Finding Out About Mr. (Perry) Lorenzo's Death And Life

one of the first (and best) people who introduced me to philosophy

Some of you may have read my piece A Tale Of Two High School Philosophy Teachers, in which I told the stories of, and drew a stark contrast between, the two teachers who introduced me to the discipline of philosophy. Last month, I reposted it and mused about who precisely our substitute teacher for a semester who introduced me properly to philosophy was. I remembered him only as “Mr. Lorenzo”, and I added to the post “if anyone ever manages to track him down, let me know!”

As it turned out, one of my former classmates who I’m connected with in social media, did have a better memory about that matter, and wrote back that his name was Perry Lorenzo, that he had gone back to Seattle, that he had a significant impact on quite a few other people, and that he had died of lung cancer back in 2009 at only 51 years old. That was quite a shock to discover, and I’ve been meaning to write a followup post for quite some time. Today’s the day.

Almost all that I know about Mr. Perry Lorenzo comes either from my own memories of that one semester when he was our substitute teacher for a Sacraments class at Catholic Memorial High School in the 1980s, or from the online sources that document or celebrate the much longer life he lived for the twenty-plus years after he taught us. It is the latter that I will focus upon here.

The first source sent my way was an “In Memoriam” piece from the Seattle Opera Blog. I learned from that Perry Lorenzo had been the Director of Education for the Seattle Opera for nearly two decades, a position he assumed in 1992, drawn away from his teaching position in the humanities at Kennedy Catholic High School in Burien, Washington, where he had been teaching since 1982 (except for that semester when he taught as a substitute out by us in Wisconsin).

The article opens up a vantage point on the teacher I got to know briefly. His approach to education I outlined in my own piece came through even more. He was a dynamic teacher, primarily interested in fostering not only his own students’ learning but that of others as well. He also took an interest in assisting other teachers himself.

He knew that students cannot be expected to appreciate our art form without education, and he made sure that every one of the teachers of the 700 students who come to each of our dress rehearsals was prepared to introduce their classes to the opera they were going to see

The piece also mentions his interest and involvement in ecumenical dialogue, and his engagement with people of other faiths. Mr Lorenzo had mentioned to us in our class that he was a big fan of Augustine of Hippo, a saint who had definitely been a sinner, because he had experienced what he called an “Augustinian conversion” himself as a young man in a Seattle that bore significant resemblance at the time to the Carthage of Augustine’s times. Given what I got to experience of his patient but probing style of engaging in conversation, and his clear commitments to a life both of the mind and in Christ, it’s entirely unsurprising to me to learn he was involved in good-faith dialogues across religious lines.

I’ll lift out one more bit from the piece, which really struck me.

He was an intent and critical observer of our art form. He said frequently to me that I didn't pay him to tell me anything but the truth, and sometimes his truth was tough. But when we did something well, his ability to grasp the essence of why it was good always amazed and moved me.

My former classmate shared another piece with me as well, a more standard but still quite interesting obituary piece from the Seattle Times. From that I learned he went to Gonzaga University, studied philosophy and classics, had considered the priesthood and began at seminary, and then decided on a vocation of teaching. It also provided a bit of Mr. Lorenzo’s own words:

Mr. Lorenzo’s passion for opera dated to his childhood, after he discovered J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” “Someone suggested I might like Wagner’s ‘Ring’ as well,” Mr. Lorenzo once told an interviewer. “The library had recordings. I immersed myself in the [Sir Georg] Solti recording of the ‘Ring.’ It was one of the most important turning points of my childhood.”

As well as some really lovely testimonials about him, which again to me both ring true with the person I remember from my teenage years and reveal him through the eyes of others:

The Very Rev. Michael G. Ryan, pastor at St. James Cathedral, said Mr. Lorenzo was immensely intelligent. “He was a born teacher and a perpetual student who never stopped learning,” he said. “He was the quintessential renaissance man. He had a passion for beauty and a passion about his Catholic faith. As much as he loved opera, it was his faith where all this came together and made sense.”

Kelly Tweeddale, executive director of Seattle Opera, said Mr. Lorenzo “had an intellectually amazing breadth and was able to tie the philosophical world with the historical world. He really made whatever topic he was talking about incredibly alive and relevant to people.”

These drive home to me the fact that Mr Lorenzo lived a very thoughtful and active, well-integrated life. It may have included the discipline of philosophy as only one of many he was interested in and involved with, but I think one can say that it sounds like in the real sense he lived an eminently philosophical life.

The Seattle Times piece also quoted his life-partner.

Paul Hearn of Seattle, Mr. Lorenzo’s longtime companion, said they met when Mr. Lorenzo gave a lecture at the University of Washington 13 years ago [in 1996]. Though Hearn was not Catholic, their first date was to St. James, he said.

Hearn said Mr. Lorenzo brought him to the Catholic Church and broadened his appreciation of opera. The two would pray together and do morning liturgies. “We were monks in love,” he said.

It was not really a surprise to learn that Mr. Lorenzo was gay or that he had found a deep and lifelong love to share with another gay man. When he taught us the Sacraments class, we had very frank classroom discussions about sexuality, desire, friendship, constancy, marriage, and a host of other related topics, using Plato’s, Aristotle’s, and Augustine’s ideas and looking at Augustine’s own life. These were clearly matters that he had thought a lot about and thought through.

I expect that for many people there would be some cognitive dissonance in their minds at learning that a devoted Catholic who practiced his faith, participated in the sacraments and taught others could also be gay and have a partner to share love with. And that goes both for Catholics who perhaps are a bit overly focused on the wrong things or misshaped in their intellectual and affective formation, and for those who aren’t but have lots of ideas about how “the Church” works.

There’s a great piece in Mark Shea’s Blog, More on Perry Lorenzo, which provides an interesting testimonial letter by Ted Naff. Shea also authored a piece A Gay Man I Consider a Saint, in which he wrote:

One of the people I admire most in the world, who I regard as an inspiration and, very likely, as a saint was a chaste gay guy who lived here in Seattle named Perry Lorenzo.. . . I didn’t know he was gay (same-sex attracted) during his lifetime and only found out about it after his death. Dunno if he lived a life of perfect celibacy or not and, frankly, regard it as none of my business, though my assumption, given all I know about his profound love of Jesus and the faith is that he was faithful in that area of his life as in all the others I ever saw. I don’t see that it’s my job to be the Sex Police of other people lives, be it in Perry’s case or in anybody else’s. All I know is that the guy was clearly a man who loved Jesus, loved his Catholic faith, and taught a huge number of people about it, both gay and straight, in a way that was immensely attractive and uplifting for everybody who encountered him.

Since a number of people wrote in to him, claiming to be scandalized, he also wrote a followup piece, A Final Comment on Perry Lorenzo.

Interestingly, in his piece, Shea mentioned Perry Lorenzo’s blog as a place one could go if one wanted to get a solid sense of what his views on matters, his commitments, and his sensibilities were. The description of it on the blog itself runs: Exploring the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of God in art, music, poetry, literature and the prayer-life of the Roman Catholic Liturgy”.

I’ve been reading bits of it from time to time, and it’s a very interesting experience to get to see, as an adult who is now at an age older than Mr. Lorenzo lived to, reading these entries anywhere from 14 to 20 years after they were written, well-educated, focused, and informed enough to understand most of what I’m reading, just what thoughts he had and chose to share. If you’d like to see what I’m talking about, perhaps check out his blog for yourself.

The last thing I’ll link to here is an all-too-short snippet of one of Mr. Lorenzo’s many lectures, this from a set of his talks on Wagner’s “Ring,” where you can actually hear his voice.

Since I learned that he died younger than I am now back so long ago, and more about the person he was and the many positive involvements he had in so other people’s lives, I’ve been thinking more about Mr. Perry Lorenzo. I can’t say that I’ve managed to put all of those thoughts into anything resembling a proper order, and to spill them all out onto the page at this juncture would be, I think, a mistake. So I will set down just a few of them, and perhaps return to writing more of them out at a later point.

The first thing I was particularly struck by was the fact that if he died 51 years old in 2009, he was born in 1958, and would have been just 12 years older than me when I attended his class (and perhaps 11 years older than many of my classmates), so perhaps around 28 years old. As I remembered him, he certainly didn’t seem old, not even middle aged, but he had a kind of settledness to his spirit. He knew who he was and what he intended to do with us in our class. He was definitely an adult in a full sense, which one couldn’t say for many of the nominal adults in my life in 1980s.

The second thing for me was a sense of unfairness that he had to die what I now see as so young. I don’t think of myself at 54 as particularly “old” (though I likely would have as a teenager), and he was cut down in what certainly seems like his prime. Interestingly, one of the earliest entries in his blog, Crossing The Waters, discusses the death of someone much younger than him:

Just recently a friend died — or, more factually, was killed in a terrible accident. She was 21, beautiful, smart, talented, generous, just out of Yale, and riding her bike on a fundraising-bike-trip across the country for Habitat for Humanity. A car struck her and killed her.

Friends, family, people all are saying things like "What a waste!" and "We are devastated!" or even the eloquent silence of shock and disbelief. All such responses are honest: and I cannot argue with them. Death is a fact that all of us face — the deaths of people we know, of people we love, and indeed most of all our own deaths.

How we live, what we do, how and whom we love — that's what's important in the face of death.

The last thing is that I expect he would be pleasantly surprised, but not all that surprised, to see that I, one of the high school students he shared his mind and his passions with in the classroom, and demonstrated how to dialogue well, went on not only to earn a doctorate in philosophy, but also to become someone whose career is perhaps most defined by teaching. Not teaching according to some sort of systematic pedagogy, but something closer to the ground, more entangled with texts and thinkers I think are worth sharing with students.

I don’t often make comparisons between myself and others these days, but it seems to me that if you put me and Mr. Lorenzo side by side and looked at what we brought to our classes, our students, our talks, the comparison would be greatly in his favor! But that’s quite all right by me. I count myself fortunate that our paths crossed back in the 1980s.

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Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.