Peter Steele's path to something better

Peter Steele SJ, 22/08/1939 – 27/06/2012

‘Things can only get better', was Peter’s characteristically self-deprecating response to the list of publications, qualifications, accolades and many achievements rehearsed as he rose to receive an Honorary Doctorate from the Australian Catholic University last year.

His half chuckle, and by then somewhat hoarse and high-pitched, response summed him up – at least for himself and those who knew him. 

A man of grand and gracious gesture, it was always for others. 

For himself, the manner was ordinary and the presence bordering on the shy. even if the prose could be prolix.

Those verbal explosions came from an abundant inner life that was complex, at times moody, yet always affirmative. But such effusions came after long consideration and what he used to call ‘brooding’.

This is captured in his portrait at Newman College (pictured). There he is in an ill-fitting doctoral gown, almost unaware of wearing it as it slides off his shoulders.

On his lap are books on which his hands rest loosely. The look on his face is part bewilderment, part surprise, completely vulnerable and not a little sad. He seems to be saying, 'Mate, has it come to this?'

Peter’s adult life, his professional career and the character of his vocation are all indelibly marked with Melbourne University. Proud to say he was a boy from the bush, he crossed the Nullarbor in 1957 to see what it might be like on the other side. Adventure, travel and discovery were the hallmarks of his life for the next 55 years. 

But it was at Melbourne  University that he most expansively found out what life was like on the other side, going there in 1962. And there he met his lifelong mentor, though he presided at his funeral in 1988: Vincent Buckley. It was Vin who licensed his muse, fostered his talent and shaped some of the enduring features of his imagination.

Vin’s life and work, despite his melancholy, were about ‘the honeycomb’, the sweeter things, their depth and perseverance at the heart of our living. For a good deal of Vin’s middle life, that focus centred on the Incarnation.

Peter shared that passion lifelong, though he added to it. He shared with Vin an unusual sensitivity to how that deeper sweetness could be brutalised. To survive the glare of that sight, Peter took comfort in the relentless commitment to irony, which was the subject of his doctoral thesis on Jonathan Swift.

However sunny the greeting or warm the embrace of any and everyone he met – and in forty years, I only ever heard him once speak ill of another human being – beneath the exterior there lurked in Peter an acute familiarity with the dark side. 

Nicknamed ‘Stainless’ early in life, the swashbuckling gait and swaggering style masked all that he knew and felt of life’s grimier parts. You can measure how present and potent in his life that was by the way he prized paradox. It was the fulcrum of his imagination.

‘Fools and knaves’ is how Swift viewed our species. But to this sober recognition Peter added what he learnt in his lifelong pattern of prayer taught by the Jesuits’ founder, Ignatius Loyola. In the Spiritual Exercises, the retreatant is asked to pray to see and discover ‘where the divinity hides itself’ in the darkest mysteries of Jesus’ Passion.

Peter waited and he discovered. And what he found was the complement to what we celebrate at Christmas – Easter. 

Peter took to heart all his life what he learnt early from the Romantics and the Existentialists: that from conception we are death bound creatures. Mortality and alienation were subjects of his constant musing, prayer and poetry. And as a death bound creature, he sought every day to find plausibility in affirming that, despite the corruption and self-interest that soil so much human endeavour, he could still find the ‘dearest freshness deep down things’.

It is a testament to the value and fruitfulness of his lifelong search that he met his decline in health in recent years with such serenity. It was as if he was saying but not uttering ‘See, I told you this is what it builds up to. And I’ve been preparing for this day with all the surrenders to trust and love that I’ve made for decades.’

But Peter knew the pain that challenges love and kills trust: disappointment with his brothers; frustration with his own limitations; indulgence of his considerable passions; the Cross of the unstinting love of his many friends, some of whom didn’t reciprocate. But no matter what the fare, Peter was always ready to take it because for him, it was the path to something better. Throughout his poetry and preaching, yearning and longing for what might be, how this event or that personality might be made more of, were constants.

For Peter, the end of all our longing is greater yearning still. Now all that waits him is the crowning of that desire.

Fr Michael Kelly SJ was founding publisher of Eureka Street and is now executive director of the Bangkok-based UCAN Catholic news agency.