Vernon Robertson is in heaven
Cahill, Elizabeth Kirkland
VERNON ROBERTSON IS IN HEAVEN Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill lthough I no longer live there, the recent passing of my friend Vernon Robertson, for thirty-one years a Catholic priest in...
...Indeed, as he told it, his conversion was triggered by the sight of a statue of the pregnant Virgin on the grounds of the cathedral at Chartres (a mystery that grew with his later discovery that rio such statue has ever stood there...
...His little house was so crammed with pious clutter that you couldn't move far at one of his lively, crowded parties without knocking over an icon or brushing up against one of the splendid banners, paintings, or photographs that hung upon the walls...
...Elizabeth KirkIand Cahill is the co-author, with Joseph Papp, of Shakespeare Alive...
...Vernon loved the earthiness of his chosen faith...
...So many of my own memories of him revolve around occasions of hospitality, from the spare breakfasts and rich conversations we used to share in an anteroom of the Carmelite monastery after he had said Saturday morning Mass, to the merry garden party he and his sister threw to celebrate his recovery from a nearly fatal illness...
...For how else did Christ spend much of his time, according to his disciples' accounts, but in simply being with people, listening, healing by his presence...
...Vernon understood, with a Southerner's instinct for graciousness, that we manifest the divine spirit not through grandiose acts but through small gestures of generosity...
...A former Episcopal priest endowed with considerable family wealth and the jowly demeanor of an aging cherub, Vernon was ordained in Rome at the age of forty-four...
...He was a fellow convert, funny, eloquent, and thoughtful, and he was a singular help as I took my last steps toward Catholicism...
...Unable to imagine its realms of glory, reluctant to reduce them to trite images of pearly gates and lute-toting angels, I have generally avoided the subject altogether...
...He accomplished much and touched many, and the tributes since his unexpected death have been profuse...
...A funeral Mass in these surroundings, with choral polyphony echoing off the walls and incense floating through the air, was indeed a feast for the senses...
...It was during his funeral that he made his final gift to me...
...He spent much of his time simply being with people--sharing a good meal, trading a joke, hatching yet another plan to bring about social justice, listening, always listening...
...And yet in his death my friend has conferred upon me a new confidence: that although heaven is not a place as we understand place, it is the destination of joy for which God intends us, a place not defined by minutes or inches, but rendered gloriously infinite by a peace that passes understanding...
...He was, in his openness to people, the most Christlike person I have known...
...And what better expression exists of the gospel of hospitality than the Mass, the sharing of the Body and the Blood...
...He knew everyone in town, and feared no one...
...Bantam, 1988...
...Saint Martin, Vernon's last parish, was aesthetically the perfect church for him, its interior animated by colorful life-sized statues, enormous stained glass panels, an ornately carved elevated pulpit, and, encased in glass, the relics of two third-century saints, Magnus and Bonosa...
...That he was seventy-five does not at all mitigate the disorientation...
...To me and to the many others who loved him, the keenest loss is simply the loss of his presence...
...When is death ever timely...
...I know that Vernon Robertson is there, chuckling joyously as he shares with Christ a feast of rich food, of wellaged wines, beckoning us all toward communion with our Lord through the kind of generosity of life and heart that he embodied...
...For all his refinement and good taste, he used to say with a chuckle that the vulgarity of Catholicism-the statues, the relics, the beads, the icons, the incense---was its chief attraction...
...VERNON ROBERTSON IS IN HEAVEN Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill lthough I no longer live there, the recent passing of my friend Vernon Robertson, for thirty-one years a Catholic priest in Louisville, Kentucky, has disoriented me...
...In the three decades of his priesthood he helped found a network of inner-city Montessori schools, established Louisville's first residence for people with AIDS, and resurrected two dying parishes in parts of the city into which some of his well-heeled friends would never think of venturing...
...My vision of heaven up until now has been vague...
...And I know one other thing about heaven...
...As I sat in the packed church and listened to the triumphant reading from Isaiah ("On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of wellaged wines"), I suddenly understood, with the force of a revelation, that Vernon Robertson is in heaven...
...It was but three Easters ago that he, in the company of a Jesuit priest, a few relatives and friends, and the Carmelite nuns, welcomed me into the church...
...i Commonweal 3 | July 17, 1998...
Vol. 125 • July 1998 • No. 13
