Fr. Joseph J. Feeney, SJ

I met God as a baby, I met the Jesuits as a high-school kid, and here I am now, 76 years old, a Jesuit priest, a professor of English, and a happy man. How did it all happen? And how do I find Jesus in my work today?

My Jesuit-part began at St. Joseph’s Prep in Philadelphia—four of my happiest years—where I learned, loved, had a faith crisis, thought of being a teacher, a lawyer, or a priest, and ended up with two out of the three.  Back then—I graduated in 1952—kids made life-choices in high school, so I entered the Jesuits at 17, learned to pray, majored in English, studied philosophy, taught high school for three years, and studied theology (at Woodstock College in Maryland, I was taught by the greats: John Courtney Murray, Gus Weigel, Walter Burghardt, Joe Fitzmyer, and Avery Dulles).  Ordained in 1965, I did my third year of spiritual training with the British Jesuits at St. Beuno’s College in North Wales—a happy and international year in Britain and on the continent.

My professor-part developed when I did my Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, then I started my life of teaching at Saint Joseph’s University. From the beginning, I resolved never to bore my students (I had been bored too often myself), and became a lively, often zany, teacher with very high standards. I taught freshmen, Honors, and upper-division students, created new courses (Modernism and Postmodernism, Hopkins and Joyce, The Contemporary Catholic Imagination in America), and along the way was Visiting Professor at Georgetown, Santa Clara, and Seattle Universities. As priest-professor, I’ve counseled students, celebrated their marriages, baptized their children, even  buried a few—always dispensing laughs, hugs, and tears as appropriate.

As a university professor I became a scholar too, writing over 200 articles and book reviews on English, Irish, and American authors, and specializing in the great Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89).  My Hopkins work has literally taken me all over the world: I’ve lectured on him in the U.S., England, Wales, Ireland, Italy, and Japan.  Many of my articles were on Hopkins, and since 1994, with a professor-friend in Toronto, I’ve co-edited The Hopkins Quarterly, an international scholarly journal.  In 2002 we co-edited a book of essays, Hopkins Variations: Standing Round a Waterfall, and in 2008 my own book, The Playfulness of Gerard Manley Hopkins, was published in England.  Over the years, my life has had many highlights: discovering an unknown Hopkins work in London—the 48-line comic poem “‘Consule Jones’”—and publishing it in The Times Literary Supplement;  exploring Hopkins’ playfulness for the first time;  teaching some wonderful students and writers at Saint Joseph’s;  getting to know London, my favorite city in the world;  lecturing in beautiful and hospitable Japan;  glancing out a window while lecturing at the University of Venice as a gondola glided by;  lecturing at Christmastime in the magical city of Santa Fe; and making lasting friends among my students and fellow scholars (Protestants, Jews, atheists, and Catholics).  For this life and these highlights, I’m deeply grateful to the Lord.

And what about the third, very important part of my life, finding Jesus in my work? With students, I do pastoral work: celebrating Sunday Mass in the University Chapel; counseling them on personal, family, and faith problems;  celebrating their weddings and funerals.  More commonly, though, I find Jesus through their needs as I help them become more human and more Godly through literature. In my Modernism/Postmodernism course, for example, I probe contemporary culture: its losses, and the boundless, often sad, freedom it brings.  But I never “angle” my course toward Catholicism or Christianity: I’m a professor of English, after all, and I owe intellectual integrity to my field and its methods. Besides, I’m more credible this way, I think. Thus, my approach to Jesus is often indirect, but I do comment on the absence of God, for example, in my course on the 20th-Century British and Irish Novel. And I try to model Jesus myself by listening very carefully, and being human, thinking, warm, gentle, and understanding with my students.

With fellow scholars, I am likewise indirect. They know I’m a priest and I always use the “S.J.” after my name, but in lecturing and writing, I’m rigorously and intellectually honest and objective, ever questioning, faithful to data and the text, often enough studying and writing about purely secular areas, e.g., Hopkins’ playfulness, his knowledge of music, his early environmentalism, and the secular meaning of his poem “The Windhover.” It’s important for a priest or Jesuit, especially in a college or university context, not to see everything from a religious standpoint—otherwise, I’d lose scholarly trust, and there’d be little dialogue. Thus, I find Jesus—the Word of St. John’s Gospel—through intellectual integrity, honesty to data, clear thinking and writing, trust in my colleagues, and an incarnational love of the world created through Christ-the-Word, created for us to live and enjoy and study and probe and explore—and write about in our own words.

As I look back on my life at 76, I can happily echo the words of a character in Goethe’s play Faust who reflects on his own life and sighs, “Es war doch so schön”—“It was, ah, so beautiful.” Mine was too—“so schön,” “so beautiful.” And blessed. I’m very grateful.