Sunday, March 21, 2004.
Father Robert Schwenker OMI, a 1958 Notre Dame graduate, died
last Tuesday. He had been jogging in one of the poorer neighborhoods
of Bogotá, where he lived. A hit and run.
Father Bob was more than a friend. A mentor perhaps is the right
word. I've never known a more authentic Christian. He truly wanted
to live the Gospel -- which led him to poverty and prayer.
Father Bob was the one who got me to the South Bronx. He had
heard that a chapter of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity
(M.C.) were there. So in his travels as Vocation Director of the
eastern province of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate -- he simply
followed a map into the heart of the Bronx and looked up the Sisters.
They were moving out of their borrowed home on East 142nd Street
within a week. Did he want it? Well, yes, he did. A vacated house
in the South Bronx in the early 1980s would last perhaps three
days before being stripped, not just of light fixtures, sinks
and toilets, but of copper pipe, electric wire and fuse boxes
as well. Father Bob found someone to take over the house immediately
and returned a few months later with a number of volunteers to
help with the Missionaries of Charity's summer youth camp, myself
among them. I had met Father Bob earlier in our common hometown
of Columbus, Ohio. When he invited me to volunteer that summer
I accepted.
The camp went fine. The novelty of New York is what I remember
most though, and the freedom of knowing that for the first time
since I was 6 years old I wouldn't have to return to study in
the fall. I recall an early evening at the end of that summer,
however, sitting on the front porch stoop with another volunteer.
The beat of boom boxes measuring the pulse of Willis Avenue at
the end of the block and the clicking of dominoes on makeshift
tables straddling the sidewalk across the street set the mood
for the long, lazy, after-dinner hours. It struck me in the cool
of that evening that in less than two weeks the summer project
would end, and I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest
of my life. I had just finished a bachelor's degree at Notre Dame
and had no inkling whatsoever of getting a real job, especially
after seeing a few of the realities of another world like the
Bronx. I wanted to travel. I had thought of working just enough
to get a car to drive to Santa Fe or Tucson perhaps. It was an
intoxicating idea. And I suppose I would have gone through with
it, had Father Bob not asked me a few days later to stay on through
the winter, "hold the fort" as he had said. Just not let the house
appear to sit vacant. He'd be back in the spring when his commitment
as vocation director was up. He wanted to return to the Bronx
as a missionary.
I said I would, of course. The Southwest could wait.
Another episode happened about the same time that, I suppose,
pointed in the same direction. Mother Teresa was in New York.
She'd often slip in and out of the Missionaries of Charity's house
on 145th Street. This time, however, people discovered she was
about. And I was one of those people.
I knocked at the sisters' unpretentious front door just off
3rd Avenue and asked the superior, Sister Priscilla, if I could
see Mother Teresa. She told me Mother Teresa was visiting with
her sisters and, with that morally superior tone that salespersons
often affect when soliciting the one and only acceptable answer
from a customer, asked if I didn't think that it was only right
that she do so. I told her quite honestly that I didn't care if
Mother saw her sisters or not. I simply wanted to talk to her.
I added that I would like to stay on her front porch stoop, if
that was okay, until Mother could see me. I was bluffing of course
(it was nearly lunchtime), but my bluff paid off. Mother Teresa
came out to see me. I told her I wasn't sure of my future. She
said I'd be in the Bronx next year when she returned. (I was,
but to this day I refuse to call her utterance inspired. It was
more common sense than anything else.)
At any rate, she invited me to adoration with her sisters at
5 p.m. And so it came to pass that it was I who brought Father
Bob to meet Mother Teresa. He was hesitant to go. ("Are you sure
they won't mind? It was you she invited, no?") But when he spoke
to her after prayer, mentioning his own disquietude about the
future, Mother Teresa told Father Bob to obey his superiors. (Again,
hardly prophetic, but it turned out to be what indeed happened.)
Thus the main thing to come of our encounter with Mother Teresa
was that we could now attend adoration with the sisters. I maintained
the daily prayer routine for as long as I could until two other
volunteers and I started an emergency men's shelter later that
winter. The shelter quite logically opened at 5 each evening.
It was only in looking back at that fortuitous summer of 1980
that I came to realize that Father Bob was just then beginning
to hear the "call within a call," as Mother Teresa spoke of her
own journey. He was feeling an urge for deeper prayer, which naturally
led to poverty. And perhaps it was at this point that our relationship
found rare kinship. During the following winter, he continued
to travel the eastern seaboard as the OMI Vocations Director,
but his heart was with the three of us who had turned our 142nd
Street brownstone into a men's shelter. (See Notre Dame Magazine,
October 1981, for a story about our volunteer work on the shelter.)
That period challenged me physically, psychologically and spiritually
perhaps more than any other in my life. Father Bob visited often,
helping out with food, bringing in other volunteers and, perhaps
most important, offering encouragement. I felt as though we were
journeying a similar path: desperately searching for God in poverty.
The one difference, I suppose, was that throughout the years my
faith faltered. His did not.
When the harsh New York winter was over and Father Bob returned
in the spring, we had already shut the shelter. New volunteers
had come to help with the M.C.'s summer camp, and our home on
142nd Street was restored as a residence for volunteers. Father
Bob's time as vocation director was coming to an end, and he invited
his superiors to the Bronx to see the shelter. His request to
them was simple: Let him stay. He had a home. He'd help the Sisters
out in whatever they may need -- celebrate Mass, hear confessions,
accompany them when they visited the homeless in Grand Central.
Whatever. Perhaps some of his fellow Oblates would like to join
him? There were myriad possibilities for ministry in the Bronx.
His superiors understood the request; they appreciated the possibilities.
But they simply didn't have the personnel. No, it would not be
a good idea. Father Bob would have to pull out.
He did. They sent him to Ceiba, Puerto Rico, where the Eastern
conference had a mission. It worked for a while, but the spiritual
challenge simply was not there. Most of his fellow Oblates did
not appear to understand him, he later told me. Ask many a middle-class,
first-world Catholic entwined in the life of the Church and they
will honestly and sometimes even fervently insist that the real
missions are in the first world. That's where the spiritual poverty
is. And they'll quote no less an authority than Mother Teresa
to back their claims.
But such reason does not convince those called to a deeper spirituality
(and didn't convince Mother Teresa either). Father Bob finally
asked and was granted permission to join his fellow oblates in
the neighboring province of Haiti, a much poorer and more challenging
ministry. Ironically, just before he was to leave, he received
a call from the OMI Eastern provincial. Mother Teresa had approached
him with a request. Could he send one of his priests to the South
Bronx, to say Mass for her sisters, to hear their confessions,
to perhaps even help out a bit with the sisters' ministry to the
poor? Of course, there was so much to be done in the Bronx, there
was great spiritual need. A priest could be overwhelmed with ministry.
Perhaps he'd want to send a team of Oblates?
Would Father Bob want to go to the Bronx? the OMI provincial
humbly asked. It was too late though. Father Bob was further along
the track. The Bronx would have been several steps backward.
As it turned out, in its ministry to the poorer strata of society,
the OMI Haitian province moved Father Bob about quite regularly.
For the most part, he and I were able to keep in touch. I visited
Father Bob in 1983 in Chardonierre, in the southwest corner of
Haiti. Later, newly wed, my wife and I traveled to see him in
an isolated village of central Oaxaca, Mexico. He was eventually
transferred to Malagana, Columbia, and finally to Bogotá,
where he died. We corresponded by e-mail when he was able to hook
up, and at one point were even able to talk via computer.
It was also via computer that I received the message that Father
Bob had died. It was a four-line e-mail. I read it. Reread it.
I logged off and walked the five minutes to my house. My wife
was leaving as I approached, and we took shelter from the overzealous
tropical sun under our house posted some 6 feet off the ground.
I told her what I knew. That Father Bob would be buried in Bogotá,
but that there would be memorial services for him in the States.
I told her I had had a premonition of his death: I had imagined
several times that he would die while I was living in this rather
isolated section of the northeast coast of Papua, New Guinea.
I spoke of the numbers of people who would gather for the services
in Buffalo New York; Lowell, Massachusetts; Columbus, Ohio; and
Washington D.C.. And that I would not be there. Then I said that
not a single one of them would know that Father Bob had written
to me once that I was the closest brother he had had.
It was then that I began to cry. And for about an hour, while
my wife went to pick up our three children, I continued to cry
alone on my bed.
When one is 22, a bit naïve, and with no determined goal,
one might assume that one=s journey is typical. Not that any of
my friends had opened a men=s shelter in the South Bronx after
graduating from Notre Dame, but the only real difference between
them and me, at least so it appeared to me at the time, was that
they had pulled off a year of law school after college, whereas
I had given away all my clothes, emptied my bank account and spent
all my energy searching for the proverbial pearl, which I figured
had to be found in the poverty of Isaiah 53.
In the end my discoveries appeared much different than my youthful
exuberance had envisioned. Still that winter opened up to me a
different world, one in which I would try to find accommodation
for several years thereafter. It was a world of the desperate
and of the saint, of loneliness and consolation, of darkness and
of the negative way to God (costing not less than everything).
Father Bob introduced me to that world, and he would continue
to inhabit it for the rest of his life.
It was only later when I entered seminary at the age of 26 (I
never finished; marriage beckoned) that I realized that my mentor
-- whom I did not seek out and who did not seek me out, but that
simply happened -- was far different from those of other seminarians.
Thus my journey rather atypical as well. Because of the world
he had chosen to enter, Father Bob was an exception. The external
manifestations of his internal journey were evident to any observant
eye. He was the most unpolitical Church persons. He really did
want to live the Gospel, wherever it took him, or better said,
because it took him. What he owned fit in a carry-on; he was ready
to move at a moment's notice. He had sworn off the drink, although
he was not alcoholic. He quietly told me one day why: He had simply
seen too much alcohol-associated violence in his ministry in the
Bronx, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Mexico and Columbia. He thought to
himself that there had to be something he could do. So he went
dry. It was a sort of prayer, or what older terminology might
call spiritual warfare. He was intelligent; he kept abreast with
current events and theological trends. But the pearl he quested
drew him ever further into an internal world that few appear to
traverse. It was one of poverty, countless hours of meditation,
a dietary discipline aimed at combating violence, and the preaching
of a single Gospel message of repentance and salvation to the
poor.
Father Bob led a lonely life. Few understood his quest. His
mother hoped for years that he would not only give up the priesthood,
but, more important, the ridiculous conviction of Christianity.
He told me with a bit of a smile years later, before she died,
that she had given up on the second hope -- but not the first.
Perhaps it was I that best understood it. We shared the first
part in the Bronx. And it is perhaps my greatest sorrow that I
could not follow him the whole way into prayer, poverty, solitude,
faith.
Father Bob is gone now. At 22 in the first floor kitchen of
432 E. 142nd St. I remember reading him Robert Frost's image of
how "two roads diverged in a yellow wood." I had found the poem
in a battered paperback and liked it enough to memorize it. Father
Bob must have looked for a copy himself because years later he
surprised me by reciting it from memory as well. The poem ends
on a melancholic tone. How else? Frost speaks of "ages and ages
hence" when he would remember with a sigh how he had taken the
road less traveled. There's no doubt that Father Bob did the same.
And yet, for me also, although only midway on my life's journey,
those ages and ages hence appear to be already as well. I sigh,
however, not so much in memory of a decision made -- for, in fact,
I'm not sure how well I've stayed the path -- but rather for an
encounter with him, my mentor, my friend, my brother. For in the
end, in my life, it was he who has made all the difference.
Father Robert Schwenker OMI, was 68 when he died. May he, and
all the faithfully departed, through God's mercy, rest in peace.
* * *
Daniel J. Stollenwerk, who received a degree in American Studies
from Notre Dame in 1980, also holds a doctorate in theology from
the Pontifical University of Salamanca, Spain. For the last two
years he and his wife have been volunteer lecturers at Divine
Word University, Madang, Papua New Guinea. He may be reached at:
dstollenwerk@dwu.ac.pg.
(June 2004)
