Scripture readings: Daniel 12:1-3; Revelation 21:1-5, 6-7; John 12:23-28
A Patient Man of the Soil
From his childhood, Columkille was a patient man of the soil who knew his golf greens and flowers well. Tiger Woods was truly fortunate not to have been born in Massachusetts in 1943. That meant fifteen years later, Tiger never had to tee off against high school caddy Brian Stephen O’Grady. The history of the PGA, which Columkille would later follow with keen interest and patent “insider” insight, would have certainly been very different. But Brian switched tracks from the possibility of glory on the PGA Tour to seek a more substantial type of glory – not for himself – but to glorify God by devoting himself to the Passionist religious community and priestly ministry.
When he arrived at Holy Cross Prep Seminary in 1961 to begin college, Brian joined Fr. Jim Gillette and myself who had already been there for four years. Even though Brian was a “new kid on the block” I testify that neither we nor our twenty other classmates beat him up. How could you pick on someone who had such a booming laugh that it shook his whole frame while his Irish face turned red? His voice never rose much in volume, but his self-deprecating humor and dry wit made him comfortable company, if you gave him the time to make his point.
But I think Brian learned some of his greatest lessons for life from nurturing flowers. He knew what it meant for seeds to go into the ground and die, that they might be transformed into a rose of great beauty. Time and much care were necessary for the flower to come to maturity. Rose petals cannot be rushed to open before their time. Wisdom in the soul requires many days and years of patient listening to the Spirit of God and the ways of God’s children. Young Brian learned that even the prickly thorns on the rose’s stem have their own positive role to play. They enable climbing roses on the garden wall to hold on for dear life to the intertwined vines of ivy and honeysuckle. Sometimes in life what looks like a “thorn” is really a safety hook keeping us intertwined with God, our source of authentic life.
An Apostolic Man of the Gospel
In 1963, Brian became known as Columkille of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, a novice in the Congregation of the Most Holy Cross and Passion. Like St. Paul the Apostle, writing at the beginning of the Letter to the Romans, Columkille sensed very early in life that he was meant to be “a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God…the gospel about his Son, descended from David according to the flesh, but established as Son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness through resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Rom1:1-4). After profession of vows in Pittsburgh and seven more years of study in Scranton PA, Jamaica NY and Union City NJ, Columkille was ordained priest forever in 1971. Our little class of three took a six-week summer course at Catholic University then disbanded for adventures that would take us all in different directions, even other continents. We never lived together in the same place again.
Like St. Paul of the Cross preaching throughout Italy, Columkille would stay in his home country totally devoted to the Ministry of the Word in a variety of ways. He would travel at times from parish to parish, conducting missions of renewal in the busy post-Vatican II era. Most of his preaching apostolate for twenty-seven years was carried on as a valuable member of Passionist retreat teams in Pittsburgh PA, Shelter Island, NY, North Palm Beach FL and West Springfield, MA. He was a dependable, cooperative team person who knew that the greatest witness to the retreatants was precisely the way the Passionists and their team associates ministered together. He knew the poverty of Appalachia firsthand from his parochial ministry in West Virginia. His final active assignment in Massachusetts gave him an opportunity that neither St. Paul the Apostle, nor St. Paul of the Cross ever had. Columkille served as the regular Mass celebrant for the Passionist-founded “Chalice of Salvation” which is still televised live each week to a loyal audience of the diocese of Springfield and western Massachusetts. These fervent viewers looked forward to Col’s presence in their homes this way, and made their concern for him known when critical illness suddenly ended his TV ministry.
A Man of the Passion of Jesus
In our present Passionist Constitutions, we find a brief, but powerful, sentence which sums it all up for me. “We seek the unity of our lives and our apostolate in the Passion of Jesus.” (Const. 5.) Perhaps when we are young, healthy and involved in multiple opportunities for sharing our talents, we might give more attention to the apostolic focus in that sentence. Whatever we do apostolically, we strive to keep alive the Memory of the Lord’s Passion, both its traditional first-century roots as well as the contemporary passion of the “crucified” of today’s world. But when we personally suffer an abrupt physical setback which impedes our vigorous apostolic activity, we could find it very disconcerting to make sense of our lives anymore. How would you do with that development if it happened to you tomorrow?
Columkille was struck down by a massive stroke on December 31, 1998 while celebrating Mass, sailing happily through his three decade-long apostolic preaching ministry. In an instant, he was confronted with the need to make sense of his life – not just for a day, or a year till he recuperated – but for the rest of his life as it stretched before him from that sobering vantage point. He was forced to do something that most of us only face in our 80s and 90s, to find the unity of his whole life in the Passion of Jesus when his life had apparently run into an immovable wall of lost opportunities.
Since January 1, 1999, though limitations curtailed most of his public ministry, Col’s interior life was steeped in the poverty of spirit inspired by Christ himself. “For you know the gracious act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though Christ was rich, he became poor for our sakes that we might become rich.” (2 Cor 8:9). Truly rich in so many ways naturally speaking, Columkille found in Christ his strength in transforming his poverty of the body into spiritual wealth that endures. Like a rose whose time has come, that poverty of spirit began to bloom. But like the flowers Columkille tended, it would take time and would not be mature right away.
Many of our devoted Passionists here at Hartford since 1999, especially Ed Hall, Conrad Federspiel, Gregory Paul, William Drotar and other members of the community helped him generously. In these recent years of skilled nursing care, Terry Kristofak and Sister Catherine Mary Clarke, walked closely with Columkille through the multiple challenges he faced. The staff of Monsignor Bojnowski Manor in New Britain was extraordinary in their faithful attention to Col in these last critical months.
A few months ago, Columkille said to Sister Catherine Mary. “I said ‘yes’ to the Passion of Christ when I made my vows and now I should consider this time of my life a privilege.” I think this is what it sounds like when a person has genuinely accepted the paschal shape of his or her own life, when the passion and death of Jesus helps me to make sense of my unique experience. As Sr. Catherine Mary says, “That thought seemed to be what he really strove for when he was really able to search for some answers.”
“I am troubled now. Yet what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour. ‘Father, glorify thy name.’ Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it and will glorify it again’” (John 12:27-28).
What Brian O’Grady the gardener had learned as a youth bore fruit now fifty years later. The first stroke brought Columkille serious permanent physical limitations and a persistent psychic burden. They had become a “thorn in the flesh” which, in a paradoxical way, forced him to hang on for dear life to the once-crucified now-risen Lord in whom alone Columkille could find authentic life and healing for his spirit, if not for the body. Eventually, he must have heard deep inside, what St. Paul the Apostle also heard from the Lord. “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor 12:9)
A Man who Shared his Wealth even when He Seemed to be Poor
Columkille was rich but sickness made him face poverty in ways that none of us chooses. At the beginning of one’s religious life, we can never know what the vow of poverty will really mean. We usually define it in terms of simplicity and putting aside the search for material wealth. But there are other forms of “wealth” – the ability to share the fruits of one’s education, health that offers us freedom to move around easily for 60, 70, even 80 years, many friendships that renew us when we are discouraged, and other forms of wealth too many to mention. But the unpredictable zigzags of life and the passage of time intervene so that, eventually, we are all more honestly defined by the way we handle the poverty of our limitations.
Throughout his life, Columkille was rich in talent, wisdom, humor, and zeal for God’s people. But even during the days of his long illness when he seemed to be most poor, Col shared his “wealth” with all who visited him –
his appreciation and knowledge of horticulture, once tending the flowerbeds in our various houses even till the time when he could only reach the orchids on the window sill on the Foley Hall corridor from his wheel chair:
his empathy with the common man whose folk hero world revolves more around Saturday afternoon Nascar races than the high jinks of Hollywood celebs;
his wholehearted laughter, which came from a heart free from pride;
his insight and compassion for human frailty, which was the fruit of countless hours in private conferences, and in the ministry of the sacrament of reconciliation for weekend retreatants in a parlor just a few steps from this chapel;
his thoughtful interior mood, somewhat shy in the presence of more boisterous verbal people, but warmhearted and recognized by classmates and fellow religious who communed with him in the things that meant most, especially in the throes of his illness;
finally, his parting priestly blessing, which he would give when you requested it, words of benediction flowing from one who knew the Lord intimately;
With St. Augustine, we know that “we are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.” The songs of Revelation inspire us to look beyond the present horizon of limitations to that other horizon, that of the New Jerusalem where “there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, for the old order has passed away…” We thank God for all that Columkille shared with us. We entrust him in peace to the God whom he loved, and to the Lord Jesus whom he followed even to the cross. May the Lord grant him eternal rest.
- Paul Zilonka, C.P.
Donations can be made in Father Columkille O’Grady’s memory to the Passionist Retirement Fund, 526 Monastery Pl, Union City, N.J.
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