and yet.
It’s been a weird week, painted with a dull pallor of grief, as my own face was by far off memories and the death of a far off man.
On the bedtime scroll last Saturday night, as is my wont - my little dog settling in beside me under the covers, when I come upon a town I used to live in trending on Twitter.
Click. And then his name. Followed by his photo. Someone I hadn’t thought about in years. I sit here writing this unable to recall even the last time I saw him. I could have sworn I’d seen a photo of him the last time I thumbed through my childhood photos. I checked yesterday. Not a one.
And yet here I am. A radical queer, trans outlaw writing about grieving for a Catholic priest.
His name was David O’Connell. He was an Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles at the time of his murder.
I knew him as Father Dave. The associate pastor of the church and school I attended as a kid. He was a young man then, newly ordained, enthusiastic and always smiling, taking joy in making all of us laugh. He’d play around when he came to visit our class, squeezing himself into one of our second grade desks, pretending he was stuck and then walking with it around his waist. Or barging into p.e. class during square dancing week, to Miss Nava’s irritation, demanding she play the chicken dance, his face flushing redder than its already Irish red as he performed the silly steps with us, laughing merrily. I’d already checked out, at seven years old finding such displays juvenile, beneath me.
He was among those from the church who would visit my mother when she was especially ill, sometimes to give her communion, sometimes just to give comfort. Comfort for her, comfort for me in the way he would ask how I was doing or what I was working on if I happened to be doing homework at the dining room table. He would come to the hospital, at the end. He must have been at the funeral, but I don’t remember that, really.
Father Dave spoke to us often of the poor, the less fortunate, the lonely, the sick and the beauty in caring for them - in his sermons, visits to class, during school wide masses on Holy days. He put his words into action - those Sundays spent selling bread from the Justice Bakery after mass, trips every two months to an orphanage in the hills of Tijuana, leading a caravan of cars filled with donations of food, of clothes, and of toys. From what I’ve read this week, Bishop Dave, as he was recently known, continued that work he began at St. Raymond’s.
Looking back I can’t say that I bought in to the whole fairy magic aspect of church, even as a kid. What did resonate and what I took with me when I left at fifteen, was Jesus’ rather social justice oriented ethos - don’t judge, love one another; and those actions with Father Dave. I’ve reflected on this in the days and years since - at Occupy Los Angeles, blocking the freeway for Mike Brown, running the Alt-Reich out of town, far and many miles away from those days, from the man he became, from the fairy magic religion we were raised in - and yet.