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Fr. Bill O’Neill: “Look, and look again”

As a boy visiting the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, Bill O’Neill, S.J., once snuck a look behind an old tapestry hanging on the wall. From the back, he saw only a tangle of threads—knots and raveled ends with barely a hint of any pattern. It’s an image he has carried with him ever since: how often our lives can look that way from the inside, the design obscure, the hand that holds the threads invisible.

Since then, O’Neill, now a professor emeritus of social ethics at ���ҵ���’s Jesuit School of Theology, has spent much of his life learning to look from the other side. That work has taken him far beyond the classroom: to art museums in St. Louis, refugee camps in East Africa, a hospital room in Nairobi, and a funeral in which a dying man summarized an entire life in eight words.

���ҵ���’s quarterly “Search for What Matters” luncheon speaker series invites faculty and staff members to reflect on the question “What matters to me and why?” As this spring’s featured speaker, O’Neill drew on all of those threads and asked his audience to consider how they might be woven together into something they couldn’t yet see.

Here’s what matters to Fr. O’Neill, excerpted and edited for length.

Beauty

It began with a friend. In 1974, during my early Jesuit formation in St. Louis, I met Daryl Cornish—an exceptional artist who was, by his own account, singularly ill-suited for philosophical study. During a lecture on Descartes, Daryl spent the first hour diligently taking notes. Then, captured by something, he put the pen down and drew a portrait of the professor instead.

I failed to help Daryl understand philosophy. But it was he who taught me to understand art.

I had entered the Jesuits at the age of 18 and knew little of painting; Rockwell jostled in my mind with Rothko. But Daryl taught me to see, little by little. We went, those days, regularly to the Saint Louis Art Museum and he introduced me to the moderns, the impressionists, expressionists, post-impressionists and their more recent kin like Rothko.

Look, he said. Then, look again.  See the line, the color, the texture and hue. Look—see the immense silence of Rothko, the kinetic colors of Kandinsky, the geometric play of Klee. Look and look again.

Daryl taught me to find what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called the “inscape” of a painting, its singular, irreducible beauty. What started as an education in aesthetics became, over time, a philosophy for living.

That philosophy was tested when I traveled to the refugee camps of Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, and Uganda—places where I saw what I can only describe as the grey anonymity of suffering. In one camp in South Sudan, I watched lorry after lorry arrive, crowded with people who had lost everything. Among them was a girl about six years old, too exhausted to cry.

As we placed her on a blanket on the ground, she simply looked up and said, “Thank you.” Her face is with me still, in the immense silence of that place, her words remembered.

Look and look again. For there was beauty here, beauty even under the sign of its negation. Not wretchedness, but only tragedy. For here was a life, infinitely precious in God’s eye, beauty, if only we could look and look again. The color, texture, and hue of a life still to be painted.

Hope

The apostle Paul tells us to “hope against hope” (Rom. 4:18). And that, too, is a lesson I have learned, little by little. For to look and see the beauty of another, the inscape of a life, even and especially under the sign of its negation, is to hope. Hope is crucified beauty. It is the story of life and must be lived.

In late 2019, I was asked to commit four months to the Jesuit Refugee Service’s project in Kakuma camp in Kenya—home to more than 300,000 refugees from 20 countries. I had a book manuscript due, was 68 years old, and had no professional background in caring for children with cognitive and developmental disabilities, which was the project’s primary mission. I asked for a day to pray over the decision.

St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, spoke of differing types of discernment: graced deliberations that often entail a weighing of options grounded in knowledge. But I knew so little, little indeed that inspired any hope of success. And yet, I knew—rare in such discernments—knew without doubt that this is what I should do. I had grave doubts about my success, but no doubt that I should say yes and four months became three years.

In Kakuma, I found my way through a succession of unlikely roles: overseeing pastoral ministries, assisting youth programs, managing crises, and once, in a single memorable afternoon, devising a cricket-farming plan to feed the project’s fish pond in the morning and hunting down citations to Kant and Habermas in the afternoon. At the day’s end, I could say: “At least we got the crickets right.”

But the story I return to most is that of Fabien, a 14-year-old boy from the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. After surviving an attack by rebels—who had tortured him for trying to protect his mother—Fabien arrived in Kakuma alone and ill. In the camp’s reception center, another refugee named Alain recognized him from their shared village. A small miracle.

Alain, himself a pastor and human rights advocate who had been forced to flee with his family, took Fabien in and became his guardian.

When Fabien’s old wounds became life-threatening, I arranged a surgical consultation in Nairobi. The surgery was urgent and expensive. A Lenten offering from a San Francisco parish provided the funds. For weeks, I walked to the hospital every day, not knowing whether the boy would live.

Fabien survived. He was eventually resettled with Alain’s family in Saskatchewan, Canada—a place, Fabien noted in a message to me, that is very cold.

In befriending Alain and Fabien, in those long days of waiting, I hoped against hope. And I remembered the words of a Catholic Worker colleague long ago: “Bill, we who are privileged cannot afford the luxury of despair.”

In Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, and Uganda, I have learned hope from those like Fabien and Alain who have suffered far more than I can imagine: they have not despaired, and neither can I.

Friendship

Look and look again. The beauty of such friendships—with Alain, Fabien—has taught me to hope, little by little. And there are many friends whom I would name: Pat, Dan and Carol, Bob and Lynn, Kevin, Julia, Tim, Louis, Daryl, Joe, Tom, Eddie, Bator, Lysa, Sal…so many others, a cherished litany. For friends, I think, tell the story of our lives. They see what we do not, they look and look again.

I began by telling the story of my friend, Daryl the artist. We resumed our friendship after my regency in Tanzania when we were both assigned to study theology prior to ordination in Berkeley.

By then, the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, first diagnosed years before, had become more pronounced—first a cane, then a wheelchair. Eventually, he could no longer hold a brush. Students at his side would place a brush in his mouth, and he would paint: beautiful series on the Psalms and the Ignatian Exercises.

It was a life of struggle, and so many would say, what a loss, dismissing his art. In the last months, when I visited, he could not even speak. We simply sat in silence, reading a book on Rothko. I saw him in the infirmary, just before he died. He had waited for his friends to say goodbye. And I preached at his funeral, recalling what he had said to his sister in letter not long before: “All my life I wanted to be a painter. But now I am the paint.”

A life of beauty, hope; the grace of friendship. Look, and look again.