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Posted: December 19
(Rome) Christmas is almost here, a time for giving and receiving gifts. Well, I got a wonderful gift a few weeks early. I went to the meeting of Jesuit provincials at Loyola to present the new movie described in the previous blog. Many of the provincials are now friends from my visits as I travel around the world, but one of them is an old friend going back over thirty years to my time studying theology in Berkeley, California. Father Bob Scullin and I were founding members of the Bobadilla House Community, the first of the student communities to do its own cooking rather than eating at the central cafeteria as had been the norm. Beyond cooking we also prayed together and met regularly each week for faith sharing. (A side note: Nicolas Bobadilla was one of the founding members of the Jesuits, along with Ignatius and Xavier, but he lost a key battle when he opposed the move of the new religious order into education, which he thought would compromise the mobility that the group prized so highly. He also had a big ego and frustrated his companions, but he is never honored by having his name given to a school or community. We waggishly undertook to right that wrong.)
I don't remember whether Bob was much of a cook, but he could really play the guitar. With nimble fingers he could embroider a melody and fill in the spaces between phrases with subtle runs. I was also a guitar player, but more on the line of providing a solid rhythm—very important for supporting liturgical music, which I did all through university studies and the "regency" years of teaching high school in Belize. But Bob was the real thing, and I knew my guitar playing was just a hobby in comparison. Now photography, that was different. I got more serious about photography and also began drawing during those years of theology. The animated film I did back then led directly to my going into design as my area of specialization in communication. I ended up studying in New York City, at Pratt Institute, and discovered that Bob was working at the same time on the Lower East Side as assistant pastor at Nativity Parish. And he was still playing guitar. He even showed me a copy of a song he had written about Ellis Island that had been published in a folk music magazine. It was wonderful to be able to spend time with him again, but that ended when I finished my studies and moved on, returning to my home province of Missouri, as he eventually returned to his home province of Detroit.
So Bob and I connected again at Loyola, and he gave me a present of his first CD of music, titled, "And It's So Clear." The cover photo is a black and white image of statues of musicians, made from wood scraps that washed up on the mud flats down by the Bay in Berkeley. He was pleased that I immediately recognized the image and we shared a laugh about the memory. The music is good. The Ellis Island song is on there, and lots of sterling guitar playing. Some of the songs are religious in theme, some more social like the one about Ellis Island or the one about the war in El Salvador.
"I hope these songs, some going back thirty years, capture some of the wonder, fear and hope that first captured me when I wrote them. In a way, they are all love songs, And they are all part of my ongoing conversation with Jesus," Bob wrote in the liner notes.
The CD is a great present. I am happy that Bob has continued following his passion and weaving it into his vocation, just as I am trying to do with painting. We both laughed that getting closer to sixty motivates you to finish some long-standing projects. Friendship, however, does not need finishing.
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