A friend of the school gone

I am a very poor potential customer for the fast growing social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Given the prospect of a free minute or more, I do not think first to enter the communication stream of the internet, or telephones or even letters and notes. I do actually have a membership with Facebook, but have not ventured on the site for maybe two months. It is not a virtue of mine - friends and family tolerate me to a point. It got the best of me today.

This afternoon I checked the website of my home parish, St. James Cathedral in Seattle, where I was confirmed and received my first holy communion many years ago. It is a very vibrant parish with many activities and programs in education, social service, liturgy, music and the arts. I was stunned to see posted on the site "Funeral Homily for Perry Lorenzo." Perry was an old friend whom I have known for over twenty-five years. He died on December 19th, and his funeral Mass was celebrated on December 30th. Until this afternoon, I did not know he had been sick or that he had succumbed to this illness weeks ago.

We started teaching in Catholic Schools together right out of college. When I left to pursue graduate work at Catholic University, Perry continued teaching at one of the Seattle Catholic High Schools, eventually to become the DIrector of Education for Seattle Opera. Perry was a master teacher, a Catholic intellectual, with a profound appreciation for the arts and humanities, and keenly aware that all of this beauty and goodness derived from its source in the God from whom we move and have our being. His lectures held captive and inspired students and adults alike. I was to call him this week to request a lecture for this year's Madeleine Festival.

Perry was the kind of friend whom you might not see for a year or two, but would pick things right up where they were left from before. A true Seattle native, he was an avid coffee drinker who drank me under the table more than once, forcing me to switch to decaffeinated while he looked on with disdain. I last saw him when the Cathedral Choir travelled to Seattle on tour in April of 2008. After our Cathedral Choir participated in the Sunday Mass at St. James, we had lunch and continued talking through the afternoon right up to the call time for our evening concert. Perry was an enthusiastic supporter of the Choir School, and was very interested to visit and help in any way. He was incredibly impressed by the choristers at both the Mass and Concert we presented in Seattle.

I learned today that Perry was diagnosed with bone cancer only seven months ago. The cancer had already spread to his lungs. From all accounts he fought valiantly, and resigned to either fight on to healing or die as God willed. He was 51, and was at the peak of his career with the Seattle Opera. We shared a great respect for the Catholic intellectual tradition, and a love for the church despite its many flaws and imperfections. I am sure that we at one time discussed what was to evolve into the Choir School's mission statement where students are prepared to "engage the culture with the Catholic intellectual, artistic, moral and religious tradition."

There remains an enormous and growing chasm between religion and intelligence, faith and science. Can one be rigorously and honestly intellectual and still be a person of faith? The Church has at times in its history demonstrated that absolute coexistence of faith with intelligence and reason, and at other times has failed miserably to proclaim the truth, beauty and goodness of God, leaving people with little choice but to abandon Catholicism as a pre-modern opiate of the masses. I have often worried that something I have taught or presented to my students may fail utterly in much the same way. Perry worked tirelessly as an 'evangelizer' of the Catholic intellectual and artistic tradition.

Many of us have faced or are facing difficult health situations. We also struggle with religion, the notion of a saving God, and with faith that might seem to be without any real meaning or substance. Fr. Michael Ryan, the pastor of St. James Cathedral gave this prayer to Perry in the last weeks of his life. It is a prayer by the Jesuit theologian and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

When the signs of age
begin to mark my body
(and still more when they touch my mind);
when the illness that is to diminish me
or carry me off
strikes from without or is born within me;
when the painful moment comes
in which I suddenly awaken to the fact
that I am growing ill or growing old;
and above all at that last moment
when I feel I am losing hold of myself
and am absolutely passive within the hands
of the great unknown forces
that have formed me;
in all these dark moments, O God,
grant that I may understand that it is you
who are painfully parting the fibers of my being
in order to penetrate
to the very marrow of my substance
and bear me away within yourself.

Fr. Ryan used this prayer again in the homily at his Funeral Mass, but concluded with these words:

"Perry, dear friend, God has penetrated to the very marrow of your substance and borne you away within Himself. You have passed from the land of reflected beauty into the land of Beauty Itself, into the embrace of Beauty Itself. We would be selfish to want you back. And we will best honor your memory by continuing along our own search for meaning, and by doing as you did: letting all that is beautiful enchant, enthrall, and intoxicate us. And lead us to God."