the faith, like I really couldn't sustain a life of being like, and for the next 10 years I won't be really participating in the Mass, which I don't think any mother should have to sustain. And so I it really spoke to me in this catechesis, which honestly provides tools for parents to help their children access and participate in the Mass, and also not just the Mass, but look for holiness in their lives with children, children. And and to me then you know my kind of blossoming as a mother was was tied to looking for that holiness with my children and what God was offering in you know, giving me the gift of having children and becoming a mom, and you know changing my life completely radically, um, while at the same time, having just given me all these like gifts in the church itself, um, so I needed both things to be nourished at once and um, and the catechesis really gave me, just gave me, gave me tools for that.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

Um, the catechesis of the Good Shepherd is founded by a Old Testament theologian, ophia Cavalletti, and she kind of picked up on the work of Maria Montessori and, together with one of Montessori's acolytes, so this was like next generation Montessori, they kind of developed this, this catechesis, in Italy, and it's very, very it was like done in her home, you know, very kind of handmade. These are really just like things she made to. Actually, she didn't have children herself to teach another person's child about the faith, because that person was like I don't know what to do. The faith, because that person was like I don't know what to do. Um, um, and I have.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

I have just been, I have been gifted back and blessed by the ability to give a faith that I never had, um, and to and to be given it by seeing the child's capacity for faith. And it's seeing the child's capacity for faith and it's different from what many outsiders think. It's different from what many insiders think, you know it is not, the Catechism of Good Shepherd is not really instructional so much as invitational to enter into that childhood spirituality, like starting at age three to allow adults to participate with children in the capacity for wonder, just to open ourselves up to wonder, is just an incredible gift that children model for us and it's just absolutely what Jesus meant when he was. Like the children have more faith than you, you know. And then, even just as the child grows, you know this is our human development.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

So as the child moves out of this level one and when you're in age three, then moving into level two, when you're a little bit older, like you come into this period of just this period of curiosity, like you're just so curious, you want to know the answers to everything. You want to know how are things all tied together, like how, and? And you have this access to the fact that, sorry, that, like God's work has gone on, goes, has gone, goes on forever. And what is that forever? It's forever in one direction and forever in the other direction and he's just been giving and giving and giving to mankind since the beginning of time. And children have access to that and they show us how to experience it and not possess it, and not try to control it or um or uh yeah, or or micromanage it or um yeah.

Grace Klise:

All the things that we like to do as adults.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

Yeah, yeah, and um, I, I have learned to pray. That is like the, that is the, the that is. The greatest thing that that children have taught me is is how is, how expansive the tool of prayer is, how many different forms prayer takes, what a prayer is, um, and it is more a state of mind than a specific thing that you're doing, and that is something that I don't, I don't, I don't, I needed to learn that as the kind of next part of my journey as a convert, and it's something, yeah, that I, you know, continue to grow in.

Grace Klise:

Yeah, as someone who has been in a CGS atrium, I just marvel at the faith of, of young children and I think there there is so much that we can learn, especially when it comes to how we see the world and starting with the little materials that children are spending their atrium time working with, the wonder the wonder of a child that I sometimes lose sight of amidst schedules and emails and to-dos. So I'm glad you could share a little bit about CGS and we will include a link if people are interested in learning more. She does everything for the city of New Haven's Catechesis of the Good Shepherd program serving dozens and dozens of families. So we're very grateful for everything you do. Our last question is where are you finding God on campus?

Kay Perdue Meadows:

even though some of the buildings aren't as old as they look, as I'm told, we're still calling on the past to bring us towards a more positive and fruitful future. Like I just I think that is a beautiful way that you know human beings work with God.

Zach Moynahan:

You know human beings work with God.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

I really believe in the mission of a university to do that and I love that. I love how much everybody sort of studies their own specific thing and how deep and how granular they get into it and how forceful the desire to know more is and to kind of push against the limits of what we don't know and what we do know and touch that kind of veil of mystery and what's unknown Um, I feel like I see that all the time. I see that in the, I see that in the work in the theater. Um, you know, we don't name those things as you know, many people doing those things don't name those things as God, um, uh, but I really believe that it's that he's there.

Grace Klise:

Yeah, full circle in thinking that you were raised in the home of an academic and here you are giving your life's work to academia and to this institution, but doing it in your own way. So thanks for sharing that with us and thanks to everyone for listening. We'll see you next time on Finding God on Park Street.

Kay Perdue Meadows:

That was beautiful, Kate.

Zach Moynahan:

Thanks Kate, thanks Grace.

Grace Klise:

If you enjoyed listening today, please share this episode with a friend or relative and leave us a rating and review so more people can find our podcast. The producer of this podcast is Robin McShane, director of Communications at STM. Sound mixing and editing are by Ryan McEvoy of Yale Broadcast Studio and graphics are by Mary Lou Cadwell of Cadwell Art Direction. We hope this podcast encourages you to seek God today and every day. You are in our prayers. Thank you for listening.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Grace Klise

Host