Father Thomas W. Gedeon, S.J., 1925-2005.

On my return from Marytown I was surprised and saddened to learn of the death of Father Tom Gedeon, one of the many great Jesuits I'd gotten to know up at Colombiere. A veteran retreat director who spent two decades at the helm of Retreats International, after his retirement Father Gedeon took up pottery - and became quite good at it. I always enjoyed viewing Tom's latest creations on my trips up to Colombiere; on my last day working there as part of my hospital experiment, I got to spend some time at the pottery wheel, ultimately producing a small bowl under Father Gedeon's patient direction. Tom Gedeon was a man would could turn working with clay into a spiritual discipline fusing creativity with contemplation. I'll miss him.

At Colombiere, Father Gedeon was also half of an unlikely duo that struck me as fine material for a short-subject documentary. Father Gedeon produced his pottery in a basement workroom which he shared with Brother Bruno Karpinski, a cigar-smoking former missionary who had spent half a century in India and Nepal. While Father Gedeon turned out a succession of glazed clay bowls, cups, jars and the like, Brother Karpinski produced (and, for that matter, continues to produce) shellacked wooden crosses and images of Jesus and Mary mounted on finished plaques. Father Gedeon and Brother Karpinski were as different in personality as they were in artistic medium and style. Where Father Gedeon was soft-spoken and deliberative, Brother Karpinski was talkative and gregarious. Though they differed in life history, artistic sensibility and temperament, Father Gedeon and Brother Karpinski were bound together not simply by the fact that they worked in the same space but by a common vocation as Jesuits. Taken as a pair, the two men and their artistic output offered concrete evidence of the diversity and universality that characterize the Society of Jesus. Though Brother Karpinski continues to produce his wooden creations, without Father Gedeon working nearby at his pottery wheel things won't be quite the same. AMDG.