In Memoriam:
Tom O’Rourke (1934-2001)

In suit and tie and dress shoes his IBM image
seemed out of place at protests. Sign in hand:
“Close the School of the Americas.”
He was a mirror image: where “those inside”
must stand if anything is going to change.

A monk of sorts, his row house a hermitage
nec minus solum quam cum solus esset
(never less alone than when alone).
He was alone. None of us knew his rounds.
Our parochial world could not contain him.
Off to the Nevada test site—alone.
Twenty miles south with migrant mushroom
workers on strike. Again alone. Yet after
a march he would be the first to search out
old friends at the bar in a familiar pub.

For this hermit the traditional vows were
untraditional: poverty without promises.
Just being poor anew every day. His sister
says his closet was almost empty: a second suit,
an extra pair of shoes, running sneakers and
a windbreaker. He was lovely in that jaunty cap
that framed his smile in the cold at a courthouse vigil.

His celibate embrace was, well, cosmic.
Last Christmas he gave me The Great Work
Father Tom Berry’s new book. He loved the title
and Berry’s vision and told me proudly that he had
“crossed that threshold” (far from familiar pieties).

Holy obedience was to go wherever required—meetings,
talks, presentations. “God is in the details,” the architect said.
At Sunday mass (where he chauffeured an elderly woman every week)
I sensed I seldom could by homily bring him in, connect:
“A sadness and anxiety for the whole world.” someone described him.
He could bring us up short when a meeting grew silly.

Instead of clothes, that hermitage was full of books, journals,
articles (science, politics), lectio divina, remote preparation
for wherever tonight took him. I am not sure whether
my chronic unpreparedness astonished or dismayed him!
A Sunday reading of his send-off evening was from Isaiah:
“Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?”
Indeed…

What shall we do without him?

John P. McNamee
8 February, 2001

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