With the whimsical mordancy that only an Irishman can get exactly
right, a mutual friend of Denny Moore's and mine recently spoke
of Denny's being "dead at the moment." I'd heard that arresting
usage before -- in Ireland, of course -- and knew exactly what
was meant. It was the sort of thing Denny would say.
The phrase came up in a conversation about what had happened
a few hours after Denny's funeral. When Denny, Notre Dame's associate
vice president for public affairs and communications, died last
December, he had been the University's principal spokesperson
for a decade and a half. His funeral, not surprisingly, overflowed
the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, but it was a somewhat quieter
and less formal occasion when several of us surrounded his grave
in Cedar Grove cemetery to raise a few glasses of whiskey in gratitude
for him, to honor our friendship, to share our love for him, to
pray with him and to wish him God speed. The memory of that session
is among the many reasons I find it awkward to speak of Denny
in the past tense. It reinforces my conviction that he is dead
only "at the moment," as you and I and everyone we love will some
day be.
It was, to put it mildly, a variegated gathering, the sort that
only a man of Denny's generosity and gregariousness could attract.
Even my brother Hugh, a confessed Republican, was there, affably
reminiscing among lefties. When one of us piously began a toast,
"We all believe in the Mystical Body of Christ," another caustically
rejoined, "Mo doesn't. He's a Muslim!" Mo and everybody laughed,
including Denny, no doubt, knowing how unquestionably Mo belonged
among us.
Those of us who knew of Denny's fondness for G.K. Chesterton's
biography of Saint Francis of Assisi could see it illustrated
in our motley graveside convocation: "He honored all men," Chesterton
wrote of Saint Francis (and could as easily have written of Denny).
"That is, he not only loved but respected them all. What gave
him extraordinary personal power was this: that from the pope
to the beggar, from the sultan of Syria in his pavilion to the
ragged robbers crawling out of the wood, there was never a man
who looked into those brown burning eyes without being certain
that Francis Bernardone was really interested in him, that he
was being valued and taken seriously. . . . He treated the whole
mob of men as a mob of kings."
Denny practiced the regal egalitarianism of Francis so skillfully
because he celebrated it so regularly at Mass and savored it so
heartily in his family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances.
It is not an exaggeration to say that everyone he encountered
fascinated him. In people others found easy to despise, he always
managed to find something to revere. Such is the attitude of saints,
and it doesn't come naturally. It must be taught and learned.
The teachers, obviously, are the saints themselves, the people
constituting that "great cloud of witnesses" in the New Testament's
Letter to the Hebrews. By the time he died at age 55, Denny, I'm
overjoyed to say, had already begun to teach.
Whether or not it was the letter writer's intention, "cloud
of witnesses" seems to get it about right. Fatuous theology, saccharine
piety, overwrought prose, bad art and sentimentality have all
combined to produce a fog that obscures the images of these remarkable
men and women, gives them a uniform, blurry appearance, and makes
them seem, well, forgettable. Dorothy Day, who knew a thing or
two about the saints, elided the question of her own canonization
by replying, "I don't want to be dismissed that easily." She also
pointed out that a person could go to hell imitating the imperfections
of the saints, which is another way of saying that the saints
are, except for their sanctity, pretty much like all the rest
of us.
That seems to be the point of the elaborate and soporific genealogy
of Christ at the beginning of Matthew's Gospel. Nodding off at
Midnight Mass during the endless account of how so and so was
the father of so and so, it's easy to forget that this skeletal
tracing of generations from Abraham to David to the Babylonian
exile up to Jesus features a list of some pretty unsavory characters.
This is documentation of the fact that Jesus, as the theologian
Herbert McCabe, O.P., wrote, "belonged to a family of murderers,
cheats, cowards, adulterers and liars -- he belonged to us
and he came to help us. No wonder he came to a bad
end and gave us some hope."
It certainly gives me hope that Denny, who was kinder, more
honest, more patient and braver than I, also was my friend. It
is heartening to know that he was, and still is, in a communion
that includes the likes of me. I'm grateful that he is among that
great cloud of witnesses surrounding this mob of kings in which
he was once and I am still swept along.
Each of us has a personal litany of saints, idiosyncratically
arranged and not always in precise alignment with those endorsed
by the Vatican. These are, whether canonized or not, whether immediately
likeable or not, undoubtedly our friends, people with whom we
are heartened to be in communion.
This is why, when we Catholics pray as we are commanded always
to do, our interior lives become every bit as loony, crowded and
unsettled as those of subway drunks. Alongside our neighbors,
we are busy buying groceries, beer and hardware, gassing up cars,
renting videos, chasing the damn dollar and resenting the boss,
but we are simultaneously engaged in furtive conversations with
Jesus, Mary, various apostles and countless long-dead men, women
and children. We have close personal friends in both worlds, so
we always have company to enjoy, entertain and endure, whether
other folks see it or not. Calmer people who can't or won't keep
company with the dead have trouble keeping company with us.
When you consider the people, the saints and uncanonized witnesses
with whom we habitually commune, this wariness seems all the more
justified. Denny's personal litany (and my own) would include,
for instance, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit priest and poet
whose "May Magnificat" Denny liked to keep framed and handy on
his desk.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Hopkins joined my own litany one day during my adolescence when
my mother, standing in our kitchen, read aloud these lines from
one of his poems:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am,
and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal
diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
She then clutched the volume to her breast and cheered, "Hopkins,
I love you!" Mom's susceptibility to the arts notwithstanding,
I knew that Hopkins was a guy to watch.
And he was. At first glance, Hopkins epitomized everything I
disliked: An effeminate Oxonian geek neurotically searching for
absolute answers, he was very much a child of the '60s, the 1860s,
that is. He rebelled against his Anglican family, "swam the Tiber,"
as they said in those days of converting to Catholicism, and was
received into the Catholic church a year before his graduation
in 1867. His conversion evidently did nothing for his frail health,
gastrointestinal miseries and profound depression, and you can't
help but wonder, in our present Myers-Briggs era of religious
formation, what today's Jesuit order would make of an application
from a young man as mentally and physically ill as this garden
variety Victorian nutcase so obviously was. Nevertheless, he joined
the Jesuits in 1868; served in poor parishes in Manchester, Liverpool
and Glasgow; unhappily taught Greek and Latin to uncomprehending
university students; and died in Dublin of typhoid fever in 1889.
He was 44 years old.
Like other demented geniuses, Hopkins had led a diminished,
if not miserable, life, never at peace, never quite fitting in.
He couldn't bear to read the hurt and angry letters his parents
wrote him when he became a Catholic, so he read them over and
over again. He burned most of his early poems when he entered
the Jesuits, renouncing poetry as too world-approving for his
chosen vocation. Seven years later, equally unable to withstand
the grace of God and the nagging of his muse, he began to write
again, but few of his poems were published, fewer still were read,
and none was raised. He frequently suffered what he described
as "the loathing and hopelessness which I have so often felt before,
which made me fear madness. All my undertakings miscarry: I am
like a straining eunuch."
Thank God Father Hopkins was so very wrong about the miscarriage
of his undertakings. Thank God that through his poems, he continues
to minister to a community of excitable misfits, reminding us
Jacks, jokes and poor potsherds that:
The mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there.
Thank God this same strange man, who himself had hung from some
terrifying places and shuddered above some terrifying chasms in
his own imagination, was able to leave us such authoritative evocations
of nauseating doubt and such cracked and glorious hymns of exuberant
faith. Thank God his dying words could be, "I am happy, so happy."
Maybe there is hope for us insecure crazies after all. Thank God
he is still with us.
Franz Jaegerstatter
While Franz Jaegerstatter was every bit as mismatched with his
surroundings as was Gerard Manley Hopkins, and every bit as much
a victim of madness, the pathologies afflicting Jaegerstatter
emerged not from his imagination but from the depraved society
he so bravely withstood.
Had Jaegerstatter been born in the rural American South instead
of the rural Austrian North, he would have deserved the label
"white trash." By the time he had emerged from adolescence into
adulthood, this hayseed from a wide place in the road named Saint
Radegund had gotten a local girl "in trouble" and earned a reputation
as unsavory, hard-drinking and occasionally violent.
Eventually, he not only settled down and got married but underwent
a religious conversion as well. By 1938, when Hitler's Third Reich
had annexed Jaegerstatter's all-too-cooperative homeland, the
former hellraiser had become a respected farmer, model family
man and sacristan in his parish church. Jaegerstatter opposed
the annexation and tolerated the Nazi regime with a mixture of
contempt and resignation. When he was conscripted into military
service he reluctantly complied. Saint Radegund was the sort of
tiny town in which everyone knew everyone else, so it was easy
to find local officials to pull strings. Jaegerstatter managed
to get listed as an "indispensable" agricultural worker and returned
to Saint Radegund after six months, alarming anyone who would
listen to him with the announcement that he could not and would
not fight in the immoral war which Germany had begun.
Here Jaegerstatter's life begins to illustrate what a shrewd
monastic friend of mine is fond of saying: If you want to make
God laugh, just tell him your plans. Jaegerstatter had despaired
of the distracted and lethal hedonism of his youth, embraced a
renewed faith and found -- in prayer, in marriage, in family and
in the church -- a life of true peace. He felt himself truly alive
for the first time and planned to share his new life with others.
"I can say from my own experience," he wrote to a friend, "how
painful life often is when one lives as a halfway Christian; it
is more like vegetating than living."
God began to show him what real living requires. In the two
years that elapsed between his return to Saint Radegund and his
call to report again for military service in 1943, Jaegerstatter
went through hell and was supported and encouraged by . . . no
one. Everyone, and none more than Jaegerstatter, knew that the
consequence of his refusal would likely be death, and everyone
advised him to obey the Nazi authorities, to think about his responsibilities
as a citizen, husband, father and breadwinner. Gordon Zahn's classic
book In Solitary Witness excruciatingly describes how
"every single one in the long series of spiritual counselors to
whom Jaegerstatter had turned, from his pastor, to the chaplain
. . . in his death cell regarded his action as an imprudent, foolhardy,
and unnecessary sacrifice." His local bishop admitted that "I
explained in vain to him the moral principles on the degree of
responsibility that the private citizen has for the actions of
the authorities, and reminded him of the much higher responsibility
he had for those around him and particularly his family."
Thank God Franz Jaegerstatter didn't listen to those counselors.
He went to his death assuming, with lamentably good reason, that
his witness would be dismissed by most, ignored by many and remembered
by few. Shortly before he was beheaded by the Gestapo, he wrote
a letter from prison in which he wondered, "Is the Kingdom of
God of such slight value that it is not worth some sacrifice,
that we place every little thing of this world ahead of the eternal
treasures? Happy are they who live and die in God's love." Thank
God this impetuous Austrian redneck could so confuse and fascinate
us with a peculiar understanding of happiness. Thank God for his
solitary witness.
Flannery O'Connor
All the people in my customized litany have given courageous
witness in various ways. Like Denny Moore, the most recent addition,
Flannery O'Connor accepted her failing health and too-early death
with numinous aplomb. By the time of that death (in 1964, at age
39, of lupus erythematosus, a blood disease as miserable and incurable
as it sounds) the eccentric young woman from Milledgeville, Georgia,
had published 31 short stories and two novels, Wise Blood
and The Violent Bear It Away. The work of this unusual
storyteller, who once bemoaned her readers' impression that she
was "a hillbilly nihilist" instead of "a hillbilly Thomist," intrigued
and disconcerted literary critics with its simultaneously hilarious
and terrifying evocations of the invasion of God's grace. It isn't
every writer, after all, who can at the same time tease out a
prayer and a belly laugh with a description of a defenseless old
woman begging in vain for the mercy of a homicidal cracker psychopath.
She could, which is among the reasons that she was with the rest
of us oddballs at Denny's grave.
She was a great writer, certainly, but I also esteem her for
her willingness to speak the truth at awkward times, her refusal
to allow bashfulness to smother her most urgent convictions. The
same searing prophetic light blazes in her art, her speech, her
manners and her life.
It memorably flares in a letter she once wrote to a friend recounting
a long dinner party at the novelist Mary McCarthy's apartment
in New York City. The caustic McCarthy could be a daunting hostess
-- she's the one who memorably denounced Lillian Hellman by saying,
"Every word the woman utters is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'"
Flannery described being among the guests of this celebrity:
who departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual.
We went at eight and at one, I hadn't opened my mouth once, there
being nothing for me in such company to say. . . . Having me there
was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few
words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward
morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being
the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [McCarthy] said
when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it
as the Holy Ghost, He being the 'most portable' person of the
Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it
was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, 'Well
if it's a symbol, to hell with it.' That was all the defense I
was capable of, but I realize now that this is all I will ever
be able to say about it, except that it is the center of existence
for me; all the rest of life is expendable.
That instinctive response to a late-night moment of social discomfiture
is a particular treasure in O'Connor's already invaluable legacy,
but it is also characteristic of her refusal to tolerate any complacency,
whether secular or religious. She was no more eager to please
glib believers than she was to please Mary McCarthy. "Smugness
is the Great Catholic Sin," she wrote in another letter. "I find
it in myself and don't dislike it any less. . . . With a few exceptions
the American clergy, when it takes to the pen, brings this particular
sin with it in full force."
Thank God for this erudite red-dirt spinster, who wrote strange
stories, raised peacocks and scandalized the literary scribes
and Pharisees. Thank God for her tales, letters, wisecracks and
prayers, which resonate with our own when we see glints of meaning
in the mystery of pain. Thank God for her inability to maintain
a polite silence.
Captain Mbaye Diagne
He was at Denny's grave with us, too, this most surreptitious
of military heroes. One of the Muslims in the litany, Diagne was
a native of Senegal, born to a large, poor family in a Dakar slum,
the first in his family to go to
college. After graduating from the University of Dakar, he joined
the army and worked his way up through the officer's ranks.
When the United Nations
sent peacekeeping troops to Rwanda in 1993, to moderate a smoldering
war between the Hutu government and the Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan
Patriotic Front, Captain Diagne was among them. As trouble spots
go, Rwanda seemed unremarkable at first, as did the U.N.'s standing
orders to its forces there: They were to observe the strictest
neutrality, not intervening in yet another local ethnic brawl
among Africans without oil. Such orders are easily obeyed, even
by men like Diagne.
But then, in spring 1994, all hell broke famously loose. Off-duty
government soldiers, Hutu street gangs, and finally ordinary men
and women began to kill every Tutsi and peaceable Hutu they could
find. An unimpeded slaughter continued through spring and summer
until conservatively 800,000 Rwandans had been put to death.
Perhaps because their murderers preferred to work with machetes,
perhaps because a cowardly U.S. administration and international
community wanted to avoid the legally actionable term "genocide,"
perhaps simply because of its incomprehensible enormity, the carnage
was, and still is, too often described as a tribal frenzy of bloodlust.
The massacre in Rwanda was not, however, a spasmodic eruption
of insane violence, but something every bit as purposeful, organized
and satanic as the Nazis' "Final Solution" half a century earlier.
The customary orderliness of Rwandan society, the cooperation
of the media, and a perverse notion of "umuganda," the work and
civic duty of ordinary citizens, were all carefully harnessed
by ideologues zealous for Hutu power and enraged by real or imagined
challenges to it. Like their Aryan supremacist predecessors in
Nazi Germany, the perpetrators of the Rwandan slaughter could
count on the inaction of witnesses.
Mbaye Diagne was not inactive. In fact, one BBC reporter, Mark
Doyle, remembers him as absurdly hyperactive, the very stereotype
of an ineffectual U.N. official in a war zone, rushing around
from one military headquarters to another with maps tucked under
his arm, busy with mysterious and largely irrelevant errands.
"I didn't know at the time what he was doing," Doyle said in a
recent television interview. "I had an inkling from one or two
people that he was saving people's lives, and I learnt about it
several weeks later after he'd been killed."
In the first moments of the killing, the unarmed Captain Diagne
evidently resolved to disobey the U.N.'s standing orders not to
intervene. He plunged into the horror and began risking his own
life to save others. "I learned that he'd rescued the family of
the [murdered] prime minister, the children," Doyle said, "and
he'd hidden them in his house. I understand that he saved quite
a lot of other people as well by driving through the front line,
hiding people in his car, driving back through the front line
and so on."
Accounts of Diagne's heroism have only begun to emerge from
the atrocity of a decade ago: How he could laugh and swagger and
joke while the bloodbath roiled; how he once discovered 25 Tutsis
hiding in a Kigali basement and ferried
them in five jeep trips, five passengers at a time through
23 militia checkpoints, to the safety of U.N. headquarters.
Lieutenant Colonel Babacar Faye,
a close friend and fellow Senegalese army officer in the U.N.
contingent, believes that it was Diagne's in-your-face attitude
that allowed him to negotiate the roadblocks of bloodthirsty militiamen.
"He established real contact through his sarcasm," said Faye.
"Most of the time he made you angry before you became his friend.
. . . He was the kind of person that could share all that he had;
he would give you a pack of cigarettes or for all the group. Sometimes
he would just force somebody to smoke with him."
"That's just the way he was," said Gregory Alex, head of the
U.N. humanitarian assistance team in Rwanda. "People laughed.
Even they [the genocidal militiamen] have, or
had, some attachment to a real world where there's real laughter.
Even in all this gore, hatred; as long as you can have that brief
glimpse of his smile, or laugh about something that's good, you'll
grab onto it. And with Mbaye I think that's what everybody did.
At all those checkpoints, they all knew him."
Diagne's eccentrically heroic career was cut short on May 31,
1994, when a checkpoint at which he was waiting came under rebel
mortar fire. A piece of shrapnel shot through his Jeep's rear
window and killed him instantly. To this day nobody knows how
many men, women and children this insubordinate martyr managed
to conceal in hiding places throughout Kigali and the surrounding
countryside. Nor does anyone know the number of people he was
able to smuggle, sweet-talk, bribe and backslap past checkpoints
manned by murderers. Dozens, certainly. Hundreds, probably. Thousands,
possibly. It is by no means a cliché to add that God knows.
And Denny, too, no doubt.
Vincent Van Gogh
No graveside gathering as motley as ours could be complete without
a bankrupt, paranoid-schizophrenic, gonorrhoea-afflicted, suicidal
Dutch painter. What is Vincent Van Gogh doing in the litany?
All artists need patrons, so Monsieur Vincent could be included
under the patronage of Denny's fondness for outcasts. Poor Van
Gogh fairly invented the stereotype of the Crazed Artistic Genius,
the romantic hero who shatters conventions and sacrifices (or
escapes) constraining bourgeois relationships in service to his
pursuit of the sublime. But Van Gogh, at least if his letters
are to believed, was really a rather sad man, if a great painter,
and never believed that artists were significantly different from,
let alone better than, other people. There is no hint of self-congratulation
or approval in his observation to a friend that "a painter as
a man is too absorbed in what his eyes see, and is not sufficiently
master of the rest of his life."
Van Gogh was hardly the master of his own. Born March 30, 1853,
in Groot Zundert, the Netherlands, the son of a dour Protestant
clergyman, he was a seminary dropout and failed missionary who
couldn't hold down a normal job and had to depend for most of
his life on his long-suffering and not-at-all wealthy brother,
Theo, for financial and psychic support. Despite the fact that
his 10-year career as a painter -- like Flannery O'Connor's similarly
short career as a writer -- is a marvelous explosion of artistic
grace, of the some 900 oil paintings and 1,000 drawings and watercolors
he managed to produce, he sold only one. He was poor and mentally
ill, a disgrace to his family, rejected by the woman he loved,
and even clumsy at suicide. On a hot July day in a wheat field
near Auvers-sur-Oise, he shot himself in the belly with a pistol,
later staggering into a local inn sobbing, "I tried to kill myself.
I bungled it." After an excruciating death, he was buried in a
grave strewn with sunflowers.
Still, looking at his searingly luminous canvases, reading his
unflinchingly honest letters, and considering the meteoric 37-year
trajectory of Van Gogh's life, it's difficult to disagree with
W.H. Auden's conclusion that "in spite of everything, the final
impression is one of triumph." Here, after all, is a man who genuinely
preferred to keep company with the poor; who once wrote that he
wanted "to paint men and women with that something of the eternal
which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to convey
by the actual radiance and vibration of our coloring"; who thought
it wonderful and terrifying that when confronted with "the image
of indescribable and unutterable desolation -- of loneliness,
poverty and misery, the end and extreme of all things, the thought
of God comes into one's mind."
Anyone who prays before icons knows that to look on an icon
as a painting is to look on an icon in vain. An icon is a painted
prayer, which also may be said of dozens of Van Gogh's works.
Surely God could not turn away someone as desperate to find him
as was this tormented artist. Surely he prayed with the rest of
us at Denny's grave that day. Loving and loved as we all were,
surrounded as we were by the martyrs and all the saints, God couldn't
turn us away either.
So God joined us.
Michael Garvey is an assistant director of news and information
at Notre Dame.
(October 2004)
