He was not one of my college professors, but he was one of my very best college teachers. He was a fellow student, albeit one my parents’ age, and one whose life experiences could hardly have been more foreign to my own.
He was Boston Irish, and proud of both, a gifted singer / pianist who’d entertained for and with some of the biggest names in his profession. A political conservative who actually attended Berkeley in the 60s, amid the sit-inners, war protesters, and Black Panthers – was characteristically blunt and outspoken with his opinions – and lived to tell the tale.
He was an alcoholic who left the liquor behind, and a Catholic who experienced a remarkable spiritual transformation after tuning in to a Billy Graham crusade on television. He bowed out of show business for a while, enrolling in a Baptist college to earn a degree in music and writing (two things he was already exceptionally good at) and to learn the Bible, which was new to him.
He had met and mingled with most every kind of person there was, from mafiosos to movie stars, cops to cabbies, hippies to priests, and he’d paid attention to what he saw and heard. And along the way, he passed to me – along with the wicked joy of puns – a few well-observed proverbs and some timeless insights into human nature.
· He often quoted the advice of a neighbor, a psychiatrist, with whom he enjoyed talking over the ways of the men and women he met in the course of his nightly performances at local restaurants and drinking establishments. He was trying to understand why people said what they said … the subtleties and incongruities, the meanings between odd lines of conversation.
The psychiatrist suggested he stop trying.
“Just watch what they do,” he advised. “Watch what they do.”
· We once debated the motives and character of a mutual acquaintance whom he had known longer – and didn’t trust at all. I protested that the man had always been gracious to me.
My friend gazed upon me with an odd spark of light in his gimlet eye.
“Be careful,” he warned, “of people who are only as kind as they can afford to be.”
· He knew politics, inside and out, and then-President Ronald Reagan had no greater ally or advocate; my friend had watched him from his earliest days as governor of California. He often filled me in on the history of famous political figures and the biases of sundry political journalists, and walked me through the points of departure between liberal Holy Writ and conservative common sense.
His most frequent explanation of their differences always came down to an adage that adjusts for other things besides politics.
“A conservative,” he said, “is a liberal who just got mugged.”
· He had as wide and remarkable a spectrum of friends as anyone I’ve ever known, and is still the only man I’ve ever seen consistently go so far out of his way to make an enemy an amigo. For all of that, he maintained one clear, unwavering requisite for friendship.
“No man can be or stay my friend,” he said, “who doesn’t treat my wife with respect.”
· Like all individuals who think for themselves, he had the purest makings of a natural rebel. In his presence, as Arthur Miller put it, “a fool felt his foolishness,” and that always set him on a collision course with petty tyrants and institutional bullies.
Once, trying to balance his responsibilities in a work environment against his profound disdain for the cruel and calculating persons in charge, he sought the counsel of an old priest whose path he happened to cross. “Is it possible,” my friend asked, “in good conscience, to be part of an organization that you believe is doing wrong?”
“Yes,” the priest said. “But only if you’re doing everything you can to change that.”
· It bugged my friend that religious folks loved to capitalize the “t” in “truth,” when they spoke or wrote of godly wisdom and spiritual things.
“Truth is truth,” he insisted. “Something is either true, or it isn’t. There’s no such thing as ordinary truth and ‘super-duper-extra-strength Truth.” Which means, he liked to add, that at some level, “‘2 + 2 = 4’ is just as true as John 3:16. Jesus didn’t say, ‘I am certain kinds of truth.’ He said, ‘I am the truth.’ Small ‘t.’ Anything true leads us to Jesus.”
· He marveled at the defenses people offer up for immorality – be it adultery, homosexuality, sex outside of marriage, whatever. “But we’re in love,” people say, as if that word is somehow supposed to sweep all other arguments before it. And for so many in our culture, it does. Whatever seems most loving must somehow be most godly – and therefore, okay.
“But the Bible doesn’t say, ‘Love is God,’” my friend said. “The Bible says, ‘God is love.’ God is the measure of what love is; love is not the measure of who God is. No matter how much I may want to bend His truth – or interpret His character – to make Him endorse what I want to do.”
Hope you’ve been sharpened by a teacher as wise as that. And been able to call him your friend.
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