BIBLIOGRAPHY
OF
PHILIP EARL
KRAMER
SON OF
RALPH HENRY
KRAMER
As soon as I believed there was a God, I knew I could not do anything else, but live only for Him, My vocation was to become a Priest or a Brother, dates from the same hour as my faith. How great God is! There is such a difference between God and everything that is not Him!
In its beginnings of my faith I had a good many obstacles to conquer. I had doubted so much that I didn’t believe everything in a day. First, it was the miracles in the Gospel that I considered unbelievable. Then it was that I wanted to mix in passages of the Koran with my prayers. But God’s grace and my spiritual director’s advice cleared away the fog.
I want to live for God alone, I want to do the most perfect thing whatever it might be, My confessor made me wait. As for myself, though I longed to “breathe out my life before God in sheer losing of myself,” As Bossuet says, I did not know what order or diocese to choose. The Gospel showed me that “the first commandment is to love God with all my heart.” And that everything had to be enfolded in love. Everyone knows that love’s first effect is imitation. Therefore I wanted to enter a Religious order of the Mariannhill Missionaries, where I thought I might be able to find the most exact imitation of JESUS. I don’t feel I was made to imitate His public life of preaching; thus I ought to imitate His hidden life as a poor and humble workman, it seems to me that no one offered me this life before.
I love very fondly the family, the Lord had given to me, with 5 brothers and 5 sisters, not counting myself. There was two sets’ of twins. All of them, married and have at least 5 children in their immediate family. But I knew that there was something more for me., rather than getting married and devoting my time with the physical world of marriage. I wanted to find a more complete spiritual world, and this is the reason, I wanted to join the Mariannhill Missionaries. I feel that I had only come a certain way since recovering my faith, but I know and assert that it was from the very first instant when my faith burst once more into my heart that I had finally been totally taken hold of by the imperative sense of God., The absolute of Love, that is what I mean when I say, “live only for Him,”: or “breathe out my life before God in sheer losing of myself.”
God alone, this imperative is at the heart of every consecrated life. No matter what may be the signs, the pathways or the detours that God uses to guide a destiny, no matter what the service He calls for or what tasks He leads someone to, no one can speak of a religious vocation if there is now some intuition of this Absolute. A person’s heart must have begun to vibrate with the first tones of that “Live and Work only for God.”
I entered the Mariannhill Missionaries and I felt that I was reborn again into a spiritual and blessed state with God. I left my home and went to Dearborn Heights, Mich. To become a postulant. I went to Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit learning and getting to know the Lord’s words. On June 1986, I found that the Mariannhill Missionaries was not part of my vocation, but to find another order or wherever God wanted me to go, I was not certain. I moved to Pueblo, Colorado to start searching, found out that my age was to old for most of the Orders and Dioceses. After this startling revolution, I finally realized that God did not want me in an order but to help others’ by evangelizing with Exotic Pet Birds.
I started the Strictly Bird Society, a Rescue & Adoption service for abused & injured exotic animals. And using what little knowledge that I have, to show to everyone that these creatures our God’s creatures, and should be used to help glorify his knowledge and witness the beauty of kindness God has for even his smallest creatures. I am presently doing Educational Show-N-Tell programs at various schools, hospitals, nursing homes, where ever I can find at least two other people to give them information o how to care for these special creatures, and use the Words of God, by showing others how great God is with all creatures and where else can you find such a picture as a beautiful Exotic Bird. There must be a God to bring out the pr0cise measurements of the colors of the birds.
I am also enlisted at the Mercy Center in Colorado Springs, learning to become a Healing Faith Provider. I am presently only on the 2nd year and will have to go for another 2 years. I am praying with this experience I will be able to help others more efficiently and effectively. With God’s Love.
I have decided to use the Motto of the Mariannhill Missionaries to help me follow thru with the goals that I have.
Ora Et Labora
Philip KRAMER
1015 East Seventh Street
Pueblo, Colorado 81001
(719)542-3974 FAX: 775-415-7268
LAST UPDATED: 7:25 AM 11/26/99