By Michael Patrick O’Brien
Growing up in a divorced family, without a father, I still had many father-like figures. Two of them died before I was born, a poet and a pastor. Although I never met them, I call them my Middlebury monuments, as in Middlebury Vermont, the small New England town to which both men were connected.
How does a child of the high arid mountains and deserts of Utah monumentalize two men from the lush rolling green hills, rivers, and lakes of Vermont? My family- O’Briens, Gleasons, Sullivans, etc.- for many generations back lived in Vermont. They bequeathed one of the monuments to me.
My mother, essentially orphaned at age 9, told me many stories about her own surrogate father, a loving and gregarious uncle named Thomas J. Leonard (1871- 1951). Father Leonard was an undocumented (but eventually naturalized) immigrant from Limerick, Ireland, who served as a Catholic priest and civic leader in Middlebury for almost four decades. He sang Irish songs to my mother and gave her the middle name of Mavourneen, which means “my darling.”
The other monument I discovered for myself, at Utah’s South Clearfield Elementary, when I prevailed in one of the many reading contests in Mrs. Rigby’s 5th grade class. The prize was a book titled You Come Too, a collection of poems written by Vermont’s Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963). Frost, the descendant of Scottish/English immigrants, taught at Middlebury College, which was located just across the street from my uncle’s Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary parish church. My young eyes devoured Frost’s poetic words. He was the first poet with whom I lyrically bonded.
Both men had difficult childhoods. Leonard grew up poor in Ireland, coming to the America along with his epileptic brother in 1888 thanks to the hard work and pinched pennies of his sister Mary, a domestic servant in the household of the Middlebury College president. Leonard worked at various mill laboring jobs before finally entering college and the seminary in Quebec. His beloved sister Kate, my great-grandmother, died at age 25 right after giving birth to my grandmother.
Frost confronted death early too. His father passed when Frost was a young teen, leaving the family with only about $8. His mother died of cancer when Frost was in his early twenties. Left largely alone to care for his clinically depressed sister, he worked in factories and on farms while seeking his education and trying to launch his writing and teaching career.
The two men also were quite different. Frost was baptized into a Christian church, but later left it as an adult. He married and had six children, losing four of them before he died. Leonard was a devoted Catholic, from cradle to grave, and eventually a cleric. He was a family man too, but in a different way. His sister Mary cared for him during the entirety of his ministry and his younger brother John brought him to his Burlington home when Leonard retired from the active priesthood, probably due to poor health, in 1949.
For four decades each summer and fall, Frost taught at the Bread Loaf School of English, at the Middlebury mountain campus in nearby Ripton, Vermont, about 8 miles from the main campus. And of course, he wrote the words that reached me some fifty years later in 5th grade, expressing secular and almost agnostic themes about nature, farm life, and the mundane activities of daily living.
For four decades, Leonard ministered to his Middlebury flock. He celebrated thousands of masses, baptisms, and weddings, and channeled God’s grace and compassion while saying last rites and burying thousands of his friends and congregants. He spoke at civic occasions, served on the local school board, blessed soldiers heading off to two world wars, and joyfully welcomed soldiers back home.
Despite his non-religious bent, Frost was close friends with a rabbi who also spent summers near Middlebury. Frost’s colloquial poetry, at least in the book I won and read in grade school, flows with spirituality. There are many examples, but one of the best is “Fire and Ice” (1920):
“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.”
Frost also wrote a poem called “Not All There” (1936):
“I turned to speak to God,
About the world’s despair;
But to make bad matters worse,
I found God wasn’t there.
God turned to speak to me
(Don’t anybody laugh)
God found I wasn’t there—
At least not over half.”
Frost, with his written words, could pastor with the best of them. And, it turns out, Leonard could write with a poetic flare too.
In a fundraising appeal during the 1921 Irish Civil War, the priest and Irish patriot sought help “to relieve the hunger and distress of the children and the women who are without homes, without work, without food only in a most meager way and have no place to turn for succor.” Succor is, I think, a word only a poet would use.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the American Civil War, Leonard eloquently explained the meaning of life to hundreds of blue and gray veterans: “If you are faithful to the post which providence will assign you, no matter what that post might be, you will be successful in life…Your name may not be emblazoned on the fading pages of earthly history, but what is infinitely better, it will be inscribed in the imperishable records of the Book of Life.” He also, perhaps unwittingly, described himself: “True, sincere and practical religion is the balance wheel of every well-ordained human life.”
Both Middlebury men monumentally influenced me. As I have studied them over the years, however, one question continues to vex me. One man was a poet, and the other a pastor, but which was which?
