WIP Web Journals

Father Charles Currie has been the president of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities since 1997. He began his academic career teaching and doing research in chemistry at Georgetown University in 1966. He served as president of several higher education institutions and directed Georgetown University's Bicentennial celebration. I interviewed him during my last week in DC.

What were you doing when you were 21?
I was just beginning the training to be a Jesuit. This was in 1951 so it was a very different world, a very different church. It was a great experience. We had 42 novices in my class; today we’re lucky if we get four or five.

What are your thoughts on the relationship between science and religion?
When I got to St. Joe’s in Philadelphia I had a fascinating 6 years teaching a course in science and theology. And that’s a very interesting field today. It used to be that you would get some theologians trying to do some science or scientists trying to do some theology but there’s a lot more people who have been trained today in both so the quality of conversation and discussion is much better.

Who has been the most influential person in your life and why?
There are a lot of people: Father Tim Healy was a young Jesuit when I was studying in Fordham New York. It was in his room one night that I made my decision to be a priest and I later worked with him at Georgetown where he was President. Of course my parents; they’re both very special people. I attribute any intelligence I have with dealing with women to the relationship I had with my sister. We had a great relationship and I thought that was very formative.

What do you value most in life?
My faith: I think sometimes we take that for granted. It came home to me very graphically once when I was trying to help a woman dying in a hospital. She not only didn’t have any family but she didn’t have any faith and she was desperate and that made me realize how lucky I was to have a faith that puts things together and that personal relationship with God, with Christ.

How did you get to where you are today?
I don’t know how to answer that one except a lot of things were kind of accidental. I guess the first key decision was to become a Jesuit and then the kind of work I got involved in as a Jesuit: higher education. That certainly puts you on a certain path.

What are the main aims of your association?
I see our role as representing the 26 Jesuit higher education institutions to the Church, the Society of Jesus, the other higher education associations, Congress, the Administration. But the role that I think is even more important is promoting collaboration and we do a lot of that.

How do you balance liturgical life with the demands of your job?
Some folks feel that in an administrative role such as this that a priest has to put aside his priesthood. I think that’s nonsense. I don’t think a day has gone by in my role in this job that I haven’t been called on to do something pastoral.

What’s your favourite place in Washington?
I’ve been in Washington over 25 years. I think you have to be inspired by three obvious memorials of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. The Holocaust Museum is a very profound human experience. There’s so much cultural life in this city. Washington is my favourite city because there’s so much here.

How did you get involved with the situation in El Salvador?
I knew nothing about El Salvador until I was coming back from Vietnam. The President of Georgetown told me six Jesuits and their two co-workers had just been killed in El Salvador and I organized Georgetown’s response to this. So I had an intensive crash course in El Salvador and Central America and I was privileged to go down there just a couple weeks after the Jesuit’s were killed. That was a very moving time. It’s very much a part of my life now. You know once you get involved with El Salvador you don’t leave. Dean Bradley, a great Jesuit down there – he was one of the ones who took the place of those who were killed, always says the Salvadors will break your heart and then they’ll help you put it back together again.

What advice would you give a young university graduate?
Keep a sense of hope in your power to make a difference. The purpose of education is to develop your imagination; with your imagination you create options for yourself; with those options you have a sense of hope. If you have that imagination then you have the tools to really make a difference in the world.

Before I went to DC I interviewed the award winning Irish playwright Frank McGuinness.

What were you doing when you were 20?
I was studying English at UCD and that was my big passion at the time. I had a very good second year in College. It was a great liberating year because I was so homesick in my first year. Second year I met a lot more people, I was more sure in what I was doing, I had become enamoured with the city so I was a happy guy at 20, very happy.

How did your university course impact on your career?
There was an enormous opportunity to read and to tackle big authors like Chaucer, Wordsworth, Milton and Pope. Without knowing it at the time, when you have the opportunity to immerse yourself in difficult subjects you carry a good working memory of them with you and that’s very, very important. But one of the main things about university was that it introduced me to people from beyond the Derry-Donegal hinterland.

Who has been the most influential person in your life and why?
My mother unquestionably. She was a very, very powerful person, a very funny person, a very intelligent person. She worked in a shirt factory. She really was an enormous positive force for me and it’s from her I think that I got a fierce determination to do well because she would have loved the opportunity that I got.

What do you value most in life?
I value my relationship with my partner Philip. Life for gay people has got better in this country but it still is a struggle, particularly for younger gay men and lesbians, and we’ve been together thirty years this month in May and it’s lasted. It’s had its ups and its downs like any thirty-year relationship but if you asked me what I’m proud of most that is it: that we are still together.

Did you always want to write and how did you transform that dream into a reality?
I did always want to write but I think the only hard way of being a writer is work and I had to sit down and really write and rewrite and put my mind to it and slog and really, really try to get better and better and better and I still do that.

Do you have a particular writing process?
I write longhand in a little red copybook. If I get past page twenty with that it means the play will be finished. I can’t write without a title. I’ve no fixed time for work but I would certainly do a fair amount in the week and I do a fair amount of reading and thinking.

Was there a particular moment when you thought: “I’m a proper writer” now?
That day was when I was 20 or 21 and I got a letter from David Marcus from The Irish Press saying the first poems were going to be published. And then of course there was the day that The Factory Girls my first play was accepted for the Abbey.

How important is your nationality to your work?
Well it’s just a hard fact. My background is Irish, I write about Ireland and make no apologies about it. It’s a complex society we live in, perhaps even more complex now that the North has a semblance of peace without the savage, brutal war happening. I’m intrigued by this country. I am intrigued by the cultures of this island.

What writers should an aspiring writer read?
You can do worse than read Jane Austen for plotting and for subtlety of characterisation. In Irish writing I think that Heaney is still a great voice, so many people imitate him that’s the only thing, and the same with Muldoon. So, in poetry, I think you should read all of W.H. Auden because I think he’s a benevolent influence on Irish people because he is, without being facetious, so English and yet American, American and yet English. You’ve got this wonderful confusion in him that’s very good for Irish people to have. I think you should certainly have a good working knowledge of Lorca and Ibsen, the Europeans, and among Irish writers you should be ashamed of yourself if you’re a playwright and you don’t know the whole of Synge - in terms of stagecraft and how you can push things in plays Synge is the master.

What advice would you give to a young university graduate?
Well I really regret not travelling after I did my primary degree. I think it’s very good to take the opportunities offered to you to go abroad - even if it’s only to Blackpool. Do something with it: go away and leave your self and your family behind you. What I did do was to believe that everything was going to be alright in terms of making a career out of my Arts background. And I think that requires stamina and it requires a big degree of faith in yourself. So I think you’ve got to follow your head as well as your heart, believe in your luck and you also sometimes have to make your own luck.

The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvellous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

Once upon a time in Dublin my friend Fionnuala read out loud this poem that our friend Fiona had given her. Since I first heard it 18 months ago I’ve shared it with numerous people (some of whom don’t have Fion in their names). This poem has etched itself into my consciousness and the phrase “know it while you have it” was one I repeated to myself during the highs (see every other blog!) and lows (sleep deprivation) of the WIP experience.

I was reminded of the poem’s message when I asked my Ten Questions interviewees what advice they had for young graduates. Father Charles Currie said, "Keep a sense of hope in your power to make a difference" whilst Frank McGuinness stressed the importance of believing "that everything was going to be alright in terms of making a career out of [an] Arts background.”

The priest, the poet and the playwright all emphasise the importance of having faith in yourself, especially when it’s seems like the most difficult thing to do. It's a message I find myself clinging to as I enter the world of work at a time of economic instability. I wanted to share this poem in this my last proper blog because I know there will be potential applicants to WIP who may be debating whether or not it is worth their while filling out the very extensive application form. I was in the same position last year and I’d urge you to do so. What do you have to lose? The gods will offer you chances… this may be one of them.