When I was a senior, my sister Colleen (SFS ’86) was a freshman. As a dutiful older brother, I did my best to offer tidbits of advice that would ease her transition to college, and, I hoped, help her come to love Georgetown as much as I did. Most of these tidbits I passed on as gentle suggestions. On one, however, I was unyielding: she had to take Father Thomas King’s course on the theology of evolution.
I took that course when I was a junior. It changed my life. It’s one the very few courses I took as an undergrad that I still think about. It opened my mind and expanded my faith. It helped me grow into my adult Catholic faith. Some of that was a result of the books and articles we read. Some was a result of the discussions we had in class. Most of it was the result of the presence and compelling example of Father King.
Colleen happened to visit Washington last week. We went out to dinner, and at one point our conversation turned to memories of Father King. Her memories were clear and strong.
“He was a complete weirdo, but the good kind of weirdo, the kind that makes you smarter and better, the kind you remember decades later and smile,” she said. “He was like a Jesuit Yoda.”
Even in the 1980s, Father King had what could only be described as a singular style. We saw it in the classroom and at Mass. He would get entirely and passionately caught up in the material he was presenting, whether it was the unfolding of God’s hopes for Creation through the wonders of evolution, or the proclamation of God’s passion for every human heart, as evidenced in the drama of the Mass.
Tom King’s beliefs were passionate, and his passion was evident. It showed in his breathing, in his speaking, in the gestures of his spidery fingers. Colleen recalled that she often wondered if Father King was having some sort of attack as he spoke—maybe it might have been better if instead of a Teaching Assistant he had a GERMS team on constant standby.
I will always remember a conversation I had with Father King one afternoon in his office in the Theology Department. I had stopped by during office hours, ostensibly to ask some questions about the material we were covering in class. In reality, I was actively entertaining the possibility of entering the Jesuits after graduation, and I wanted to hear a little of Father King’s story, to hear how he understood his life as a Jesuit scholar.
I asked him why he had focused so much of his career on the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—a Jesuit paleontologist, philosopher and theologian whose work had for a long time been considered suspect by the Vatican. I asked Father King if it made him nervous to be associated with someone who had for a while been silenced by the Church because of his work.
First, he gave me a long discourse on the nature of time. I have to admit that a lot of it went over my head and I wasn’t always sure what it had to do with my question, but he was wound up and once that happened, you just had to listen and wait. So I did. As I recall, his point was that change usually takes time, sometimes a very long time, and patience is a virtue both for scholars and for people of faith. That made sense to me.
Then he said something that was for me a moment of grace, a signal moment in the gradual emergence of my own vocation. He laid out for me his understanding that in the Church, as in any organization, someone has to be willing to be ahead of the curve, even though that can be an uncomfortable and even treacherous place to be. If no one is willing to do that, he said, then progress will stall, growth will be stunted. That would be bad for the Church. Someone has to be willing to lean into the future, to take the risks involved with asking “What if?” That’s why the Church has Jesuits, he said. That too made sense to me.
I left his office that day with a feeling that I had been taken seriously and treated with kindness and respect by a remarkable man of passionate faith and intellect. I also left thinking that maybe I should and could be a Jesuit after all. In his wonderfully quirky way, Father Tom King had nudged me and my life in the right direction. Turns out that was a typical day in the life of a far from typical man. Georgetown will miss him dearly. Resquiescat in pace.
A memorial mass for Father King will be held at 10 p.m. on Thursday, September 24 in Dahlgren Chapel.
