Chapter One
Frat Boy
(1978-79)
If you had stopped in Durham, North Carolina, on a Friday night
in 1979 and walked across the green lawns of Duke University,
past the gothic buildings and the towering cathedral, under the stone
arches, across the quad, and through Kappa Sigma’s wooden door
into the din of the never-ending fraternity party, you would have
found me-the life of the party, in the center of the throng of men
and women drinking, eating, singing, and dancing-getting the
beer-chugging contest under way and tossing pints down the hatch.
My record: thirty-two in one night.
At the time, it seemed like fun. But the hangovers! They lasted for
days. Such was the life of the best and the brightest, the cream of the
crop, the spoiled, wealthy frat boy. I arrived at Duke, in January 1978,
much more temperate. I spent my first semester learning the ropes
and finding my way around campus. People at Duke were friendly
but serious, focused, and smart. I decided early on to sign up with the
professors who had the best reputations, and whatever subject I ended
up having the most credits in would be the subject I would declare as
my major. I ended up majoring in African-American history.
Duke didn’t allow juniors and seniors to live in campus dorms. To
stay on campus, you had to move into a fraternity house; otherwise,
you had to move off campus and rent an apartment in Durham. The
autumn of my sophomore year, my roommate Doug and I made the
rounds of the frat houses and attended the weekend rush parties. We
decided on Kappa Sigma. In January 1979, we moved in as pledges,
and the partying began in earnest.
Kappa Sigma made John Belushi’s Animal House seem like kindergarten.
I studied all day, spent hours at the piano, and stayed up
late into the next morning doing more than my share of drinking. I
don’t know when I ever slept.
The fraternity brothers treated us pledges as lackeys. We had to
jump through hoops to get every fraternity brother’s signature in our
pledge books, a process that lasted the whole semester. To earn a signature,
we had to fulfill some demeaning task for the brothers: clean their
rooms, wash their cars, type their papers, or fetch tennis balls during
their matches. They ordered us around and called us names, and we obediently
complied-up to a point. The pledges appointed me “Secretary
of War,” and my job was to strategize battle against the brothers. Under
my command we waged mischief and mayhem, risking demerits and
at times expulsion. Still the brothers held the upper hand, gathering us
pledges once a month for an evening of humiliation and abuse, lining us
up against the wall for hours and calling us every name in the book. Our
pledging ordeal ended with the infamous Hell Night, held in April. The
following week, with the necessary signatures collected-and grateful to
be alive-we were blindfolded, sworn to secrecy, and initiated.
I never did understand how my fraternity brothers managed to
do so well in school. They partied all night, every night and still got
straight As. Our fraternity had the highest grade point average on
campus. We had a file cabinet full of stock term papers, available to
anyone who wanted to copy them, but that doesn’t entirely explain
why the brothers were so successful. They were hard partying, hard
drinking, hard studying, hardworking, and brilliant. When I was still
a pledge, a senior frat brother reproached me for being insouciant.
Insouciant? What did that mean? Who were these guys? Today, most
of them are CEOs, lawyers, bankers, and doctors, some of them millionaires.
One uses a private jet.
The most fascinating of all was Paul Farmer. He came from a large
family that lived on a houseboat in Florida. Paul was a flat-out genius.
A premed student who also majored in anthropology, Paul wrote his
mother every day, composed theater and book reviews every week for
the Duke newspaper, The Chronicle, and produced displays for the
main entrance to Perkins Library, one of the largest in the country.
Each evening he hosted marathon parties in his rooms for dozens of
students. It seemed that Paul never studied, yet he earned straight A’s.
He went on to Harvard Medical School, became a leading researcher
there, and founded a clinic for the poor in Haiti. His example inspires
countless other doctors to serve the third world poor. His story was
told in the best-selling book, Mountains beyond Mountains: The Quest
of Dr. Paul Farmer. He has become our own Albert Schweitzer. But
even back then in college, we were in awe of him.
* * *
In those days, I pondered three possible careers. I could become a
newspaper publisher like my father, his father, and his grandfather or
a lawyer like my high school friends Chas and Mark. Mostly, though,
I wanted to be a rock star.
My friends still laugh at my grandiose ambition, but I was serious.
I wanted to compose my own songs, record as a solo artist, and move to
Los Angeles and live like Jackson Browne or James Taylor. I had been
playing the piano seriously since I was six and had taken up the guitar
at ten. At Duke, I spent a lot of time in their new music building, with
its more than forty music studios, two performance spaces, recording
studio, and extensive music library. Years earlier, one of my brothers and
I had built a primitive recording studio in our basement by connecting
tape players and attaching microphones to them. He played drums and
bass guitar; I played piano and acoustic guitar and sang.
At Duke I studied classical piano, learning my way around
Beethoven, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, and Brahms. I spent four hours
a day practicing. I also played pop music and wrote my own songs. I
loved the Beatles and the Beach Boys and all the singer-songwriters
of the 1970s-Billy Joel, Jackson Browne, Elton John, James Taylor,
Dan Fogelberg, and Graham Nash-and I tried to write like them.
After a few months, I had several dozen good songs, and in the
midst of my busy class schedule and crazy fraternity life, I drove off
one night to a recording studio about two hours west of Raleigh. It
was an unimpressive building, its interior walls lined with orange
shag carpeting. But it was filled with the latest musical recording
equipment, and there in the center of the studio was a magnificent
grand piano. I recorded seven or eight songs, handling all the parts
myself. Afterward, my friend Margaret and I bought a bottle of
wine, and stayed up late in my fraternity room listening to the tapes.
The experience of recording my own music was one of the most
exciting of my life. That night, I dreamt of becoming a successful
singer-songwriter.
It was through my love of music that I befriended one of the most
influential people in my life, the legendary jazz pianist Mary Lou
Williams. During my time at Duke, she was artist in residence, and
her jazz classes were the most popular on campus. I signed up, and
on the first day of class, nearly a hundred of us crowded nervously in
the seashell auditorium where the orchestra rehearsed. Down below
in the center was a gleaming black grand piano. Mary Lou was late.
When she finally walked in, the room became quiet. She was a big
woman with dark skin and black hair. She was dressed in black, and
pinned to her dress was a large black papier-mâché rose. Without saying
a word, she ambled toward the piano, looked around the room,
and threw us a smile. Then she sat down and started to play. We were
instantly mesmerized.
Her story is just as extraordinary as her music. She started playing
piano at the age of three and joined a jazz tour at twelve. She
played with Duke Ellington when she was sixteen. She joined Andy
Kirk’s band, Twelve Clouds of Joy, in the 1930s, leaving in the 1940s
to settle in Harlem, where she played at every well-known jazz club.
She counted Billie Holiday and Dizzy Gillespie among her best
friends and appeared with Dizzy at the Newport Jazz Festival. Plus,
she composed and arranged music. She wrote for Louis Armstrong,
Tommy Dorsey, and Benny Goodman, compiling a body of work
that included more than 350 pieces. At the height of her career, she
performed three movements of her classic Zodiac Suite with the New
York Pops Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.
Then, in the mid-1950s, she converted to Catholicism and gave
up music. She decided not to have a family but to spend the rest of
her life in contemplative prayer and humble service to the poor. Her
musician friends were stunned. But at St. Ignatius Loyola Church on
Park Avenue, where she attended daily Mass, she met an astute Jesuit
who convinced her to return to music as a way to serve people and
inspire them to love one another. So she scored a Catholic Mass with
jazz music that became the first jazz Mass performed at St. Patrick’s
Cathedral. Every year she performed for Dorothy Day at the Catholic
Worker farm in New Jersey. All the while, she continued to pray for
several hours each day.
“Jazz is love,” she told us that first day of class. “You have to feel
the love in the music. It will make you into a more loving person
and bring joy into your life.” We were beguiled. Through her music,
Mary Lou taught us jaded Duke students about the spiritual life. She
imparted love through boogie-woogie.
I wanted to learn from Mary Lou, so I went up to her after class
one day, introduced myself, and asked if she would give me private
lessons. She agreed on the spot.
For several months, I took the bus each week to her house, on the
outskirts of Durham, where we sat on a small bench before her modest
upright and together played jazz. Her hands stretched well over an
octave. She taught me the finer points of syncopation and the emotion
behind the diminished seventh chord. She showed me how to make
my left hand lope along on bass while my right jingled some kind of
melody. She tried to teach me improvisation. She would play a riff and
then ask me to repeat it. I would try but never quite get it right.
I treasured those hours with Mary Lou, who became a true friend
to me. One day, she presented me with a jazz piece she’d written for
me. Her love, joy, and sense of wonder touched me deeply. Even then,
early in my own spiritual formation, I recognized that this woman
was filled with the Holy Spirit. And although it was her music that
drew me, it was her holiness that captured me and set me spinning.
* * *
Each May as the school year came to an end, all the Duke fraternities
and sororities spent a wild week at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
When finals ended in the spring of 1979, I headed off to the party.
I remember only parts of it. We drank all night and slept all day on
the beach. On one of those nights, my friend Digger and I drank ourselves
sick on Schnapps. Later, the temperature dropped, and chilly
strong winds blew in from the ocean. By the time I returned home
to Bethesda, Maryland, for the summer, I had developed a bad case
of bronchitis, and the doctor ordered prolonged bed rest. I ended up
in bed for over a month. My brothers were off at camp or at work,
my father downtown at the National Press Club. My mother was in
Baltimore teaching at Johns Hopkins. Alone at home, I faced a long
summer.
I also faced myself. Lying around gave me the space to reflect on
my life. In searching the house for something to read, I came upon
my father’s copy of Arthur Schlesinger’s massive biography of Bobby
Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and His Times. Once I opened it, I couldn’t
put it down. As I read about the assassinations of Robert Kennedy
and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the emotions I felt as a boy when
those events occurred rushed over me like a tidal wave.
To be honest, I was much more interested in Bobby than in John
Kennedy, because after his brother’s death, Bobby Kennedy clearly
changed. As Jack Newfield wrote in Robert Kennedy: A Memoir, Bobby
Kennedy underwent an inner transformation that began with searing
grief and soul-searching prayer and led to an unusual sense of compassion
for the poor. He took up poetry, pondered the eternal questions,
and began to expand his horizons. Eventually, he stood with César
Chávez and the United Farm Workers, attended Dr. King’s funeral,
and spoke out vehemently against the Vietnam War. He talked about
the need for justice in a way that few politicians had ever done before,
or have since.
On the night of Dr. King’s assassination, April 4, 1968, Bobby
Kennedy spoke to a crowd of African-Americans in inner-city
Indianapolis. After he told the stunned crowd that Dr. King had been
killed, he spoke extemporaneously about the need for compassion:
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice
for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that
effort….
In this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps
well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction
we want to move in. For those of you who are black … you
can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for
revenge….
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did,
to understand and to comprehend and to replace that violence,
that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land,
with … compassion and love….
What we need in the United States is not division … not
hatred … not violence … but love and wisdom, and compassion
toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those
who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or
they be black….
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so
many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make
gentle the life of this world.
The next day, in Cleveland, Kennedy gave a clear denunciation of violence.
“What has violence ever accomplished?” he asked. “What has
it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by an assassin’s
bullet…. Violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and
only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from
our soul.”
As I lay there with a bad case of bronchitis blues, Kennedy’s words
flowered within me. He awakened in me a passion for life and peace.
I could identify with him because we both came from white, upper-class,
well-educated, ambitious Catholic families. But now we had
something else in common: I aspired to reach the same sort of inner
transformation that he had experienced between his brother’s assassination
and his own death. Now, a decade later, Bobby Kennedy
was drawing me to a larger vision of life, to a wider compassion for
humanity that he had edged toward by 1968.
And all of a sudden, I could see. I could see not only the immorality
of violence, but also its impracticality. I could see the precariousness
of life. I could see again how precious life is. And there in bed I
made a clear decision to reject violence as best I could.
What most disturbed me was the injustice of it all. Bobby Kennedy,
the nation’s best and brightest, had died for declaring ideals of justice
and peace, as had Dr. King. What chance did anyone have to make
this country more just? How would anyone ever again offer honest
political leadership? Why even go to law school? Or seek a career in
politics, the media, or law? Why try to make a difference at all?
These questions only deepened with each biography I read of
Kennedy and Dr. King. The stories of their lives rocked my presuppositions
about life, work, purpose, and death. They turned my life
plans upside down and set me on an entirely new path.
Chapter Two
The Day of Conversion
(1979-80)
By the end of June I had recovered from bronchitis. To earn some
money for my junior year, I took the first job I could find, on
a construction crew. I got the grunt work: picking up trash, digging
ditches, pouring cement, raking yards, and chopping down trees.
As the school year approached, I decided that I would not apply
to law school. Nor would I go into the family publishing business. My
heart and mind were restless, and I needed to set out on a new search.
This was hard, and it made my return to classes unsettling. I continued
composing and recording, but I didn’t know where I was headed.
Even my musical hopes were in jeopardy. I joined the student
association that organized concerts on campus, and the first concert
that year featured Livingston Taylor, who was James Taylor’s younger
brother and had a hit song on the radio that year. After the show, I
found him alone in his dressing room and introduced myself as an
aspiring singer-songwriter. Then I asked, “What advice do you have
for me about going professional?”
He sat down, looked me in the eye, and said, “Don’t do it. The
music industry is totally corrupt. It isn’t at all what people think. It’s
very difficult to make it. You have to travel endlessly and sell yourself
out. Don’t do it unless you absolutely have to, unless you have no other
choice.” I mumbled my thanks and walked out in shocked silence.
That Christmas, a musician friend, Bob, and I went to New York City
and left some cassettes of our music with Elektra/Asylum Records. As
I recall, they wrote us with interest, but neither of us pursued it.
Meanwhile, my class work grew more demanding. I was working
hard for several extraordinary history professors. One of them,
Anne Firor Scott, was a leading feminist historian. She taught
American social history and spent years studying the diaries of ordinary
Americans from the late 1700s. She copied dozens of them, had
them bound, and assigned them as our readings instead of textbooks.
The ordinary voices on those pages, written during the American
Revolution, sounded like those of any struggling person today, and I
was deeply moved by their humanity. But as I had during my bed rest
over the summer, I was struck by the mystery of death. Those voices
were long ago silenced. Where were they now? Were they alive in
some distant heaven? Had they vanished forever?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from A PERSISTENT PEACE
by JOHN DEAR
Copyright © 2008 by John Dear.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Loyola Press
Copyright © 2008
John Dear
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8294-2720-2
