JAPE, DUSTY AND BIG D

For whatever reason, last week I was reflecting back on my days in seminary: twelve long years that actually passed quickly, as have these past 53 years as a priest. I thought about all those men, and they were all men back then, who passed through my life as I did with theirs. So many of them have passed on, of course, time waiting for no one and nothing, some in the prime of life, others after having lived a good, longer life.

There was Chuck who died of cancer at 54. He and I had entered seminary as high school freshmen in September of 1957. Chuck was usually "Charlie" to all of us. We all had nicknames (mine was "Willy"). There was E.J. (Skip, to others), Frenchy (who has a French name), Herc (for Harlan), Ishtvan (Hungarian for Steve), Eli (whose last name is Whitney), Tiny (who was anything but). But you get the point.

We even had nicknames for our professors/teachers: Monsignor Gerald Durst, whom we all called "Dusty" -- not to his face, of course! There was also "Jape" (for Joseph P. Marzen, our Dean of Men who was called "The Disciplinarian" back then, and rightly so); and "Big D" (our English teacher who stood 6"4").  These also are resting in peace with no more students to torment or to torment them.

Sometimes it takes a reminder to remind one of one's past and the people and places who were part of that past and who helped make us what we are today. When we reflect back on that past, what we discover, or at least what I have discovered, is that it was neither as bad as I had imagined it to be going through it, nor as good as I would like to have remembered it to be.

And even though that past has had an effect on our present lives, the effect is not as profound as we often attribute it to be. For depending on the present situation, it is easy either to romanticize the past beyond recognition or to indict it for all present failures and shortcomings. The past is never that good, that bad, or that powerful. And if it is, then we are still living in the past.

And neither are the people who have passed through our lives, no matter how long they were in our lives, no matter how strong of a hold they had over us at that time. They, too, were never that good, that bad or that powerful. For, I hope, we have moved on and so have they.

Jape, Dusty and Big D were truly powerful forces in our lives as young seminarians, mostly, upon reflection, for good, and sometimes, to be honest, for not so good. But so am I in my relationship with others. So are all of us, I suspect.

We are what we are partly because of our past. But who we will be depends more now on the present than on the past. That is true for us as individuals, as a church, as a diocese, as a community. We may well sing the praises of the saints of the past, and justly so. But we must always be in tune to the present if, in the future, we want this present to be remembered well.