Champion of the Meek As recent events have shown, being a religious leader can sometimes be a trying task. Especially for ministers who take the less-traveled road. Memphis said goodbye to one such man of the cloth this week when Father Joe Kerrigan led his final mass at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Father Joe is returning to a parish in his home state of New Jersey. Memphis will miss him. In a 1998 cover story, "The Accidental Priest," former Flyer staff writer Jacqueline Marino described the priest this way: "Kerrigan isn't wearing his collar. With his spiky hair, rumpled black clothes, and goatee, he doesn't look like a Catholic priest who counsels refugees, but almost like a refugee himself." That's Father Joe. Kerrigan had a sense of humor, too. "If the Catholic Church dissolved tomorrow," he told us in 1998, "I'd either become a stand-up comedian or I'd join the Irish Republican Army." But Father Kerrigan was also a serious man who took up important causes. He initiated the cathedral's anti-sweatshop efforts and was a tireless supporter of the Memphis-based International Children's Heart Foundation. He gave badly needed spiritual support to Father Fred Sauer, the Bartlett priest who set fire to some curtains in his church and was sentenced to 33 months in federal prison. On his way to New Jersey this week, he will visit Sauer at the Lexington, Kentucky, prison where he is serving the last days of his term. In these days when the question "what would Jesus do?" has become an abused cliché, Father Joe Kerrigan's life answers the query with humility, humor, and grace. Tilling the Soil As of this week, the Memphis and Shelby County Music Commission and its president, Jerry Schilling, complete their first year in harness, and they're crowning the anniversary in style, with a premiere at The Orpheum of a new A&E biography of Sun Records founder Sam Phillips. Schilling, a longtime associate of Elvis Presley's and a veteran of the music business, has been involved in several such documentary projects; he pushed for this one, and he next hopes to promote a film version of Peter Guralnick's Elvis biography, Last Train to Memphis. In the meantime, Schilling and the commission are dealing with some of the nitty-gritty involved in reviving the city's entertainment industry. The commission has launched a health-care plan for lower-income musicians and is developing sources of funding for it. It has started a Web site and database devoted to Memphis music and is networking with similar organizations elsewhere and with private and public institutions that can aid in its mission to put Memphis back on the map of world music where the city figures now, in much the manner of its Egyptian namesake, as a legendary capital of the past. A generation ago, Billy Ray Schilling voted for the first Memphis Music Commission as a member of the old Shelby County Court. It is appropriate that the baton has been passed to Squire Schilling's younger brother Jerry, who was even then immersing himself in a life which would associate him in important ways with Elvis, Billy Joel, the Beach Boys, and others. Jerry Schilling and the cross-section of citizens who form this third version of a local music commission cannot will another great era of Memphis music into being. But they can create fertile ground for a new flowering, and it appears that they are making a start.