When Regina Garvey phoned to
say that John had died that morning, I was speechless. I heard my voice
repeating so sorry so sorry so sorry, but my mind was scarcely
functioning. Days later, words continue to elude me.
Born in 1944, three years before his father and an uncle founded the
small but distinguished publishing house, Templegate, John Garvey was
twenty-nine when he began writing reviews and articles for
Commonweal. Five years later, when I returned to the magazine as executive editor, I asked him to become
a regular columnist .
Actually I also asked him to consider joining the staff in New York.
He cheerfully and instantly brushed off the offer, content with his life
in Springfield, Illinois, married to his high-school sweetheart, the
father of two young children—and anyway wasn’t New York City Babylon?
What
Commonweal could not do, John’s evolving faith did. In
December 1984, he informed readers that he had become a member of the
Orthodox Church, “the result of some twenty-one years of moving in that
direction. When I first discovered Orthodoxy I found that I had no
doctrinal disagreements with it, whereas I did with Catholicism…. Over
the years I found in Orthodox spirituality and liturgy something which I
could find nowhere else, something I need…. This was not a matter of
leaving Catholicism, which I love, but a matter of becoming Orthodox. If
it were not for the existence of Orthodoxy I would gladly remain a
Catholic until death.”
Several years later John first decided to pursue the study of
Orthodox theology at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in Yonkers, New York, and
finally chose to be ordained. Only in America: An Irish-American, Roman
Catholic, Notre Dame graduate from the Midwest ends up as pastor of St.
Nicholas Albanian Orthodox Church in Queens, New York.
Throughout that assignment and others, John continued his writing, three hundred and forty-one articles for
Commonweal over
four decades as well as occasional articles for other journals and four
short books. In 2000, his wife Regina became the administrator of
Commonweal’s three-year study of American Catholics in the Public Square.
John’s columns were gems of the plain style: conversational,
first-person, direct, without elaborate metaphors or clever categories.
He had a rare capacity for conversation, and especially for listening.
In his columns, he introduced people from his pastoral experience or
from the rest of his everyday life: “I once knew a man who….” Or, “A
woman who sat next to me on a four-hour bus ride….” Where many
columnists dwell on the world’s wholesale miseries, John went retail:
the loss of a loved one, or of love, or of faith, or of purpose.
“On the day the news reported rumors that Jerry Brown and Linda
Ronstadt were heading for a nudist colony in Africa,” he began one of
his early columns, “I met a man who had left his job as mechanic in a
small town and moved, with his family, to be near the hospital where his
twelve-year-old son was being treated for a brain tumor. He had no
money and his car was stalled. We were going to get it started again
with jumper cables…. He was patient nearly beyond belief…. At the center
of his life was this heartbreaking, perhaps hopeless thing.” And, yes,
there was a connection between the attention we give, often of
necessity, to “newsmakers” like Jerry Brown and the man patiently trying
to cope with a wrenching reality.
John wrote about our self-delusions, especially of control and
autonomy, and our ways of propping them up: therapeutic clichés, media
clichés, conservative clichés, liberal clichés. A favorite theme was the
confusion of faith with certainty. Believers could turn anything,
including Jesus, into an idol to be manipulated to serve their
self-interested purposes. Nonbelievers could equate all faith with
fundamentalism and ignore their own certitudes.
John’s columns—at least in the years before the editors put tighter
word limits on columnists—were spiked with hilarity. Writing of appeals
to “get in touch with one’s feelings,” John reported that he had tried,
but “they were out so I left a note.” Lamenting the mental befogging of
our culture, John remembered a university job repairing academic jargon
“that came by our desks by the barrelful.” A proposal for a program
called “Human Development Counseling” bravely announced, “The process of
human development, according to [recent studies], can be both
constructive and destructive.”
“I wrote in the margin,” John recalled, “‘Let’s make sure this
knowledge doesn’t get into the wrong hands.’” He also decided, “I should
think about quitting.”
For many years after their son and daughter had moved to the other
coast, Regina brought hors d’oeuvres and John his storytelling and
infectious laughter to our dinners at Thanksgiving, Christmas,
and—thanks to the difference with the Orthodox liturgical
calendar—almost every Easter. Once he and Regina retired to the
Northwest to be closer to children and grandchildren and live on their
modest resources, John and I marked all those holidays with hour-long
phone calls trading hilarious illustrations of the Downfall of
Humankind.
That hilarity was streaked with melancholy, however. In an unusually
personal column last July, John mentioned his serious childhood illness
and the deaths in his family that had contributed to a prolonged “mix of
depression, anger, fear, and anxiety…. I lived as if I were a clenched
fist.” Ultimately he was blessed with a recognition of his own
brokenness, one that it wasn’t in his control to mend.
“You have to turn from yourself to something outside yourself, hoping
it will be gracious,” he wrote. “This is where the Christian story
matters so much—we see in Jesus what the God who called us forth from
nothingness is like. I know now that I can’t be without him.”
He isn’t.
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