By Veronica peake
JOY Peake, who died on 19 October last year, had already led a full life as a wife, mother and active parishioner before becoming a consecrated secular in her late sixties, two years after her husband Gavan died. And it was her husband, with a little help from the Holy Spirit, who kick-started her journey into the Catholic Church.
Joy Peake was born in Bunbury on 28 January 1923 and was schooled, with her brother, by correspondence before boarding at Methodist Ladies College in Claremont for five years.
Settling in Mt Lawley, she was working at a deli close to home where she first met her future husband, Gavan.
One night when she was walking past his house, he was leaning over his front gate, and spoke to her. She asked him if he would like to make up the fourth player for bridge the next night and so their romance began.
After a week or two, Gavan told her that he would never marry her because she was not a Catholic which rather surprised her because she presumed God would be a uniting God, not a dividing one.
She decided not to worry about it but to leave it instead, entirely in God’s hands.
One night Gavan took her to a Redemptorist mission in Leederville and, to his horror the sermon was on mixed marriages.
Afterwards, Joy decided to go – just out of interest – to have a chat with a Father J J McGrath in Highgate.
The very first sentence the priest uttered bowled mum over. She was hit by the Holy Spirit though she new nothing about Him.
Three months later, on 2 July 1949, she was conditionally baptised into the Catholic faith. After her confirmation at 26 years of age Joy was forever saying that had Gavan decided he no longer wanted to get married she would have replied: “That’s OK. I’ve found what I need to fulfill life’s purpose and I give never ending thanks to God for using you to lead me to where I’m sure I belong in His Love. May He bless you muchly wherever your life’s journey now leads you.”
The following year they were married and from then on their life was filled with all the dramas and traumas that go with having nine children; the first three years being spent with the first two, living in shacks on the block like so many people did after the war ended.
In her faith life, daily Mass was Joy’s top priority but getting there was becoming difficult. There was no such thing as concelebrated Masses in those days and normally daily public Mass was at 6.30am so she rang the Redemptorist Monastery one day to find out if any of the priests would be celebrating his Mass on the side altar.
As a result, Fr Cecil Dennehy decided they needed another Mass more suited to mothers and all those whose lives would make the earlier Mass time a difficulty for them. And so the 11am Mass began – which has now been celebrated at the Redemptorist Monastery since 1965.
Mum became a founder, along with a couple of Redemptorist priests, of Group 50 and so began the Catholic Charismatic movement in the Church. Group 50 is still meeting at the monastery on Thursday nights as it has since it began. May she now be rejoicing in the eternal spring time of heaven with God, Mother Mary, and all the family of Heaven with whom she talked daily.
Joy quoted her favourite Scripture verse, Psalm 143:8, on everything she wrote: “Let me hear in the morning of Thy steadfast love, for in Thee I put my trust. Teach me the way I should go, for to Thee I lift up my soul.”