I was in an antiques store in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, when I saw this mysterious platter (serving plate?) with a quote from “Ellwood Kieser C.S.P.” from Christmas of 1988. It reads, “I Am Called not To be Successful But to be faithful.” I wonder what the significance of this is? And who is Ellwood Kieser?<\/p>\n
Ellwood “Bud” Kieser (1929-2000) was a Catholic priest who took on some unusual (for a priest) activities in Holly\u00adwood in the 1960s and 1970s. He produced a long-running TV show called “Insight,” a religiously-themed weekly series that featured writers, directors, and actors. He also produced movies, including “Romero” (1989), and “Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story” (1996). As to why a priest was making tv shows and movies, he replied that Jesus was a storyteller using those stories to challenge and motivate people, and therefore he also wanted to tell stories via tv and film with the same purpose.<\/p>\n
So what’s up with this plate? I’m guessing it’s someone who wanted to honor Ellwood Kieser by sharing a favorite quote, rather than something that Kieser made himself. But who knows? It’s interesting to note, however, that the quote “I am not called to be successful, I am called to be faithful” (and similar variants) is usually attributed to Mother Teresa, not Ellwood Bud Kieser. Which, in this case, makes this platter even more mysterious.<\/p>\n
The “Christmas 1988” date adds a clue, which is open to interpretation: maybe Bud Kieser did make this plate at one of those “paint a dish” places and his name and this date underneath indicates that he made it, rather than suggesting it’s his own quote?<\/p>\n
At any rate, I didn’t buy this platter, but rather just took a photograph as I was curious to find out more later about this quote and person. One last note – Ellwood Kieser was not only an unusual priest who spent his time in Hollywood, but he was also a tall priest – 6′ 7″ tall! I wonder if he liked or played basketball?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was in an antiques store in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, when I saw this mysterious platter (serving plate?) with a quote from “Ellwood Kieser C.S.P.” from Christmas of 1988. It reads, “I Am Called not To be Successful But to be faithful.” I wonder what the significance of this is? And who is Ellwood Kieser? Ellwood … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3662,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,14,54],"tags":[879,349,880,881],"class_list":["post-3659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antiques","category-ceramics","category-vmoco","tag-ellwood-kieser","tag-hastings-on-hudson","tag-mother-teresa","tag-serving-platter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3659"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3664,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3659\/revisions\/3664"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mckinneyarts.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}