Father Tom

Father Tom’s spiritual awakening struck in the desert. It was the 1960s and Tom was working in Woomera – an area of the South Australian outback harbouring military secrets. “It was a wild time, the 60s. I spent a lot of time partying, playing football, and pursuing women,” Tom tells me as we sit in his living room cluttered with books. A gifted narrator, Tom is comfortable with himself, something which is immediately noticeable, and makes you feel at ease in his presence. 

“In my early twenties I worked at a weapons testing facility in Woomera where I provided ground support to those testing missiles,” Tom says. One morning as Tom and his colleagues were boarding the bus that would take them to the project site, he noticed one of them, Ricky, was absent. “Ricky was a friendly man, though one that was in debt,” Tom says. “He gambled to try to win money to pay off his debts. After work that day, we discovered that Ricky had died by suicide. It was shocking.” Tom pauses for a moment, and I leave him alone with his memories of an old friend.

 “That night,” Tom continues, “I walked into the bush. I had no idea where I was going. In the darkness, I bumped into a tree startling a sleeping kangaroo.” Tom walked for hours, thinking about Ricky. Eventually, his thoughts turned to his own life. “I felt suffocated as everyone was on my back,” Tom says. “My parents told me I drank too much and had sex with too many women. My boss couldn't understand why I wasn't taking advantages of all the opportunities at work. My football coach, who told me I could play professionally in any league, couldn't understand why I wasn't applying myself.” Returning to his parents, Tom reflects, “Despite all the trouble I caused them, I realised for the first time they never gave up on me.”

“And that's when it happened,” Tom says, referring to the spiritual awakening. For the first time, Tom sensed that there was something more to life than the one he was living. “Suddenly the stars, earth and my body came alive with this energy,” Tom explains. “I understood I believed in God: not as someone up in the sky but as this palpable energy. I felt ecstatic and started dancing. I was completely sober.” Tom gazes at me with unflinching intensity as he speaks. His thoughts returned to Ricky, to his pain, his suffering. “I felt like a selfish shit,” Tom continues. “That night I made a decision to get to know my colleagues better.”

After that experience in the desert, life changed: Tom became involved in trade unions fighting for the rights of workers, volunteered at a homeless shelter, and joined the management committee of his football club. His relationships with women also changed, they became more serious, he tells me.

“Did you fall in love?” I ask.

“That is the question,” Tom responds before telling me about one of these relationships. “I had a relationship with a woman, I bought her a friendship ring, I loved having sex with her. She wanted to marry me. I would look into her eyes trying to work out whether I wanted that too.”

“How long were you together?” I ask.

Tom sits back in his armchair. “Two years. She asked me to marry her. I said no.”

“Why? What was the realisation that you came to?” I ask.

“I appreciated all her goodness, beauty, and love. But the ecstatic experience in the desert was much more profound that anything I was experiencing in this relationship,” Tom replies.

After two more relationships, both of which ended when he could not commit to marriage, Tom believed he was being called to priesthood. “As I was a narrow-minded Catholic, I thought the only response to the ecstatic experience in the desert was to be a priest,” Tom says.

“Did you believe the Catholic Church was expansive enough to hold this experience you had in the desert?” I ask.

“I did not know, to be honest,” Tom responds. “But then if you had a spiritual experience as a young man, the path to seminary would soon follow. Around this time, I was a best man at a friend’s wedding. Standing at the altar, listening to their vows, I realised that while I was happy for my friends it was the priest’s role in that relationship of love that I saw for myself. There was something of priesthood in me.”

When Tom decided to enter the seminary, it was the late 1960s and he was close to turning 30. The local seminary did not appeal to Tom: “The priests would be served better food than the seminarians, use better cutlery, and sit elevated looking down at the seminarians. As a union man, I could not live in a system based on such blatant inequality.” He decided St Paul’s National Seminary in Sydney, devoted to those whose call came later in life, would be a better fit.

While his longing for God remained with him during his years at the seminary, moments of ecstasy like that in the desert were lacking. “I never experienced anything remotely close to the experience in Woomera. At the end of my training, I was on the verge of leaving the seminary as there was nothing happening,” Tom says referring to the distinct absence of God’s voice in his life. This silence continued during his first placement as an assistant priest. After the first six months of his placement, Tom embarked on a 30-day spiritual retreat. “I decided that if I didn’t experience something on the retreat, I would leave the priesthood,” Tom says. “The [spiritual] experience was too superficial.” While on retreat, he tended to the monastery garden one spring afternoon and without warning, something happened. “I felt an indwelling presence of God with the words: ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine’ [Isaiah 43:1],” Tom says smiling. “I felt ecstatic. I danced right there in the monastery garden.”

Tom stands up to walk to the kitchen, stepping over his Apple laptop that sits on the floor. He is barefoot, as he normally is, so he can “touch the land and feel its sacredness.” As I wait for him to return, I hear the fluty sound of a magpie’s song in the distance. I peer out the window but cannot see the bird. Tom returns carrying an armful of books. “I will tell you about these later,” he says placing the books near a vase of spikey honeysuckles. At the top of the pile is a book by Bishop Geoffrey Robinson.

Tom was born in Gawler, South Australia, in 1940. His family, devout Catholics who prayed the rosary every night, lived about a half hour drive from the Salisbury Explosives Factory –the largest explosives factory in Australia during World War II. “I have three brothers and two sisters,” Tom says, showing me a family photo taken in 1945. The photo, with its soft brown colour and white frame, shows Tom and his siblings, lined up in order of size, dressed in their best Church clothes.

The family home was small, so Tom shared a bed with his older brother, Jim. In 1947 when Jim was 9 years old, he was killed by a car as he cycled to the corner store. Jim’s small body smashed through the windscreen as the glass shards pierced the face of the startled driver. Jim died instantly. Tom was 7 years old. “On the day my brother died, I was brought home from school and told he had gone to Heaven,” Tom says as he leans back in his red armchair. After the funeral, a wake was held at the local school. The driver of the car that killed Jim was at the wake, Tom tells me: “My dad walked towards the man and gave him a big hug to show he forgave him. They stood for a long time, hugging. This memory has stayed with me for the rest of my life.”

Though Tom was in pain, he did not cry at the funeral. Not because he did not want to, but because he couldn't. “My father, while gentle with my sisters, was strict with us four boys,” Tom explains. “If we returned home late, our hands would be hit for every minute we were late. The pain was excruciating, yet if we made a sound or cried Dad would go berserk. My dad was angry and powerful and would hurt you if you broke the rules, the same as God who would send you to hell if you broke the rules. I was fearful and angry, and I could not cry.”

Tom’s father wanted his boys to be tough, to have what it took to make it in a world that could be brutal. No one prepared Tom’s father for how difficult life would be. Born in 1894, Tom’s father was forced to leave school just as he was learning to read so he could help support the family. He was seven years old when he said goodbye to his friends, who would grow up taking for granted that they could read and write. Tom’s dad began working in construction and by the age of nine was helping to build roads. By the time he married at the age of 40, he had already been working fulltime for three decades. Tom’s Dad left Australia once to fight during World War I, an experience, Tom tells me, that changed him: “Dad fought at Gallipoli and when he returned, everyone knew he was different, but no one said anything.”

Tom did eventually grieve the loss of his brother. Five decades later and with the help of a physiotherapist who was treating his back pain. “When the physiotherapist touched my lower back, the area I store my emotions, I bawled my eyes out for the first time. It was cleansing,” Tom says.

From the 1970s to the present day, Tom’s ministry has been expansive, working with communities across the state and country. Tom has served as a parish priest, often in marginalised communities, and was involved with the Young Christian Workers serving as the chaplain for many years. In later years, he led retreats, often in the desert, and offered spiritual direction to priests, nuns, bothers and lay people. He has studied Buddhism with Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, whirled in rhythmic ecstasy with Sufi dervishes, and spent time with Native American spiritual leaders in North America. In Australia, he encountered spiritual teachers while working in a remote Aboriginal community in the Kimberley in 1992. In his hallway is a painting of Tom and one of his teachers from the Kimberley. In the painting, Tom looks the same: he has the same warm smile, the same direct and sincere gaze; the only thing missing is his white beard.

While Tom’s spiritual journey continued to grow and unfold, he experienced moments of serious doubt. “A number of times in my life I thought that I cannot keep going in this outfit, being a priest with bishops making the decisions they were,” Tom says. “There were moments that were so hard.” One such moment was the Church’s poor response to sexual abuse. “I was outraged that Church authorities would not listen to [the late] Bishop Geoffrey Robinson who was involved in developing the church’s response to child sex abuse in Australia. He was an expert in cannon law,” Tom says as he picks up Robinson’s book from the side table. “You need to read Robinson’s book,” Tom says, referring to Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church, which explores what the author sees as the roots of abuse in the Church. As Tom leafs through the book, my eyes are drawn to the Aboriginal artworks which sit in-between familiar Catholic images of Jesus on the Cross. After reading me an excerpt from the book, Tom looks up and adjusts his glasses. “I was infuriated the bishops would not listen to Robinson. It was because it was not what they [the bishops] wanted to hear.” Robinson, himself a survivor of abuse, campaigned for a special Vatican council to address the crisis.

But the closest Tom came to leaving was when he fell in love with a nun. He was in his forties. “It was her relationship with Jesus and openness to grow in that relationship that caught me on fire,” Tom says smiling. “I was excited to find a soul so alive with this love for Jesus. It is so beautiful to spend time with someone like this, it was like listening to a beautiful orchestra.”

“Did this love feel the same as when you fell in love in your twenties before you were a priest?” I ask.

“Very different,” Tom replies still smiling. “I had never felt anything like this before. Our love for each other was inseparable from our love for God.”

When Tom told her that he was in love with her, he discovered that she felt the same way. By this time, they had been friends for a decade. When I ask whether others in the religious community suspected they had feelings for each other, Tom tells me he does not know: “If they did suspect, they did not say anything to me.” To discern what they should do – leave and get married or remain as priest and nun – they went on an eight-day spiritual retreat led by a nun who guided them through the process, gently and with no judgment. “They were challenging days,” Tom says. “I discovered the essence of our relationship was not her or me. It was Love and Love is God. God was telling me not to be afraid. We both realised that our primary call was our relationship with God. But we can love each other in the context of that love. And it’s that love that brings the vibrancy to the relationship. A sexual love with each other would not have given us the gratification we were looking for.”

When it comes to marriage, Tom believes that priests should be allowed to marry. He also thinks that women should be allowed to ordain as priests. Tom has long struggled with the male-dominated culture of the Church. “God is Love and Love is incomprehensible mystery, to put that all in the masculine….and the patriarchal culture…it’s outrageous,” he says.

During our conversation, when inspiration strikes, Tom will recite Bible passages from memory or poems by mystics. Sometimes he will sing songs in Kaurna language. I wonder what my spiritual experiences would have been like had I met a priest like Tom growing up. Having attended a Catholic primary school, I don't remember anyone teaching us about the mystics. My earliest memory of a priest was attending Mass one morning with my entire grade one class. The draughty church was full of young primary school students. I remember looking at the priest, through my seven-year-old eyes, as he stood on the altar and said, “God is a bastard. When everything is going well in life, He will make something go wrong.” The priest’s face was unsmiling, his anger obvious. Nothing in that moment inspired me to approach the priest or learn more about his God. 

Tom, now in his eighties, lives in Willunga, a historic town overlooking the sea, on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people. A diverse landscape of vineyards, bushland, and almond groves surrounds him. In 1993, he walked the Tjilbruke Dreaming Track – a major Dreaming trail for the Kaurna people. Over 26 days, he walked along rugged coastline, private farms, and bushland. On this land where he senses its “hidden fire,” Tom leads multi-faith contemplative prayer groups. “There is a hunger for God in the community,” Tom says. “But the Church is not reaching or talking to most people: the majority of Catholics never go to mass.” Small communities are essential for the spiritual path Tom tells me, and it is through these small groups that he hopes people of any faith will find their own way to Love. In these groups, Tom tells me, no one refers to God as father; God is gender neutral.

Gratitude is part of their expansive practice and for Tom, he is most grateful for the decision he made to visit his father, decades ago when he was still alive, to ask him as an adult, why he was so tough with his boys. During this visit, the two men took it in turns to describe what it felt like to be the son, and the other, the father. “My dad talked about his experiences in the war, the pain and hurt,” Tom says. “He also talked about his frustration of being illiterate – he could not read his own father’s letters to the editor that were published in the newspapers. At the end of that day, it was beautiful as two men became very good friends. I had closure and we stayed close until the end of his life.”

Tom believes we are all connected, to each other, to the earth, to Love. Whatever our tradition is, Tom believes it will inevitability lead us to the realm of Love. “Love something and let yourself be loved. This is all we need,” Tom says.