Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm., feminist mentor: rightly did the maidens love him

Carole R. Fontaine

When I first arrived at Duke University in 1979 to begin doctoral studies in Old Testament, I did not know how truly lucky I was. "Oh, you're Roland's student" was the greeting I received immediately from the Religion Department when I checked in. It was news to me, though Roland Murphy was certainly the reason why a professor at Yale had suggested Duke as a place for me to study wisdom traditions. I had read Roland's work, naturally, as I waited for school to begin, but I did not translate that into immediately being tagged as "his"! Where I was studying, students were very lucky indeed if such well known professors even kept appointments with them or turned in their grades after a year or two, much less took an interest in them at the outset! The Religion Department at Duke had already impressed me, calling me repeatedly during the decision period, with smooth words and substantive offers of assistance, so my choice had been an easy one. But I wasn't really expecting to be considered worthy of any attention by anyone, given my previous experiences of graduate study.

I knocked on his office door, but didn't find him; one old timer grad student who spotted me said, "Oh, he's just coming in; look for an enormous Q-tip--he's got his robes on!" As it turned out, Roland sweeping quickly through the halls of the Divinity School in the brown robes of his order with an thick shock of white hair emerging from the top did give off the aspect of a highly effective Q-tip on the move! Maybe it was the "costume," maybe it was the stories of the other students, maybe it was the reading of Murphy's work I had already done: after our first introduction, I moved into a relationship of mentoring and wideranging conversations that was to last for over two decades and which, even after his death, continues to nourish me. Yes, I was a very lucky young bible scholar in the making!

When one looks at Murphy's enormous amount of scholarly production, his relentless attention to scholarly detail as well as the theological "Big Picture," his committed involvement with the life of faith and the building up of other believers, it is more difficult to remember his presence in the classroom and behind the scenes of academia. This is no surprise, since those aspects of his career were known only to his students and colleagues during his career, and represent the "orality" of the man's work. As such, not all of what he was or did in that context has been "documented," but since it has been treasured up in this heart at least, I add it here as part of the tribute to my teacher.

Roland was a familiar and beloved fixture of the Duke University and Catholic communities in the Research Triangle of North Carolina in those years. Whether early in the morning or late after working hours, you could find Roland reliably in his office and available. He brought his little lunch daily--cheese and sprout sandwich on whole wheat--and consumed it with a pint of dark beer. In early days, he used to have his lunch openly in the Divinity Student lounge where any M.Div. or Catholic seeker could find him and engage him in lively theological conversations. Eventually, tee-totaling Methodists put a stop to all that free discourse: surely no one should be subjected to the sight of a religious person drinking beer on site! So Roland retreated to his office for lunch, but those not offended by his choice of beverage were always welcome to join him. Catholics across the campus solicited Roland for spiritual advice and prayer: on one of his daily swims at the pool where he repeated the Psalms of Ascent in both Hebrew and Latin, keying the verses to his swim strokes as a form of his meditative practice, he encountered the much beloved "Coach K" of the Duke University Basketball Team--always contenders for national championships and the pride of Duke sports, then and now. "Father!" cried out Coach K, a Polish Catholic with a Chicago background that placed him within Roland's old stomping grounds, "Would you pray for the team, Father? Please!" Roland replied in that booming, joyous voice of his, "I always do, Coach! I always do."

Within his own department, one has only to look at the list of women students trained by the graduate school during the time Roland taught at Duke University to conclude that there must have been something of a special atmosphere--a woman-friendly one!--about the place. (It's not so much that anyone went out of his/her way to make women feel welcome, but rather that we were able to flourish under the atmosphere of benign neglect that obtained for all students.) Beverly Gaventa, Barbara Geller, Claudia Camp, Elizabeth Huweiler, A. J. Levine, and scores of women studying for the M.Div. all benefited from Roland's ready acceptance of their presence, their questions and their insights. Indeed, when I speak around the country on topics of wisdom, psalms or the Song of Songs, it is rare when some woman does not emerge from the audience to tell me her "Roland Story." "Oh!" said one to me, "you studied with Roland Murphy? No wonder you're like you are! He's the most exciting man I've ever heard talk about the Bible. And parts of the Bible you don't hear about, too. Why, after the day-long retreat he did for our denominational association on the Song of Songs--gosh, the audience was so turned on, we fled the building looking for our spouses! The only possible response to what he said was to go celebrate your sexuality with your partner--and it's biblical, too!"

As a woman scholar with no particular interest in banging the drum of essentialist womanhood in my work, I think one of the things I appreciated most as a woman about Roland's mentoring was his genuine surprise at the sexism I encountered in the pursuit of my profession. In fact, he was usually more surprised than I was, and just as deliberate in responding to it. Roland never questioned that his women students should be where we were, never thought that we could not or should not do it--and in his last letter to me, he reiterated those sentiments, and affirmed that he was glad to have been part of the overturning of the blindness of the formerly all-male scholarly guild. He translated this support into reality in many ways: he worked in depth with all those of us who wrote dissertations for him, and the impact of his methodological clarity is visible in our work. He supported the departmental initiatives to steal away all the sharp women off the doorsteps of the graduate schools of the Northeast. When Claudia Camp came down for an interview at Duke (which, in typical Claudia-style, she turned into an interview of Duke), Roland pushed me out the door with a and guide her to the Dining Hall, saying "Get her for us!" But that was only the beginning: whether with offprints or that complimentary JBC, introductions to publishers, job recommendations, all kinds of inclusions on meeting panels and on boards, or at professional meetings, Roland followed through for his students, well after their degrees had been completed.

So, as a walking emissary of the Tree of Life (ah, that Q-Tip motif, back when they had wooden sticks), Roland became that to those who grabbed hold of him. Faced with a crowd of feisty women, often with interests outside of his training and purview, he took the extraordinary step of joining us in our studies, rather than discouraging us from working outside the realms where he felt his competence lay. "Images of Women" and "folkloristic" applications of method to Bible were not exactly falling off the tree in the late 70s; there were no set guidelines for how to work on interdisciplinary topics or feminist questions! While we all thanked God repeatedly that Carol Meyers was available to us over in Duke College and on site at excavations, without Roland's willingness to explore brave new worlds with us, I wonder sometimes what sort of scholars we would have become. With Roland, we sensed paradigms for collaborative scholarship; he insisted on being taught before he could feel comfortable directing a dissertation in one of these off-center topics. Together, he and I studied Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Mapping (ably guided in our readings by my husband, at the time a Ph.D. student in Experimental Psychology) so we could both follow the comments of structural linguists on the function of form in the proverb genre. "All these charts!" he said, "do they actually mean anything to you?" Reluctantly, I admitted that they did--sort of--and his response was "Show me!" I was not the only one for whom he was willing to read widely: the Camp dissertation, practically the first world-wide to take the "Images of Women" methodology into the biblical realm, was another place where the professor became the student and the student the professor. I suspect there are good reasons why none of us felt any pressing desire to "slay the father" in our writings, and Roland's simplicity, humility and kindness showed us that there was a professional "way of being" which eschewed the typical excesses of ego. I know only now, after many years of teaching, what it costs when a teacher looks up and smiles when you've knocked on the door, inviting you into his world! Roland did that.

One of the things I most treasured in Roland's availability to me as a budding theologian were his great philosophical "diagnostic skills." Not only did we actually have personal conversations about where I found God in my life (imagine doing that in some graduate programs!), I talked over my bizarre denominational history as a woman from poverty who left the Southern Baptist church over civil rights and never looked back. You could voice an unformed thought, a question, a crux to Roland, and before you had even finished speaking, he would know what you meant and where the trouble was. I always walked about after such events, saying, "How did he know?" especially in circumstances where I did not really know myself what I was asking for, only that I felt a theological lack, a break in the thread of my thinking. Later, consulting the references he would give me on all of these ancillary theological questions, I was always struck by how his recommendations were so en pointe, and just what I needed when I needed it. I asked once why he was so able and willing to engage me as an equal partner in theological discussions. "Well," he replied, "this is one of the advantages of spending your whole adult life as a male in a religious order: when someone special walks into your room, you usually have the sense to receive it for what it is--God's gift--and not be bothered by the status questions." Even when I began teaching, Roland still consented to play that diagnostic role with me, becoming my Spiritual Director--well, how could he not, when I had quite literally had John of the Cross' LIVING FLAME OF LOVE fall on my head from a high book shelf during a sale at Episcopal Divinity School? As I was coping with the implications of what turned out to be an eternal headache, Carmelite writings proved to be just what the doctor ordered. I pelted Roland with questions about John, his headaches, his run-ins with the Inquisition, his relationship to Theresa, her headaches, and the role of female-male theological friendships as divine blessing. "They were so different in temperament," I wrote to him once, "it seems strange that they could be so much to each other when they were so different!" "Ah," he replied, "different, yes. But how she loved him!" As I struggled with neurological symptoms and diagnoses during a long-ish dark night, Roland was my spiritual touchstone. We decided that while suddenly smelling roses was a documented event for those engaging in contemplative prayer, a trip to the neurologist wouldn't be out of place, either! "After all," he commented, "even if what you are experiencing is organically based, God is using that to get to you, and you'll need to deal with it anyway. But you are your own best interpreter; we do not need to be afraid of this thing. It all belongs to God." When people wonder how I survived my encounters with the Boston medical establishment (somewhat) intact, I always laugh and tell them I subscribe to "industrial-strength spirituality"--I've been "carmelized"!

All this, I think now--all this!--because Roland's family was poor, he was tall, and the Carmelite brothers in Chicago had a basketball hoop! Like the blessings God heaped on proto-Israel by turning Joseph's career in Egypt into a salvific event for both "Own and Other," Roland came to us at Duke as a "missionary" or an exile: distanced perhaps from his own people's academic setting, but here among a different people whom he "fed" from his fund of personal commitment, lifetime of experience, and humble faith. I bless the Carmelite Brothers' hoops, and their interest and encouragement of a tall, thin young man with a great mind and not many economic resources. What a gift Roland's early life later turned out to be to the rest of us!

A defining encounter around Murphy's quest to be accessible occurred one day in the Divinity School Library. Roland was a voracious reader throughout his life, and a familiar fixture at the New Book cart. Unlike others, he did not seem to abhor student questions when engaged in such activities; so he was always in conversation. One day when we were both at the card catalogues (remember them?), out of nowhere (from my point of view) he asked me abruptly, "Honey, why aren't you afraid of me?" Taken aback, I blurted out my first response: "I didn't know I was supposed to be." "Well, all the men are!" he went on to say, and asked me if I had any idea why. I really couldn't say, but as we talked, I ventured: "Maybe its your size? My husband is as tall as you and he often finds that if he sits when he is in the company of shorter people, it seems to put other men more at ease." (Six feet, seven inches! My husband is only 65", but he and Roland shared similar height challenges.) "Hmm," he returned, "Well, I'll try that--but it doesn't bother you!" I reminded him that based on my experience, he was just the right size, but that being tall really did spook some people. I don't know if sitting down worked for him, but I went away with my first insight into the situation of those placed in authority or acknowledged to be "the" expert: obviously, things looked different from the other side of the desk! Famous people needed normal interactions, too! My very tall husband also remembers his kinship with Roland in fond ways: among a gaggle of snooty humanists, Roland always welcomed the scientist with respect and interest. Roland often hitched a ride to the airport with my fella who was on his way to Raleigh to feed the lab rats, and he never missed a connection for his pick-up or delivery! Standing there in his "monk-suit" (the affectionate Dukie term for those cheap, shiny suits that he wore with such dignity and disregard), with the tiniest carry-on imaginable (reminiscent of those Gospel disciples advised by the NT to travel light), he was always where he was supposed to be, though perhaps hiding his cigarette from open view.

There are so many wonderful oral stories to tell about Roland that one could go on and on: Roland after seeing his first color episode of The Muppets (a big favorite of his apparently, but he had not known "It's not easy being green"); Roland in class the day after seeing Star Wars; Roland with his yellow pads, one page per line, working on commentaries over the years and bringing them into class to teach from; Roland considering Camp's invitation to bug out of the SBL panel on Ricoeur in order to go to the Bruce Springsteen concert with us instead; Roland driving all night to sit beside Pat Skehan's death-bed, or bemused, going off to an IRS audit which wound up with the government having to pay him! (Quite a substantial amount, too: "They have learned not to audit me, I think," he said of it later).

I recall his response to my first tentative insights into the role a goddess tradition might play in female spirituality (Why Protestant Women Need the Goddess) when I asked if he thought I was "all wet" on my reading of Woman Wisdom: could our crusty old sages really have included a female-identified tradition in their reading of the cosmic scene, given all that patriarchy? "Well, give them some credit for not being idiots!" he cried out. "Of course they could have cared about women enough to include an Israelite "response' to Ishtar!" He went on to say that he could certainly see the value of my argument about the special needs of Protestant women, but then said, "But what I don't understand is: if women need the Goddess, don't men need the Goddess, too? Why don't I feel this need?" Of all the things I was expecting him to say, this was not even on the chart--that he should so sympa thize with the arid theological horizon of my women students that he could take on their need as a human one and look for the signs of the same deprivation in his own soul! "Roland! I said, Protestants! You don't feel a need for the Goddess because you know where to find the Lady Chapel, and know what it means when you get there!" I told him. He blessed my struggles and told me to keep him posted: through long nights with the Hurrian Black Ishtar, or the Shekinah, I felt the light of my teacher shining on my researches. Incorporating some of this work later into his many-editioned TREE OF LIFE, he wrote the perfect assessment (to my mind) of the role of goddess traditions in the formation of the character of Woman Wisdom--"Genealogy is not identity"--thus honoring them and recognizing the genuine differences in the biblical material, as he pressed us all to greater integration in our thinking. Reading my most recent book in proof stage, where I argue for greater theological attention to the concept of a Mother's Torah, (that Torah-of-hesed of Proverbs 31), for once he didn't send me a list of typos and corrections (I knew his health must be flailing by that little omission--even now, though I am writing this article in "talking voice," I can hear him sigh over all these split infinitives!), but said, 'Well, you seem to have become a Second Ezra--finally, a woman lawgiver! Teach us what the Law needs to look like now." As a Torah-mother should, I replied to him in handmade book form, in color, for his 85th birthday (he had warned us all off handing him yet another festschrift!). "These are by your granddaughters," I wrote him: I had made digital color copies of the work of all my women scribes in a recent Exodus class, and bound them up for him as "A Book of Exodus." All the work of my maidens was there for him to see--acknowledging that in a real way, this too was part of his legacy.

Roland always used to remark when he was applauded for his teaching that "It's easy to get people to think you are a wonderful teacher. The trick is to get really great students!" This was typical modesty of a sort not that common in our guild. I submit here that it's not quite so simple as the monk would have us believe: great students are possible only in the context of fine teachers! Roland Murphy was such a one.

Carole R. Fontaine Ph.D. (Duke University) is the John Taylor Professor of Biblical History and Theology at Andover Newton Theological School, 210 Herrick Road Newton, MA 02459, where she is also a scribal artist-in-residence (e-mail cfontaine@ants.edu). She has served on the editorial boards of BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST, SEMEIA, WOMEN IN JUDAISM, and the CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY. She is author and co-editor of six books and nearly ninety articles on biblical topics; her most recent work is entitled SMOOTH WORDS: WOMEN, PROVERBS AND PERFORMANCE IN BIBLICAL WISDOM (Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). She is currently engaged in fulfillment of an ATS Grant for Theological Research, "The Tree of Life in Context," a visual exploration of the development of the wisdom tree motif and its relationship to Judean inscriptions. She can be seen in the Discovery Channel/BBC documentary, THE QUEEN OF SHEBA: BEYOND THE MYTHS.

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