Being There

When I was in college I studied in upper stairwells to avoid visual distraction.  Ironically, I saw something that I am changed by today, 45 years later.

Fr. Jack Schuett was a typical Jesuit, which is to say that there was nothing typical about him.  He was about 5”9, black curly hair and a boxer’s nose, a smallish mouth that had a kind of smile, like he knew something about you, like he had your number.  He taught existential phenomenology, which he said was really phenomenological existentialism, if you know what I mean.  He taught in the cassock that the “Jebs” wore back then, the kind of thin black robe that flowed from the roman collar past fitted shoulders and down  over black trousers to the tops of the black shoes that were almost shined.  When he taught, he taught with a kind of intensity, that half smile keeping us on our toes, making the deeply theoretical material seem somehow relevant, that boxer’s face seeming to suggest it was a good thing for guys to know about.  I guess as I describe him through my adolescent eyes, he was what I would call a guys’ guy.  He was cool.

Perhaps it was his philosophy textbook I was attempting to study there in the third floor stairwell in the Briggs Liberal Arts building, a back stairwell rarely used, especially on the top floor.  There was a window that let natural light in, good to study by, but providing a view of a bit of sidewalk, also lightly traveled, from the Jesuit residence to the back of the campus; not much was there to be distracted by. 

But as luck would have it, there was Jack Schuett, walking back and forth along that sidewalk, walking slowly, meditatively, holding open in his right hand his small, thick breviary, the book of daily prayers called “the office”.  The prayers were said at dawn, mid-day, evening, and night, and consisted of psalms, gospel readings, repetitive refrains, and commentary, meant to keep the person connected with God and Godly things.  Here was the guys’ guy with the boxer’s face walking with God, on the back sidewalk where there were no distractions.

This alone may have been a life-changing insight, this being-with-God in the middle of the campus life.  But it gets better.  As I had tried to get back to my study, I noticed his pacing stop.  I looked and saw him pull a green ribbon down the page he’d been reading and close the book, crouching down and opening his arms.  Then I saw the reason.  A young woman was walking toward him with a toddler, a little child who by now had accepted his outstretched invitation and was sitting on one knee, looking at that little smile of his, then up at his mom’s face, and back and forth.  Then he stood, shook the hand of the young woman, and shared a smiling conversation while the toddler explored the curious tent of his cassock.  After a few minutes of this, the mother and child went on their way, and he pulled the book open with that green ribbon and returned to his meditative pace.

I will never forget his crouching down to the toddler’s level and holding open his arms, that breviary in his right hand.  God will wait.  There is a child to be welcomed, a former student to be affirmed.  Oh, yes.  Existential phenomenology is a way of looking for the meaning of life by considering a human’s being there, there in life’s world, there beneath all of the science and philosophy and theory.  It is seeing the child and getting down on the plane of the child, looking up at its mother . . . or, even by accident or grace, looking down from a philosophy book through a side window in a back stairwell and seeing a priest enjoy his humanity, his being there.

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