Goodbye To A Priest

Father Hanley was a priest who taught me in high school, and I hadn't seen him in a long time. In fact, I hadn't even thought of him in years, although when I got the email invitation to his memorial Mass, a flood of memories came back to me.

High school for me was awhile ago, and I'm reminded of that when I run into my classmates at reunions. They have gray hair and they talk about the 1950s and 60s with a great deal of familiarity. We all have vivid memories of JFK's assassination, the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, miniskirts, Woodstock, the moon landing, etc.

I share all those memories with my classmates, but I also have something most of them don't have, even the ones on their second marriages -- a 13 year old daughter. I got married late and had children even later, so while some of my classmates have grandchildren, I still have teenagers.

At my last reunion a couple of guys mentioned they were already retired and had moved to South Carolina. I said, "I have a kid who's not even in high school yet. That retirement place on the beach is a long way off for me."

When Father Hanley died I realized that he was probably the last surviving teacher I had in high school. The little Catholic high school where I went has a cemetery in a field out back, and most of the priests who taught me are buried there. About ten years ago, on a visit to the school, I took a walk through the cemetery and read the headstones. When I saw the birth dates I realized that most of them were only in their 30s and 40s when they taught me, and now I’m older than that.

I wanted to go to Father Hanley's Mass, and I marked it on my calendar. I envisioned myself going back to the little chapel where I attended Mass in high school, seeing some of my classmates, perhaps walking through that cemetery again. I would revel in the memories, thinking back to the good and bad of high school.

The tough guy poses we struck, the machismo that was as thin as a haze of cigarette smoke. Talking about girls. Playing basketball in a gym that throbbed with teenage hormones. Thinking about girls. Wondering how my life was going to turn out. The cutting humor that teenage boys have, where everything was unprintable but so funny it made your sides hurt from laughing. Thinking about girls. Talking about life, morals, religion, sports, and a million other things with the priests during and after class, with blazing honesty. 

I went to a Catholic grade school and was taught by nuns. Eight years of stern-faced women in black habits made me feel like a prisoner by the time I was 13. When I got to the all-boys high school it was a relief to have male teachers. They didn't mince words, they didn't wheedle or scold you the way the nuns did. Some of them had served in World War II or the Korean War, and they had the grit of life on them. They told it to you straight, and we boys were grateful for that. They didn't take any nonsense, but at the same time they had a kindness you could sense under the gruff exterior. They cared about us, and we knew it.

Father Hanley taught a religion class. I don't remember the specifics of what he taught me, but I do remember a lot of passionate discussions in class. I remember talking about real world situations, challenges we faced every day, and how to handle them. It wasn't a pie-in-the-sky philosophy, or the rote memorization we had in grade school with the nuns, but a nuts and bolts discussion about real life morals.

There was a lot going on in the world. The Civil Rights movement. The Vietnam War. The hippie movement. Old values were being questioned, and people were anxious for change. Father Hanley and his peers didn’t shy away from those tough questions, and they taught us how to look at them honestly and try to find the moral path amid all that turmoil.

I realized the night before Father Hanley's Mass that I couldn't go. My wife was out of town visiting our son in college, and I had two teenagers to look after, with a full schedule of activities the next day. It was impossible to do it all and still drive 25 miles to get to my high school in time for the Mass.

So, I had to say a silent prayer for Father Hanley, and hope that he's in Heaven now. I wish I had gotten to see him at some point in the last 40 years and thanked him for what he did for me. I'm sure he didn't get nearly enough thanks from the thousands of students he taught in a long teaching career. He was one of many priests who taught me, men who gave up the comforts of family life to teach other people’s children, who lived in a community and had no salary, no house or car to call their own.

People like him, who don't have children of their own, have to live on in the lives of the people they taught. I know that he influenced me in profound ways, and he did that with thousands of other men. All those discussions about what's important in life sunk deep into us, and helped to mold our later lives. I would not be the person I am today without the Father Hanleys of the world.

Many thanks, Father. May you rest in peace.

More On The "Tiger Mother" Controversy

By John McDonnell

My last post got more attention that any other post I've written for this blog. It was about the new book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua.

This book has generated a firestorm of controversy, especially after Amy Chua wrote an essay in the Wall St. Journal about it, titled, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior". Chua is getting a lot of flak from bloggers everywhere, and it seems every parent has a strong opinion about her thesis, which is basically that Western parents are too soft on their kids.

Amy Chua has struck a nerve, because that subject is one that every parent I know struggles with. Get a group of parents together these days and invariably the talk turns to their children, and before long they're telling stories about how soft their kids are. Oh, they don’t use words like “soft” or “spoiled”, but that’s the gist of the stories.

If you have teenagers, it’s easy to go on a rant about the sense of entitlement they have, how they whine about the few chores they're asked to do, how they have more money and toys and gadgets than any other generation in history, and so on.

A lot of Western parents these days are asking questions like: Are we raising our kids right? Have we given them too much? Should we have been more demanding, asked more of them? What kind of people are they turning into? Now along comes this Amy Chua person to reinforce our worst fears.

You were too easy on them, she says. You gave them too much, and didn't ask anything of them in return. You should have taught them how to work harder, how to deal with adversity, how to respect their elders, etc., etc.

It's true that when I compare my childhood to the one my kids have, it's like I came from a different planet. I grew up in a house that was hardly bigger than some of the garages I see in the affluent suburb where I live. Of course I had no cell phone, computer, video games, or cable TV, but in my house we didn't even have our own phone line. We had what was called a party line, where you shared the phone line with another house, because the rate was cheaper. We had a big black phone on the wall in the kitchen, and if I wanted to call a friend I had to stand there and talk amidst the hubbub of a family of six, then be ready to hang up in an instant if someone on our party line started dialing the phone on their end.

But it goes further than just being deprived of material possessions. Parents back then demanded more of their kids, and they weren't shy about it. There was a lot of yelling in our house, especially around report card time. It was a kind of yelling that got very personal, and in today's world it would probably be called abuse.

Apparently Asian parents still do this, because Amy Chua admits that she called her daughter "garbage" once when she was particularly angry at her, and another time yelled herself hoarse when her daughter couldn't play a piano piece right.

I have never yelled at my kids like that, because I decided years ago that I didn't agree with that style of parenting. I thought there was a better way, one that wouldn't tear down my kids' self-esteem. I can't help but shake my head in wonderment, however, on the rare occasions when I do raise my voice just a tad, and my kids tell me to stop yelling at them. "Yelling?" I say. "You call that yelling? That's not yelling. I know yelling, and what I did is definitely not yelling."

Would a little more volume in my voice have toughened my kids up, made them more resilient and better able to handle life's down times?

Maybe. But you can't go back, and as I said in my last post, I'm basically happy with how my children are turning out. They are happy, confident, and outgoing. They have opinions, and they're not shy about expressing them. They haven't gotten straight "A's" but they seem able to handle a lot more than just schoolwork in their lives.

The jury's still out, like I said before. But I'm not going to be one of those parents who lacerates myself with guilt because some writer comes out with a glib formula for child-rearing. My parents did their best, but I feel I improved on their methods.

And besides, what worked 30 years ago is not necessarily going to work in today's world. The world my children live in is light years from the one I lived in at their age. They need to be confident, flexible, and adaptable if they’re going to succeed in the the next 30 years. They do not need to be rigid rule followers, because the rules are changing every day. 

These kids need different skill sets to survive in the 21st century.

And learning how to deal with a “Tiger Mother” is not one of them.