Portland

The University of Portland Magazine

Spring 2016

Missing

By

by Patrick Madden

I had just settled in to work when the phone rang; it was my wife Karina, in a tizzy. The two youngest boys were missing. She’d been in the bathroom only a few minutes, and when she came out, the back door was ajar, Marcos and James nowhere to be found.

Understanding my role in situations such as this, and having lost and found children numerous times before, I spoke calmly, reassuring Karina that the boys were certainly nearby, maybe in the head-high weeds in the empty lot just across the backyard, maybe in the garage, maybe at the neighbors’, had she checked the playroom upstairs?

Yes, of course she had.

She wanted me home right away. I wanted to avoid driving halfway there only to get the relieved phone call. I wanted peace and systematic thinking, a plan, but I also wanted not to get worked up, to solve the problem by paying it no heed. The statistics on such disappearances were overwhelmingly in our favor. Most kids were found after a few minutes, innocently playing, unaware that they were causing their parents consternation. Marcos and James, just three and almost two, were overwhelmingly more likely to have wandered off than to have been taken, more likely to be safely ensconced than in any sort of danger. The fact that I was making up these statistics based on guesses and wishes did not dissuade me from believing them. I offered to call friends and neighbors to enlist their help, which I did, then I went back to work.

When Karina called again a few minutes later, I expected good news, but she was growing more distraught. I explained that the neighbors were already searching, which she knew, and suggested that she stay close to home, so the boys would find her there when they returned. She had called the police and she wanted me home now.

I was not worried, I told myself as I waited at a stoplight. They’d show up and we’d release our tension with a good laugh. I’d not even allow myself to get cross about all the undone work left waiting for me.

At each highway mile marker my thigh felt a phantom buzz from my cell phone, but Karina never called. When I hit the exit for home, I called her, half-expecting that in her jubilation she’d forgotten to notify me. But there was still no sign of them. The police were there. The neighborhood was filled with neighbors. The elementary school had been alerted. It had now been forty-five minutes.

I strained to guess where they might have gone, to get inside their heads or to hear the whisperings of the Spirit, to be guided to my sons. I drove as slowly as I dared, scanning the tall grass and trees along the roadside. Nothing.

…

There was a time, only a few years ago, when I thought four children was plenty. Karina and I had matched our parents’ output, had reached a reasonable return on our marital investment. Our car, a minivan, allowed us to travel together to Yellowstone or to the grocery store. Our house was comfortable, with the three girls sharing a large bedroom and their older brother across the hall in his own.

But the births of Marcos and James were the most irreversible of irreversible processes. Though they’ve existed for only a fraction of my life, they’ve so inserted themselves into my consciousness that they seem to have existed always; their lives are so entangled with my own that I feel as if without them I am not.

…

After I’d been home for over an hour, comforting Karina, talking with police and friends and school aides, running and driving everywhere within a half-mile radius, checking and rechecking the drainage ditches the nearby farm the empty lot the house under construction the cars along the street the elementary school hallways the city ball fields the church parking lot the entrance to the mink farm the highway crossing the length of road as far as I could imagine they might have walked, praying frantically against the encroaching dread with each creeping minute with no news, I returned home broken. With my mind racing with a thousand scenarios, I trudged across the yard to the back deck, where Karina was weeping and two officers were explaining that they’d called police from nearby towns; firemen were parading their trucks noisily through the streets in hopes of calling the boys’ attention. They were serious now, somber, willing to discuss the possibilities we’d dared not voice. They would set up a base at our home, resystematize their search, go door to door and enter the homes they could. The Amber alert was active. It was now nearing two o’clock. The boys had been missing for two hours.

…

I have traveled for conferences and for work, have visited family, have stayed home teaching while Karina took the kids to Uruguay for a month before I joined them there. I have spent weeks without seeing my children, days without speaking to them. I have learned, on the phone, of their injuries and emergency room visits, the discovery that the littlest has a peanut allergy. But in those lacunae I have always felt peace, have never suffered from the slightest suggestion that they were unsafe. Yet that day, across the protracted expanse of just two hours, I entered a place in my mind I had never visited, nor imagined was there. As I stepped up onto the deck, slumping my shoulders, breathing slowly, holding my gaze fixed on the middle distance between our house and the street behind, I was bereft. I had abandoned hope.

As I listened to the officers’ tentative plans, I no longer believed that Marcos and James were nearby just playing; I’d personally checked all the places they might have been hurt or worse, and so had a hundred other people. The only option left was that they had been taken. I asked, “Are there any traffic cameras close to here? At the light at the crossroads? At the school?”

My mind conjured a grainy black and white still image of a dark sedan. The camera angle was just low enough to allow a glimpse of a small boy (I thought) in the passenger seat under the hovering dark figure of an adult.

The police officers weren’t sure, but they would find out. It was unlikely. Meanwhile, they were doing everything —

My lethargic stare narrowed and locked on the slightest blur of movement across our backyard the next backyard the street the driveway across the street.

“Who is that kid!?” I yelled. My body sprang off the deck and began sprinting.

“Who is that kid!?” With each shout, I expelled all the air from my lungs; with each stride, the form came closer into focus. It was Marcos. When he saw me, his eyes went wide and he sat down on the driveway. Our friend Anita, who’d been walking along the sidewalk, got there with me and scooped him up while I ran past, bounded up the front stairs, and barged into the neighbors’ house. James was standing surprised in the front entryway, his mouth ringed by a chocolate goatee. I sobbed as I gathered him up and ran back outside, where his mother and the officers and a small group of neighbors were smiling and sighing, perhaps crying as well.

The ensuing hours involved lots of research and explaining. Marcos and James, unable to communicate any answers, were no help. The police entered the home, found no one there, determined that the boys had let themselves in and had plundered the bananas and Halloween candy. They’d been watching cartoons. They’d broken a vase. In all, their crimes were misdemeanors, easily remedied. We called our friends to call off the search, and the word spread quickly that everyone could go home and return to their usual level of vigilance. Several gathered instead in our yard, to offer what compassion they could. The threat was over and our minds could settle on the real results, not the excruciating possibilities that had haunted us for the past pair of hours. Karina’s friends, especially, hugged her and shared their own lost-child stories, all agreeing that none had suffered as long or as dreadfully. I called my neighbor Lonnie, whom I barely knew, to tell him that my sons had ransacked his home. He laughed a little, told me not to sweat it. I promised to replace the vase and the candy. He said, go ahead if you want, but get the vase from the dollar store. Later, he pieced together that one of his kids had left for school by the front door, leaving it unlocked, while everyone else went out the garage. Later, Karina and I mused on the improbability that the boys had gone so far so quickly to a house they’d never visited on just the day that the front door was unlocked and the cupboards were stocked with enough candy to keep them occupied for a long while. Later, another neighbor explained that he’d been checking all the basement back doors on the street, but hadn’t thought to do more than ring doorbells at the front.

Our friends in our front yard made what small talk you’d expect, verbal sighs of relief and offers to help in any way at all. Karina expressed her thanks. People nodded. They commented on how God had watched over the boys.

But I, with my young sons returned, could still not quite leave the dark place my thoughts had settled, could not heave off the feeling of despair that had overcome me. Then and for the next several days, I was on edge, jittery. I had no appetite. My head ached. I thought, as I do too often, of the parents whose children weren’t protected, who really were lost forever. Even recently, even nearby: a toddler stolen and raped and killed by her neighbor; an adolescent refugee persuaded and raped and killed by her neighbor; a teenager who didn’t come home from school one afternoon, whose mother reported her missing to unbelieving police who refused to investigate, citing statistics that most young adults that age were not abductees but runaways. But she had been abducted, by a jealous rival and the boy they both liked, then beaten with a baseball bat and left dead in the desert. Not thirty miles away, a few years ago, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart was taken from her home in the middle of the night, then held captive for nine months by a mad preacher rapist until an America’s Most Wanted episode led to a lead and she was recovered. Thus she was one of the “lucky few” who ever get home again. After the first 48 hours, the statistics say, the probability of finding a kidnapped child reduces to near zero.

…

The next day, after classes, I showed up a few minutes late to a faculty seminar. David Allred was explaining the principles of quantum entanglement, the double-slit experiment, and the indeterminacy of photons. I listened intently, fascinated, to his description of single quanta beamed through one or another slit and the resultant disappearance/omnipresence of the photon from/on both paths until it strikes a target in an interference pattern, having acted as a wave, interfering with itself. Until the energy resolves at the absorptive screen, it cannot be said to exist in either space definitively, or it “samples reality” along both paths, and not simply because our senses and instruments are too crude to find it. To put it another way, a particle exists in a range of possible locations until it is observed, and the observation fixes it in a particular place. Stranger yet, a photon or an electron can be split in two, with one part carried far away, and any observation or action on one half results in an immediate and predictable effect on the other. In this way, either information travels faster than the speed of light or the very notion of location in space loses meaning. The nature of the quantum universe is this very simultaneity and nonentity, untraceable and unknowable, affected by our observations and fundamentally beyond our ken, yes, but also fundamentally unknowable in moments of irresolution or inattention.

With all we have learned, we have finally arrived at Sophocles: we confront our unbreachable ignorance.

This, I sensed vaguely, was a metaphor, a gift, an unsought connection sent to nudge me: Everywhere and nowhere/indeterminacy/ separation/reunion. Before my sons had appeared in one particular place I had felt viscerally that they were everywhere and nowhere. In a way, the time of their disappearance and the fact that I could not observe them produced in my mind a superposition of possible locations, until by observing them, I fixed them in only one place, one of the only acceptable places they might have been. More and more I am coming to believe, and to be comfortable with, the notion that everything is probabilities, only probabilities. But this did not occur to me, nor did it comfort me, when I could not locate my sons.

…

A couple of weeks later, I was shuffling down Concourse C in the Salt Lake City airport when I saw the stately blonde figure of Elizabeth Smart, now grown, recently returned from a mission to France. She was walking toward me, sharply dressed in pressed gray skirt and red blouse under a wool overcoat. Nobody bothered her, though a few heads, like mine, quickly turned in her direction as she glided past.

I was leaving my family for a few days. She was coming home.

Patrick Madden is a professor of literature at Brigham Young University, and the author of the essay collection Quotidiana. This essay is drawn from his collection, Sublime Physick, from the University of Nebraska Press.

I am a Hard Worker

By

by Brian Doyle

We are in Iowa. We are near the Raccoon River. It is snowing gently. It snows more months than not, in Iowa. A girl and her brother are hiding behind a tree on the corner of Caulder and Seventh. She is ten years old. This is on the south side of Des Moines where most of the Italians live. Her parish is Saint Anthony’s. Her grandfather is Anthony. Her brother is Anthony. Her family is from Tuscany. She and her brother Anthony are making snowballs. They are plotting to attack cars and one particular car comes into view, a pristine meticulous beautiful 1967 Ford Mustang owned by a hot-tempered boy whose family runs the local Dairy Queen. His name is Francis. His family is from Sicily. They hear the car grumbling faintly through the snow and they take up their positions and when Frank Renda’s car thunders past they pelt it with snowballs and then Tony and Larree Moro take off running as fast as they can from the burly boy who leaps roaring out of his car, not ever imagining that someday, amazingly, incredibly, this girl sprinting into the whirling snow will be his beloved wife, the mother of their beloved children; but amazingly, incredibly, this will come to pass. More things are possible than we ever imagine are possible.

…

She went to Abraham Lincoln High School. She was a terrific athlete, a sprinter, a hurdler, a softball star. She was a terrific student. She thought about the University of Iowa. She would have been admitted in a heartbeat. She probably would have earned a scholarship. She thought about being a doctor. But her dad withered and faded and died. Cancer ate him from the inside and by the time he died he was half the burly sinewy man he had been. He never stopped being the gentle cheerful man he had been, though. She remembers that. Cancer could not kill the man inside the broken body of the man. She remembers that. He was buried on her sixteenth birthday. Her mother was gone. Her stepmother was cold and dark. Her stepmother sold the family house out from under the brother and sister. She graduated from high school at seventeen. She never went to the prom. She worked furiously to afford an apartment. She baby-sat and shoveled snow and raked leaves and worked at the Iowa State Fair frying chicken fourteen hours a day in the hot dense thick blanket of high summer in Iowa. One day she walked down Ninth Street in Des Moines knocking on doors and asking for work. I am a hard worker and I could start today. First stop: Dairy Queen. No. Second stop: Bing’s Stationery. No. Third door: the Safeway grocery store. I am a hard worker and I could start today. Answer: Yes. You can start tomorrow.

…

She bagged groceries for two days. Eggs on top. Fragile things on top, where the customer can see them and register that they are fragile. On her third day she was promoted to checkout girl. Four-hour shifts, eight hours on the weekends, Sundays too. Then she was promoted to the booth, handling checks and money. She stocked shelves. She mopped floors. She cleaned the windows and the toilets. She wrote orders and checked inventory and changed prices and flagged shoplifters. I am a hard worker. She was promoted to manager of the produce department. She was eighteen. Her friends went off to college. She was promoted to assistant manager of the store, and then store manager of her first store in Des Moines. I am a hard worker. She was twenty-one. One day she fell in love. He was dashing and handsome and amazingly, incredibly, he was Frank Renda, the boy with the Mustang, and the girl who had pelted his car with snowballs was now a very alluring and accomplished young woman and they laughed about those snowballs for the rest of their married life.

…

At age twenty-two she was promoted and sent to manage a store in Houston. Then she was promoted to a “show” store, and then to a gleaming new store, and then came The Test. You do not advance to district manager at Safeway unless you pass the grueling draining strenuous Test. Three days of judgment, decisions, grace under duress, behavior patterns, management style, knowledge of industry, intelligence, creativity. The woman who never got a chance to go to college nailed The Test. She earned the third-highest score in the United States. I am a hard worker. She was promoted to district manager. She and Frank married. They had three children, each one born in a different Safeway district. At thirty-three she was a vice president. Then she was in charge of 120 stores. Then she was a senior vice president. Then she was the executive vice president. Then she was named president of Safeway Health. And along the way, she founded and chaired The Safeway Foundation and right here is where Larree Renda’s face lights up and she gets passionate and tears come to her eyes, and the girl who walked down Ninth Street knocking on doors so that she could eat and pay the rent at sixteen, the girl who was the first woman ever in several different positions for one of the biggest and best corporations in America, the girl who dreamed of being a doctor but never got a chance to chase that dream — that girl starts to talk about what she is proudest of in her glittering career, what she truly loved, what would have made her dad proudest, what might help make cancer a faint dark bleak memory, something that you have to find in dusty history books. That might happen. More things are possible than we ever imagine are possible.

…

“It started because we felt we had a responsibility to help our employees be healthier,” she says. “Then the idea grew. We were not just selling groceries. We were in the community business. We were in the social responsibility business. You are a stupid company if you are not socially responsible. It saves money. You make more money. People want to work for you. The best people want to work for you. And we went for it. We pushed the whole industry. I am very proud of that. Free-range chickens, non-caged eggs, betterraised pork, fresher and more local produce and producers, smaller carbon footprint — we really pushed, and we changed for the better, and we changed the industry for the better.

“And we pushed in so many other ways. We started a jobs program for veterans. Incredible employees, smart and honest and disciplined and incredibly hard workers. Why do companies not leap to hire veterans? Stupid. And we were raising money in all sorts of ways for all sorts of causes and charities that meant the world to our employees. We raised money to fight cancer, and money to fight hunger. Why are there so many hungry children in America? That’s sinful. That’s not acceptable. As a food company we were responsible to fight that, I thought, and fight we did. We raised money for education, and to work with people with disabilities, and for health and human services. We raised over a billion dollars. We gave away $250 million a year. Those are good numbers. Believe me, after forty years of studying numbers, I know good numbers. But it’s the money we raised for cancer that makes me the most proud, I think. It meant the most to me. My dad died of cancer, and my husband Frank died of cancer, and I was going to be a doctor to fight the cancer that killed my dad, but I never got the chance. That didn’t happen. But I played the cards I was dealt. I got a chance to start a foundation that changed a lot of lives, that meant a lot in healing, that might play a key role in beating cancers. My dad would be proud of that. Frank was proud of that. You know what’s worse than watching your husband die? Watching your kids watching their dad die. That was terribly hard. That was awful. All I can do is hope my work made that a little less possible for others someday…”

…

The girl who whipped those snowballs through the swirling snow, the girl who walked down Ninth Street desperate and brave and knocking on doors, the girl who never got to go to college, the woman who rose faster and higher through her company than any other woman ever, the woman who married the man of her dreams, that woman retired from Safeway last year, at age 56, after forty years of hard and creative work. I am a hard worker. She earned pretty much every honor her industry awards. She serves on several boards, among them, rivetingly, the International Speedway Corporation — “honoring my dad, who raced cars on dirt tracks on Friday and Saturday nights.” She might —might — take one more job running a big company, if the right one appears. Her children are out and about — Tommy (who pitched for the Pilots) with Safeway, Kristina (who also earned a degree on The Bluff) teaching third grade at the family parish school, and Tony playing pro baseball in the New York Yankees’ system (where he was the Carolina League’s batting champ in 2014). She’s building a new house. She’s figuring out the next steps. But she was on campus in May 2015, not only as a University regent (since 2008), but to receive an honorary doctorate, and to give a terrific Commencement speech to the Class of 2015. She was nervous before the speech. She had never given one like this. But she wrote her own — I am a hard worker — and she delivered it with eloquence and passion and tears, and when she finished there was a thunderous roar, and she got a standing ovation from the students and their families, five thousand people standing and applauding the girl from Iowa who never got to go to college. But that girl now has a doctorate, and from the way she clutched that document to her heart as she resumed her seat on stage, it may never leave her hand ever again.

“The girl who wanted to be a doctor,” reads her official citation, “the woman who was forced to watch as her father and her husband died from cancer, used every bit of her relentless energy and creativity not only in her profession, not only in her whirlwind of volunteer efforts, not only as a beloved wife and mother, but to better the lives of countless thousands of people. That is holy and remarkable work, and that is a prime reason the University today confers the degree Doctor of Public Service, honoris causa, on Larree Renda, of Hillsborough, California.”

Amen to that.

The University was the Best Decision I Ever Made

By

by Kunal Nayyar ’03 as told to Laurie Kelley

I got my start in theater at the University of Portland — that’s where Mindy Logan taught me to act, and I still use all of her acting methods to this day. Those were such formative years for me. I hadn’t done a play in eight years, being so busy on Big Bang. To do a play right you really have to have time to rehearse. I was honored that Jesse asked me to be in his play with him, and I jumped at the chance, feeling that the play was right, I had the proper time to prepare, and I could be on stage with Jesse. It was wonderful.

…

My new book is called Yes, My Accent is Real. It’s little snippets of my life. It’s about my journey from New Delhi to Los Angeles. It’s not a memoir; I’m too young to write a memoir. A lot of people know Raj Koothrappali from Big Bang Theory, but people don’t know that I’m actually from India. People call me an Indian-American actor or British-Indian actor, but I grew up in New Delhi. I wanted to tell my story so that it would inspire young people to realize that dreams can come true if you take a chance.

…

From the time I was 18 I really wanted to be in a college that was close to my brother, who was at Reed. I had looked at lots of colleges and the University of Portland really caught my eye. I got a good scholarship, and that was that for the decision. I never even visited or saw the campus. I just took a chance, and it ended up being the best decision I ever made. I lived in Corrado Hall, which had just opened. I remember so many things so vividly… I didn’t know what I was doing. I had a great funny roommate. I was always falling in love with girls who were never falling in love with me. I could never figure out what time to show up to parties. I didn’t understand the cadence of sarcasm. I would just laugh at everything even if I didn’t understand the jokes. Because some of the jokes are cultural, you know. But I would just laugh because I wanted to be included. People probably thought I was an idiot who just laughed at everything. I worked in housekeeping my first summer, cleaning a lot of offices, and then I became a computer lab manager, without actually knowing anything about computers. Or managing.

…

I majored in business, and never did actually get a minor in theater — too lazy. I’d have had to take set design and costumes and such but all I wanted to do was act. So every semester I just took my entire business classload and then I did as much acting as I could. My parents advised me to get a business degree, and I agreed with them — we wanted to have something I could fall back on in case my acting dream didn’t work out. I’m blessed to have parents who supported me in whatever I wanted to do. What they really cared about was the kind of human being I turn out to be. They’re happy that I’m financially comfortable and that I’ve worked very hard to achieve things, but those things don’t matter to them. I think they’re just happy that I’ve made a good life for myself. And that I have a good family and I work hard. I’m a decent human being, I think, and that is what they are most proud of.

…

I have been married for four years now. My priorities shifted radically. For the first time in my life I feel more responsible for someone else than just me. Plus it’s nice to have a partner in crime. My wife Neha is Indian also, and we get homesick, but we are very busy — Neha is a fashion designer, launching her own label, and I’m busy with the show. We long to go home to India, but when we go home we have to see a thousand people in ten days. We wish we could marry our universes and have our families in Los Angeles, but… Where do we live in the future? Do we raise our kids in India? Do we raise them here? How is that going to play out? But, you know, we’ll be fine. We just have to trust in the universe and it will all work out.

…

Neha and I did establish a theater scholarship at the University, yes. We wanted to give back. I know how much help the theater department needed. And I wanted to honor Mindy Logan, a truly wonderful acting coach. I didn’t know what I was doing when I started. I needed direction, and she gave me confidence. She taught me how much hard work it takes to really learn how to act, how much hard work and sacrifice it takes to be good at your craft. She laid the foundation of everything that I’ve achieved in my craft. Everything. When I was in Jesse’s play I consciously went back to her training. Whether you’re a singer or a dancer or painter or athlete or whatever you do, your foundational training is what you build on. You must have strong foundations to be able to build. Mindy was amazing. I remember how much I needed help when I was in college — maybe Neha and I can help someone else in the years to come…

Francis & Francis

By

by Timothy Egan

The most popular figure on the planet — the only priest who’s ever been on the cover of Rolling Stone, National Geographic, The Advocate, and Time, among many other periodicals — is a 78-year-old man with only a single functioning lung. His birth name is Jorge Bergoglio; his chosen name is Pope Francis, a name he chose to honor his spiritual mentor: that half-starved ascetic, that pauper who didn’t own money, property, or even shoes — Francis of Assisi, one of Italy’s two patron saints.

Most of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics know something of Saint Francis, but he is revered by many others as well. You can go to secular Berkeley, or equally secular France, and find the stone bird bath of Francis. He’s the nature saint. The patron saint of the environment.

But he was much, much more. Choosing his name — surprisingly, the first pope named for this revered figure — says much about the lasting power and impact of the saint from Assisi. And just how did this scrawny figure, dressed in a filthy tunic, with sores and boils all over his skin, living in a hovel, become so powerful?

A few biographical notes: He was born in 1181, or 82. He was a nobleman’s son. A bit of hellraiser. A party animal. His merchant family had money. The path was set for Francis to take over the business. His life, an easy life, was set for him. Francis committed “every kind of debauchery,” an early biographer said.

Remember, this was almost 400 years before the Renaissance. The early era of the Holy Roman Empire — which was neither holy, nor Roman. Italy’s hilltop towns were always at war with each other. And Francis went to war, against the neighboring town of Perugia. At the age of 21, he was a high-spirited warrior. Ready for adventure! Pillage! Bloodshedding! The rah-rah didn’t last long. Perugia defeated Assisi. Francis was captured, thrown in a dungeon with rats and a cold floor. There he spent a year before his father came up with ransom money to spring him.

But something had happened to him in that dank, dark place. After his release, he didn’t return home. He holed up in an abandoned church and prayed. When he emerged, he was a different man. He refused his father’s pleadings. He said he wasn’t interested in wealth, or a career in the merchant business. He was interested in the lost souls, the untouchable lepers in the valleys, the poor, the passed over.

This greatly alarmed his father. At the age of 25, Francis was hauled into court by his dad, who claimed that he refused to accept his family responsibility. There, Francis is said to have torn off his nobleman’s clothes, and renounced family and wealth. He stood, nearly naked. You can see this stunning narrative in the Basilica at Assisi, the Giotto frescoes.

Thereafter, Francis devoted his life to the marginalized and the forgotten. He said the church had grown too wealthy, too complacent, too removed from Christ. The poor lived shunned lives in the malarial shadows below the sun-washed hill towns, while bishops and other clerics resided in opulent splendor.

…

Francis was a radical. A mystic. But he was a radical by example. As his mythic status expanded, he attracted many followers. He asked only that they sell all goods and give them to the poor. They dressed in simple tunics, usually shoeless like him. He felt, in order to get closer to God, you had to rid yourself of material distraction.

He was, in one view, the original hippie (very Oregonian), with his rejection of conventional life, his view that all living things have meaning and are connected. They called him, Il Poverello, the Little Poor Man. Fire was a brother. So was the moon. So were the stars. So, in the end, was death. Famously — though perhaps apocryphally — he charmed a wolf that was menacing the town. He preached to birds. By one definition, he was crazy. By another, he was brilliant.

He was not a priest, or even, by today’s measure, an evangelical. He was a life force, similar to Ghandi. But he was not a humorless scourge. Not a scold. Certainly not a statue. He was playful. Fun. Gregarious. He liked a joke. He would dance while preaching. Sing. Strip to his undergarments.

He felt he and brothers were inferior to all, superior to none. Humility — again, by example — gave him an aura, his power.

As his fame spread throughout Europe, he could have been like Martin Luther, and led a breakaway religion. Instead, he never directly challenged church authorities — except, of course by example.

One of the most daring things he did was go to North Africa, at great danger to himself, to meet with leading Muslims, this at a time when one of the crusades against Muslims and other infidels was going on. He walked much of the way, and it cost him.

Returning from Africa, in his late 30s, Francis got very sick. He had contracted malaria while in Egypt. Also had trachoma, a horrible eye infection. He seemed to wither away before people’s eyes, and yet, his power grew. Two years before he died, he experienced the stigmata — the wounds of Christ.

As his condition worsened, he retreated to even more austere conditions. He lived in a dirt-floored hovel, like his prison dungeon. Shivering with malaria. Vomiting. To him, it was liberating.

He died in 1226, at the age of 45.

And that should have been that. Remember: Francis had no army. His followers were poor and powerless. He had invented nothing. He had not written any great manifesto. But 800 years later, Francis is still immensely popular, perhaps more so than ever. He appeals to liberals and conservatives, believers and nonbelievers, all over the world.

…

Cut to 2013, and a conclave of cardinals, trying to pick a pope. From the Sistine Chapel, white smoke appears. Birds alight — a sign. An Italian immigrant from Argentina — Jorge Mario Bergoglio – who rode on the back of the bus through slums, washed feet of prisoners and AIDS victims, is named pope. He is the first Jesuit pope. The first non-European pope in 1,000 years. And the only pope who once worked as a bouncer at a club.

He takes the name of the pauper from Assisi. This new Francis, striding through St. Peter’s Square, bypasses the limousine waiting for him and climbs aboard a bus, with other clerics. He pays his own hotel bill before checking out. He decides not to live in the Apostalic Place, but reside instead in a two-bedroom guest house. He will get around in a Ford Focus, not the Papal Mercedes.

His first words are Fratelli and Sorelle, buona sera! “Brothers and sisters, good evening!” Instantly, people feel a whoosh of fresh air in Saint Peter’s Square. Then, to cardinals who selected him, he says, “May God forgive you for what you’ve done.” Humor! Another fresh air breeze. As before, he washes feet of the poor and outcast, washes the feet of women and Muslims. He dials complete strangers up by phone and offers them encouraging words, or just says hello. One man hangs up on him — three times; he can’t believe the pope is calling him. He eats in the Vatican cafeteria, wears a plastic watch.

All symbolic, yes. But like that other Francis, radical by example, following the admonition of Francis of Assisi: “Preach the Gospel, and if necessary use words.”

And also, like the earlier Francis, the pope is playful, exuding an unusual amount of joy. He likes books, soccer, tango music, and gnocchi. He appears not to take himself seriously. He knows how to seize a moment. He goes to Naples, the heart of Mafia, and in words that could only have come from a former boxer says, “Corrupt society stinks.”

The most astonishing thing happens on return flight from South America. He’s asked about gays in the church, long a troubled spot for Catholic hierarchy. The Church had called homosexuality “an objective disorder.” Francis looks at the reporters, shrugs and says, “Who am I to judge?” No more famous words have ever been uttered by a Pope.

But there it is — the simplicity, the humility, the lightness of being. His power comes from exuding powerlessness. He changes hearts by example. The church, rather suddenly, seems to be no longer about what it’s against, but what it’s for.

…

Like Francis the nature saint, this Francis emphasis our duty to creation. He issues an encyclical on the environment. In a speech before a joint session of Congress — the only pope ever granted such an audience — Francis challenges climate change skeptics. Think about that: the Church that put Galileo under house arrest for promoting sound science is now challenging the science deniers in power.

Last year, he was asked about his secret to happiness. He said, Slow down. Take time off. Live and let live. Don’t proselytize. Work for peace. Work at a job that offers basic human dignity. Don’t hold on to negative feelings. Move calmly through life. Enjoy books, art, playfulness.

Regarding money, he said, “I ask you to ensure that humanity is served by wealth, and not ruled by it.”

Has he changed church doctrine? Not really. Not substantively. But by his choice of words, his emphasis, he has moved mountains. He embraced unwed mothers. He embraced divorced Catholics, welcoming them back into the church fold, many of whom said they felt unwanted. He said those who’ve had abortions can be forgiven, a similar welcoming.

In the curia in Rome, the old line clerics scowl. One is quoted as saying, “He’ll be gone soon, but we’ll still be here.” That’s what they said about Francis of Assisi.

So, not yet three years into his papacy, has he changed hearts?

I consider myself similar to a lot of American Catholics — culturally bound to the church, but not to follow its dogma, particularly sexual dictates, on things like birth control. Europe has never had fewer practicing Christians. Their great cathedrals are empty — except for tourists. The United States, according to a Pew Center survey, is trending the same way, led by millennials, who are wary of pontifical certainty. But many people are giving the church a second look, or a first. So we have this paradox: as much of the world has become less identified with organized religion, the leader of the most organized of religions is the most popular man in the world.

After observing Francis in the first year of his papacy, I wrote a column for The New York Times called “Lapsed but Listening.” Not long ago, I ran into Father Steve Sundborg, my Jesuit friend from high school, now president of Seattle University.

He said: Which is it now?

And I said: Less lapsed, more listening.

Tim Egan is a columnist for The New York Times and the author of many remarkable books, among them the Northwest classic The Good Rain and the National Book Award-winning The Worst Hard Time, about the Dust Bowl. This essay is drawn from his visit to campus in Fall 2015, when he delivered the annual Father John Zahm, C.S.C., Lecture, honoring the University’s co-founder. 

Twila Sylvia

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Meet the estimable wry Twila Genevieve Sylvia, who has worked for eighteen years in Bauccio Commons. Job? “Washing tables and listening to students.” Age: “None of your business, although I have a great-greatgrandson.” Works lunches five days a week. Keeps a sharp eye out for students who are crying, sitting alone, who want to talk. “They get so homesick,” she says. “They get lonely. They like to see a friendly face. I listen a lot. A lot of them stay in touch after they graduate, sure. I get letters and cards and visits. One student wrote a paper about me for class. We forget they are just kids. They’re so tall and they seem so confident but they get awfully lonely. At least they have me, is how I look at it. I have the time for them. Sure I do.” How many kids has she spoken gently to and listened carefully to, in eighteen years? About 15,000, by our count. There are many quiet ways to do great things. Thank you, Twila Sylvia.

Not Without Love

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by Martha Gies

I ask theology professor Rene Sanchez one question: how does he teach Theology 105, the basic required intro course, now that there is such ethnic and religious diversity on The Bluff?

Because, he says, everyone who teaches it on The Bluff begins with the idea that every student, regardless of their tradition, asks certain questions: “Why am I here? What makes us human? What is the purpose of my life? Why is there suffering? Why do bad things happen? To us these are theological questions,” says Sanchez. “I use the Augustinian priest John Shea’s great line: ‘Faith is not believing in something that you cannot see; rather it is responding to something that you cannot deny.’ “I ask my students, ‘So what are the things we cannot deny? And my experience has been that students are fairly receptive. My experience has also been that other faiths — and I have a lot of Muslim students — are very respectful. The Muslim kids really understand religious respect.”

Long before he came to the University 5 years ago, long before many years teaching at Moreau High School in Hayward, California, he came out of El Paso’s notorious Segundo Barrio, an impoverished immigrant community squeezed up against the border, where his father picked cotton and the family lived in a house with no windows. He moved with his parents as they followed opportunities for work, to New Mexico, to Tucson’s Anita Barrio, where the family finally had running water. Here Rene began first grade at Davis Elementary, today a bicultural magnet school — but back in the late sixties, Rene and his friends were beaten for speaking Spanish.

In 1969, when they moved north to Santa Rosa at the invitation of his mother’s family, there was work in an apple cannery. Here his family at last made a true home. Rene thrived in school, but he has carried with him memories of the suffering he saw in those immigrant neighborhoods of the Southwest, the hopelessness, the drugs, the suicides. He has tenderly nursed his memories of the young men and women who never made it out of poverty’s despair, and he brings their stories into the classroom.

At Santa Rosa’s Piner High School, after arguing brilliantly in a student mock trial, Sanchez was offered a full ride to college and law school by a senior partner of the local law firm that mentored the classroom law project. But Sanchez no longer wanted to follow his older sister Alicia into law. “I remember looking at this man, face to face, and telling him no. And they were like, ‘Are you insane, kid? We’re offering you the world.’” But it wasn’t the world he wanted; he wanted to be a healer.

“I look back now and I think I was looking for some kind of peace or serenity, he says. He quotes St. Augustine: “Our hearts are restless until they find rest in Thee.”

He became a youth minister at Resurrection Parish. He discovered Father Richard McBrien’s superb book Catholicism. “I would read a paragraph or two on a thinker, and if I really liked him, I would go to the library and check out a book. So I read Augustine and Aquinas and Rahner,” and then Marx and Jung and Michael Parenti, and Marie-Dominique Chenu, the French Dominican who taught Schillebeeckx and Yves Congar. Self-taught and theology-smitten, Sanchez didn’t go back to college until he was 27. At Holy Names College he earned a BA in history and religious studies, and then began teaching at Moreau High, which is named for the founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross, Blessed Basil Moreau.

Then on to Notre Dame and Boston College, where he “came to realize we don’t understand what love is. We tend to want to impose a kind of artificial one-ness, a unity through uniformity, and not look at distinctions and particularities. So as an example, let’s say a racial discourse: the idea of I don’t see color: That’s a problem! I understand where it comes from, but it’s a problem. Unfortunately the Christian mistake frequently has been to impose our view of love on the Other. In social ethics, which is what I specialize in, it means learning the history of the Other. If we are Christian and we say we love the undocumented migrant, but we don’t know about the history of the United States in relation to Latin America, we do not love the undocumented migrant. So we must learn that history. And then go back to our communities of origin and translate for our people the messages and the wisdom given to us by the Other.”

“I can’t tell you what justice is, but I can tell you what it’s not,” he says to his students. “If I’m just looking out just for Rene Sanchez, that’s not Christian. If I’m looking out just for Chicanos, that’s not love either. And Catholic justice can never be about just us Catholics. When I look at politicians now, I don’t ask what they’re going to do for Chicanos; instead, I ask, What are they going to do for women? Young people? Gay, lesbian, transgender? The elderly? I’ve got to care about the communities that I don’t belong to. I’ve got to worry about The Others. My teaching philosophy begins and ends, in a very real sense, with loving my students. I know it may sound simple, but it is an absolute necessity. Without love, everything else is of little value…”

Jean Paul Mugisha

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Now here is a most interesting sophomore: the shy brilliant Jean Paul Mugisha, whose family fled war-battered Congo for a refugee camp in Rwanda, where Jean Paul and his family lived in a mud house, no electricity, no plumbing, one meal a day. Studying math, physics, and chemistry on his own, he got a perfect score on the Rwandan national high school exam — but as a refugee he was banned from scholarships to Rwandan universities. But the nonprofit These Numbers Have Faces discovered him, the United Nations settled his (ten strong) family in Portland, and Jean Paul spent last year studying at PCC and interning at Allison Engineering. By chance he met University president Father Mark Poorman, C.S.C., who was so impressed that he offered Jean Paul a scholarship; and today he is an electrical engineering major, a Villa Maria resident, and a soccer fanatic. His ambition: somehow, someday, bring electricity to his Rwandan community.

Fanatics Do Not Speak for Islam

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by Michael Berdine ‘ 68

As-salaam-u alaykum, peace be to you, we say in Islam — much as in the Catholic Mass we say the peace of the Lord be with you, and the responses are similar also: and with your spirit in the Catholic Mass, and wa alaykum as-salaam, and to you be peace, in Islamic culture.

I start with the word peace because I wish to say bluntly and clearly and loudly that Islam is not the twisted creed of the malefactors who perpetrated heinous crimes on September 11, the thugs who have distorted the true meaning and teachings of Islam ever since. The root of the word Islam is silm and salam, which mean peace, and Islam is about living in peace with the Creator, with yourself, with other people, and with all the creation that we have been granted by the One. “If anyone kills a person — unless retribution for murder or spreading corruption across the land — it is as if he kills all mankind, while if any saves a life it is as if he saves the lives of all mankind,” says the Al Ma’idah.

Nowhere in the Qur’an (which Muslims believe to be the exact word of God revealed to the Prophet Muhammad), or in the hadith (the teachings of the Prophet himself), do we read that the ends justify the means. Nowhere. Moreover, if we mistake our motivation and values, attributing false righteousness to ourselves, we will have lost our cause and, perhaps, our souls. So to those who claim to speak for Islam, who claim that terrorism and the murder of innocents is a right path, I say: you do not speak for the faith, and you should beware the loss of your holy soul.

In the Hadith al-Qudsi: “The first of people against whom judgment will be pronounced on the Day of Resurrection will be a man who died a martyr… He will say [to the Almighty]: ‘I fought for you until I died a martyr.’ [The Almighty] will say: ‘you have lied: you only fought that it might be said: ‘He is courageous. And so it has been said.’ Then he will be dragged on his face to the Hellfire.”

The cold fact of the matter when we talk about “Islamic” terrorism is that the murderers, for that is what they are, are not true Muslims. They are mere actors. They commit crimes for effect, to make an impression. They seek to gain their objectives through the manipulation of an audience. But these actors use real bombs, assassinations, murders, rapes, and mayhem to manipulate others to their will. Their agenda is political change, and no matter how assiduously they insist that their motives are religious, they are not the motives of Islam. Do not grant them that which is not theirs to claim.

Even their use of the word jihad is false. There is no such thing as a holy war in Islam. Only God is holy in Islam. The word jihad has a root verb — jahada — which in Arabic means exerting maximum effort or striving. The theological connotation is striving for betterment. Its major form — the “Greater Jihad,” jihad alkhabir — is the struggle within oneself for self-improvement, elevation, purification and getting closer to God. In short, it is a spiritual struggle to do good and avoid evil so one will attain heaven in the afterlife. Another form of jihad is using economic power to uplift the condition of the downtrodden and to finance the struggle for justice and liberation. The last, but not least form of the word, known as the “Lesser Jihad,” or jihad al-Saghrir, is the physical form, where people actually fight against oppression. The principles of that form are stipulated clearly in the Qur’an and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad: Fighting is only to defend against those oppressors who attack Muslims to force them to convert away from their religion or to drive them out of their homes. Fighting is limited to combatants. The Prophet commanded that the lives of civilians are to be protected. The word jihad is an Islamic-Arabic term that has been incorrectly translated and largely misunderstood. There is no equivalent to the term “holy war” in Islamic terminology. There is no mention of “holy war” in either the Qur’an or Hadiths (teachings of the Prophet Muhammad), which are the primary sources of Islamic teachings.

Every aspect of each Qur’anic mandate is aimed at nurturing an environment that will allow peace to emerge and prevail. Recognizing that humanity is flawed and will err, Islam provides a system to eradicate injustice and allow peace to flourish. In the spirit of its universal message of peace and respect for diversity, Islam’s goal is not to impose itself by force or declare war against non-Muslims. For a believing Muslim, specifically one who practices his/her religion according to the Qur’an and the Sunnah, the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and justice are always superior to war for those who are conscious of God.

As-salaam-u alaykum, peace be to you.

Michael Berdine ’68 was the first director of the Cambridge Muslim College in England, where he is now a research fellow.

A Tangle of Bearberry

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by Brian Doyle

My mother is driving me through the rain to the beach. I am applying for summer jobs. The rain is thorough and silvery. We do not speak. The trees along the road are scrubby and gnarled and assaulted by reeds. I am huddled in my jacket. No one else is on the road. You never thank your mother enough. The road is so wet that our tires send up tendrils and spouts of water behind us. I can see them flaring steadily in the mirror on my side. My mother is intent on the road. She would like to say something gentle about the interview I will have in a few minutes but she knows that I will not hear what she says. I will hear what I thought she said, which is not what she said. I heard a lot of what was not said or meant then instead of what was.

My mother woke me that morning, and fed me, and handed me clean folded clothes, and handed me the plethora of forms I was supposed to have filled out but had not filled out and of course filled out hurriedly scribbledly scrawlingly as she drove me through the rain to the beach. We drove along silently as I scribbled and she maybe thought about all the things she would have liked to say but was too wise to say.

This would have been a perfect time for me to say or whisper or even mumble my gratitude to my mother for eighteen years of extraordinary love and care. This would have been a great time for me to say something like I see your hard work, mom, and I see your weariness with all these kids, and I see how quietly worried you and dad are about money, and I can only faintly dimly imagine what it must be like to bear and coddle and raise and protect and educate and love children and have them be rude and vulgar and dismissive and contemptuous and worse. That would have been a great time for me to say something gentle for once. Rarely were we alone together for thirty minutes as we were that morning in the rain on the road to the beach. That would have been a great time for me to say quietly I see you, mom, and I love you, and I never say that, and I should say that every thirty seconds every blessed day, and I should touch my head to the holy earth every dawn and say thank you for you to whatever it is that we mean when we say The Mercy and the Coherence and The Imagination. That would have been the perfect time, alone in the quiet car in the quiet rain on the silent road among the gnarled little trees.

By the time we got to the state park headquarters it was too late for me to say anything, and I hurried off to the interview, and I don’t know what my mother did for the next few minutes. Probably she went for a walk along the boardwalk, or sat in the car writing letters; she was always in motion, always quietly doing something even in moments when nothing needs to be done; that was how she was and still is, though now she moves very slowly indeed and does not drive at all. Now I drive, and she sits in the passenger seat, and we talk freely and cheerfully and deeply and avidly and eagerly and every time I talk to her I say I love you. We don’t say that enough. We don’t. After a while I came back from the interview and she started the car and we drove home through the ranks of the bent twisted little trees. There were pitch pines and salt cedars, and here and there beach plums, and thickets of sumac, and I thought I saw a tangle of bearberry but I could not be sure.