In 1975, I turned 21 and headed down from Queensland to join the Jesuit novitiate in Sydney. Most nights a fellow novice used offer a prayer for Ted Kennedy. I could not work out why we needed to pray constantly for a US senator, no matter what his Irish Catholic pedigree. I then learnt that there were two Ted Kennedys.
As a second year novice I was sent to Redfern. Ted enjoyed forming Jesuit novices. I was appointed Mum Shirl's driver. I learnt a lot. Then I was asked to drive Len Watson down to Canberra where we watched the passage of the Northern Territory Land Rights Act through the Senate.
In those months, I learnt that there were many Ted Kennedys. He was an enigma — exhibiting sophistication and simplicity, subtle discernment and black and white judgment, a romantic vision and that resignation born of hard, bitter experience, soft love and brittle anger.
Ted was a man of the Word that he proclaimed Sunday after Sunday at the old wooden lectern in St Vincent's Church Redfern, and a priest of the Sacrament, blessing and breaking the bread for all comers at the Tom Bass altar which he brought with him from Neutral Bay.
Ted was like the Old Testament prophet Amos confronting Amaziah. He was like one of the 12 in the gospels taking nothing for the journey as they stepped out proclaiming repentance and casting out demons.
Like Amos, Ted did not plan to become a prophet at Redfern. But he found no need to shake the dust from his feet once he arrived there. He proclaimed and lived the radical edge, or was it the radical core, of the gospel — making it more ordinary, more demanded and more expected of each of us.
He spent a lot of his time and nervous energy engaging with a string of Amaziahs from 'Head Office'. He often heard religious authorities telling him not to prophesy at Bethel, the king's sanctuary, the temple of the kingdom. He just kept prophesying about the swarms of locusts, the devouring fires and the plumb line which would lay waste the hypocritical, institutional aspects of Church and nation.
His family background and his early parish experience were no preparation for the ministry he exercised around the