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The cover of the book, illustrated with a detail from a sculpture, said Divine Favor: The Art of Joseph O'Connell. I had never heard of Joseph O'Connell (1927-1995, the copyright page said), but by the time I had finished turning the pages, I could hardly wait to show the book to my wife, Wendy, and plan a pilgrimage to see some of O'Connell's work in person. We owe a debt of gratitude to the publisher, Liturgical Press of Collegeville, Minnesota, for this labor of love. In addition to the tribute by Garrison Keillor, which follows below, the volume includes a memoir of O'Connell by the late J. F. Powers and an assortment of brief reflections on O'Connell's art, primarily sculpture but also printmaking.
—JW
Joe didn't care to have a eulogy at his funeral and so there wasn't any. He wasn't one to be coy about it. If he'd secretly longed for someone to stand up over his coffin and talk about the lyricism of his work, he'd have said so, or left it an open question, and then one of us would have stood up and done it. Probably me. I could have said that he was an Italian artist of the Renaissance, a friend of Ghirlandaio, who was dropped into Stearns County in the mid-twentieth century, one of God's noble experiments. I could have said a lot. Maybe he wanted to spare me the trouble. Probably he hoped to spare the congregation. Having tried so hard all his life not to promote himself, he didn't care to be wrapped in gold foil and sprinkled with canary feathers at the end. And Joe was a Christian who tried to live by his faith and avoid large pronouncements. And so we skipped the ten-minute talk about his lyrical sensibility and cut to the postlude, Duke Ellington's "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone," and everybody left the church smiling and trooped down the road to the cemetery and laid him in the ground.
He was an extraordinarily fine artist who looked like a former boxer and talked like a carpenter. A wiry guy with large, muscular hands, a hank of black hair falling over his forehead, black horn rim glasses on a creased face, and a really majestic grin. He was a great friend and a classy guy, elaborately kind, and nobody else could be charming the way Joe could. He really knew how to bestow himself.
I think of him as he was on a fall morning back around 1970, working in his old studio on the side of the hill, woods behind it, overlooking the meadow and the railroad tracks between Saint Joseph and Albany. It's ten o'clock in the morning and I just finished my shift at the radio station at Saint John's. I walk in, the studio smells of sawdust and wood fire, music is playing, a hot jazz band from the twenties. Joe is bent over a wooden Christ on the cross propped up on a sawhorse, running his fingers over the face and chest, brushing away shavings and flecks of sawdust, squinting at the grain, worrying over it. The piece looks finished to me, a stunning achievement, but to Joe it is a sick patient in a painful late state of treatment. A tiny crack on the left cheek is troublesome to him, and he feels that the nose is off and needs reshaping. Meanwhile, the priest from the church that commissioned the figure is pressing Joe for a definite delivery date, the original deadline having passed some months before. The priest is pressing him hard, wanting to schedule the dedication. Joe is supposed to telephone him today—Joe groans at the thought.
Joe put a lot of feeling into a groan. He had a great repertoire of groans, with real gravel in them, and he always smiled when he groaned, as if savoring his own hopeless situation. And he had plenty of hopeless situations to choose from. "I am in the arts, you know," he would say. He liked that phrase.
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