Restored to faith after homelessness and addiction
By Naomi Leach & Veronika Cox
Robert Kreshl has gone from living on the streets of Hobart and asking Jesus to save him, to leading an art ministry revitalising religious statues.
The South Hobart parishioner, who also volunteers six days a week with the St Vincent de Paul Society’s Loui’s Van (“I do that out of gratitude and gratefulness to God”) has only been back in the Catholic Church over a year.
“Amazingly, within two weeks, I felt like I’d come home,” said Mr Kreshl, 67, about his parish of South Hobart.
“And I don’t say that lightly. I haven’t felt I’ve been at home for fifty-odd years.”
Baptised as a baby, Mr Kreshl walked away from the Catholic faith at the age of 14.
About eight and a half years ago, a severe poker machine addiction saw him unable to pay his rent and sleeping rough in Hobart’s CBD.
“Everything was going to the poker machines. And I found myself in the winter of June-July 2012 and I had pneumonia, pleurisy, hypothermia and I was literally breaking a rib every time I coughed.”
One night, afraid to sleep in case he didn’t wake up, he walked the streets.
“I had come to my rock bottom,” Mr Kreshl said.
“I begged Christ to save me. I didn’t know what else to do – I couldn’t stop playing the poker machines. I was mentally praying and literally said: ‘Lord, dear Jesus, I surrender. I don’t know what else to do. Please save me.’”
He says that about 10 seconds after that prayer, a woman with a teenage daughter walked up to him and said: “Jesus Christ loves you and you’ll find a bed in Bethlehem House tonight!”
“I couldn’t help but see and believe that Christ was actually answering my prayer almost immediately, and I had nowhere else to go so I went.”
He lived in Bethlehem House – a house for homeless men run by the St Vincent de Paul Society – for a year and then at a halfway house for another six months. He is now free of gambling.
After a period of attending another Christian denomination, Mr Kreshl says he felt Jesus wanted him to come back to the Catholic Church.
He hadn’t been attending South Hobart Parish for long when he noticed that the Stations of the Cross in St Francis Xavier Church needed attention, and he approached parish priest Fr Michael Tate offering to clean them. Mr Kreshl says Fr Tate asked if he would clean the church’s statues instead.
After cleaning them without much improvement, Mr Kreshl – who had studied painting and ceramics at the University of Tasmania – began repainting them.
“I was praying the whole time: ‘Oh Lord, please guide my hand, guide my eyes, guide my mind, guide my heart, because there’s a hundred people out there and if I don’t get this right, I’m going to hear about it real quick!’”
He said the feedback on the repainted statues, particularly the statue of Mary, was uplifting.
“I thought: here I can serve God. I don’t know exactly how but I know God uses those statues to speak to people.”
When fellow parishioner Heather Excell, 21, of West Moonah, saw the statues, she asked Mr Kreshl if she could come and watch him work. He asked her to join in the painting.
Soon longtime South Hobart parishioner Helen Downey, 67, of Lenah Valley, also joined them, and Kate Howard, 64, who moved to South Hobart to be closer to the parish, has been painting with them since January. The group meets each Saturday in the parish hall.
“One of the ladies there in particular, she had been a volunteer there for 20 years and when I brought the last statue in, she was crying,” Mr Kreshl said.
The group hopes more parishes or groups will approach them with statues needing repainting, although Mr Kreshl believes the ministry will grow beyond restoring statues.
Helen, who has been singing in the parish’s choir for 40 years, says joining the ministry has been “absolutely wonderful” and that the painting group has brought “friendship and love”.
For Ms Howard, who only became a Catholic five years ago, the statue painting brings a sense of peace.
“From a personal perspective, it definitely brings me closer to Jesus and the whole Holy Family,” she said.
For Ms Excell, who studied applied design at UTAS, the ministry is an opportunity to utilise her artistic skills in service of her faith.
“Coming from a young person’s perspective, when we look at the statues that are old and worn down, and fingers have fallen off … it’s very easy to feel like the Church is dated and that it’s not relevant anymore. And so I think the work we’re doing is bringing new life to these statues, refreshing them and showing people that the Church is still relevant today … it’s still got the same love that it had 2000 years ago.”
Mr Kreshl agrees.
“Yes, and Christ is still relevant today. He’s just as much alive today as he was 2000 years ago,” he said.
Mr Kreshl has also volunteered his gifts and labour to two projects at Calvary Health Care in Lenah Valley – the refurbishment and repainting of the hospital’s traditional nativity scene and the renovation of a large crucifix which had been damaged by weather.
Director of Mission Tony Brennan said the work was of great significance.
“At Calvary our Little Company of Mary tradition continuing from the Sisters is of untold importance,” he explained.
“It connects us with our heritage and our daily mission of “being for others”. The Christmas story retells the Gospel accounts whereby our Loving God shows up among us for in the vulnerability of a child laid in a food trough – a manger – and where the Kings of the earth mingle with shepherds and cattle to pay homage. Robert has brought this to life including an angel with its script of “Gloria in excelsis Deo”.
Mr Brennan said the near life-size cross at the rear of the Lenah Valley hospital had proved quite a bit of work with sand blasting and weather-proofing.
“It’s significance for Calvary is literally in our name,” he said.
Mr Brennan explained that founder of the Little Company of Mary, Venerable Mary Potter, had taken the cross of Calvary, and the women standing next to their dying Lord, “as the obvious key emblem for their mission of healing the ill and caring for the dying”.
“Rob is a man of inspiring Gospel faith,” he added.
“I can think of no greater testimony of his personal faith as the literal restoration of this cross, so that it continues to be the emblem of a loving merciful God to a world and a hospital that needs such faith and devotion.”