Fr. Godfrey Diekmann, OSB (1908-2002)
Remembrances
by Sr. Kathleen Hughes, RSCJ, PhD
Former President of the North American Academy of Liturgy
I am happy and honored to say a few words in thanksgiving for Godfrey Diekmann's amazing life. I speak for all of us who claimed him as teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend first to you, his brothers, less to express our sympathy for his loss, though some of you may feel that acutely but more to give you our gratitude for sharing Godfrey with the larger Church and world, and for supporting and sustaining him in his vocation all these years for he was first and foremost, a monk
And he was so much else besides…
patristics scholar
exacting translator
passionate teacher
zealous ecumenist
lively speaker
rigorous editor
engaging, even sometimes raucous, conversationalist
I remember once, here in the student dining room at St. John's when Godfrey got worked up about the key to Christian theology and life. He startled and silenced a good number of tables around us when he shouted…it's not the resurrection dammit! It's the incarnation! Then, as students slipped away, he continued…But we don't believe it. We don't believe we are invited to become the very life of God! Having delivered himself of this truth, he commented on the seasonings in the soup, another of his passions.
Once he told me he thought of himself as a maitre'd, as one who loved to gather people at table and then to regale them with a seemingly endless collection of stories. Did he ever repeat himself? Rarely, and if he did begin a story we had heard before, the ending was invariably different.
Is it too much of a stretch to think of his amazing liturgical contributions in the same vein? Godfrey, the one who loved to gather people to the table. Godfrey, the one who believed that the table was the center of the Christian life and that there the gift became the obligation. Eucharist, for Godfrey, was dynamic; it was a life that had to be lived. So he worked tirelessly forming others in the spirit of the liturgy and working on translations for 30 years with his ICEL colleagues, translations which would in some measure allow the liturgy to make a claim upon us. We receive Christ for a purpose, he said once, not to keep him for ourselves but to give him to a world so in need of healing and hope.
Godfrey always referred to liturgical renewal as "The Cause" with
a capital "C'…and
in these latter days, when "The Cause" has been under such virulent attack
Godfrey longed to die and be with God where he felt he might be more
useful! He wrote this on his last Christmas card: "I firmly believe I
can help the Cause more effectively from God's throne." (Parenthetically,
I think he meant to say, before God's
throne!, but you get the general idea…)
Writing Godfrey's biography was a privilege, but it was not an unalloyed joy. I will never forget our first session, both of us new to this relationship and a bit awkward. I had asked him to talk a little about his growing up. So he began…I was born in Roscoe (comma) Minnesota (comma) on April 7 (comma) 1908 (period). More often than not he ignored my questions and answered the questions he wanted me to ask. And he was remarkably diffident about himself, his inner life, his loves, his hopes, his fears, his thoughts about life and death, even his image of God, though once in an unguarded moment he did confide that his experience of God had changed no longer was God, for him, truth, beauty, or goodness. God was, in Godfrey's last years, pure melody…and he set to music a psalm phrase which was his mantra: "You, O Lord, are my strength, my Song." Truly, if God is Melody, Godfrey Diekmann was one of God's most supple instruments. The orchestra will not be quite the same without him.