Angels and Saints

The following is another lesson I garnered from Fr. Malcolm Willoughby, a wonderful priest and friend. It's about our very nature.

Quite often when someone dies we hear things like, 'Heaven needed another angel'. Yet the truth is that we don't become angels. Angels are beings entirely different from humans. They were created in their end form: they were angels right from the start. We were born human, which means we have to develop and grow. We, in the end, become something beyond what we are now, if we cooperate with God's will.

To be sure, we don't correct a grieving friend who makes such a remark during a time of loss. But we don't get wings. We are created in the Image of God, and have our own special place in creation. We don't get transformed into something which we are not. We become friends and brothers and sisters of Christ. We become Saints.

Well, Why Not?

Father Malcolm Willoughby, a former pastor of our parish at St. Dominic in Detroit and whom I've spoken of in the past, once offered during a conversation an idea I'd have never considered. "When bad things happen to someone, there's a tendency to ask, 'Why me?' Well, why not you?" he said. "Why shouldn't you be as subject to the awful things which can and do happen to others?"

He's right, of course. And, you'll notice, the question rarely gets asked when good things come along, as though the good might be seen as an entitlement and the bad an outrageous affront. Oh, and Fr. Willoughby made this point too as we talked, you don't say that to someone who is currently suffering from a death in the family, or a personal crisis of some sort. But the question, why me?, really doesn't have any value. It may be perfectly reasonable to feel that way when you're down. Yet just as you're not exempt from the good, you aren't protected from the bad either.

Father the baseball player, Father the priest

It's funny how in life there are times where a person or an event from your past comes back into your mind seemingly out of nowhere. Just this past weekend I found myself telling my son how Fr. Willoughby, a former pastor of our church (St. Dominic in Detroit, MI) used to drink cola warm. He believed that you tasted the flavors more fully with warm pop. For whatever reason, the story had simply 'popped' into my mind.

Then yesterday, an old friend from the parish called my mother to say that Father Willoughby had passed away on November 19.

I'm not intending to be maudlin nor am I trying for an 'aw, that's too bad' moment either. But I'm interested in why I would be thinking of him recently to then hear the news of his death. I wonder if we are being told something, or reminded of something when such things happen.

In Father's case, it is with fondness that I remember his faithfulness to the Church, his straightforward yet friendly instruction, and his friendship itself which I recall well. What really struck me was his obvious humility, his willingness to accept that he wasn't the center of human history. He could see that it wasn't him or his opinions which mattered, but rather what was right. A little story he told on himself one day might illustrate that trait.

Before joining the Dominican Order in 1942, Fr. Willoughby among other things had played semi-professional baseball. He was a first baseman, I believe he said. One day, his team was involved in a game where Walter Johnson, whom baseball fans know was a quiet, flamethrowing pitcher for the old Washington Senators, indeed that he was part of the first class selected for enshrinement in Cooperstown, would be the home plate umpire. Needless to say, Father and his teammates were excited about that.

As it was, Father came up in the bottom of the first with the bases loaded and two out. He worked the pitcher into a full count, then let the next pitch go by. Johnson promptly called him out on strikes, ending what turned out to be his last chance at baseball semi-immortality. "I was sure it was a ball, but I guess it was a strike", he said, and in truth matter of factly, at the end of the story. Indeed, it was profoundly self effacing.

My wife teased him, "That first part was the ballplayer talking, but the second was the priest talking!" Father just smiled, and kind of nodded his head. He could take teasing too.

Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine. Godspeed, Father Willoughby.