We had a rather contemporary relationship, Greg and I. We first encountered each other on Twitter, years ago, then migrated into the same private chat groups, texting each other, and occasionally engaging in lengthier exchanges of ideas by email. I first met Greg in the flesh when he was in town for one of his middle son’s baseball tournaments. He came over to our house and we spent the afternoon together on my back porch. I think we spoke about the history of Catholicism in the South and the hurdles that black Catholics had to overcome not just in Southern society at large but in the Church too. It was a subject he was quite passionate about. Something else I particularly remember about that afternoon was how well my two youngest sons took to him immediately. I have two photos of Greg at my house during that visit. In one picture, my son, Matthew, who was maybe three at the time, is sitting in Greg’s lap next to our dining table. I remember that Matthew led Greg around our backyard, holding him by a finger, eager to show him the parameters of his little world at the time. The other picture shows my son John, a few years older than Matthew, sitting right next to Greg on the porch swing, grinning. Greg is holding a beer in one hand and has his other arm around John. My children aren’t generally so comfortable around strangers. But you have to understand, Greg was a gentle soul, with a soft voice, and a kind and reassuring demeanor. That is the Greg that I knew.
Greg and I didn’t always agree on everything. My preoccupations were not always his preoccupations. While we were only a few months apart in age and shared much in common, we were from rather different worlds. He was a Canadian and an academic while I was a Southerner and a corporate lawyer. Greg was drawn to Catholicism through the Second Vatican Council, the Ressourcement movement, and the work of Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar. I was an incorrigible reactionary, liturgical traditionalist, and cultural pessimist. I sometimes thought he was naïve. I think he sometimes thought I was pigheaded. But Greg never lost his temper with me. He never lashed out or sought to hurt me with a cutting remark—the sort of thing all too common in any online exchange of ideas. Greg was a man genuinely invested in dialogue as a centering life principle. If you are unfamiliar with his book, Man of Dialogue: Thomas Merton’s Catholic Vision, I highly recommend it. It is the best place to find Greg’s articulation of his own vision of dialogue as a spiritual ideal or moral obligation through the life and writing of Thomas Merton. Greg was himself, however, the best embodiment of his ideals. It was in interacting with him personally that you best encountered what it means to be open to someone else’s thoughts and opinions, however much they may differ from your own, to reserve judgment, and to focus on the commonalities that draw you together rather than the differences that divide. It was the petty injustices that grow in the hothouse of abstract ideology that always bothered him the most, the sorts of bitter hostilities we all seem to unleash on individual, private targets in payment for our speculative, public grievances.
I was pleased when Greg took a new position at Emory University in Atlanta as the executive director of Emory’s Aquinas Center after having served for years as a professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Bellarmine University in Kentucky. With Greg in Atlanta, I had hoped that we would have more opportunities to spend time together in person. Unfortunately, life would take an unexpected turn for Greg. One of the ironies of the social media age is how intimately connected we sometimes feel with the day-to-day lives of the friends who live in our phones. I remember Greg posting messages in our chat group while he was at the E.R. one evening, suffering from intense abdominal pain. They thought it was his gallbladder, he said. A fairly typical, if irritating, health issue for a middle-aged man. But it was something much worse. Over the next several months, Greg kept us up to date on his treatment, his rounds of chemotherapy, radiation, trips to Minneapolis and Boston.
The last few months of Greg’s life were nothing short of remarkable. I don’t recall his words exactly, but he said something to me along these lines—that for most of our lives, those of us who consider ourselves Christians often wear our faith loosely. It remains a kind of comforting abstraction, a cultural ritual, or an ideological commitment. The gravity of confronting one’s own mortality brings into focus the reality of what we believe. The practice of the Christian faith is nothing other than the preparation for death, and in that moment when death faces us, we must decide whether we really believe what we profess and to embrace it accordingly.
I can only describe Greg’s peaceful demeanor as he confronted the end of his life as heroic. He was never bitter. He was never angry or self-pitying. His only concern was for his wife, Kim, and their three boys. Greg’s own words better capture the tenor of his thoughts over the last few months than anything I can say. It was on Ash Wednesday earlier this year that Greg told us: “I’m called to walk the path I’m on. It’s a path of suffering, it’s a path of asceticism (whether I want the asceticism or not), but most importantly it’s a path which Jesus walks with me. It is a path that is surprisingly marked by periods of unexpected graces and even joy.” Even in the depths of suffering, Greg admonished us that “beauty and love necessarily always break through and we simply have to incline our hearts to them.” May we all incline our hearts toward beauty and love, like Greg, as we face suffering in this life, in joyful expectation of the final restoration of all things.
