Blogtrotter

Lawrence's death, with post-script

A brief note: my high school classmate and friend, (Fr.) Lawrence Signey, the one from whom I first heard Sex Pistols 45s that he brought back in 77 and 78 from his summers in his native Seaham, near Newcastle, Co Durham (not far perhaps from Bede's monastic home nearly fifteen centuries earlier on that stormy coast), the one who gave me when I visited him in his freshman year at college seminary a copy of Sid on a single of "My Way", and who I have not probably talked to but once around 84 about REM a bit at a class reunion party and perhaps waved to or got his blessing at his ordination-- well, the one who died suddenly of an infection. I found out only last night in an e-mail. The paper and my fellow classmates have no more details at present. Red-haired, ruddy, freckled, with a great taste in music! So few priests and in this time so many of those few who do so much good. I hope in his twenty years (almost to the month I estimate) he brought many others closer to the divine and to the human. Requiescat in pacem.

Since I wrote this, I did the yoga the same hour as his funeral Mass at St. Robert Bellarmine's up a dozen or less miles from here. I remember seeing that church as a kid, since I went to another of the city's parishes, St. Finbar's. Although we'd go up the hill to St. Francis Xavier in a pinch since the masses were super-fast there. My co-inhabitant has written in her blog at http://casamurphy.blogspot.com a few days ago about her take on the yoga experience. I will simply add that I hope the psychic and physical energy expended worked in harmony with that from a dozen miles up the 5 freeway, and that on the way to the site where he and I once, about a dozen miles more north, went to high school together and got to know each other over four years. And, since I know now what it is, I too say with my wife and son "namaste."