All photographs by David McMahon
SHOWING THE WAY TO GOD
Ninety-three years of life, seventy-four a Jesuit, sixty-one a priest, over thirty years teaching at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome; prolific writer, mentor to hundreds, widely loved friend and companion. Where can one begin and end in regard to the one known to us all as “Gerry”?
This will not be an obituary—rather an attempt to view his life in the light of the readings from Scripture that we have heard. It is very much drawn from the privilege of living with Gerry in the last decade of his life.
In one of the many homilies he preached in our domestic chapel at Parkville—all carefully scripted, none exceeding four minutes—Gerry remarked that it had long been his aim to “live biblically”. What he meant by “living biblically” was not immediately clear. Surely, of all people, he knew that the Bible stems from ancient times and cultures, to which we cannot return and inhabit.
So what did Gerry mean by “living biblically”? He had the good fortune that his time of theological formation preparatory to priesthood coincided with the early years of the Second Vatican Council. This meant that one thing that shaped his thought profoundly was the Council’s reappropriation of Scripture in the life of Catholic Church. To embrace this rediscovered biblical revelation and commit one’s life to its propagation was “to live biblically”.
Gerry’s early years were spent at the family’s large home, Rock Lodge, at Frankston. His parents, Frank and Joan, kept a hospitable table. Guests, including not a few of the great and good of the time, were many. Gerry told me that his father instructed the children, “Don’t just go up and greet the visitors. Engage them in conversation”. There was laid, perhaps, the foundation of Gerry’s lifelong openness to people and ideas: his hospitality of mind and heart, his eagerness to converse and discover what people were doing and what they found interesting. In the documents of Vatican II he found a similarly hospitable vision of the Church, inspired by the Bible. He devoted the long decades of his academic career to promoting and developing this vision, resisting attempts to wind it back, exploring new ways to validate it in Scripture and the theological tradition.
Gerry’s first and abiding love was for Scripture, especially the New Testament, for the study of which his classical studies at Melbourne University had so well prepared him. His move to Systematic Theology had its origins—appropriately for an O’Collins—on a golf course. Around the time he was due to be sent overseas for studies, his uncle James O’Collins, Bishop of Ballarat, was having a round of golf with the Jesuit provincial, Jeremiah Hogan. At one point, waiting for the group ahead to clear the green, the good bishop asked the provincial, “What is young Gerry going to study overseas?” On receiving the reply, “Scripture”, he retorted in characteristic bluff manner, “No, we don’t need Scripture scholars; send him to do theology”. And so Gerry moved to fundamental theology and the rest is history. But Gerry’s work in theology always rested on a firm Scriptural base. As Archbishop Mark Coleridge has remarked in a superb tribute:
He had the training of a systematic theologian but the instincts of a New Testament scholar; with the journalist’s ability to write accessibly and attractively, that was an unusual and potent combination.
You will have noted in the Scripture we have heard this morning the prominence of resurrection. Gerry was in every way a Resurrection person. In books and countless articles he mustered all his linguistic, exegetical, and indeed philosophical skill to defend and promote this central teaching of our faith.
He certainly would have resonated with what is possibly the earliest biblical statement of resurrection that we heard from the prophet Isaiah in the First Reading—not excluding the opening sentence about the Lord preparing “on this mountain a banquet of fine wines, of food rich and juicy, of fine strained wines”. Gerry liked his food and in particular a good drop of red. Above all, he would have endorsed the sense emerging from the passage that the Lord’s whole intention in our regard is to have us as honoured guests at the banquet of the Kingdom. His first strictly theological book was entitled—in the non-inclusive language of the time — Man and His New Hopes (1969). For him, as at the end of the Reading, “the Lord is the one in whom we have placed our hope”.
In books and articles Gerry returned again and again to the Easter stories in the gospels. If one of them, the appearance of the risen Lord to Mary Magdalene, features as our Gospel today, it does so for two reasons. First, it is an appearance to a woman. Gerry loved women and women loved Gerry. It didn’t matter whether it was the Princess Doria Pamphilj, his nieces, or the Vietnamese lady, Van, who cleaned his room; he was completely at ease with women and delighted in their company.
The second reason for choosing this story is that the woman in question is Mary Magdalene. Gerry devoted a number of studies to the possibility that Mary Magdalene—so prominent in the Passion and Resurrection episodes of the gospels—may have in fact been the first person to whom the risen Lord appeared and therefore the first witness to the resurrection, her fidelity, courage, and loving devotion rewarded in this way. The tradition of a first appearance to her may have suffered some eclipse because women’s witness enjoyed little credibility at the time.
Whatever about that, what Gerry would love about this scene is the delicacy and tenderness with which the risen Lord addresses Mary’s distraught love, rekindling her faith and hope at the calling of her name. If Jesus tells her not to keep clinging to him, it’s presumably because she has grasped him in a physical embrace, as of old. But now their relationship has to move to a new level. She has to let him go to the Father—as we have to let our loved ones, including now Gerry, go to the Father, to a new way of being, where we hope to join them.
Meanwhile, Jesus sends Mary on mission: to bring his message to “my brothers”, to be “apostle to the apostles”, as Gerry loved to note. Here he would have seen Mary Magdalene as the model of women’s leadership in the church, bringing, especially in our time, messages that the male leadership urgently needs to hear.
Finally, or, to be correct, in the middle, we have the Reading from St Paul. Paul’s letter to the Philippians was a favourite of Gerry’s. Principally perhaps because the Christ-hymn Paul quotes in chapter 2 (vv. 6–11) is so significant for early New Testament christology. But also, I suspect, because of the intimacy with which Paul addresses this beloved community, who, as far as we know, never gave him any trouble but simply surrounded him with affection and support.
Paul writes from a Roman prison, very likely facing sentence of death. The Philippians too have been suffering persecution. Yet his overall message is one of hope and joy:
Fill your minds with everything that is noble, pure, thought virtuous, worthy of love, honour, and praise.
This is not specifically Christian language. This is language from the best of the popular Stoic philosophy of the surrounding Greco-Roman world. It reflects conversation and dialogue with that world: the conversation that Gerry sought to initiate all his life.
The language also reflects the positive, welcoming disposition that all who met him found. I quote in this connection some words from one of our youngest Jesuits, Julian Butler, just now gone off to do theology in Boston:
Gerry wanted to see people at their best and his company allowed others to be so. He put us at ease and deftly averted any unpleasantness in conversation. He showed me a way of living with fidelity to God, generosity to others, and a sense of seeking ever what is good, true and beautiful.
Gerry was in every way a “resurrection” person. But resurrection presupposes death. Gerry did not turn away from the darker aspects of life. He counselled and accompanied with compassion many afflicted by suffering and failure. Prayers for sick or bereaved friends were constantly on his lips at our community Masses.
In these last months and weeks, we have seen him gradually stripped through frailty of so many things that gave him comfort, joy, and consolation: cinema, meals with friends, theological discourse. On the day before he died, those at his bedside heard just a grateful Nunc dimittis, and in the end there was an emptiness that only God could fill.
One of his latest books bears the title, The Beauty of Jesus Christ. Drawn from St Augustine, it states the love from which his many other loves were nourished.
All Gerry’s books are readable. Perhaps the most readable of all is this: Letters to Nevie. In it he writes, with respect to our Gospel today:
Nevie, let Jesus call you by your name. No one will ever say our name as beautifully as he does. When we hear him calling us by name, our lives can be changed for ever.
Gerry, we trust that you have heard the risen Lord calling you by name, to take you to the house of the Father, into the fullness of the Truth you so effectively served.
