I Have Called You Friends - In Memory of Fr. Drew Morgan (1960-2026)

“I have called you friends.”

— John 15:15

There are some people whose place in our lives cannot be adequately described by the word friend. They were there too early. They remained too long. They entered too deeply into the making of the person we became.

Fr. Drew Morgan was such a person in my life.

I knew Drew for nearly forty years. He was my brother in the Oratory, my mentor, my benefactor, my friend, and at times one of the most difficult people for me to understand. Our lives became intertwined when I was still a young man trying to discover what it meant to give myself completely to Christ. Drew opened doors for me—intellectual, spiritual, human—and much of what eventually became part of my own life in the Church bears, whether visibly or invisibly, the marks of his influence.

Death has a strange way of stripping things down.

When someone has been part of your life for so long, memory does not come neatly. Gratitude comes alongside sorrow. Affection alongside pain. Laughter alongside regret. Things understood mingle with things that perhaps will never be understood in this life.

And perhaps that is as it should be.

We are mysteries even to ourselves. How much more must another human heart remain a mystery to us?

Drew accomplished much. He devoted decades of his life to the Pittsburgh Oratory and to the students of the universities surrounding it. He loved the intellectual tradition of the Church and possessed a remarkable theological mind. He had a particular devotion to St. John Henry Newman, and from that devotion came one of the enduring works of his life: the National Institute for Newman Studies. He taught, preached, formed students, instructed converts, encouraged scholars, and helped create institutions that will continue to bear fruit long after his death.

But these are the things that can be placed in a biography.

A human life is something more.

I remember the man.

I remember his intelligence and intensity, his enormous capacity for work, his convictions, his humor, his generosity. I remember conversations extending across decades. I remember the dreams we shared for the Oratory and the sacrifices made for it. I remember the years when our lives were bound together by a common hope for what that community might become.

And among the memories that return to me now is one that, at the time, must have seemed very small.

Nearly forty years ago, Drew placed the Philokalia in my hands.

I was a young man then. I could not possibly have understood what those volumes would eventually come to mean in my life. I doubt either of us could have imagined how deeply the Fathers of the desert, the prayer of the heart, and the ascetical tradition of the Christian East would eventually shape my understanding of God and of the spiritual life.

There are gifts whose significance neither the giver nor the receiver understands when they are given.

Only much later do we discover that something was planted.

For that gift, among so many others, I will always be grateful.

And I remember, too, that we were very different men.

Perhaps friendship becomes most truthful when we no longer require another person to have been what we wished him to be.

With age I have come to understand something that I did not understand when I was young: we rarely know the battles being fought in another person’s heart. We see decisions, words, strengths, weaknesses, accomplishments and failures. God sees the hidden places from which all of these things arise.

And so death calls us to a certain reverence.

There comes a moment when explanation must cease.

There comes a moment when judgment must fall silent.

There comes a moment when we simply entrust the person we have loved to the mercy of God.

The Desert Fathers understood this deeply. They taught us to carry the weakness of another as though it were our own and to refuse to reduce a human being to his worst moment. They knew that only God sees the whole story of a soul.

In these days I find myself thinking less about what Drew accomplished than about the mysterious providence by which God allowed our lives to cross.

I would not be the man I am today had I never known him.

That does not mean that everything between us was easy. It was not. There were wounds between us. There were misunderstandings. There were things I wish had been different.

But gratitude does not require us to rewrite the past.

Christian love allows us to hold the whole of it before God.

And perhaps this is one of death’s final gifts: it asks us to stop keeping accounts.

What remains then is mercy.

What remains is gratitude.

What remains is prayer.

And what remains, strangely and beautifully, is friendship.

Christ’s words at the Last Supper have always seemed to me among the most astonishing words in the Gospel: “I have called you friends.”

Perhaps every human friendship is ultimately meant to disappear into that friendship.

We accompany one another only for a little while. We teach one another, wound one another, forgive one another, carry one another, and sometimes lose one another. Yet beneath all these imperfect human loves there is another Love patiently drawing each of us toward Himself.

And now Drew has gone where I cannot follow him yet.

There are things I would still say to him.

There are things I wish we might have spoken about differently.

There are memories for which I will always be grateful.

But prayer now must say what conversation cannot.

May Christ receive you, Drew.

May everything that burdened you fall away.

May every wound be healed.

May every good thing you desired find its fulfillment in Him.

May the mercy you preached become the mercy you behold.

And may the One who called Lazarus His friend, who wept at the tomb of the man He loved, and who descended even into death to seek those who were lost, receive you into that friendship for which every human friendship has only been a preparation.

Thank you, Drew, for the good you gave me.

Thank you for the doors you opened.

Thank you for placing the Philokalia in the hands of a young man who did not yet know what a gift he had been given.

Thank you for the years we shared.

And forgive whatever in me needed forgiving.

The rest I entrust to God.

Memory Eternal.