#dechardin

Farewell to Father McShane.

The Fordham community is trying to wrap our heads around the retirement of our 32nd President Joseph M. McShane, S.J. Here is a personal story I hope does not get lost in the weeks that are leading up to his final time in office.

I once wrote an article about the French Jesuit and Philosopher Pierre Teilhard deChardin. He is buried in Hyde Park, N.Y. where Father McShane spent 2 years as a seminarian. I sent him a copy. Below is the letter I received in return. It was not only so gracious and unexpected, but a wonderful insight into the man the university is losing.

AN ADMITTED THIEF-FOR A GOOD CAUSE

Since it can’t hurt him now, you might want to read it. It reveals that as a young seminarian, he admits to stealing:

I went to the cemetery … to place a home-made bouquet of daffodils that we stole from the novitiate garden on the great man’s grave.

Well, I have kept it framed in my home office for all these many years. (See below.)

Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.