Into the Deep
Autobiography of Thomas DeMan, O.P.
The full book with several pages of photos, is available by sending $15 plus $2 shipping to Thomas DeMan at St. Benedict Lodge, 56630 North Bank Rd. McKenzie Bridge, OR 97413.
Prologue
I begin writing these reflections on a plane flying back from Arizona to Oregon where I now live as chaplain at the Dominican retreat center, St. Benedict Lodge, along the McKenzie River. The preceding week I had flown to Tempe to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the old church built in 1903 across from the campus of Arizona State University. During the 1970s while there as chaplain, I was instrumental in having the historic building saved from demolition and was invited to celebrate and preach at the anniversary Mass. The church was packed and seemed filled with couples whose marriages I had blessed over the years, both in Tempe and then later in Tucson in the 1980s while I was chaplain at the University of Arizona. At the anniversary Mass several couples introduced me to their children, students now in college. I feel myself a grandparent and in some ways I am. As a college chaplain for some 45 years I often meet students whose parents I pastored as students when I began.
During the Mass I commented that the old Tempe church had witnessed the entire history of a town growing from a sleepy adobe village into one of the most dynamic and envied college towns in the country, saying that my years in the 70s were but a small part of that history. The mayor of Tempe, Neil Giuliano, a former student of mine, corrected me and said rather that those days were particularly significant not only for the city but for the whole Catholic Church. And in many ways they were, significant and creative. I was ordained back in 1962, the year the Vatican Council opened. Pope John XXIII began a period of opening windows, aggiornamento and by the time I got to ASU in 1973, enthusiasm for church participation was at an all-time high. Church was literally being turned inside out. Bishop Nicholas Walsh of Seattle came down telling the students that for centuries the Catholic Church was modeled as a pyramid with the Pope at the top, then clergy and finally laity at the bottom. But now, he said, the church is still a pyramid but it has been inverted with the people of God at the top and the clergy and papacy underneath, a truly servant church. In those days we were being called upon to reinvent church. We certainly tried to reinvent liturgy: the music, the rubrics, bringing priest and people together in conversation and song. It was a time of much dialogue; we often invited students to share their testimony and when the students spoke, many would say that Jesus became real in their lives for the first time. We also dialogued with other traditions, inviting Protestant ministers to share the pulpit. Up until the Council, we had only called each other “heretic,” emphasizing what separated us and never what united us. But now the Ecumenical Movement was sweeping the nation and the world, the old antagonisms between Protestant and Catholic - at least outside fundamentalist circles - vanished almost overnight. So many movements burst upon the scene during the days following the Council: the Charismatic Movement would pack churches and chapels each week; the Cursillo Movement, Marriage Encounter, as well as other retreat movements held out promise for much needed reform. Church and “talking religion” were popular both on campus and in the city.
It is impossible to list the number of times over the years that I’ve been interviewed by the press and TV but it was in Tempe that CBS evening news - Walter Cronkite - put me on national television.
In every college town where I served, I always searched for the perfect retreat location. Sometimes it would be along a river, other times a small spring or lake, even in the desert searching for water if at all possible. At Tempe we started celebrating Mass outside on the lawn: “Mass on the Grass” as the posters proclaimed. We filled the chapel with bluegrass, gospel and mariachi music. I always told the students that I can’t play any instrument and I can’t sing, but I love music, all kinds of music and my gift is simply to listen. Many students who started at the various Newman Centers in those decades have gone on to make careers of music, one commissioned to play for the Pope.
And people’s lives were changed. Every year we would send graduates off to various volunteer organizations for community work. At one point several years ago I counted over 45 students who had entered seminaries and convents from universities where I had served. Why did so few stay and why are so few applying for such a life now? I think there are some answers to these questions in the story I have to tell.
Following the centenary celebration in Tempe, I journeyed down to Tucson, The Old Pueblo. It is called the astronomy capital of the world, with observatories on the mountains surrounding the city, a fit place for Dominicans since St. Dominic is the patron of astronomers. But this time when I returned, I was saddened to learn that the first priest that had welcomed me to Arizona, a Dominican from back east, had been accused of sexual abuse. Although long deceased, his name now disgraced, was read from all the pulpits. He had been an icon for me, almost single handily building a campus chapel. I didn’t sleep all the night and when I awoke in the morning, the front page of the Tucson paper had the lead article about the disappearance of another priest, a local pastor, also accused of sex abuse. The clergy sex abuse crisis has been called the greatest crisis to hit the Church since the Protestant Reformation. The effects will last for decades. Again, perhaps my reflections on the years leading up to this crisis will reveal some of the root causes of the problem.
One of the reasons I wanted to go to Tucson at this particular time was to visit my classmate, Fr. Bede Wilks, now disabled by illness, unable to preach or celebrate. He and I are the last of our class of 22 that arrived to the Dominican Novitiate back in 1956. Who would have dreamed that among that group of men arriving with so much talent and enthusiasm, I would become the only survivor half a century later?
I spent a full day with Bede, driving down to the far Southeastern corner of Arizona, to the Chiricahua Mountains, a hidden place of paradise that will always evoke memories for me of a special kind of wildness. It was in these mountains where I first encountered a bear, came face to face on a thousand foot cliff with a rattlesnake, fed wild coatimundies and saw exotic parrots. The Chiricahua have a greater collection of animal life than any other mountain range in America, the only range in the US containing many species found more typically in Mexico.
I was happy to see that the little village of Portal had hardly changed over the years. Bede and I sat in the one cafe, chatted with the waitress about the drought, now in its fifth year of drying out Arizona and the whole Southwest. On this clear December day there was not a cloud in sight and only a dusting of snow on the crest of the 10,000-foot peaks. No water was flowing at the bridge by the store. Driving further up the canyon with cliffs that rival Yosemite’s more famous crags, we came to a vista point where I could look up a thousand feet to a waterfall, now just ice. It was climbing that cliff that I encountered, only a few inches in front of my face, a very disturbed rattlesnake. So many memories in that canyon. Often I would bring students on small retreats to a cabin owned by some friends. Sometimes there were too many students for the tiny one bedroom cabin. One snowy weekend Betty Snider, a friend who worked year in and year out as a volunteer both in Tempe and Tucson, making order out of all my chaos, chose to sleep in the only place left, under the old wood stove in the kitchen.
In a canyon coming out of the Chiricahua, there is a marker that reads: Here on September 6, 1886, Geronimo surrendered forever ending Indian warfare with the United States. Exactly 100 years later while I was camping in the area, I paused and said a brief prayer at that memorial. Another 100 years. That used to seem like a long time, but no longer. I grew up on an Indian Reservation north of Seattle, my love for nature, for the water, for finding my God started on Indian land. There is now probably more change, both good and bad, going on with relations between Indians and Anglos, than at any other time in history since that fateful day in 1886.
Bede and I left the Chiricahua heading back to Tucson as the sun was setting behind the mountains in the west. The waitress had assured us that the dirt road was passable, cutting off a good 50 miles on our return to the Interstate at the town of San Simon. In wet years the creeks flowed down from the mountains over the road and a few times I would have to backtrack a couple hours, grumbling about losing a gamble when I came to a raging torrent. But not in this year of drought. Driving along the road we passed in sight of the remnants of some of the largest cattle ranches in the West. I’m not much of a name dropper and in these reflections few famous people appear, but driving through this most remote part of America, I couldn’t help but recall a woman who, a few years ago, published her memoirs about growing up in this isolated high desert: Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. She has been called the most influential woman in America’s history and my campus ministry journey once took me into her Washington DC home. I’ve sometimes quoted in my sermons her historic 5-4 court decisions and independent comments. My thinking of her, however, was disrupted by an image barely visible ahead on the dusty road. At first I thought it was a herd of animals but coming closer the vision turned into a group of men with backpacks.
My classmate Bede is pretty good at Spanish and we learned they had been on the road for 5 days, taking this route to avoid border police. They were out of food for several days, out of water for the past two. Despite my respect for immigration laws, I simply could not abandon these men with food and water days away. I motioned for two of the worst off, shoes falling apart, to get in and said I would drive them to San Simon, a town with more Mexicans than US citizens. When we got to San Simon, I told Bede I had to go back and get the others. During all this time Bede was especially quiet, a small grin on his face. Through the years Bede was always the one opening church doors to the homeless and abandoned, turning his churches into shelters. And I was the one telling him that his actions were dangerous and not clearly thought out. But here in this isolated spot, knowing they might die, I knew that I would not sleep the night if I abandoned these illegals.
The next day in telling the story to a friend, Kevin Lerch, a Tucson lawyer who worked for years as county Public Defender, he told me I could easily have been arrested along with the whole group, that the Supreme Court - with O’Connor in the majority - had just declared that all are guilty in a car if any drugs are found. I certainly was violating the law by transporting illegals. I could only tell Kevin, “Well, you know who would have gotten my call from jail.”
It wasn’t the first time in my priestly career that I have come close to getting hauled off to jail. Why is our world so messed up? A hundred years ago any wanderer could hike from ranch to ranch, mission to mission, any place on the American continent, certain to at least find food and shelter. Those days have long gone.
As the plane breaks out of the clouds, we are over the Cascades. I look down and see Mt Jefferson, high above the McKenzie River on which I now live. Of the hundreds of mountains that Lewis and Clark saw on their epic journey of discovery across the continent 200 years ago, they chose this mountain to name for their patron. Those who have had the joy of hiking its glaciers and meadows, especially into a Shangri-la on its northern slope called Jefferson Park, agree it was indeed a worthy choice.
Soon the Columbia River comes into view. Lewis and Clark were the first white men to sail down these waters. Along this stretch as we approach the airport I see no roads, little sign of habitation, only an occasional farm. But the view is misleading. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, there were only 2 million people in the newly formed nation. Now there are some 300 million, twice as many as when I entered the seminary 50 years ago. And the country’s population is predicted to reach some 450 million in another 50 years. Never in recorded history have we humans faced such pressure from such growth. Can we as a society survive? Europe’s population has stabilized, but that is certainly not the situation in America or in Third World countries. In every city in which I have served, young adults want to move away, out to the suburbs, out away from the crime and congestion of the inner city. The privileged can live in urban-gated condos or in small mountain communities similar to where I now reside. But what of the millions who have no choice? For people living in poverty with no opportunity for work or food, simply opening soup kitchens & shelters is not enough. In this new century, the old wineskins seem to be breaking apart.