‘The Hawk’ had a wounded body, but he could soar

    We called him “The Hawk,” an adolescent play on “Hawkins,” his last name.
    “Mr.” Donald Hawkins, then a Jesuit scholastic, was about as far away from a soaring hawk as anyone might imagine. The freshman English teacher and Christian Life Community moderator at Jesuit High School, then about 25, used to joke with friends that he was  a walking emergency room.
    The Hawk was the man for whom Obamacare was instituted. He had more orthopedists in his Rolodex than Evel Knievel, the daredevil who soared across canyons and Greyhound buses on a motorcycle at the peril of his skeletal integrity.
    But here’s the thing: Jesuit Father Donald Hawkins may have had a cracked, earthen vessel for a body – just like his favorite Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor – but I don’t recall ever seeing him without a smile on his face and a soft, inspiring word for teenagers who knew beyond any article of faith that the world began and ended with themselves.
    Father Hawkins passed away far too early – at age 67 – on Dec. 30 in an Opelousas, La., hospital, just a few months after he had said goodbye after seven years as pastor of Holy Name of Jesus Church in New Orleans to enter semi-retirement at Grand Coteau.
    In his years as a teacher, pastor, spiritual director, ecumenist and master of church and Civil War history, his identity for me always will be his unfailing kindness and his abounding love for others.
    Father Hawkins was a child of Mobile and a child of the South, and he had a sense, as O’Connor did in her writings, that life as a Catholic could be boiled down to this: The human race was transformed by the Incarnation, God made flesh. If God truly entered history 2,000 years ago, everything changed, and that required a response. We were to be “Men For Others.”
    “What people don’t realize is how much religion costs,” O’Connor once wrote. “They think faith is a big electric blanket, when, of course, it is the cross.”
    Maybe because Father Hawkins suffered so much physical pain throughout his life, he developed a compassionate sense of what others were going through. One Jesuit graduate recalled getting a call “out of the blue” from Father Hawkins during the summer before his junior year.
    “My parents had just separated, and he found out about it and took an interest in me,” he said. “He was the one who alerted the guidance department about my situation. He supported me personally. I’ll never forget that.”
    The hundreds of weddings and baptisms Father Hawkins celebrated for former students testify to the impact he made. Jesuit can be a daunting place, especially for someone coming from a family of modest means, and he always sought out those who might get lost in the shuffle.
    Jesuit Father Michael Dooley, who was a student at Jesuit in the 1970s when Mr. Hawkins was moderator of the Christian Life Community, recalled the effort his teacher put into nurturing every student’s spiritual development.
    “A lot of people were letting that go, but he had no problems talking to people about their faith,” Father Dooley said.
    Over the years, we shared many lunches – he loved to eat anything – and conversations about life. Most of the time the conversation started with “How are you, Don?” – and then you shut up and listened to him talk about the Reformation or subsidiarity or the Battle of Vicksburg. He told me once that as much as he appreciated my sense of humor, there were certain things I had to take more seriously. He was always teaching, softly.
    He was a brilliant man who didn’t let his intelligence blind him to his purpose as a priest. In the “Habit of Being,” O’Connor wrote as a Jesuit. She wrote of two Jesuits I have come to love: Donald and Francis: “Satisfy your demand for reason, but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.”
    A.M.D.G., Don. Fly.
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].