Fr. David Willis Geib, OP

Sometimes what a person thinks is more important that what they do. What I think is my chief prayer.

As a twelve-year-old, I had made it my task to figure out the “truth” of life, even if that meant leaving the Catholic faith of my close family and Irish heritage.  If I have always been a believer and a doubter, the doubter part was sure honed by going to a boarding school, The Philips Exeter Academy, my last two years of high school. Very few people there had the faith of my family. I was aware that I could think and feel as an unbeliever, and that that side of me was actually one of my most religious characteristics. My years in college at Cornell and the University of California, Berkeley, were a continuation of my experience at Exeter.  My choice to leave college after two years to join “a monastery” came from my need to get into a believing environment for awhile. I needed to resolve the conflict inherent in my both believing and not believing.  Joining a life-style that meant celibacy and becoming a priest was secondary for me.  I never questioned that if there were a God, I would give my life to God.

Because I naturally lead with my head, the Dominicans have been very good for me.  With their motto of “Veritas,” they attract and encourage people like me.  Yet, they have been doing this for 800 years and know that the heart is essential for “truth.”  They taught me how to integrate my heart with my head.  I have been very comfortable and supported as a Dominican.

As for my head, my older brother Philip taught me at the age of seven that “time” was a crazy thing – it could not be as we experienced it.  I agreed immediately. For me time has always been impossible while being factual.  Over the years this viewpoint has led me to see that conceptual knowledge and experiential knowledge are two entirely different sources of knowledge – sometimes complementary, sometimes independent, sometimes apparently contradictory.  By 1985, I had started putting these insights into writing.  The first title of my book was “A Spirituality for Non-Believers.”  That title presumed my Exeter insight that “unbelief” was one of my greatest religious assets.  It also presumed that if there was a God, then God would take the initiative toward everyone, and that everyone would have a spirituality.  The main part of the book, however, was an argument that the two sources of knowledge needed to be acknowledged whether there is a God or not.  Since this line of argument left out story-telling about the lives of people, I more realistically changed the title to “EXISTENCE AS A DIMENSION OF PHYSICAL REALITY.”

World spiritualities have identified the reality of “different levels of consciousness”.  I have “time” as both being real and not real.  Quantum physics has subatomic particles being in space at a particular point only when they are measured. From both sides, the classical distinction between the physical and the mental seems to be blurring.  There are good arguments that physical reality varies not just in time and space, but also in how real something is.  Spirituality has always picked up when things are more real – raised consciousness, graced moments.  In that sense, it is something that both a believer and a non-believer need to use just to see reality at all.

When I entered our House of Studies, St. Albert’s, in 1962, I guessed that I would be a college professor as a priest.  That never happened because I was always in the Community room talking rather than doing extra papers.  I learned truth from talking with people as well as from studying, so I had the classic academic versus pastoral tug of a Dominican priest’s life.  I found my balance of those two factors by becoming a college chaplain. Since my ordination in 1967, I have been chaplain at Arizona State, U. of Oregon, U. of Washington, U. of Arizona (7 years), Southern Oregon State, St. Mary’s College (Moraga), U of California, Riverside (8 years), Stanford and – for the last three years -- Occidental College.  Besides this college ministry, I spent 5 years working in Catholic retreat houses, and 6 years as Novice Director for my Western Dominican Province.  All my thinking has been going on while I have been marrying lots of people, and baptizing their children, and being part of communities in many places.

God bless you all,
David Willis Geib

Photos: 2007 (thumbnail) | Facebook

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