Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is the ikon for grieving families, especially if you are Catholic. At the foot of the cross, she waits in vigil, knowing that there is nothing she can do but be there, and wait for the inevitable.
In Michelangelo’s masterpiece, the Pieta, she bears the body of her son, the fruit of her wound, before it is laid in the womb of the earth. That is what these last few days have been like with my dear friend, Father Phil, a true Marian moment, a vigil with the dying, waiting, crying, hoping, and then accepting as Mary did, “Thy will be done.” “Fiat.”
When I was a kid, brought up in a traditional family, Irish, Australian, and Catholic, the Hail Mary and the Rosary were central, more than the Our Father or even the Mass. Every Sunday, Jesus came to us in Latin and that was a hard read, even as an altar boy, but not Mary. Oh no! She was novenas, and miracles and children of Mary. She was rousingly sung “Aves”, and rose petals, bells, blue capes and candles. She was Lourdes and Fatima, Our Lady appearing to nobodies like us, and giving children the secrets for world peace, for heaven’s sake. We saw her weeping at the foot of the cross, so we knew she would understand our tears. We cherished those holy pictures that Sister Bernadette would give us for being good in class. Mary was the good mother in the otherwise distant and awful trinity of suffering Sons and too stern Fathers, one that was as much our family too. In a world that was so harsh, you had to be tough to survive. The feminine was like a fountain gushing in the desert. Where else was there softness, compassion, the delicate delight of beauty?
We learned a few of the Gospel stories, though there were not many. At Cana in Galilee, Mary told Jesus that the wedding was running out of wine, and more or less ordered him to perform a miracle to keep the party going. In the Irish culture of 1950’s Australia, anyone who could arrange changing water into wine was someone you admired enough to pray to. And any mother who would, could anticipate that level of her son’s need was surely special and spiritual in every sense. An Arab wedding must be beautiful, joy from start to finish. Mary knew that. She saved the bride and groom from total embarrassment. As acne faced and awkward teens that we were, that was a saint we all needed.
Thus, when one felt you had a vocation, or a “calling” as the Irish named it, you weren’t drawn to Jesuits or Franciscans so much as drawn to the many Marian congregations, Oblates of Mary, Marianists, Marists. They seemed so much more human. That is where I ended up for a time, and that is where I first met Father Phil, my Marist priest, dearest friend of 25 years who died this morning in a Washington Hospital.
Marists are one of many French founded congregations devoted to the example of Mary, the mother of Jesus as the obedient and faithful one. Phil joined right out of his high school, run by the same Marists. And as in the beginning, so at the ending, his passing away had some special Mary moments too, ones that were fitting to his extraordinary and yet simple life. Yes, he died hearing the religous sisters’ sing Salve Regina’s and his younger sister Ginger praying “Hail Mary’s” that intoned the plea, “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” But this time, there was a special Mary moment that even Phil, half unconscious in the bed, seem stirred by. It was a Mary Moment of prayers that he had never heard before because they were not from the Gospels.
Phil was a theologian. His specialty was Marian theology, but even he was surprised to learn years back that there is another sacred text that tells more stories of Mary than the Gospels do. It was the verses of the Koran, prayed by my adopted Gazan son Ahmed, over the ailing body of Phil, whom he had come to know and love as his Uncle Phil. Even Ahmed did not fully realize the grace in this moment. Here he was, a Gazan, a victim of the ongoing genocidal war, having lost his sister and her baby in December 2023, to Israeli dropped, American bombs, praying Sura 19 over the priest son of a Major, hero of D-day and colleague of General Westmoreland, the commander of Vietnam, the general who notoriously made ‘body counts’ the measure of success. General Westmoreland was even at Phil’s ordination. In that hospital room, even though we did not know it, there was war and peace being finally played out.
That this son of a storied military family going as far back as the War of Independence, the Civil War and World War One, had resisted his father’s pressure to become a warrior, and had become, instead, a man of peace, and the messenger of Jesus’s message of love was the singular achievement of Phil’s life. But that he, a Roman Catholic priest, son of a warrior, would be honored to be blessed in his final journey by a refugee of war, a devout young Muslim man offering a Koranic prayer while the world is still at war, says something about the possibilities that perhaps only grace can conjure, and the kind of community that Father Phil so welcomed.
He was a man of many parts, languages and talents. He could speak to you in French or Spanish- even Latin, and loved translating poetry and sacred texts. If anything would make him mad, it was shoddy translation, when the modern liturgists had taken an ancient prayer of the mass and butchered it beyond sense. Phil would not have considered himself an old time Catholic because he loved “semper reformanda”, the church’s reform energy, but he also could not easily tolerate modernism that ended up being barbarism, trashing the tradition that people only saw as irrelevant because they were ignorant. 2000 years of faith is not something you easily update in some Vatican committee.
Phil lived for words. Our regular dinners at Vicino’s in Silver Spring were old-fashioned salons. Each of us would bring a pile of books, and between courses, share readings, and discuss Michael Dirda and the latest book reviews. We could go from Cavafy to Cicero, from Proust to Pound, from Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath. It was always a magic and mad mix that we delighted in, the anti pasta with Dante lost in the forest, the gelato and Goethe selling his soul. Vicino’s got used to becoming the Library of Congress on a Saturday night.
We even had our signature jokes, “Moi? pretentious?” or “Enough about me. Let me give you a chance to tell me how brilliant I am.” Humor was our endless study. What makes people laugh. That was serious. Many is the time when our conversation so captured the attention of nearby tables that someone would pass by as they left to say, “Thank you for that seminar on Greek Mythology.” It was our tradition for these last 25 years, to stake out a corner table and turn it into our seminar. We both loved books, and while our friends would accuse us both of being hoarders, we would tell them we are just archivists who are misunderstood. He loved -too much- to drink his diet coke, and our special treat was Ledo’s pizza. His Marian side came out especially in his hospitality to the religious sisters who were mission partners with the Marists in the Washington DC community. He delighted in taking them on special outings on special feasts to Port Tobacco and places like the tombs of Mother Seton and other American saints, and of course, Basilicas. They loved their Father Phil.
Quite honestly, in my life, I have never met anyone quite like Phil, for his vast and indefatigable curiosity, and his sensitivity, his aesthetic appreciation. I am ten years his junior, but he so stretched my understanding and deepened my love for the great American writers, poets and composers. We would often go to the UMD-Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center to hear Gershwin or Copeland or Bernstein, whom he all loved, or we would go to poetry recitals from Sharon Olds or Galway Kinnel, or read Richard Wright and his poem “The Blessing” which ends with these lines,
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.”
When we would read that poem, as we often did, he would just swoon, in awe that words could so transport us to another world. It never got old.
Ginger, his sister, and myself sat like Mother Mary at the foot of his cross, his bed last night, reading, sharing, praying, telling stories, and remembering a thoroughly good man, a gentleman and a scholar. I was thinking that he too, as he steps out of his body, may he break into blossom. As a teenager in search of answers to his purpose in life, he went to Gethsemane Abby outside Louisville, and met Thomas Merton who told him, you are not meant to be a monk. You will make a great priest. And that he did.
In his later years, there were so many challenges but somehow, despite his failing health, and his constrained ministry, he kept the world alive in his mind and heart. Sometimes he was a little too close to heaven in his driving, when he almost got me killed a few times driving with no brakes, but the angels were watching over us.
They simply don’t make priests like Phil anymore, and for that, while we lose a dear friend, the church loses one of its most trusted custodians who knew and so cherished that ‘depositum fidei” or the “Beauty of faith.” Sure, we live in a rational world, one that demands relevance, speed and efficiency, and all the rest, but what would we be if there weren’t those few among us like Phil who feed off its beauty. It seems as if with Phil gone, a light has gone out in the world. As theologian Hurs Von Balthasar wrote:
Beauty is the word which shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach since only it dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness
Vale Father Phil- May Mother Mary guide you home, and into Allah’s paradise. May you rest in peace, or as the other faithful pray over the departed,
اللَّهُمَّ اغْفِرْ لَهُ ، وَارْفَعْ دَرَجَتَهُ فِي الْمَهْدِيِّينَ ، وَاخْلُفْهُ فِي عَقِبِهِ فِي الْغَابِرِينَ ، وَاغْفِرْ لَنَا وَلَهُ يَا رَبَّ الْعَالَمِينَ ، وَافْسَحْ لَهُ فِي قَبْرِهِ ، وَنَوِّرْ لَهُ فِيهِ ( the Muslim prayer over the dead.)
