Murph

Murph

I was a fourth-high table head when Murph entered St. Joe’s in 1958, so I will always remember him as the cute, funny little piler named PeeWee.  In our seminary family, the tablehead/piler relationship often had a parental quality about it, so I’ve always felt like Murph was one of my kids.  And kids aren’t supposed to die first.  As Dennis Lucey said, “I would think that I, or some of the alibi aliorum would have gone first.”

Seeing Murph bustling around on alumni day, totally efficient in his lawyerly jacket and tie, made me appreciate how well he had parlayed those organizational skills he first demonstrated as a piler.  For years now, as executive director of the alumni association, Murph has been the glue that kept us all together, the symbol of our seminary brotherhood. Last year he lamented that alumni days might soon become a thing of the past, because the older core group was gradually dying off and the younger guys hadn’t experienced the deep bonds of pre-‘70s seminary life.  None of us expected Murph to go first.

Death has been skulking around lately, picking off our brothers one by one, making us uncomfortable enough to pull out whatever filters we have for dealing with it.  No one knows for sure what happens behind that mysterious veil, but I like Alan Watts’ story that God got bored and decided to play hide ‘n seek, hiding himself in an infinite number of separate beings. And, being God, “he” was able to hide so well that we’ve all forgotten that we’re “him.”  

As I look death in the eye, I can only hope it’s the portal to remembrance, to regaining that God consciousness.  Hopefully it’ll be like a cosmic seminary reunion, where Murph, as usual, will have everything already organized and laid out for us.