Remembering Noel Rowe

Faculty of Theology and Philosophy

School of Theology

(20th June 1951 – 11th July 2007)

Gerard Hall SM

Noel, you were never one for getting dressed up
unless, of course, it was for the stage.
Even here, your favourite piece was playing Lear
running around in rags in the midst of the storm.
You never forgot you were a "farmer's boy from the edge of town".^[1]
Too many religious people, you once complained, "lose contact with their earth"
trying to escape what the poet Yeats called "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart".^[2]

In your life and poetry, your message was this:
If we are to experience redemption, healing, forgiveness, love,
we must first know our own heart with all its fears, hurts and wounds
as well as our feelings and gifts: "we must know our own name".^[3]
We need to descend into the messiness of human life
and discover there our nothingness before God.

Almost thirty years ago, you wrote a prayer I still pray today:

"Lord, let me know
my own nothingness,
the surprise and emptiness
of love given and received.

Only then will I
surrender to your heart
and leave you free
to redeem a people
with an unexpected depth,
humility and tenderness
by Father, Son and Spirit".^[4]

When you died, I found myself sending an email
to mutual friends in which I said:
"Noel was a professed Marist for twenty years,
but I'll be telling them Monday, he was a Marist his entire life".
Not so long ago you said to me, without sentimentality:
"You know, I still have a Marist heart".
It was your particular insight into Mary's poverty of heart,
what you called her "nothingness before God",
that inspired your series of Magnificat poems.

You learnt from Mary that the God of Jesus
is revealed in silence, suffering and surrender:
"I want to give God back to mystery" you recently wrote.^[5]
In saying this, you were tapping into the spirituality
of the "hidden God" of Isaiah and the "unseen God" of Paul. ^[6]
Or in the words of Meister Eckhart, we need to "let God be God".^[7]
You knew this was the lesson Mary learnt at Calvary
so poignantly expressed in your "Crucifixion" poem.^[8]

You understood Jesus' crucifixion as the divine self-emptying
where all our notions of God are turned on their head.
You saw this too in Mary's Magnificat vision
where the mighty are cast down and the poor raised up.^[9]
You captured this same movement of "divine reversal"
in your Resurrection poem through playful, irreverent images
of Cana's newly-weds, Lazarus, Zaccheus and the thief
revealing that "the structure of the real is mercy".^[10]

"Sacred irreverence", you continued,
"is a gift to those found free in the spirit".
You also saw a convergence between what you named
the poor heart of Mary and the empty heart of Buddhism.^[11]
For you, Buddhism and Catholicism were not competing doctrines
but intersecting stories pointing towards the divine mystery in which
love and emptiness are counterpoised in the at-once doubting and believing heart.^[12]

In your poetry you have left us a monument^[13]
of your profound depth of soul,
exceptional talent with words,
playfulness with metaphors,
attentiveness to the spiritual heights
and depths of contemporary experience,
sharpness of insight
and love for irony.

More than this,
in your words and life,
and in your dying too,
you displayed an unshakable courage
to explore the margins between
meaning and futility,
emptiness and love,
life and death,
humanity and divinity,
the ordinary and the sacred.

Your poetry ranges across a myriad
of topics, people and places
with wry humour,
unnerving honesty,
sharp intelligence,
genuine compassion
and the gift to say the unexpected.

Your poetry arose from the depth of your encounter with life.
As we pray for you today, let us also learn from you
to empty ourselves of illusion and embrace life's ambiguities
where, despite the darkness, there are fleeting glimpses of light.

You challenge us to enter life's mystery where one's experiences
—however banal, negative or life-threatening—all count.
This is, after all, the journey of the mystics—and the simple folk.
You would have us all believe (again) in the message of Mary's Magnificat
and Jesus' Sermon on the Mount: it is to the little ones the kingdom of God belongs.

Noel, may you enjoy the language of heaven.