Navigating the Zeitgeist. Helena Sheehan

Gregory Strickland was a Jesuit who taught high school and coached the debating team at St. Joseph’s Prep. He judged me in a debating tournament and saw potential. He spoke to me in a way that no one ever had. We spent many hours talking throughout my high school years. He inspired me to reach out to life in a higher, wider, and deeper way. Greg was the most exciting person I had ever met. There was something so fresh, so bold, about the ideas he introduced and the way he pursued them. He recommended books and then discussed them with me at length and in depth. One was Great Dialogues of Plato, which I carried everywhere for a while, imagining Socrates roaming the streets of ancient Athens and probing the world from unexpected angles. I not only saw him at debating tournaments, but went to visit him at the Jesuit community in North Philadelphia where he lived, and we talked for hours on the phone. When he came to my house and met my family, my parents were uneasy. Why, they wondered, would a man of thirty spend so much time with a girl of fifteen? I veered between thinking myself quite grown up and wondering if I was just a mixed-up kid with a schoolgirl crush. Although I saw it as “purely spiritual” and he never touched me during my high school years, it was still quite physical in the sense that he was quite alert to physicality—his own, mine, and that of other people and the natural world. It wasn’t so much about sex—though he did stir me in that way—as about his sensitivity to eye contact and directness of speech. I felt a fierce sense of loss when he was transferred from Philadelphia to Washington, but we still kept up an intense correspondence, supplemented by long phone conversations. After he left, I latched on to the next debating coach at St. Joe’s, William Watters, who was quite different from Greg, more traditionally pedagogical and pastoral, but similarly generous with his time and attention, nurturing my development.

      The places where I went to meet Ken, Greg, and Bill were innercity neighborhoods considered dangerous, particularly for a white teenage girl on her own. My family and classmates never ventured into these places. I was determined to do so, even though my heart was pounding as I walked the streets. I became ever bolder in my steps away from the well-worn paths. I spent several summers frequenting City Hall. Every day I took the trolley and subway from Springfield into Philadelphia with a copybook to take notes of the trials, conversations, and city council meetings that took up my day. I got to know politicians, judges, and lawyers, all of whom were amazingly indulgent of my presence and took a surprising amount of time to talk to me. I became particularly attached to Judge Raymond Pace Alexander, grandson of slaves and son of a poor working-class family, who had become a distinguished civil rights lawyer, politician, and judge. I spent quite a lot of time in the criminal courts, which were windows on a world quite unknown to me. (I recorded words I didn’t know, such as “sodomy.” I guessed it had something to do with Sodom and Gomorrah. I looked it up in a dictionary, which defined it as “unnatural sex acts,” but I still didn’t really know what it meant.)

      I was fascinated by politics. I corresponded with various senators, including John Kennedy, asking questions, requesting reports, and commenting on the world situation. I wrote letters to newspapers on political matters. I took the train down to Washington and sat in on sessions of Congress and talked to political staffers, who got me the passes to go where I wanted. One summer I got a job working for a city councilman in Philadelphia, who was later at the center of a municipal corruption scandal. I was very disturbed by this, but convinced myself he was somehow innocent. During the 1960 elections, I was “All the way with JFK.” I became active in Democratic politics and volunteered for the campaign. JFK shook my hand one day when he met with election workers before a rally in Upper Darby. I spent hours talking with men about politics and big ideas. I was into all the razzmatazz: the hats, bumper stickers, buttons, slogans, songs. I went around singing “High Hopes.” I couldn’t get enough, and I couldn’t bear the thought of missing anything while at school, so I got into the habit of truancy. I left in the morning wearing my uniform before ducking into a public lavatory to change clothes. This involved a lot of lying, which makes me cringe even now. My parents opposed my activities, which took me ever further out of any world they could map. My mother was constantly searching my pockets, bags, and drawers. She was a persistent detective, and one day she called election headquarters and I answered the phone. I was caught. As punishment, I was barred from electoral activities (including victory parties), from inter-varsity debating, from my junior prom, from trips to City Hall or Congress, from writing letters to the paper, from doing almost everything I really wanted to do. The deceit continued, as I tried to find ways to free myself from these constraints, but this only tormented me further, as every lie violated the integrity I so sincerely sought. Finally, I decided never to lie again—a vow I’ve kept ever since.

      I felt increasingly alienated from home and school. Sometimes I wanted nothing more than to get away from my parents and teachers, but I was trapped. I wanted to fly free. I sent for many college catalogues, the farther from home the better. I would need a scholarship, so I worked hard at my studies, earning a place on the honor roll and winning academic prizes. I was ill at ease with my peers. I dated throughout high school, often with other debaters, but they seemed so young and shallow compared to the older men whose company I persistently sought. I felt torn in my aspirations. As each university catalogue arrived, I imagined going there, enjoying brilliant lectures and intense conversations with professors and students. I fantasized further about going on to be a professor or politician. I toyed with the idea of joining the Peace Corps. I filled out many applications for scholarships, but mailed none. I was destined to do otherwise, I somehow sensed.

      I moved far beyond the curriculum in my reading: books on philosophy, theology, history, literature. I burned for knowledge. One summer my mother enrolled me in a typing course, but I went to the park and read an enormous book on world history instead. While grounded, I still had books, though my many domestic duties made even reading difficult. At the time there were three babies in diapers in my house, and my disabled uncle was dying a protracted death in our house. Toward the end, he could do nothing for himself. I recoiled before the caring tasks assigned to me. My mother bore the brunt of it and she struggled to cope. The house was noisy and tense. My mother, whom her grandchildren remember as sweet, generous, and accepting, was bad-tempered, demanding, and repressive. I got up very early in the morning to have some quiet for reading and reflection, and left for school early to get to the library before classes. The dark morning hours brought some degree of peace and much-sought silence.

      I still did not question the basic tenets of church or state, but I sought a more intellectually sophisticated version of them. I did wonder about the Church’s warnings about the dangers of venturing outside its limits, asking why I should believe in the religion into which I happened to have been born, when others were equally convinced that the religions into which they had been born were true. Was I brainwashed? I latched on to apologetics textbooks to answer my questions and address my doubts. I pored over the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. I enthused over Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, not only because they expressed the ontological position I was seeking to justify, but also because I took to G. K. Chesterton’s clever and paradoxical style.

      I savored novels with political or religious themes, such as The Last Hurrah and The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor, The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, Advise and Consent by Alan Drury. I took to Frank O’Connor’s stories and nearly split my sides laughing at “First Confession.” I sought sociological analysis in The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman and The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard. I took early morning walks in dark streets pondering words I memorized from my reading, such as lines from We Hold These Truths by John Courtney Murray: “The barbarian need not appear in bearskins with a club in hand. He may wear a Brooks Brothers suit and carry a ball-point pen…. The real enemy within the gates of the city is not the communist but the idiot.” One day in downtown Philadelphia, I bought a Communist newspaper. It would be hard for anyone who didn’t grow up as I did to realize how daring this felt. However, lightning did not strike me dead, and I felt improved by exposing myself to the other side. I didn’t find its contents so implausible either. At times, I seethed with contempt for the conformism and mediocrity of the older generation in general, and of my own parents in particular. What enraged me was that they held up this complacency, which they called normality, as the peak of wisdom, the goal to which I should aspire.

      After I graduated from high school, I got a job in a detective agency in