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I Ron Barnes, S.J.
8 May 1936 - 3 February 2005
Reflection – by Margaret Brennan, IHM
Mass of Resurrection - Tuesday, February 8th, 2005
It is my privilege this evening, at this liturgy of Resurrection, to offer a reflection in the name of those of us who are colleagues, students, friends of Ron - members and associates of the Regis Community. While not part of his biological nor his Jesuit family, we do feel, nonetheless, that we have lost a brother and a dear friend who has influenced our lives and the life of Regis for almost thirty years.
I hope that it will not be an irreverent analogy to consider Ron's life among us in a kind of trinitarian metaphor. Born in the vastness of God's creation so abundantly present in the Atlantic Provinces, deeply incarnated in Christ Jesus as a Jesuit, and at Regis sharing the gifts and fruits of the creative and indwelling Spirit, Ron lived and walked among us as a teacher, a mentor, spiritual director, a colleague, a companion, a treasured friend. Ron's origins, as we know, were in Nova Scotia with its expansiveness of wind and water, sun and salt air - awash with stark and rocky shores.
Those of us who knew Ron well know how much he treasured the weeks in August each year when he went home to visit - home to his loved ones - to his beloved sister Marilyn, her husband Peter and their family - the nieces at whose weddings he officiated, their children who he baptized and fretted over in their illnesses. Home to his brothers - to Michael, and to Ralph who often journeyed from Calgary with Mavis his wife. And home in a special way to the Jesuit Villa on the ocean's edge at St. Margaret's Bay. Here he swam (even when the water was only 50 degrees!) and walked along the shore, listening to waves assaulting the beach - and loved perhaps above all (as reflected in the words of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
to sit in reverie, and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the seashore of the mind. I think that one of the darkest moments of Ron's debilitating cancer was the realization last summer that one final visit home would not be possible. There is an old adage that "the boy is father to the man." Ron's boyhood in the expansiveness of such broad horizons gave birth to a love of open spaces, a resilience, and a natural competitiveness in response to the challenges that such an environment offered to one's body and spirit.
As a result, much of living (and particularly driving) in Toronto posed their own problems and predicaments. Traffic jams and pokey drivers annoyed and irritated him - but it was the aggressive young men who pulled into outside lanes at stoplights, gunned their motors and raced ahead to cut off the less-adventurous ones behind - that sent his adrenaline sky rocketing and unleashed a fierce competitive spirit that was a menace to friend and to foe alike!
Riding his bike along the lakeshore, long walks in the country, in the neighborhoods of Rosedale and along the Scarborough bluffs, working in the garden around the Jesuit residence, listening to a symphony or an opera, restored and rested his spirit. But at times his patience with details and with long discussions wore thin. And then his natural inability to "suffer fools lightly," would 1 get the best of him and spill over onto friends and colleagues as well. Swiftly arising and swiftly dissipating, such encounters were never pleasant!
But it is especially Ron's long years at Regis - his lasting influence as a teacher, his wisdom and compassion as a spiritual director, a counselor, a mentor - his often boyish, buoyant and playful manner, his simplicity and unaffected demeanor! - this is what will remain in our individual and collective lives for many years to come. As a psychologist Ron taught courses on psychotherapy and spiritual direction, the influence of Carl Jung, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. But as a pastoral theologian he was led as well into courses on spirituality - the mysticism of John of the Cross and the everyday mysticism of Karl Rahner, the power and dynamics of the a theology of conversion.
My own memories of Ron lie rich and fertile in living light. I taught numerous courses with him over the span of many years. I learned over time not to expect him to appear except at the last minute, come into the room still combing his hair from his walk to the college; tightening (no - never really tightening) the inevitable Nova Scotian tartan tie of blue and green and yellow plaid no matter what other color jacket or shirt he might be wearing. And sometimes his socks did not match! He liked what we called team teaching - but decidedly did not like being interrupted. But when Ron lectured, more often than not from a handwritten text and rarely an outline, the carefully, often artfully, crafted sentences that gave evidence of coming from a deep contemplative place in himself. And there were times that I had the distinct impression that in the midst of sharing his own reflections, another fresh insight would emerge and he would follow it - sometimes to his own surprise and delight.
Ron loved to engage the students in discussion. He respected their questions and input and had that rare gift of being able to move forward with them to newer insights that took birth in him as well. But, paradoxically perhaps, he disliked and was uncomfortable in small group sharing and discussions that seemed to him to be artificially constructed and often a waste of time.
T.S. Eliot wrote somewhere that "old men ought to be explorers. " Now Ron, according to our present standards, was hardly an old man. But at the same time, as he was nearing his seventh decade and dealing with a deadly cancer, he became increasingly involved in exploring questions of meaning - and never more so than in the last weeks of his life in the Jesuit infirmary in Pickering. Here he was able at last, after some weeks of darkness and physical weakness, to shift the significance of the events we fear, and to once again become religiously and intellectually curious.
The psychologist James Hillman has noted that "for us humans, adventure takes place more and more in the mind, "and Alfred North Whitehead, the great philosopher, concurred most perceptively that "a thought is a tremendous mode of excitement. "
And so it was that Ron's last days and hours had left him in peace - thoughtful and pondering, praying so simply with his Jesuit brothers, united in spirit with his family, and in some way to all of us who loved him.
It is fitting, I think, to return at the end to I where we started - to Nova Scotia - to the wind and the water, the sand and the sun - and to let Ron speak a last word to us in those of the Carmelite poet Jessica Powers - for surely, his spirit is there.
Now I am coming again to a place of waters, But vast, serene. I see, as shades depart A great sea at rest.
Here in this ocean of peace I can forever fill the little pitcher of my heart. Vistas of shining water meet the eye and words of unimagined love are spoken, Master and Lord; I praise and glorify Your covenant peace, Your promise never
broken.
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