Birthdays for older people are often embarrassing and full of unwelcome wrinkles and reminders of the passage of time. Birthdays remain important anniversaries even of those who have passed through life into the next. And this week has been a constant reminder of birthdays.
We are now in Pentecost time. The Feast of Pentecost is sometimes called the “Birthday of the Church” – that mysterious event in which flames and wind erupted within a room of fearful human beings, showering them with presents of distinct gifts and charisms.
As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, such divine gifts are “manifested, given, and communicated as a divine person: of his fullness, Christ, the Lord, pours out the Spirit in abundance.”
A first birthday involves celebrating in time and space the arrival of a fragile new person into the world, one who utterly depends on his or her mother in the first place, but also on so many other fortunes and graces – the entire family forest, the culture, and the wider world – for its future flourishing.
The always theologically-astute Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton (his 151st birthday occurred on May 29 this year) is a sort of holy patron-jester of birthdays. He insisted that birthdays held a moral and metaphysical importance: “The first fact about the celebration of a birthday is that it is a way of affirming defiantly, and even flamboyantly, that it is a good thing to be alive.”
Chesterton refuted his atheist and anti-birthday mate, George Bernard Shaw, in an essay in the London Illustrated News: “Mr. Shaw is ready to praise the Life-force, but he is not willing to keep his birthday, which would be the best of all ways to praise it.”
Neither we nor Mr Shaw should feel we have outgrown birthday parties, nor be so pompous that we feel a bit silly at them. Chesterton continues: “A birthday does not come merely to remind a man that he has been born. It comes that he may be born again. And if a man is born again he must be as clumsy and comic as a baby.”
For those baptised in Christ, this rebirth marks the beginning of a unique and personal calling, and of the Holy Spirit’s initial provision of gifts that will help us meet the particular challenges of our time and place. Such gifts are always, as Chesterton reminds us, given to us. We can tragically reject or overlook them. We can also hopefully rediscover them and dust them off.
I am so mindful of birthdays and special gifts because this 11th of June marks the birthday of the second youngest of my six sisters, Teresa Martina Duffy Tonks, who would have been 54 years old.
It reminds me that the Holy Spirit paints some pretty vivid portraits in the unique and irreplaceable lives of Christians.
Teresa was simply a daunting “giant” – both physically and temperamentally – who identified her gifts and drove through life and suffering with them.
She was more than a drama, dance, voice, and literature teacher and leader – she was a force for using the stage and performance as an avenue to enhance the lives and prospects of her students, and indeed of all those who came into her sphere in her adopted city of Ararat.
She died in 2022 after ten unexpected years of engaged survival and fight against cancer. She never retired from Marion College in Ararat, Western Victoria, where she was Head of Drama and taught her classes with unforgettable impact. For Teresa, “fighting” was no bland euphemism. It involved a vigorous, punchy, and determined embrace of life every day, which meant on every floorboard, on every drive to chemotherapy, at every rehearsal, and during every collection of costumes and stage props from nearby farms and backyards.
Teresa was variously called Tess, Tonks, or Trees, depending on who was talking to her. As Head of Drama at Marion College, she intentionally worked with both students and local amateurs to encourage them to find their voices and other hidden talents, to see through their often difficult and needy experiences, and to unify their often ratty attentions into the exhilarating and unforgettable experience of being a band, a corps, a troupe de théâtre.
Teresa combined her gifts of teaching with a deep commitment to encourage those in need. Siobhan, my youngest sister, wrote in a vivid eulogy at time of Teresa’s funeral: “Her love of teaching and performing drove her to different corners of the globe, from Central Australia to London, where she worked at the Globe Theatre and in some of the city’s roughest schools.”
She would stare down the tough kids with a tougher, warmer and more determined stare to get them into Shakespeare. Inspired by the renowned English voice coach and teacher Patsy Rosenburg, she worked on the gathering together of voice, body, and movement to give adolescents who had written themselves off as “no-hopers” a new presence in their worlds.
“Teresa’s talent for storytelling and her creative exuberance tapped into this deep well of youthful energy. And it’s this force of energy that proved to be so infectious, that motivated her students and at times exasperated her peers. She had a wonderful ability as a teacher to make complex ideas disarmingly simple and engaging. And once her audience or her students were engaged they remained hooked…”
In a memorable conversation, Teresa told me of her project for live theo-drama in Ararat. Inspired by the inclusiveness of pilgrimage and medieval mystery plays, she would invite pretty un-churched youngsters to stage a Stations of the Cross. She said characteristically: “it’s a much better way to engage kids with the mystery of Jesus than to lump them into Mass – when they don’t know which way of the Mass is up!”
She had the kids produce the artwork for the 14 stations of Christ’s passion (after studying the Scriptures), and then invited them to “stage” the Stations during Holy Week. The old parish priest and religious sisters gave her great encouragement. Those invited to attend were not only the school parents and other teachers, but also some prisoners and guards from the nearby prison. She told me how powerful the experience was for her and others.
Fr John Corrigan, the generous homilist for Teresa’s funeral, noted how Teresa related to both the “little” and “big” Saint Teresas, and that she had – like them – a real-world friendship with Jesus Christ. “Tess was very intentional in asking Jesus to be with her at the end. She endured her own way of the Cross, her own road to Calvary, as we all will.”
