The Great & Troubled; or, A Letter To A Teacher On The Occasion Of His Passing

Dear Fr. O’Malley,

You taught me to write, and it’s daunting to task myself to prove it. I struggled with an epic poem to get my head around the experience of you, but failing that, here are a few things that have lasted.

“Children of God, will you shut the hell up?”

It was the first thing I heard you say in a first-year study hall at Fordham Prep, and I thought: I could hang with that guy. I did hang in the Leonard theater for the following four years, welcomed into a community in ways I hadn’t until then. I was this angry little kid going into the Bronx that year, but Fordham sorted that out quickly. It gave me friends I still have and experiences I’m still drawing upon today. I didn’t take a single note in your AP English class senior year, but I still recall chunks of your lectures. You told us the only writing is rewriting, and I looked forward to the moments when red ink was scrawled all over my returned work. That wasn’t a point of pride but a lesson to keep pushing. Gutting my writing and finding a new way to do it is the most pleasurable side of the craft. This is all you.

You said, “Faith isn’t a leap in the dark. That’s bullshit. It’s a calculated risk.” I remember the “bullshit” part because a priest cursing was a weird wonder to me. The Jesuits earned it in those days. Maybe they still do, Creation being the disaster it is presently.

There was GUYS & DOLLS in sophomore year, my second show in the Dram Society you ran. As a person now living and working in Hollywood, who has had some run-ins with pretty significant people, I always say that production as a fifteen-year-old — where I played Sarah Brown’s grandfather, with a county-spanning brogue and white paint in my hair and got to sing the oft-cut “More I Cannot Wish You” to Alanna Piazza (not a bad gig) — was one of the great artistic experiences of my life. They ask why, and while I could explain how everyone showed up for each other and acted from a place of love and childlike excitement, I can only say that I remember being happy.

I also remember tears. When Patti Hurley died, and it rocked the whole theater, rather than tell me to pick my chin up, you sat with me, your chin also down, and said nothing, because what can you say about a tragedy that, to this day, still hurts? You showed up for my suffering, and I’ve tried to do the same for others. It’s that “Men for Others” thing, I guess.

Speaking of suffering, your 9/11 sermon, which I was not present for because I had to bury my uncle due to the attacks, will live forever. Rather than dwell on the horror of that Tuesday, you implored everyone to use my beloved high school’s teachings to ensure it didn’t happen again. You said:

“The reason for the existence of this school is not to get you into good colleges, to prepare you to be an attractive job candidate, to pave the yellow brick road to the American Dream. You’re here to learn how to think, how to reason, how to see and feel the complex evidence- even if it conflicts with your heartfelt beliefs, to learn how to put the evidence into a logical sequence so you can draw a balanced, personal conclusion and ask someone wiser to critique it. We’re here to invite you to ever more complex mind-challenges, to read novels and plays so you can get into other people’s skins and walk around in them awhile, live a thousand lives before you set out to live your own life. The most basic purpose of this institution is to train men and women who are not single-minded, not simple-minded fanatics, but people governed by the objective truth, by our common humanity, and — one hopes — by the selflessness of the cross.”

I don’t always know how to do this, Father. I could be petty and small and rageful, especially in those days.

I could be unforgiving.

I remember doing DAMN YANKEES in senior year, and you sitting me down and telling me, “I can’t give you the Devil because when you walk out on that stage on those crutches, people will laugh, and not in a good way.” You may have tried to save my feelings, but it stung for years.

Years. I felt small and angry again and remained that way for many years. The worst thing an Irish person can do to another is betray him.

Then, directing this PSA on the campus of the also-Jesuit Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, a piece imploring Hollywood to include disability representation in Hollywood, I finally synthesized my anger by creating, with like-minded people, something that would buck even your narrow view. We have miles to go on this particular road, but I owe it to you, again, for lighting the way. You put a fire in me to stand up for something, to be a part of something bigger than myself.

I remember the accusation a former student — not from Fordham — made against you and how my heart broke into a million pieces. It was never cleared up, as so many of these things go nowadays, but I thought of you and the human animal in a more complicated way. Can a person be great and terrible at once? Can we forgive those who trespass against us? F. Scott Fitzgerald, no stranger to the great/troubled dichotomy, once wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” If ever there were a reflection of my education, that would be it. I cannot simply write off someone who likely saved my life as a monster. I have to find a balance.

I was not there for any suffering you may have caused. I was there when you picked me up and straightened me out. You growled, smoked, and drank too much — but you were there, always. In so many words, you told me to get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’, and I know you would’ve never settled for dying. I got through those four years and still look back at them as the best of my life. My parents swell with pride at Fordham’s mention. That’s due to the faculty, staff, and students, but it will always be your dedication to your work and your Faith in me that made me into something capable of loving and being loved, in return, of moving through the world as a part of it.

I return to that Irish ballad from GUYS & DOLLS. Arvide, the granddad, sings:

“Standing there, gazing at you
Full of the bloom of youth
Standing there, gazing at you
With the sheepish eye and the look of the truth…”

The look of the truth.

I like that. That tells me what I felt was and is correct. You gave me the truth. It was sometimes brutal, usually profane, but always clear, always loving, and always what
I needed.

You last said to me, “You, Michael, all by yourself, are enough.”

I don’t know about that, and maybe that’s healthy. It means no resting on my laurels. I’d like to believe it.

Wherever you are, Father, I hope the side door to Heaven is open to let the smoke out, and you and your God have come to terms. I think you enter His House justified.

I’ll see you when I see you on that stage.

With Love and Resolution,

Mike