Being 81 years old makes you think
about death.
Example. Every time I hear or read
about things that are likely to happen five, ten, fifteen years from now, I
think, "I won't be around to see that."
I think of Sister Leonissa, the
sister who had a huge influence on my choosing to be a Franciscan priest, and
on my perseverance in working toward that goal. In her later years, I would
visit her at the motherhouse in Riverton, Illinois. She was blind. She sat in a
chair with two things nearby: her rosary, and her radio. The rosary was for
praying, and the radio was for listening to Green Bay Packers or St. Louis
Cardinals games. But always with a smile on her face. I never saw her without a
smile on her face.
I think of Erik Erikson's
"eight stages of man." The eighth stage he called "ego
integrity." This is the stage where you look back on your life and see the
wholeness of it. Maybe you see it as a story of loss and waste, in which case you
experience despair. Hopefully you see it as a story of growth and wholeness—ego
integrity. Has my life been a story of loss and waste?
Soon after I was ordained, my
Franciscan provincial sent me to Harvard to study. I successfully got through
that experience to receive a doctorate in sociology. That doctorate has served
me well, at least in reassuring me that I could hold my head up in the presence
of almost anyone I met. It also misled me, into thinking that I would do
wondrous things toward making the world better.
Have I wasted that degree? Have I
settled too easily into a life of comfort?
I tried. I taught at Quincy College
for 40 years. I was not a great teacher--nobody ever accused me of earning the
"teacher of the year" award. I kept at it for several reasons. One
was that I knew that there were people who would have given their right arm to
have had the chance to study where I did. It would have been irresponsible to
throw away the gift of my education and go do something like be a pastor in a
parish, even though I was conceited enough to think I would have been good at
it.
Looking back, I am not so sure I
would have been good at it. Because in 1977, after only seven years of
teaching, I became involved in the movement called Worldwide Marriage
Encounter. I threw myself totally into that movement. At one point I even
speculated that my involvement could have taken the place of my being a
Franciscan—the movement seemed more relevant than the Franciscan tradition.
After five years of being on call to drop everything on a Friday and go
somewhere to be the "team priest" on a weekend—Fort Wayne, Indiana or
Jacksonville, Florida were two cases—I could not go on. I was losing my ability
to keep being fired up.
But Marriage Encounter did
something that I never expected. It put me in touch with a woman who changed my
life by challenging my sureties about myself. She consistently taught me about
the rigidities in my life, and kept me from throwing myself headlong into
enthusiasms that would probably have burned me out if I had followed them.
In recent years I have reflected on
my parents. My father dropped out of school after the seventh grade. People
said he was a brilliant man. He surely knew how to fix almost anything. He did
carpentry, electricity, plumbing, and welding. The focus of his life was his
workshop in our basement.
Our parish in Decatur, Illinois was
the center of our lives, but my father was never one of the important people in
the parish, never a "trustee" of the parish. He took care of the
sound systems in the church and school. One of my cherished memories is of
evenings with him in a room behind the stage in the school auditorium. Our job
was to watch over the amplifier for the bingo game going on out in the
auditorium. Apparently the amplifier needed a human supervisor.
But my father was the victim of
momentary enthusiasms. He would start projects and then go on to something
else. Looking back, I realize that he was not able to teach me two things that
are essential in an academic career: the need to stay in touch with literature
in a field, and the discipline to stick to a project until it was finished. He
taught me that life was a hobby. Book learning in our house was confined to a
handful of books that he bought second hand, and which I kept reading over and
over, along with the entire "Hardy Boy" series of detective stories.
He taught me that we could do anything, just by being clever. The cleverness
got me through the worlds of high school and even graduate school, but those
two crucial elements were left out.
I don't fault him for his approach
to life. He loved my mother and my brother and me, and he was proud of what we
did with our lives. He had his own obstacles to overcome. I suspect that both
he and my mother were adult children of alcoholics. But those were the days
when Bishop Sheen convinced us Catholics that to admit the need for
psychological help showed a lack of faith.
God
In the late 1960s, the years when I
was in graduate school, there was concern about the "death of God"—Time
magazine ran a cover story on it. I was facing challenges to my own beliefs
in what I was reading in sociology of religion. I was blessed that my graduate
school instructors—men like Talcott Parsons and Robert Bellah—took religion
seriously. I never heard a professor mock religion or religious people. But at
times I was adrift in a whirl of questions.
At one point I found myself walking
down Michigan Avenue in Chicago, thinking about how I could pray. Ever since I
entered the Franciscan Order ten years earlier we had prayed the psalms. I
decided that people had been using those words for 3000 years. One reason why
my sociology instructors were sympathetic to religion was that they had a great
sympathy toward how people behave, especially "little people," the
people not in charge of society. They recognized that those people have used
religion to enrich their lives, in spite of the ways that religion can
sometimes destroy people's lives. I thought, "All those people can't be
wrong."
Over the years since then I have
worked, along with my religious brothers and sisters, to learn to pray. We
learn from each other.
I learned from Islam. I saw
hundreds of men bow their heads to the ground together in acknowledgement of
their submission to God. The physicalness of that gesture impressed me. My own
physical limits prevent me from imitating that gesture. So I pray aloud. I do
this privately, in my room. I sit in my rocking chair and look out the window
at the sky and repeat words that men and women have used for all those centuries.
Because my education in the seminary gave me schooling in Latin and Greek, I
even use the words in those languages. The marvelous invention of the
"Kindle" has made it easy for me to have those translations at my
fingertips. When I use Latin I think of the monks of the middle ages using the
Latin words. When I use Greek, I think of the people of the time of Jesus, who
used the Greek version available to them, the version that shaped the thinking
of the early Christian communities.
I think of the people all around
the world who are praying these same words today, in their own languages. Men
and women in India, in Kenya, in Nigeria, in Brazil, and Cuba, and Peru, and
Alaska. I am one with these people. We are all part of the same story, the
story that centers in the person of Jesus Christ, but that begins centuries
before that, and continues centuries after him. There is sin in the story, just
as there is sin in my own story, but the psalms have words about that. Psalm 51
is one that people have always used when they become conscious of their own
weakness.
God speaks in these psalms. Even
though philosophically I know less and less about God—what we are learning in
astronomy makes us realize more and more how little we know about creation, and
the Creator of it—I piggy-back on the words that so many of my fellow human
have used and still use.
The psalms as I use them, the
system of the official "Liturgy of the Hours," keeps me in mind of
two things. The fact that I pray certain words at the same time in each
four-week cycle makes me think of the immediate passage of time, in my own life
and in the life of my world. For example, I think "today is Thursday of
the second week—evening prayer begins with psalm 72. I love this psalm, because
it reminds me of the dream of how government will care for the poor." Then
I ask myself, "do I care for the poor?"
The "antiphons," the
short verses that bookend each psalm, relate the words to the longer cycle of
the year, with the four seasons and the stories of our faith. Advent, Lent,
Easter—winter, spring, summer, autumn. Another year is progressing. For me it
is another year closer to my death. It is a good way to spend that time.
I wonder because I do not
experience the anguish and anxiety that seem to accompany the nearness of
death. Am I way off base? Will that time come, when I experience the "dark
night of the soul"? Or will I keep smiling, like Sister Leonissa?
Anyway, for now I am blessed.
