Remembering Brother David Darst
In honor of the 51st anniversary of the Catonsville Nine Action, we remember the life and legacy of Br. David Darst. The following is the eulogy spoken at his memorial mass by Br. Jerome Halverson.
Brother David Darst, FSC
Born: James Darst, December 6, 1941, Memphis, Tennessee
Novitate: June 16, 1959, Glencoe, Missouri
Died: October 30, 1969 near Auburn, Nebraska at 28 years of age
Buried: Calvary Cemetery, La Salle Institute, Glencoe, Missouri
Homily Delivered November 2, 1969 at the Mass of Thanksgiving for Brothers David Darst and John George Simon; Holy by Brother Jerome Halverson (Memorial Mass)
This afternoon we unite as brothers to honor the lives of two other of our brothers. George and Dave were peculiar people. They stood out among their peers and their elders. They did not take seriously what others thought they should. They were given values, goals, inspirations, hopes; they were given models of life: religious, educational and political. They were given definitions of justice, good-ness, courage, few of which were congenial to their sometimes unglued and unattached view of and participation in the 20th century.
They bothered some of us. They jolted our sensibilities. They overturned nearly every sacred canon of our religious and civic society. They verbally fractured the grey-bearded idioms of “be good” and “keep smiling” and “don't do anything that I wouldn't do” and “take care”. They demonstrably violated coutumiers, schedules, timetables and nearly everything that technological and scientific men revere as the redemptive forces of society. They whittled away at the supports that undergird the precarious balance of power of institutions that we have become so accustomed to. They were without a doubt the gadflies buzzing about, stinging and occasionally bitting the old and tender flesh of each of us.
They could with the wisp of word or gesture dismiss entire philosophies, traditions and theologies. Such wisping away invited the anger, the rejection and the short and sometimes long-lived alienation which they accepted. To endure such a state of reality one thing only seemed to give them courage: the desire to search consciously for new and more adequate answers, not immediately apparent either to them or others.
The lives they lived and the lives they saw others leading failed to tally with the now intuitive, now educated flashes and insights of what they thought aliveness was and was not. They looked elsewhere than most of us for the answers. They looked at art, at the unconventional, at the uncommon: they looked at the smiles, pains, fears of themselves and the unheard-from people. They wanted to know why more people, including themselves, could not share greater measures of happiness, greater measures of responsibilities. Their answers to problems and issues were few but unlike others they were pointing to heretofore unseen problems and undreamed of answers. Uniquely enough, George and Dave were simple, beautifully simple, sometimes exasperatingly simple people. Their goals and hopes: to live, to live uncomplicated and uncrowded lives. The boredom and tedium that infects contemporary values were singularly avoided and deluded.
Life, it seemed, did not come prepackaged in price-stamped baggies. Their lives were living testimonies that it was, rather, art. And as art it was a reality to be learned, to be shaped, to be molded after patterns unheard of, unseen and unpatterned. They labored, in his own way, to make, to create of themselves and other persons sensitive to that which is not common: like justice and courage and search and discovery.
David, in particular, was the most extraordinary and uncommon man I have ever lived with. Each of us has talent but David exuded creativity, joyfulness and a passion for righting the wrongs of his brothers, his country, his world. He saw and felt the brutality and indignity of war, of social and ethnic partisanship. And because of that his life was dedicated to the restoration and redefinition of human being and being human. He sought an end to war: he consorted with negroes in St. Louis to erect new social, civic and political criteria of humanness, dignity and the rights and duties of the poor, the unwanted, the pariah.
But over-riding and/or underpinning all that he did was joy. In spite of his unpopular stands, in spite of threat and anger, he had what impressed me as an indestructible joyfulness. He smiled and sometimes roared with laughter at himself. Grudges, pettiness and jealousy seemed alien to him. Many times in the heat of debate, discussion, dialog he and I would part muttering uncomplimentary and earthy epithets but it was always, I think his inability to remain angry for more than a few minutes that was incredibly disarming. For those who literally hated him and his so-called unpatriotic activities, he was without malice, without rancor, without vindictiveness. He was, rather, eager to concede the mandate of every man to obey an informed conscience.
And so we begin a new time in our lives. A time without George and David. But if we say that we loved and believed them and if love means union and if belief means things or persons that made a difference in our lives, things and persons that have a formative influence on who we are and who we become, then that love and belief rings true, rings real only if what they lived and how they lived infects and spills over into how and what we live, into this new time in our lives.