Religion: Miracles Still Happen

It was beginning to look as if the Rev. John Urich would never find a pulpit. Sunday after Sunday, for almost a year, he went to Lutheran churches whose pastors were leaving or sick or on vacation. Sunday after Sunday, each church thanked him very much, and that was all. His preaching was fine, they admitted, his handling of the service was perfect, but how can a minister be expected to look after the church and make the parish calls and all the other things a minister has to do—when both he and his wife are blind?

A friend told him that in the Presbyterian Church, a new minister may get a full year’s trial. John Urich decided to become a Presbyterian. But when he asked the Lutheran Synod to let him go, they decided to let him try six months at Grace & St. Paul’s Church on Manhattan’s West 71st Street, if the congregation was willing.

Blind John and blind Carole Urich went to work with a will. Almost since they met, in 1938, as blind students at Kansas University, both of them had known what they wanted their lifework to be. With the help of Bonnie, the Seeing Eye German shepherd they share, John managed 60 pastoral calls during the first month. They went to every meeting of every organization in the church community. They roused new interest among the teenagers of the congregation by assigning them small jobs to do—lighting candles, taking care of the bulletin board, ushering. John became adept at judging the size of the congregation by the sound of its singing and recognizing people by the sound of their voices at the church door.

“The handicap is not my blindness,” said 35-year-old John last week. “The real obstacle is the preconceived notions that people have about blind people. And once people are convinced, they go to the other extreme. There’s no middle ground about blind people. You’re either the tin-cup variety or you’re a genius.”

There is no middle ground about the way the people of Grace & St. Paul’s feel about John and Carole Urich. When the time came early this month for the secret ballot on whether to make him permanent pastor, the vote was unanimous. Last week John Urich was installed. Title of his first sermon: “Miracles Still Happen.”