THE JVC AND LESSONS OF A LIFETIME

Steve McKee’s memoir, MY FATHER’S HEART: A SON’S RECKONING WITH THE LEGACY OF HEART DISEASE tells the story of the night his father died at age 50 of a heart attack in 1969, when Steve was 16. It tells other stories, too, including this one adapted here, of how Steve came to join the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.

Can there be a bigger loser on a college campus that the graduate who returns the next year? That was me spring semester of 1975 at Allentown College of St. Francis De Sales in Pennsylvania. When I graduated in May ’74 I had wanted to get as far away from everything as I could. But I had no idea how. So, back to school for me.

Then, utterly by chance (or was it?), I heard about the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Friend of a friend. I set my sights on Alaska, but with the summer moving along, I took a teaching job at a local Catholic high school. When the JVC called in late July, I was devastated. I had to get to Alaska.

The high school I had signed on with had tumbled, and the priest in charge had been brought in to bring it back. I was to be one of his boys, English teacher and JV basketball coach. Indeed, I’d been handpicked. This priest had once been stationed at St. Joseph in York, Pennsylvania, my home parish. He’d watched me grow up. My request to void my contract was a personal affront.

He could have made me stay. But he didn’t. He also knew I couldn’t do the year and then rethink it. A lot can happen in a year. I sat across from him in his office.  As a young man, he told me, he had arranged to be stationed in Africa. But his mother had asked him not to go, not yet. And so of course he never got there. He stood up. I stood up. He put his hands on my shoulders.  “Go,” he said. “Go.”

Getting to Alaska changed everything for me.  I spent two years — 1975-1977 — in the JVC, teaching at St. Mary’s Mission, an Eskimo-Indian boarding school in southwest Alaska on the Andreafsky River, about 90 miles from the Bering Sea.

“Why Alaska?” All of the above. My flip answer is also true: Alaska and the JVC is where I went to be young and stupid. Everyone needs a place to be young and stupid, and in Alaska and the JVC I succeeded fabulously. I planned, when I first deplaned on the tundra, to save the world by the end of the week. My goodness, was I full of myself!

I learned big lessons at St. Mary’s, ones I carry with me still. I couldn’t save the world, for one thing. For another, what makes something, anything, so good (at St. Mary’s I was in the middle of nowhere and surrounded always by the same people) is also what makes it so bad. One comes with the other. Deal with it. I have come to apply that lesson to ALL facets of my life.

 Thank you, JVC.

From MY FATHER’S HEART: A SON’S RECKONING WITH THE LEGACY OF HEART DISEASE, Da Capo Press. www.dacapopress.com / www.steve-mckee.com / steve@steve-mckee.com.

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