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Trappist monastery of Gethsemani

When Joe Bairley died on May 15, 1998, five priests concelebrated the Requiem Mass. His casket was placed with his head near the altar -- lay people are typically placed with their feet toward the altar -- in special tribute to an unusual layman who had explained five months before his death: "For the last 26 years I've tried to live like a monk. I've taken vows of chastity and poverty. I've lived a very simple life of poverty. I've had no income. I've lived as poor as possible."

Yet on the day of his funeral Mass in Monroe, Michigan, Saint Mary's Church was packed to the rafters. One of those in attendance was Lori Brunson, who explained, "If Christ walked among us, he would be Joe. Everything that Jesus Christ was, Joe was. He had an unconditional love for all people and, like Christ, was nonjudgmental. He lived simply."

Bairley (pronounced "barley") had in fact entered the Trappist monastery of Gethsemane in Kentucky about a year after his 1959 graduation from Notre Dame. The novice master at that time was Thomas Merton, and in Bairley's novice class were Timothy Kelly, Gethsemane's current abbot, and Matthew Kelty, the noted spiritual writer. While there Bairley helped build Merton's famous hermitage, but an accident with scaffolding in the church and a doctor's recommendation led to his leaving the monastery in September 1961.

His was an itinerant lifestyle before and after that, trying several other religious communities, traveling throughout the United States, living for a time with a sister in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco, taking a steamer to Europe then vagabonding there for a time. He spent more than a year in Holy Cross, Alaska, a tiny village on the Yukon River near the Bering Sea. There he served as mayor and sheriff and godfather to more than 20 children.

In 1964 his father, a 1928 graduate of Notre Dame, asked him to come home to Monroe. So he moved and lived there in a house trailer for the next 34 years -- a monk in a secular world. He organized his life into equal parts prayer, study, sleep and work. At Saint Mary's Church he locked and unlocked the doors daily, trained the altar boys, lectured and served as a Eucharistic minister and sacristan. He served every funeral Mass there for more than 30 years.

Bairley used the church for his quiet times, his periods of prayer. After Mass he would take communion daily to Bonnie Wolfe, a blind woman who became a close friend and spiritual comrade. Seven days a week he'd watch the children of parishioners needing child care, but would refuse all compensation. All he said he ever needed, Monroe resident Betty Stallard once recalled, "was coffee, cigars and food." He smoked five or six cigars a day. He liked liverwurst and sausage, cheese, crackers, A&W root beer and Double Stuf Oreos.

In 1986, Monroe Catholic Central High School gave him its annual religious vocation award. The citation thanked him for his work with young people and identified him as "Bubble Gum Joe." He kept a plastic bag of stamps, keys and candy pinned to his shirt, and children -- at parties, wedding receptions and other gatherings -- crowded around him, looking for the Bazooka bubble gum he distributed freely. He once told Stallard, "the most beautiful sound in the world is a child crying in church."

He was a big man, probably 250 pounds, with a long beard down the middle of his chest. Because he lived and dressed like an indigent, he looked like a homeless person. His glasses had unmatched stems held together with adhesive tape. He wore only his trademark gray work clothes. He made some people uncomfortable because he didn't look like them. "Joe was a sign of contradiction who made people face their prejudices toward the homeless," says Father Brian Shabala, who was pastor at Saint Mary's from 1987 to 1996. "He was the heartbeat of Monroe."

"People may have been afraid of his physical appearance," says Chuck Stallard, "but once they talked to him they wouldn't go away." Bonnie Wolfe's teenage nephew Billy Sisung thought of Bairley as an uncle and will tell you he had "a sense of holiness" and that God sent Joe to Monroe to help people. Joe was a spiritual counselor and adviser to many who sought him out with their personal problems.

But Bairley never held a job, never paid income taxes, never had a driver's license or ever drove a car. He collected no disability; never had a pension. And when, near the end of his life, the people of Monroe honored him with a check as a gift, no bank in town would cash it because he didn't have an account.

I never spoke with Joe Bairley, although we were classmates at Notre Dame and both lived in Zahm Hall during our freshman year. But I remember him, because even then he wore the gray work clothes, the black work boots. Even then he was heavy. Even then he almost always had a cigar in his mouth. If the temperature dropped below 20, he might put on scarf and gloves, but he never wore a coat. John Thurin, also a 1959 graduate, now a South Bend marketing executive, was his freshman roommate, and he remembers that Joe wanted the windows open all winter long, no matter how cold it was.

Other classmates remember him as extraordinarily intelligent -- "an unpretentious genius, an academic, brilliant and religious, but not fanatic," says Gene Kelley who lived across the hall from Bairley in Alumni. "He was a personal think tank," says Thurin, "and a voracious reader who would devour books like Mein Kampf in a single weekend." He had been selected as valedictorian of his class at Monroe Catholic Central High School but declined the honor. He graduated, cum laude, from Notre Dame in 1959 with a bachelor's degree in political science. Notre Dame classmate Joe Ryan remembers Bairley as a man with a wide range of intellectual interests who "read everything" and who knew more about Western history than his professors. He was also a master card player -- cribbage, gin rummy, pinochle. He seemed older, more mature than anyone around him. He had read Ulysses 12 times by senior year and could recite Molly Bloom's long soliloquy by heart. Joe Bairley, said Father Shabala, was the most intelligent person he ever met.

Throughout his life Bairley enjoyed an eclectic literary appetite and read the Bible nightly. He reread Shakespeare's plays annually and made notes in the margins to explain them to others. He loved classical music and liked movies -- Grace Kelly was a favorite -- but rarely went to the theater to see them. He enjoyed a weekly poker game. He needed little sleep. Later in life he began reading an old Oxford dictionary, then began editing it. He searched for words in each definition that were not themselves found in the dictionary -- then in the margins he wrote definitions (eventually making it into the Ys). He checked books out of the public library by the boxful. He was teaching himself Russian when he got sick.

It was Christmastime 1996. Bairley became ill and stopped eating solid foods. In September 1997, after his first visit to a doctor in 36 years, he was diagnosed with throat cancer. He refused radiation treatment or chemotherapy. A priest friend recalled that Joe liked serving funerals because, he would say, "It's wonderful thinking of people making their final spiritual journey home."

What Bairley wanted was to return to Alaska and to die there in a cabin he had been given decades ago. But his friends in Monroe would not have it. They arranged for him to spend his final six months in supervised care at Marian Place. He was rarely alone. Friends stayed with him around the clock. He refused morphine and instead would tug fiercely at his beard to ease the pain. He would ask friends to wheel him outside to smoke a cigar.

On December 4, 1997, these friends orchestrated a "celebration of life" party for Bairley, with people invited for Mass and a reception at Saint Mary's Church. More than 600 people showed up. It was then he received the sizeable check he never cashed.

A few days later the local paper did a story on his life. Bairley told the reporter: "Dying is the happiest time of my life. This final illness is the greatest gift of all. The last three months I've been in a state of euphoria. You see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's a wonderful feeling. I can enjoy things to the fullest. I've never had this insight. I'm more alert, more capable of seeing things I've never seen before. I see the great value in human life.

"My first 59 years was like an apprenticeship. It's the greatest thing in my life, the most important thing that has ever happened to me. We all have to die. We accept it as best we can. I don't want to change one thing in my life. I want to continue as long as I can. When you're on the right track, you don't want anything to change. I think I know the answers. I think I can see the answers. It is beautiful."

Five months later Joe Bairley passed away. He was buried with his little plastic bag pinned to his chest. The church was packed to the rafters. He went to meet his Maker with about as much as he had when entering the world. He was known not for what he had accumulated, but what he had given away. How many of us will ever have our needs and wants aligned so clearly? If perfect freedom is the freedom not to want, Joe enjoyed perfect freedom and the resulting peace that eludes us all too often.

Bob Kill, a Notre Dame classmate of Joe Bairley, is the president of Hacienda restaurants in South Bend, Indiana.

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