Beyond the call...Visiting the Postulator

At Lunch with Paul Hannigan
Everyone, at some stage in their life, meets someone whose influence changes the direction of their life. Paul Hannigan was such a person for me. From the first day we met in a parlour at Mount Carmel College in 1963, the gravity of his being has influenced my sense of who I am. The passion with which he expressed himself, and the compassion with which he regarded my parents when he met them, made me aware of myself in the world in a way that I had not felt until then.

The other person who comes closest to setting me on a path at that time was Stan Cusack, who had been my class teacher in 1963. Stan made me aware of my capacity to learn by getting me to want to know rather than merely remember stuff for exams. Chemistry, for example, became not just a bunch of formulae but an encounter with an orderly world. He was also the first teacher who made me aware of what we would now call personhood – not mere existence but being someone. He made us all aware that we were not just alive but that each of us was unique. His "I" addressed the "Thou" of each of us. Which is not to say that other Brothers didn’t (try to) do the same, but that for me at least, he was the one who “got through to me”. Two other blokes also captured and held my attention – Brian Sorensen and Peter Grimes. Brian was universally hero-worshiped as a god of sport – a description he would utterly repudiate, because he wouldn’t approve of such colloquial (mis)use of the word god, nor want to endure such adulation. Yet he was possessed of an astonishing physical intelligence that he used, not - as most sportsmen - for his own glorification, but to nurture boys’ skills, confidence and camaraderie. He was so good at this that he even got me liking gymnastics!1 Peter, on the other hand was universally mocked. Yet it was he who taught one of two subjects (I did the other one by correspondence) that I passed in Sub-Senior – Religion – for both of which I scored 100%. As others in his religion class day dreamed in pastures green, I sat riveted by his accounts of the twenty Ecumenical Councils that preceded the one that was under way at the time; and his expositions on the efficacy of the Sacraments; the emerging new liturgy (that came to the Diocese of Townsville long before the Diocese of Sydney); and other matters of eternal consequence – delivered in an almost robotic monotone that camouflaged a passion2 that none of us suspected.

As significant as those men were, however, it was what Paul Hannigan manifested that I sought to emulate, and drew me into a larger world than I had previously experienced, precisely when the Second Vatican Council was reaching its zenith, and I could experience and celebrate the astonishing “resurrection” of the church in communities of like minded people, under the guidance of Barnabas Garvan, and Bernie Crawford. The grounding in critical appreciation of faith that I received at Strathfield and Minto is the most cherished outcome of my encounter with Paul – other than the fact of the encounter itself. What that encounter itself gave me was an experience of something I learned the name of in the Juniorate – Agape. My parents were wonderful people, and so were some of my teachers, but the person who ignited in me the passion “to become who I am becoming” is Paul.

The reunion of the 1966 Minto Novitiate group therefore became a reason to visit him, now living in retirement in Melbourne. I was going to Ballarat, so a trip to Melbourne was not only feasible but the obvious thing to do. I had been in touch with Paul several times in the last forty years, and I always enjoyed our more or less accidental meetings. But contact became particularly significant in the last five or so years as a result of systematic efforts on both our parts to keep in touch. As it happened, I didn’t get to see him on my first trip in January 2009. But I made sure of it the second time around in February. I phoned from Ballarat and he invited me to his place for lunch. The trip from Ballarat to Melbourne was uneventful, as outlined elsewhere, and parking wasn’t a problem. But I arrived early, so I spent a bit of time wandering around the neighbourhood inhaling the Melbourne urbasphere.

There really is a remarkable difference between Sydney and Melbourne, which you can see not only in the trees, as you might expect, but in the buildings as well. The reasons for the difference between the buildings in Brisbane and Sydney are obvious enough. But I can’t put the difference between Melbourne and Sydney down to climate. It must have something to do with the reasons for their existence. Like God, Sydney just is and needs no explanation. It is said, however, that if God didn’t exist we’d have to invent him. Melbourne, too, exists because it’s the city we had to have. Both cities exist in the image of their makers – Melbourne much more self consciously than Sydney. If Sydney is a Habitat, Melbourne is a Zoo – a performance space; a stage. It’s marvellous, don't you know, and I could have just kept looking… and looking…

At the appointed time, however, I went to Paul’s place and found that in order to knock on the door I had first to get through a locked gate. Fortunately, one of the residents turned up just as I was about to go to my car to call Paul on the phone – I had recently acquired a mobile phone but hadn’t figured out that you actually take it with you when you get out of your car. Having been admitted I waited in a parlour. Paul appeared with a walking stick and a smile that tried unsuccessfully to belie the pain he was in. He needed to be reminded of when and where we first met and when I had been in the Juniorate and Novitiate. As he’d asked the same questions every time we met or spoke on the phone in the last five years, I shouldn’t have found this disconcerting – but we’d been through it all just the day before when I phoned him to arrange the visit.

We walked to a common room and had tea and talked about old times, and the many people who’d called him up to invite him to gatherings of past students to remember – or be reminded. It wasn’t his intention, of course, but I realised, as a result of this part of the conversation, that I was not in a fan club of one. And then the penny dropped. Of course he’d ask me for details about who I am when I contact him. He knows so many people that it is necessary to be sure he knows which one of them he’s talking to. But asking me again that morning when he’d asked me the day before? Well, it’s a good way of bringing context to the person in front of him – of re-membering. I was introduced to several other members of the community who dropped by. There was to be a funeral and many of them were not going to be at lunch. The effort that people made to come and say hello was actually a little bit startling. And so was the interest paid to me at lunch. Every person who came into the dining room made a point of speaking to me. I hadn’t realised that I was attending lunch as the guest of the community until I saw my name on a white board near the servery.

The conversations at the table during lunch were varied in content but not in tone. Does muted animation sound like a contradiction in terms? They’re the words that come to mind to describe conversations that were “about something” rather than a mere exchanges of courtesies, in voices just loud enough for those taking part to hear, which had the strange effect of enabling anyone anywhere at the table big enough to seat thirty people to hear any or all of the five or six conversations that were going on at the same time. I won’t give an account of all of them, but there was one that is particularly worth mentioning. It was a discussion about what was happening in Australian politics at the time. It was clear that there were two strongly held opposing views. But there were no flaring nostrils – not even metaphorically. The two men just quietly engaged in point and counterpoint with the same dispassionate tone they might adopt if they were talking about a problem in higher maths. It was particularly noticeable to me, because I can’t talk politics without, for example, wanting to strangle anyone who thinks John Howard was good for Australia. Yeah, right. Just like Joh Bjelkie Peterson was good for Queensland. I cease being a conversationalist and become a controvercialist.

I was reminded by that conversation that most of what we learned from our elder Monks in the Juniorate and Novitiate was “taught” in such conversations. What was learned was never about “subject matter” but “how to be” – how to be-thinking ancient history rather than merely learning stories; how to be-researching a geography issue rather than merely fact finding; how to be-solving a maths problem rather than merely remembering formulae; how to be-praying rather than merely saying prayers … that sort of thing.

Can you imagine my surprise when a very elderly Monk asked me, Why the Eureka shirt? I had picked it out to wear that day for a reason, but the last thing I expected was to asked what the reason was. Why not? I replied, knowing that I need not have said any more than that. He nodded. Then I said, It’s the beginning of modern Australian history. His eyes widened. From 1788 to1854, I continued, the ancient history of Australia was being wound up by colonisation. That process was no different from colonisations that preceded it back to the beginning of human history. Colonists did the bidding of the Imperial Power. But, starting in 1776, colonists realised that they could determine their own destiny. That’s what happened in this country in 1854. He relaxed and said, You’re not one of Norm Gallagher’s mob then? I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had, indeed, been a member of the BLF for a year. They defiled the memory of Eureka by claiming the Eureka flag the way they did, he said. I couldn’t help myself and replied, Yes, a bit like the way the American so called Christian Right defile the memory of someone rather more famous than the miners. He neither agreed nor disagreed with what I had just said but told me that he’d grown up on a farm that took in the site where the Colonial Forces had assembled for their assault on the Stockade. I see why you asked about my interest, I said. That was it.

At that moment a bloke who is an accomplished musician came to the table and sat close by. I was introduced as a chorister, so the conversation turned to music. What are you singing? He asked. When I told him we’d just done Benjamin Britten’s A ceremony of Carols, his eyebrows arched in surprise as he said, Oh so you’re not just a church choir, then? Interesting comment, I thought. We do stuff from opera, masses, folk, classical, you name it, but no, I said, we don’t sing hymns.

I was introduced to a bloke who makes domestic furniture for the residence. As we talked it became clear that he was actually an all rounder. You name the trade, he could do most of what needed doing around the place and in other community houses. He had a very engaging manner, and quickly had me sharing about my experience renovating houses. At one point we talked about the use of water levels to determine the height of posts on uneven ground, and I mentioned that my father had used the technique to determine the height of cylinders in a farm irrigation system. He was fascinated by that. I became aware of several pairs of eyes and ears taking in our moment of mutual admiration. It was as if the forty years just past had taken a different course and I was at home in their community. I can’t begin to tell you the ways in which that feeling has resurfaced in the months since.

Another bloke, who rushed in for a cup of coffee and paused to say hello on his way to the funeral was a mathematician, still working in a number of schools, way past his mid seventies and not counting. Ever keen to find something to say that related to the lives of the people I met, I asked him if he’d read Sue Woolfe’s Leaning Towards Infinity – a novel about the discovery of a new number in maths. He had indeed, and was NOT impressed. A few days later I happened upon a review of the book that pointed out something I hadn’t even noticed when I read it:
Sue Woolfe's biography states that she knows nothing about mathematics. With the central event of her novel set in 1994, she ought to have had a fairly easy job of finding out how math is done and discussed nowadays, and who does it and why. However, Woolfe's determination to humiliate her main character, middle-aged prodigy Frances Montrose, with the scorn of a unanimously badly behaved, testosterone-driven male mathematical establishment leads to her to untruth, fatally undermining the premise and effect of her novel. Deliberately demonizing men as mates and as mathematicians is sexism of the worst kind. The multigenerational familial dissonance and harmony of this book, its redeeming features, are lost in Woolfe's caricaturing of men and women and a science she does not understand.
Oops!

But that was nothing compared with the reaction to my next enquiry – directed to whom I cannot now recall. Have you read Denis McLaughlin’s The price of Freedom?3 The place went so silent that you could have heard an ant think. Someone said he had, most hadn’t. There’s another one4 been written since he wrote his – takes a different approach, someone finally said. Good thing, I said. There’d be no point in writing the same book twice. Silence again. Later it occurred to me that perhaps I shouldn’t have asked. DM’s book a profound challenge to everything that has been believed about Edmund Rice until recently; and the implications of the story he tells are so devastating, that people, at the end of careers that embodied the criticised world-view, may feel diminished or vulnerable. No one said so, of course, and all listened as I enthusiastically expounded on the positives that arise from the new view of the Founder and the Congregation he nurtured into life – their Congregation, not mine. Oh well, I never was all that good at discretion.

As lunch was winding up Paul asked if I could do him a favour – deliver him to Flinders St station. The details are related elsewhere so I won’t repeat them here. When I dropped him off the pain in his hip was very evident. But so was his determination to get on with life. He was off to another appointment with another of his fan-club. Sixty years as a Monk, most of them in class rooms, keeps him busy in retirement catching up and remembering. Well, being reminded, anyway. I wonder how many people will contact me in my eighties and want to spend time with me, remembering the impression I made. I can’t think of any, but I hope I am surprised.

1. When Brian was posted to PNG, the supervision of gymnastics was taken over by a Brother whom I can only describe as the most callous bastard I ever known. All these years afterwards I suspect that he hated sport as much as I do, and that in him I saw what I would have been like as a teacher had I stayed in that system “teaching” sport, as I would have been obliged by the Vow of Obedience for Christ’s sake. (Double entendre very much intended) Needless to say, gymnastics ceased to be the liberating medium through which I began to find and respect my body’s capabilities, and became instead just another ordeal to be endured.

2. I became aware of it some three decades later when he came to my restaurant with a mutual friend, and became a regular day time visitor to our gallery, in which situation we could talk as peers. It wasn’t long before I finally understood why I was hooked on his religion classes – as distinct from his other two classes, Maths 1 & 2, which I failed – all those years ago. It’s simple really. He was such an original thinker that one had to be outside the square to get his wave length.

3. Denis McLaughlin, The Price of Freedom, David Lovell Publishing, Melbourne, 2007


4. Daire Keogh, Edmund Rice and the First Christian Brothers, Four Courts Press, 2008