Priest and President

Why would a quiet person throw a party?  There’s something about a room full of people that has always turned me into a three-year old, needing a mommy or a daddy to hide behind.  But when The New President stepped into his office six years ago, he started throwing parties.  Every semester he would invite the faculty and staff to the President’s Dining Room for wine and cheese.  Everybody was invited – from the vice-presidents to the secretaries, from the popular faculty to the guy who drove the putt-putt “elephant” around campus vacuuming up litter.  The table in the middle of the room was covered with the good stuff – fresh fruit carefully prepared and arranged, generous chunks of various cheeses, and bottles of wine and bowls of non-alcoholic punch – just like the big shots had in that room. 

His inauguration had been no coronation.  He had chosen instead  a red tee-shirt and a pair of work gloves and joined in living the inauguration theme,  the theme that would characterize the place for his presidency: leadership and service in the community.

Caroline was near retirement, having been a secretary at the university since High School.  Having worked hard for four presidents, her persona had become somewhat vestigial, her office moved to the margins of the top floor, where she was busy but invisible.  She had fallen in her office, and was rushed to her hospital in Grosse Pointe where her broken hip was surgically repaired.  When she opened her eyes, there he was, The New President, sitting in the chair at her bedside, just smiling at her.  He wanted to be sure she was OK.

The St. Ignatius Chapel had been marvelously refurbished, its worn and dreary character illuminated by cherry and ebony furniture, tile flooring, brass lights and stained glass windows.  At the Eastern end, in front of a mosaic of Our Lady of Guadalupe was a commanding bronze baptismal font, looking as if it had been forged and hammered in some Arthurian workshop.  The New President stood there, his white chasuble placed over his head flowing to his wrists at his sides and to his feet in the front and back, as he waited for the music to end, so he could bless and dedicate the font, its holy water silently pumped to its rim and rippling down its ancient looking sides.  With his left hand he freed his right arm, pulling back the chasuble and the long white sleeve of the alb beneath it, all the way to his bicep.  Raising his right arm to the ceiling like a sword to the ceiling, he said the prayer of blessing and sliced down through the glassy surface.  As he withdrew his forearm from the dark water, I felt as if I had seen something somehow holy, that somehow he had defied the elements, quietly conquering them.  With a bundle of reeds he used that same bare arm to sprinkle that water, now holy, onto the altar, and ambo, and tabernacle, and crucifix… and all of us, now also somehow holy.

He seemed to do this when he was not tied up at lunchtime, The New President.  He would sit on one of the benches around the fountain in the square of the Student Union and eat his sandwich, and perhaps an apple.  He’d watch the water “Springing up into life eternal” the little bronze plaque read, and he’d listen to the squawks of the peregrine falcons in the clock tower beyond it, the ones he could see from his fifth floor office.  From time to time some of us would come by and join him, one at a time, as if we were visiting an anchoress, walled into a corner of the cathedral, dedicated, wise.

The convocation at the end of each summer brought the faculty back with a week to collect and prepare for the return of the students, and gave all of us a chance to find out how our struggling urban university was doing, and then have lunch together outside and have some fun, including a great baseball game that brought out the minor-leaguer in a lot of us.  The New President took the podium in his Titans baseball cap, shorts, and polo shirt, dressed for the game, but prepared for the presentation.  An economist, he would let the charts and graphs tell most of the story, on the huge screen behind him.  He’s point out the ups and downs, help us to understand the trends…and he’d let us know how critical each of us was to the mission of the place.  Oh, and just in case we would take him too seriously, to mistake his leadership as displacing our own, he’d pepper his presentation with the world’s worst one-liners, like he would at the shorter town hall meetings he’d host every semester.

The priest who was The New President hosted his last wine and cheese reception yesterday.  The Next President will officiate over the convocation in mid-august.  This New President steered us through six years of graphs and charts that had upward trends, on campuses that like the new chapel honor the holiness of their function, a place where students grow to hear and respond to the call to lead by serving.  Oh, by the way, that’s why this quiet person, this guy who was The New President, Fr. Gerard Stockhausen, SJ, throws a party.  Take and eat.  Take and drink.  

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.