Made, not begotten: A tribute to Father David Burrell, CSC

 

In July of 2011, I moved back to Notre Dame, to take a job as the rector of Duncan Hall.  As I was settling in, before the students arrived for the new school year, Father David Burrell invited me to Corby Hall for dinner.  I had met and befriended David while living and working in Uganda for a year and a half with Holy Cross's Overseas Lay Mission program.  He took credit for setting up me and fellow volunteer Whitney.

“David, I was expecting to see you on the flotilla,” said the much younger priest at our table, wearing black clerics, glass of wine in hand.  David didn’t make the connection and looked up puzzled, thumbing his impressive eyebrows.

“The flotilla to Gaza,” the young priest clarified. 

It was the summer of the second freedom flotilla, officially named “Freedom Flotilla II: Stay Human.”  It aimed to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza symbolically and, in a small way, materially.  The flotilla ultimately did not sail, but it remained a topic of discussion for a full news cycle.  The previous year, a different flotilla did set sail, but the Israeli military raided it and killed nine activists on board and turned it around before it could reach Gaza.  

“I would have if I could have,” David said sincerely, using the young priest’s name gently in response.  The young priest, it appeared, was trying to get a rise out of David.  It was not hard to get a rise out of David.  

In 2018, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Situation of Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories predicted that Gaza would be “unlivable” by 2020.

On the first of October this past year, 2023, David died.  Six days later, that predicted unlivability in Gaza exploded, as people like David warned us that it would.  "What happens to a dream deferred?"  Israel suffered heavy casualties that day, as the world knows.  Then Israel regrouped, and it has been making Gaza even less livable since, as most of the world knows and as some of the world tries to avoid knowing, fully.  

I wish David were still with us.  He could share his wisdom and his clear analysis.  David would have mourned those Israeli lives lost.  He had sympathy for all human beings.  Yet, David was no both-sideser.  He knew and saw too much.  After I had the privilege myself of moving through the checkpoints of occupied Jericho, easily with my US passport; after I walked down Hebron's al-Shuhada street; I understood David's intense feelings on this topic.      

In our last correspondence, a week or so before he died, we talked of attending the same zoom webinar to learn how, on earth, to build international solidarity, specifically in order to prevent war between the US and China.  David knew that there is nothing inevitable about that war, or any war.  He understood that we make our own history, even if not under circumstances we would choose.    

While I wish we could still correspond, at the same time I'm glad David hasn’t had to witness this latest installment of nakba.  This televised genocide of the Palestinians, bought and paid for in part by our tax dollars.  He probably would have resented his own growing helplessness in the situation, as he aged and neared the end.  He nevertheless might have tried to break out of Holy Cross House by now, to get on the next flotilla, stubbornly ignoring doctors’ and religious superiors’ orders.  

Near Lake Saka, at the Holy Cross novitiate for East Africa, at the top of this beautiful mountain crater lake, we turned around to see David stubbornly climbing up behind us.  With his foot and his back issues, he was supposed to stay in the car.  "My doctor said I sometimes have to act my age," he told us down there. When he reached the top, he cracked himself up, "I decided to act my age!"    

Before David returned to Notre Dame for his jubilee in 2009, he had a colorful Ugandan stole made in Jinja.  He wanted the colors to be loud, to stand out in the basilica.  “I’ve got a reputation to keep,” he told us.

David had many reputations, as we all do.  The one I wish to remember the most is his standing up for the victims of the occupied Jericho road and trying in his own small yet animated way to liberate the occupied Jericho road.  Like a good Samaritan.  

History is made, not begotten.  “Go and do likewise,” Jesus told the young scholar, at the end of the parable.  In other words, "Stay human."  We'll do that, David.

shielded

“It’s a shame,” Julianna thinks.  “Sad.”  She is reading the New York Times on her phone in the car, waiting for Greta’s dance class to end.

Thirty-five years ago, yesterday, she was born in Abington Hospital, north of Philadelphia.  

Julianna habitually reads the news, or at least habitually scrolls.  Some days she isn’t sure she likes reading the news.  Is she doing it out of a sense of obligation?  Because she should?  But often, she does enjoy it, or enjoys scrolling at least.  She manages to catch an episode of The Daily at least once a week, and she is pretty faithful to David Leonhardt’s The Morning.  

She grew up with Peter Jennings on the ABC evening news.  More so, she grew up with Jim Gardiner and the local Philly 6 ABC Action News, which preceded and followed the national broadcast.  The former gave her a sense of the world.  It implicitly warned her: be careful out there. The latter gave her a sense of the more local geography, particularly Philadelphia: be careful down there.  

She refuses to pay extra for the Times cooking section.

Thirty-five years ago, tomorrow, she came home for the first time, with her parents, to the house in Glenside.  There, she lived her first five years, with her parents Tammy and Pete and her older brother, also Pete.  Or Peter.  At five, right before she started kindergarten, they moved out to Doylestown township--a kind of exurb, outside the borough of Doylestown.  She went to Our Lady of Mount Carmel school for nine years, from kindergarten to eighth grade.  In the latter years there, she ran track, did dance, played softball, and after they let girls join, she became an altar server.  She got good grades.  She sang a solo for the May Procession.  She went to Gwynedd Mercy Academy, an all-girls prep school.  She had a not-serious boyfriend in 11th grade, who went to the all-boys prep school.  She ran varsity track and played varsity volleyball.  She studied faithfully, and she passed her AP tests, including calculus.  She volunteered, weekly, in a tutoring program in North Philly.  Her dad was proud of her kindness and service and her AP scores, but he wasn’t keen on her going to North Philly.  

Peter went to Villanova.  When she graduated, she went to Holy Cross, in Worcester.  They offered her some decent money, and Tammy and Pete were able to foot the rest of the bill.  They had a good financial advisor.  At Holy Cross, she majored in accounting and English.  She drank for the first time, but only on the weekends.  She studied in London spring of her junior year and relished traveling around Europe on relatively cheap flights.  After graduation, she joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and taught for two years at a small Catholic grade school in a blighted Chicago neighborhood on the south side.  Her dad was proud of her service, but he was not keen on the location.  

After the JVC, she took a job with Deloitte, in New York, which was always the plan, and she moved to Hoboken.  In Hoboken, she met and made an unserious and then later serious boyfriend: Bobby.  Bobby also worked at Deloitte but in a different department.  He was from Summit, New Jersey and had gone to NYU. Also, he was Catholic too.  They got married several years later, back at Mount Carmel, and they lived the fun young couple life for a few more years in Hoboken, drinking on the weekends.  

Before their first kid’s arrival, they bought a house in Rutherford.  Just last year, before their third kid, they moved to Summit, where they bought a bigger house.  Bobby’s parents were both retired, healthy and active, and available to help with childcare.  They had encouraged them to move out to Summit.  There’s a train from Summit to Manhattan.  

Julianna no longer works at Deloitte, but Bobby does, and he has done pretty well there.  She is a full-time mom, which is indeed a full-time job, even with the nearby grandparent help.  She is active on the elementary school PTA.  Greta is in first grade.  Julianna does some ad hoc editing for a friend, for pay, and accounting for the PTA and the church, as a volunteer.  

  

“If only Hamas wouldn’t use human shields,” she thinks, as she scrolls.  “If only the Palestinians hadn’t voted for Hamas in the first place,” in 2006, she learned a couple months ago.  She returned to that thought, as she did two days ago, while she scrolled in line at Whole Foods.  

“Israel has no other choice.  It’s tragic.”  And like two days ago, her thought process terminates.   

Greta emerges from the studio.  Julianna buckles her in the booster seat, and they drive home.  They listen to the Frozen soundtrack. They beat the rush hour home.

Honesty in education?

 Hi Mike, or Whom It May Concern

My name is Terry Fitzgibbons.  I'm an A/R in EA of Passaic, and I enjoyed your presentation this past week at our rep council.  Thank you for coming out and for all of the information you provided.  I agree with all the points you shared.  My wife is a state employee and in CWA, and we are seeing mailers targeting her to drop her union too. 

If I may, I would like to push further on the Honesty in Education front.  If not the elephant in the room, the elephant in my head the other night was, What about Palestine?  

Many rank and file educators here in Passaic, across the state, and across the nation are concerned that "the union" (however they perceive it: the local or the state/national affiliates) may or may not have our backs when it comes to teaching honestly about Palestine.  In NJ, this perception stems in part from President Sean Spiller's statements, which we view to be very one-sided, ahistorical, and politically convenient.  We are concerned, in part, because NJEA PAC backs candidates who, yes, are decent on public education but who are complicit in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.  This is true of almost the entire NJ congressional delegation, and it is also indirectly true for NJ state leaders.  For instance, NJ state legislators, both Dem and Rep, have criminalized the nonviolent BDS movement.  (See the Ben and Jerry's/New Jersey/Unilever story from a couple years ago as an example.)

Perhaps this is not in your purview.  It may be more of an academic freedom/legal question.  (And forgive my PAC tangent above--I share that as an example of why some teachers do not feel safe and feel that the Honesty in Education is circumscribed.  Perception for many folks is their reality.)  If so, could you please direct us toward NJEA resources and/or personnel on academic freedom?  The Council on American Islamic Relations has excellent resources, but we are looking for resources internal to the union, too.  While we don't expect the NJEA to make better public-facing statements and resolutions anytime soon (like the UAW or the postal workers have done), it would behoove members to have a flow-chart, for instance, for what to do if we're targeted or disciplined.  For in-the-classroom work and also for out-of-the-classroom advocacy.  If this already exists on the local level, I apologize for that lack of knowledge.  Or, if it's as simple as "keep detailed notes and call Frank," that will work too.

I have not heard of incidents yet in Passaic in recent months, fortunately, but we want to be prepared.  A couple years ago, a teacher in our district was smeared by an outside group as being anti-Semitic for her pro-Palestinian advocacy in and out of the classroom.  Thankfully, the union stood by her.  But she was tenured and well-respected in the district and union.  Not everyone has her "social capital."  And that was before the mass hysteria and McCarthyism that has enveloped us since October 7.  I do know of teachers in Montclair and Teaneck, for instance, who have been targeted by outside groups or by less informed colleagues and who have been disciplined by administrators.  I know of professional development workshops focusing on Palestine that have been cancelled by superintendents (e.g. Scotch Plains) and books that have been pulled from school libraries (e.g. Newark (not NJEA)).  

Thank you for listening and your consideration and any help in advance.  Thanks so much for your work and commitment.  

Solidarity!

-Terry Fitzgibbons