Jesus Laughed

As you age, you begin to accrue griefs large and small that then stick to you like cold mud on your boots. When I was younger I didn’t realize how universal grief is; my parents, especially my dad, held the grief over my sister’s death in a drunk driving incident tightly, and it was so overwhelming that I understood it to be unique. And it was, in its way. Just as every person is different, every person who grieves their loss feels it differently. But in many ways it was completely ordinary. I now know several people, some my own age, who have lost children. I, personally, am down one sister, one foster brother, one niece, and three grandparents, not to mention a plethora of estranged uncles, beloved pets, and old acquaintances. I wear these feelings of grief all the time, more as tattoos than as clothing. Like tattoos they fade, but they never really go away.

I heard this morning that one of the best people I have ever known has died, at the age of 65. He was a priest and a teacher at my high school, decency embodied, more than anybody I have ever known. Father Ron watched out for me in a way he didn’t need to; I was the atheistical son of atheistical parents at a Catholic school, and there were certainly those there who viewed me as an interloper, one who did not belong, either to the faith or wholly to the student body. But Father Ron, though he was one of the most sincerely devout people I have ever known, wasn’t that sort of person, and he didn’t view me that way.

We were curious candidates for friendship, really. I arrived at Central Catholic High School keyed-up and combative about religion; as a 14-year-old who wasn’t entirely sure about his sexuality, I viewed Christianity as a monolith of oppression that the world would be better without. Father Ron was almost thirty years older than I was, and so deeply steeped in the Church, and so serious about the good parts of Catholicism — the parts I didn’t believe existed — that he initially interpreted my hostility to religion as hostility towards him. I was in his freshman Christian Life class (right? is that what they called freshman religion in those days? I think it is). I refused to capitalize “God” and was prone to poking fun at some of the more ancient and backwards (to me) aspect of the Church. Hell, I still am. Just as I am today, I was a person with sharp edges as a kid. Father Ron was one of the people who got cut.

He called me into his office after class one day to ask me: did I have a problem with him? It wasn’t a power move, or a scare tactic; he wasn’t that kind of priest. He genuinely wanted to heal what he saw as a wounded relationship. I explained to him, as best I could, that it wasn’t him I was hostile to, but the Church. The Church was such a part of him that I might not have expected him to understand, had I ever though about it. But he did what he always did: his very best. He took my explanation at face value, and for the next four years seemed to take a special interest in my well-being. To this day, I’m grateful for that. I can’t say I would have done the same in his place.

He was a beloved figure in our class, bearded, sweet-natured, somewhat heavyset — behind his back some of us called him “Father Rolo”, though I swear to you it was affectionate. When we had mass, all 700 students in the big gymnasium at the back of the school, he gave homilies on decency and fellowship. One of his favorite parables was about a group of people sitting at a table with bowls of soup and spoons longer than their arms, which made it impossible to feed themselves. It wasn’t until they realized that they had to feed one another that they were able to eat. That was his ethos.

Not that he was all sincerity and serious homilies. At one of those same masses, for some reason, the lights cut out. You can imagine what that scene must have been like: seven hundred keyed-up teenagers, bound up in their good church clothes, plunged together into darkness. Just as it was beginning to dawn on us that we had the teachers outnumbered and they had no way to hold us accountable, Father Ron’s voice came over the soundsystem: “Strangers in the night / Exchanging glances / Wondering in the night / What are the chances . . .” It wasn’t the most dead-accurate Sinatra impression, but it rendered a restive crowd of agitated adolescents neutral by making us all laugh. That was his ethos, too.

News of his death has been making the rounds among my peculiar group of Catholic school misfits today. It’s totally emblematic of the way Father Ron lived his life that all of us, the atheistical public school refugees who sweated out four years of religion classes and being gently but distinctly othered, remember him in much the same way, as a man of decency and humor who took seriously Christ’s admonishment to love everyone, even those of us who didn’t believe what he did. He was the kind of teacher you told stories about, years after you’d last been in his class, and the kind you could always look up when you went back to your hometown, and he’d be there, as open and good and gracious as he had ever been. I’ve never known a man quite like him.

In the Gospel of John one can find the very shortest verse in all of the New Testament: Jesus wept (11:35). There are a thousand ways to interpret the verse, and more: that Jesus’ tears are proof of his humanity; that he is outraged over the coming destruction of the Temple; that he is afraid to die; that he is moved by the grief of his friends. That last one is the one that makes the most sense to me today, the day I learned my old friend, Father Ron, has passed away. I am moved by the grief of my friends. It is a testament to the man for whom we grieve.

I wouldn’t be me, of course, if I didn’t find something lacking in the Bible, so here it is: Jesus never laughs. He is angry, and he is sad, and he is generous, and so on, but there is no verse that reads, Jesus laughed. For many centuries much was made of this absence of mirth, though most of that has gone out of fashion these days. I miss Jesus’ laughter, though, because that would be the balm we need in the wake of Father Ron’s passing, the one that would be most appropriate. Father Ron was a kind and gentle and decent man — and he was a man who laughed, often and well, and presented a version of Catholicism that was much less dour and stern than I had understood it to be, before I met him. I learned many things from him, not least of which was that there is goodness to be found in places where you don’t expect it, and that such goodness is a reason to smile.

I have no doubt that Jesus laughed; someone just forgot to write it down. Father Ron, though, was Jesus’ laughter, embodied. Good-bye, old friend. I miss you.