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.
