Mike Sehler SJ

This week, I got the word that a former teacher of mine, Mike Sehler SJ passed away. The fragility of life is something that I, like a lot of people, don’t stop to consider.
I first met Father Sehler in ’75. He introduced me to James Joyce/James Agee. A quirky, intellectually gifted and, yes, sometimes arrogant fellow. I was immediately drawn to him. I can remember one class where he just talked about the then breaking news of Florence Ballard, one of the original members of the Supremes, who died in 1976 at the age of 33. “Gentlemen, can you imagine being that famous and dying at 33?” He spent that whole class talking about life’s ironies. I loved his sensitivity. Mike also said that ‘the English alphabet has just 26 letters. 26 letters and in the right hands these 26 letters have given the world literature’. He also once told me to make sure to only read the classics because there’s ‘not enough time’ to get through all the entire world of literature. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of his teaching. Mike’s gift to me and all the other kids he taught was to just appreciate the dazzling beauty of language.
Because of him I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in “Lonesome Dove” and had nightmares about slavery in “Beloved” and walked the streets of Dublin in “Ulysses” and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” I’ve laughed out loud reading Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinions for their sheer brilliance and have been humbled by the blazing intellect of Charles Krauthammer’s editorials.
Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, lemme tell you. Those are big years. Everybody always thinks of it as a time of adolescence—just getting through to the real part of your life—but it’s more than that. Sometimes your whole life happens in those years, and the rest of your life is just the same story playing out with different characters. I’m eternally grateful for going through those years with the likes of Mike Sehler.
Keep him in your prayers.