Una Cadegan
2005 Recipient of the Lackner Award
Acceptance Speech
Looking for Mrs. Greenleaf
The word thanks isn’t big enough, of course, to express what I’m thinking tonight, but it’s the one that gets us closest, so – thanks. If it’s true – and I have my doubts about this, but I don’t want to publicly question the judgment of the Rector’s Council – that I am any use at all in helping people see what a Catholic and Marianist university can be, then pretty much all the credit goes to other people.
So, thanks and more than thanks to my family, to Sally Cadegan my mother who is here tonight, and Bill Cadegan her husband and my father, who left us the year I began teaching at UD, but he’s here tonight, too. You can tell I got a good start in life on the work I am now doing if you look at the artwork in my parents’ dining room. Some people settle for reproductions of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, but above my parents’ sideboard hangs a genuine Una Cadegan original, a Last Supper drawn around the time of my first communion. My mother and father have always enjoyed pointing out that the apostles at the ends of the table look like they’ve had a little too much wine (I was still mastering perspective in second grade), but my personal favorite feature is the caption beneath the cup of wine: “This is my blud.”
Thanks also to my youngest brother, Leo, who lives in Steubenville, Ohio, and made it possible for my mother to be here tonight. His wife Ann and her daughter Marissa in their turn made it possible for him to come, so I am grateful to them, as well. Our middle brother, Liam, lives with his wife Jaime and my nieces Shannon and Emily in Moreno Valley, California and, while tonight is quite a good party, that’s a rather long way to travel.
We all grew up in an industrial river town in eastern Ohio called Toronto, a prosperous place until about the time I graduated from high school. It was not automatically assumed by any means in my high school that everyone would go to college, but in my parents’ mind there was never a question—and they made no distinction between their daughter and their sons on this score, which did not strike me as particularly unusual at the time but for which in hindsight I am deeply grateful.
I came to UD in 1978 mostly by accident—my biology teacher told me to have my SAT scores sent to UD, and said I’d like it here, so I applied. Someone from admissions called me over Christmas break and asked if I wanted a scholarship application, and I followed the money. There are so many people here tonight, and before me on the list of Lackner Award winners, who were my teachers at UD, that it takes my breath away—Jim Heft, Pat Palermo, Judith Allik, Xavier Monasterio. I remember especially, as I know so many of you have been doing recently, Larry Ruff, who died in December. I had Larry for English the first semester I was at UD, and surprised myself by liking him, loving what he taught, and doing well in the course.
I also went to graduate school mostly by accident. (This appears to be a theme, and not much use to those of you trying to help people be more reflective about vocation and discernment, because once again I just followed the money). I wrestled with a number of things about being Catholic during those years, but perhaps most especially that I was the only person I knew among large number of the students and faculty in my department who had been raised Catholic and was still practicing. One night in graduate school this topic came up during a conversation with my roommate Barbara. I should mention that when we moved in together she was an agnostic, and that after living with me for a year she was an atheist (it took me a while to realize that it was a little arrogant of me to take much credit for this change). So we were talking about the number of non-practicing Catholics in the department, and I said that I thought they all still had something in common. Barbara said, before I could even finish the thought, “Yes, guilt.” Now, this is a very venerable stereotype, and, like many venerable stereotypes it has some grounding somewhere in truth. But I was impatient with it as an answer then, as I am now. It is at the very most incomplete. What I had decided that the people in our department with Catholic backgrounds had in common was, in the words I used then, a passion for meaning.
This fits with what I think is the truthful grounding of the “guilt” stereotype—let me try it out on you and see if you buy it. If Catholics (not just Catholics, of course, but bear with me here for a minute) take seriously what they know and believe about the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus, then it is impossible not to think about the ultimate things, all the time. This is hard work, and we don’t do it well most of the time, and if we don’t have a healthy love for our own weakness—a weakness also embraced and inhabited by a God who fell three times on his way to be crucified—then guilt (the unhealthy kind, not the kind that is the sign of a functioning conscience) is the result. But if we hold our weakness in perspective through a healthy humility, we’re still confronted with what it means to see the ultimate in every moment and try to use that to guide what we do.
I have, as one does in the Marianist world, been thinking quite a bit about Father Chaminade at this time of year, and have appreciated the reflections on various parts of his life. But I have been thinking especially about Father Chaminade in the spring of 1789. A few months earlier, King Louis XVI had called the Estates General, an advisory body to the king that had not met since 1614. (Bear with me—historians think about odd stuff; it’s an occupational hazard.) All over France, members of the clergy, the aristocracy and the ordinary citizens met to put together petitions for the reforms they were hoping to see in French society. We do not know a great deal about the specifics of Father Chaminade’s political views, but we do know that he signed two of these petitions, as a member not of the First Estate (the clergy) but of the Third, acting on behalf of the school he had helped to run for over a decade at this point. He had no way of knowing that within the year the social order of France would be largely overturned, and that within just a few years his own life would be in danger. He had no idea that his life’s work would be given over to re-building the Church in France. He had no idea we’d all be sitting here nearly exactly 116 years later, recalling this event that he did not know would be a turning point.
We’ve been hearing a lot of confident assertions lately about the direction in which history is headed. Americans have perhaps been uniquely susceptible to this tendency over the years, but I don’t think I’m wrong in thinking that the tendency has been especially pronounced in the past few years, the consequences especially dire. As a historian I can’t help but be extremely nervous when people, especially people in power, become convinced that they know in what direction history is moving.
Which is why it’s embarrassing to admit that recently I have been thinking the same thing. On the Friday of exam week last semester, I was lying in bed after the alarm went off, listening to a story on National Public Radio about the town of Salinas, California, which was just about to close all of its public libraries because of a lack of money to run them. Salinas, as you know, is the hometown and the setting for many of the writings of John Steinbeck. As I listened to the story, and thought of there no longer being a single public library in the hometown of John Steinbeck, the thought came into my mind: we are living in a dying civilization.
Now, anyone who has lived with me will tell you that I do not generally wake up in a good mood, but this was a little gloomy even for me. But as I got up and had some coffee and moved on into the day, my mind kept returning to that thought, and I kept turning it over and over in my mind, wondering. Was it just morning demons? A wintry, end-of-semester overreaction? How would I know if it were true? Since, as a historian, I’ve already said I can’t answer my own question, what do I do with this persistent sense that something is deeply amiss?
One Marianist answer, of course, is to “read the signs of the times.” Sometimes I think we’re really lucky Father Chaminade said that, because it gives us a lot of leeway. But it poses its own set of questions – what happens when different people look at the same set of signs and see them very differently? What if a number of these people on different sides of an issue all profess the name of Jesus?
You will be relieved, I expect, that I’m not going to pretend I have answers to these questions. I do have two things, though, that I’d like to offer tonight as part of my gratitude for this deeply moving honor. First is my deep conviction that the University of Dayton is a place very nearly uniquely situated to read — and act on — the signs of the times in a way that adds to human flourishing. I think we do not sufficiently appreciate how odd we are, and I mean that in a good way. To take the enterprise that is the modern university and attempt to base it, genuinely and fundamentally, on love and on wisdom, is rare, astonishing, bold, dangerous. We owe it to each other to keep each other honest about how well and how deeply and how consistently we do this.
When I am trying to be honest about how well I am
doing something, one of the people to whom I turn regularly is
Flannery O’Connor. When I think about where those of us
involved in the ongoing pursuit of Marianist education might
look to keep us honest, I think of Mrs. Greenleaf. Mrs.
Greenleaf (in a short story titled, “Greenleaf,” so you know
she’s important) is the wife of the hired hand on Mrs. May’s
farm in the rural South. Mrs. May thinks Mr. Greenleaf works
just barely hard enough, and Mrs. Greenleaf not nearly hard
enough at all. What Mrs. Greenleaf does every day is what she
calls prayer healing. “Every day she cut all the morbid stories
out of the newspaper—the accounts of women who had been raped
and criminals who had escaped and children who had been burned
and of train wrecks and plane crashes and the divorces of movie
stars. She took these to the woods and dug a hole and buried
them and then she fell on the ground over them and mumbled and
groaned for an hour or so moving her huge arms back and forth
under her and out again and finally just lying down flat and,
Mrs. May suspected, going to sleep in the dirt.”[1]
When Mrs. May first comes across Mrs. Greenleaf in the midst of her prayer healing, her reaction is to wince. “She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true” (316). When she hears Mrs. Greenleaf pray, “Jesus, stab me in the heart,” she “felt as furious and helpless as if she had been insulted by a child. ‘Jesus,’ she said, drawing herself back, ‘would be ashamed of you. He would tell you to get up from there this instant and go wash your children’s clothes’” (317).
Well, here we all sit in our well-washed clothes, but those of you who know anything of Flannery O’Connor know that in this story it is Mrs. Greenleaf who knows how to read the signs of the times. Her over-the-top, embarrassing identification with the world’s suffering is much closer to the truth than Mrs. May’s respectability. It might, on second thought, be a mistake to ask Flannery O’Connor to help keep us honest—surely we can find someone else who would set the bar less high.
But, you know, we’re already stuck. Wherever we look – Jesus Christ, Father Chaminade, Teresa of Avila, Martin Luther King – we confirm that if reading the signs of the times leads us somewhere really snug and comfortable we need another reading lesson. We can’t possibly know, of course, where our responses will lead us, but we are in such good company – or at least such familiar, flawed, human company – that we’ll keep to the road a while longer yet. As T.S. Eliot said – who certainly had his own feeling that his civilization was dying — “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” This is all so hard and so unending that we also very much need parties like this one to keep us going. Thank you all, more than you can possibly imagine, for this thing I surely don’t deserve but will greatly benefit from trying to live up to.
I have had great good fun for many years (and hope to have for many more) participating in discussions of Catholic intellectual tradition. The university’s support of these activities is truly amazing, and is, I hope, bearing fruit in ways we will all benefit from. Over the years, I have also become convinced that for those members of the University community not primarily interested in academic matters, the key sign that we are living up to what we proclaim to be as a Catholic and Marianist university is basic economic justice. The Task Force’s recommendations reflected this belief, as did the priorities recommended to the President by a follow-up committee chaired by Father Contadino. I have been heartened and encouraged by how much support there is from the University’s senior leadership and from the Board of Trustees Mission and Identity Committee for taking a serious look at whether the lowest wage levels at the University reflect a community that aspires to be a national leader in ways really central to our tradition. As a gesture of appreciation for that support and confidence in what will come of it, I would like to make the $5000 stipend that accompanies the Lackner Award available through Human Resources as a temporary fund to meet emergency needs of University employees who might not yet be fully benefitting from the great vision of unity and abundance that our traditions call us to.
[1]Flannery, O’Connor, The Complete Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1971), 315-16.