THE GOOD Theology teacher Paul Kramschuster forms his outlook on the world from the many values taught to him throughout his life. BY MARY B. FREEMAN MANAGING EDITOR In the United States there were 45.3 million people living below the poverty line in 2013, according to the United States Census Bureau. Seventy percent of people with mental disabilities are currently unemployed, according to the American Psychological Association. About 50,000 youth in the United States sleep on the streets for six months or more, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. These are the exact statistics that Theology teacher Paul Kramschuster works to combat, and his many life experiences have given him the tools to do so. Growing up in the small town of Mora, Minnesota in an old farmhouse, Kramschuster, son of a cattle buyer and seller, was very involved. From football to hockey to jazz band to class president of student council, Kramschuster’s vast opportunity to fully experience life has been present his entire life. Raised with strong values and an even stronger Catholic faith, Kramschuster has long lived a life of adventure and exploration. Whether it be in the midst of his peers in his hometown, at college with his nose in a book, in his early twenties spending four years at Holy Family House or at Sion, the search to live out the values he has been taught has never ended. It began with his parents. Both were Catholic and Kramschuster was firmly raised in this faith. However, it was not only the faith that his family instilled in him, but also the strong values they taught him growing up and the belief that he was going to be well-educated that strongly influenced Kramschuster’s life. “My father never taught me the [cattle] trade,” Kramschuster said. “I remember when people would come up to me and say ‘so are you going to follow in your fathers footsteps’ and before I could answer my father would always say ‘no, no he’s going to college.” Further than Kramschuster’s parents’ beliefs in a higher education, however, were their beliefs in doing good in the world, a value that has been passed down to Kramschuster through example. One such example was of the infamously teased “Art the Fart,” an older man in Mora living with Tourette syndrome. Kids in Mora would tease “Art the Fart”, messing with him to get him riled up. But one day, Kramschuster came home from school to find Art in his kitchen, sipping a glass of lemonade, about to mow his lawn. “I guess I saw that here is someone that a lot of people think is unsafe and crazy and my father would give him opportunities to earn money,” Kramschuster said. “He treated him as a real human being, someone who was worthy of paying attention to and having conversations with. That was a huge lesson that [I saw] as a kid.” Graduating from high school with only reading the bare bones of the assigned books in English class, Kramschuster then went on to St. John’s University in Minnesota. It took until his junior year of college for Kramschuster LE JOURNAL
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to establish his major in the Humanities, master’s degree in the Bible and the way he would live his life. After spending a year in Salzburg, Austria studying abroad his junior year of college, Kramschuster came to the realization that he had many unanswered questions about life, and he was upset to realize that he had not read any more than what had been assigned to him in class. “It was The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Kramschuster said. “I remember going to the bookstore and buying that book and then reading it. I realized that I hadn’t read anything yet. So I just started reading.” He has not stopped since. Whether it be German, Russian, French, political or Biblical literature, Kramschuster has read and been influenced by them all. The themes that lay interwoven in the many novels he has devoured have played an important part in shaping him into who he is today, someone who is aware of the issues in the world. However, it wasn’t until after college that he saw them come to life when he worked at Holy Family House, a soup kitchen and homeless shelter in Kansas City, Missouri. According to Kramschuster, this is where he saw the gospel and all that he had learned come alive. “I understood [the gospel] in a much more profound and experiential way [at Holy Family House], what [I studied} in the intellectual sense,” Kramschuster said. “The gospels became more alive and real in that context.” Holy Family House is where Kramschuster met his wife, a woman who was volunteering at the same time as him. It is also where he met Frank. One day Frank knocked on the door of Holy Family House and said that he was being kicked out of his apartment because his building was closing down. Frank had known it was closing for a long time and had done nothing. So, Kramschuster helped him move some of his things out. Eventually Frank came to Holy Family House and told Kramschuster he had nowhere to put his belongings. He had nowhere to live, but Frank told Kramschuster he would go find a place to stay, and he did. “The place [he found] was covered in cockroaches and it was a shock for me to walk through that building
