Fr. David Kevin O'Rourke, OP

I was the fifth of five boys, the youngest in a large, very vocal, and idea-oriented clan in small-town New Jersey. The year I was born my two oldest cousins graduated from Princeton, one at the top of his class and went on to Harvard Law. So my own eventual entrance into and graduation from Yale surprised no one. But this was no island of privilege. Four summer's work in a steamy paper-mill paid the bills. My mother, a very kind, pious, but intense and fragile introvert taught us lessons out of nowhere which you do not forget. Her family, like my father's, was involved in politics as well as business. "Politics in America," she once told me, "are all about race. And race is about the presumed right of white men to kill black men." No elaboration - just a statement you drop in the lap of a ten-year-old. In retrospect it is probably no surprise that my very first ministry was in the civil rights movement, running inter-cultural workshops for high school students down in LA, and sponsored by the NCCJ.

I have written about my life and ministry at length in two memoirs so there is no need to rehearse that here. One, "A Process Called Conversion," was published by Doubleday in 1985. The second, "The Story of an Accidental Outsider," I chose to publish privately through the Poniecki Foundation last year, since I wrote it principally for family and friends. But all of my eight books and studies are in the GTU and different Cal libraries, so they are available.

During my years in France after I left Yale, 1955 - 1957, I was lucky enough to have my incipient belief that life is intelligible both articulated and confirmed. I lived for a year and a half as a lay student with the Dominicans in St. Maximin, exposed to the extraordinary austerity and personal discipline that was part of daily life, and to their courageous leadership in preparing the ground, theologically and liturgically, for the Vatican Council. Growing up, William Carlos Williams was our family doctor. Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and Thornton Wilder were Fellows of Davenport College where I lived. So I guess, perhaps by osmosis from exposure to men like these, I learned that having something to say, taking the risks to say it, and developing the discipline to get it said were just part of life.

I look back now to my nearly fifty years as a Dominican with a profound appreciation for so often being in the right place at the right time, from the first days back in the 1960s when we were working to set up the GTU and our own presence in Berkeley, my clinical training at Penn's medical school, all paid for by a generous grant from NIMH, right up to my current work in the former Soviet Union along with my happy ministry here in this tiny and financially-strapped parish in Point Richmond.

As St. Thomas taught, the heart of our Christian effort, and of my preaching I hope, is to make sense of life sufficiently well that we can become the masters in our own personal and spiritual households. I have been so fortunate that life has placed me in such an incredible variety of stresses and challenges that I have had to make sense of it just to keep my head above water. And considering how many people have sunk into the depths, overwhelmed, that survival is no small matter. I add, finally, that my poetry and watercolors have played no small part in helping me make sense of tough times. I was visiting a Polish friend, a poet who had returned to Krakow, when I wrote this poem. He liked it, so I add it.

ORDINATION

I wonder.

Do these ten young men
trimmed and polished,
layered in linen and wool
and soon in gold brocade,
do they remember?

As they march by the marble and porphyry tombs
of generals and counts,
under the polychromed vaults,
past their stone-faced fathers
in working-mens' jackets,
uncomfortable in places of honor
and old at fifty,

do they remember
the locked and rusting gates of failed mills,
the flights of concrete stairs,
the kitchen windows steamed by boiling pots
and laundry?

As they return
smiling and relieved,
into the carved and frescoed sacristy
to embrace,
and to be embraced,

and wait for deferential brothers
to transfer the brocade of power and rank
from their shoulders
back into chestnut cabinets
rubbed to brown satin
by four hundred years of unseen hands,

do they remember
the friends sitting shoulder to shoulder
on the broken sidewalk
of the Brezhnev housing blocks,
knees drawn toward their chins,
passing a bottle
from hand to hand
in silence?

I am a foreigner. I cannot say.

But I wonder.

Krakow, 9/24/01

[updated: September 6, 2005]

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