“Wipe that smirk off your face!” This shocking command came from my new English teacher in senior year of high school. It was a rude introduction to Father Francis Desmond who had joined the faculty that year to teach English to me and the twenty other boys in my class.
This rebuke hit with special force because it came from a man who was not only a teacher but also a priest. Almost 60 years later, I still remember the sting of that authority’s angry rebuke, a charge that felt like a slap in my face. If I had been smirking, I was unaware of it.
My recollection has taken inspiration from a short essay in which Robert Coles, the now-retired Harvard psychiatrist, recalls an experience that he had in the fifth grade of a Boston grammar school. The essay, “Here and Now We Are Walking Together,” appears in the newly published Best American Spiritual Writing 2004, and portrays his teacher as a formidable authority.
He still finds value in Miss Avery’s lesson: “We should pay attention to others, as well as ourselves.” This moral trumped the fear he felt in the presence of his teacher, who wielded her ruler like a rod of iron, sometimes slamming it on the desks of her students.
Fortunately, I soon discovered the softer side of my teacher. Even as an adolescent not brimming with self-confidence, I had the good sense to approach Father Desmond after class to plead innocence. In the face of my protest, he backed down and seemed to recognize his mistake.
Only a few weeks later, he and I had become friends and, in company with two or three fellow students, spent much time together. Our friendship, however, was not built only on compatibility; we soon discovered another bond – conspiracy. In league with Father Desmond, we became conspirators against the school’s administrators.
He would feed us inside information about the deviousness of the headmaster and his chief faculty assistant, people whose policies we disapproved. Our chief complaint was the way they overemphasized sports to the detriment of academic standards.
If this makes me and my co-conspirators seem, not mere rebels but also adolescent snots, that impression is not altogether incorrect. But, because of having a faculty ally, our small band of students had power that transcended our tender years.
The closest the headmaster, a monsignor, ever came to recognizing our rebellion happened one day when I was on the field in my baseball uniform. He sidled over to me and said: “Griffin, you are getting too big for your britches,” exact words that still reside in my head, some six decades later. The headmaster did not dare specify what he meant but he did not have to.
I feel thankful for these memories from adolescence and often ponder their meaning. This activity of memory and meaning seems to me beautifully appropriate for later life. In this connection I value the words of Sven Birkerts written in the Boston University publication Bostonia in 2002.
“Those of us lucky to live long enough, I now believe, discover that we have two lives: the original life, in which we first encounter the world, register the powerful shaping forces of family and our various relationships−loves, friendships, and antagonisms−and have the experiences that pattern us for later events; then the second life, the main work of which is to distill and absorb the meanings of the first.”
So here I am again, trying to distill and absorb the meanings of my first and original life. This activity always proves valuable as part of the ongoing drama of self- discovery. Though often played out on a small stage, this drama reveals large implications for the great search.
About the incidents portrayed here, I can draw from them personal characteristics that remain in late life. Skepticism about authority runs through my years, except for a period in which I became excessively pious.
I now regret that time of lapsing from my native doubting about those who hold power. It was a kind of abdication of my native reluctance to accept what others say or do when they have authority over me. An attitude of critical appraisal belongs to my inner being and I am glad that I reclaimed it again.
The last four years of the Bush administration have done me the service of raising to a new height my distrust of the powerful. As I write these words, the awe-full results of the election are still not known but I hope not to have four more years of such instruction.
As for Father Desmond, he was more than a co-conspirator. He was also a man of considerable intellectual ability and he stirred in me a love of English language and literature that has been a resource for all of my life since. I feel thankful that our friendship managed to survive that first classroom encounter.
Richard Griffin