Given to the Manhattan College Graduate Theology Students
Bronx, NY 9/16/69
To accept today the request of fellow graduate students in the theology program to say a few words about Brother
Thomas is, I think, more a gesture of confidence in me as someone willing to risk openness than it is even a tribute
of honor to him. And yet, I think the two elements are very much intertwined.
You as friends have asked me to speak to you about a friend. Friendship is a risk. To open ourselves and our
feelings and our innermost thoughts to others leaves us in turn open to vulnerability, to being misunderstood,
and possibly even to being rejected, disillusioned, and hurt. And so friendship demands trust: mutual trust that,
in the presence of the other, we can remove our defenses and our masks and our walls that separate us, and because
of the invitation and the call of a friend, simply be ourselves.
Today you have invited me to be myself as I see myself in the existential moment of this event and its impact on
my life and to speak about my friend; and so, overcoming my initial hesitancy and the easily admitted mistrust
of my own emotions, I do accept and do respond to your trust, not without - to put it simply - a comforting and
consoling sense of gratitude.
Thomas himself was similarly such a man to me. He always invited me to be myself and to call things as I saw them,
often on my part with deep feeling and even when we sometimes heartily and even heatedly disagreed. And so, I
will not talk about him as the learned Ph.D. in mathematics that he was; or as the energetic builder who at Christian
Brothers College, Memphis, helped establish by his leadership a now highly-regarded four-year Engineering and Liberal
Arts College in a comparatively short period of nine years as its President; or as the firm, courageous, but often
criticized superior who spoke simple, direct, sometimes harsh language he refused to soften by evasive ambiguities;
or as the Provincial who combined observable hard work and even stubbornness with a sensitivity he seemed for some
reason to reserve only to the privacy of confidences entrusted to him.
I choose rather to speak as you have invited me to speak, and as I think he would want me to speak: and that is,
about him as a friend. And there I will be brief. He knew me well - over many years and through the many normal
crises all of us face in the loneliness of the call to celibacy. He accepted me. He cared enough to correct and
to challenge me and even sometimes to hurt me - as a good physician must who loves you for the life he sees in
you and who is administering a cure - when to his mind he honestly thought I was wandering from the ideals and
achievements he felt I was capable of realizing for the service of the Brothers and the Institute he often told
me he loved.
He enjoyed with relish the times we could mutually weave humor into serious discussions of personal or Provincial
problems. He relaxed with me in the company of other Brothers over conversation, jokes, and songs, and this atmosphere
mysteriously made him appear almost boyish and quietly most at home. He was always available to listen when I
needed just to talk, and, unknown to many (some of whom may still hardly believe it), he too shared with me the
loneliness and sometimes the alienation that position and power and responsibility had thrust into his life. He
called and challenged me to be tough on myself when on various occasions it would have been much easier for me
to escape this self-confrontation and self-criticism by being tough on others, especially in judgment even more
than in act.
And since this man was a message - as we are all in a sense revelations of a message in this mystery that is the
uniqueness of the individual person - it seems to me that commemoration of Brother Thomas here in this circle of
our new-found friendships has several things to say to us is this liturgy we are about to celebrate this evening
is to have meaning and relevancy for the group that we are in light of his life and of this death.
The message of Brother Thomas for us, I think, is this: (1) he believed in life and celebrated it every day: alive,
alert, searching, even often working the soil and the landscape and material things, creatively contributing to
what the popular song says: "Live free and beauty surrounds you"; (2) he believed in work -work with
his hands but especially work with the mind: he was an excellent teacher (he insisted on retaining a class schedule
even while he was President of the College), never unprepared for class or unavailable outside class to give a
student individual help; he was an efficient, able administrator whose eagerness to return to his work and to its
tasks immediately after every meeting that called him away was such a consistent pattern with him during his six
years as Provincial that I knew almost with certainty even before it was official that he was on that plane last
Tuesday: it would be the first flight he could get out of Baltimore after the Provincials' meeting ended Tuesday
morning, and I knew he had an Allegheny pass; (3) he was tough-minded in the sense that our professors in our
own program here are tough-minded: like them, he invited and even challenged one to ask questions, to trust oneself
to be creative and to make suggestions, to challenge the system even - but while doing all this, to read, to investigate,
and to take counsel before one would plunge into precipitous judgments, conclusions, or decisions; and for this
he was considered ruthless; yet he could and would yield yardage, but only when a colleague had courage to face
him in person and stand the test of a contest of minds rather than hide behind gossip, hearsay, or commonly unfounded
rumor or complaint; (4) he knew the labor of graduate work and the necessity for it if we are to live more freely
and intelligently as men and women prepared professionally for more effective service to society and to the Church.
He inaugurated a program just five years ago that freed several Brothers each year for full-time graduate studies
(twenty Brothers in one year alone in one of these last five years) and this against much criticism and against
a tradition and mentality that said, "We can't afford all that manpower released from our own institutions
and schools for the leisure of study"; and (5) only a little over a week ago, he told me he was finally though
gradually approaching the admission of what the program we are in this year can do for society, the Church, and
religious and priestly life in the decades ahead. He had had reservations but had withheld judgment - as was his
sometimes aggravating and cautious style - until he could investigate more thoroughly. He heard Brother Gabriel
Moran speak last spring at a meeting of the Christian Brothers' Provincials of the United States, and spoke to
me twice since that time about our program here. In my last conversations with him only a matter of some days
ago, he was already beginning to fashion in his own mind what he might eventually personally be able to do as a
Provincial to effect wider encouragement and support for the vision and work of Brother Gabriel Moran.
So, to sum up and then go forward with a real sense of celebration: We commemorate a man today who believed in
the Christian Brothers and in us men and women studying here as a group and in what miracles we can work for one
another and for others if we relax in the risk of openness that friendship and mutual trust and encouragement demand
in these changing and ambiguous times.
We commemorate a man who believed in the necessity of strenuous graduate study for tough-minded service in whatever
"re-entry arenas" our personal freedom and confidence in self dictate must be our individual fields of
labor for society and the Church in the years ahead.
But first, last, and always - and I knew this - he was a man of simple, uncomplicated, some would even say unscholarly
faith in Christ: a faith he seemed to know and to accept while I had to admit even in my very recent last visit
with him I was still in the process of searching in order to accept with similar depth and meaning. The important
point is this: he was not surprised or impatient with the need for searching on the part of another even though
he seemed so sure. That says very much to us assembled here, I think.
Finally, on behalf of all of us here from the Midwest Provinces of the Brothers who over the years were in one
way or another associated with Brother Thomas, I wish to express our thanks for your condolences, for the delicately
sensitive words you have individually or privately spoken, and for the consolation of this coming together of new-found
friends for this liturgy-celebration in his memory.
To end these few words and to introduce, if I may, the offertory petitions, I would like merely to offer these
final lines of a poem I wrote this past year. I present these closing lines of the poem as a prayer that in the
days and years ahead we may be given more men like Brother Thomas to replace him:
Let watery words be still
And mighty men come forth to speak
And lead with giant courage-steps
Beyond the safe and pebbled shore
And out into the deep.
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