Dear Friends,
As we continue to mourn and give thanks to God for the life of our beloved brother, Peter DeMott, we also remember and give thanks for the life of another one of our beloved brothers, Elmer Maas, who went home to God four years ago during the night of May 7 into May 8. We take consolation in knowing that Elmer and Peter are now home with God, along with all our beloved departed, and are among the cloud of witnesses now interceding for us.
Below are several remembrances of brother Elmer.
With love and gratitude,
Art Laffin
Come, let us go up to the
A Memory of Elmer
by Anne Montgomery
During the night of May 7-8, Elmer Maas, in the 70th year of his life, heard and answered this call after a life living and sharing the Word of nonviolent love. The civil rights marches of the 60's taught him the price that the powerless pay for freedom and justice. He never turned back from that struggle which led him from the security of college teaching to part-time jobs and fulltime peace work. The short list of involvements included the Peoples' Voice Cafe in
In 1980, with 7 others, Elmer enfleshed this command in the first Plowshares action and for 25 years either participated in or facilitated most of those that followed. He understood that the threat and actual use of nuclear weapons represented the determination to use any degree of violence to obtain political and economic control of the earth's resources for the powerful. He also understood nonviolent resistance as the grassroots community building and the simplicity of life at the roots of the Gospel message.
The "Little Professor" was a remarkable combination of humanist scholar and jailbird with the awesome ability to clarify the historical relationships of religion, philosophy, art, music, and, of course, PLOWSHARES. He could return from deadly court scenes to regale us with his musical compositions like "The Jailhouse Blues" or more classical offerings flowing from his mother's treasured piano. The legacy Elmer wanted to leave all peacemakers was his "curriculum:" a project growing out of his integrated charts, supplemented by hundreds of books, files, tapes, videos overflowing an apartment also always open to visitors.
He envisioned 7 years of seminars, and we worried about his health as he struggled to transform his charts into workable classes.
Elmer, your curriculum is yourself, your work completed, integrated on the mountain of vision. Your legacy is your great and loving and humble heart. You always worked behind the scenes, tireless even when exhausted, waiting outside a police precinct to be certain everyone was released. All of us will share memories. Mine range from a night struggle through polluted waters to a Trident submarine to the easy task of luring Elmer to the "Met" to relax and explain all the cultural connections of a renaisance painting. We will use your charts with gratitude, but most of all we will try to struggle up the mountain of nonviolent love, "that God may teach us God's ways and that we may walk in God's paths," beat the swords of violence into plowshares and learn war no more.
Peacemaker
Elmer Maas, 69, a musician, teacher, philosopher, civil rights worker and prophetic peacemaker, died of heart failure May 7 in Voluntown, Conn., during the Atlantic Life Community Retreat. On May 14 more than 200 friends and some of his relatives gathered at the Maryhouse Catholic Worker in New York City
A native of
Maas helped formed SCORE, the Student Committee on Racial Equality, which worked on antipoverty issues in central
Compelled by a biblical faith and commitment to nonviolence, Elmer worked tirelessly to end all war making and bring about total disarmament. Well known throughout the peace community, he was a member of the War Resisters League, the Isaiah Peace Ministry, the Atlantic Life Community and Kairos/plowshares
In 1980, he took part in the Plowshares Eight action at a General Electric weapons plant in
An extraordinary musician, he co-wrote a musical comedy, "The Insurance Company," and composed "Dusk Leaves," which he began in jail. He was an early member of the Peoples' Voice Care and part of the People's Music Network. Maas was the choir director for the Valley Lodge retirement community for the poor in
Elmer embodied Gospel love and was an inspiring beacon of hope and truth for our world. Deo gratias for Elmer Maas!
[Art Laffin is a member of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker in
COPYRIGHT 2005 National Catholic Reporter
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
Elmer Maas -- In Memoriam
By Art Laffin
Elmer Maas was my very close friend who I loved like a brother. I first met Elmer in
In 1980, Elmer moved his belongings to the basement of the Covenant Peace Community house in
I remember visiting Elmer at Graterford Prison following his sentencing. He was glowing! I don't know if I remember seeing anybody so at peace with their confinement. He told me all about the litany of injustices at the prison as well as the incredible people he had befriended. He always identified with the plight of those who were victimized by a racist and oppressive system that thrives on dehumanization.
When Elmer was released from prison after 18 months, he returned to
Over the years I savored Elmer's friendship, was inspired by his wisdom, and marveled at his intellect. A musician, historian, philosopher and master of numerous disciplines, Elmer spent his adult life refining his interdisciplinary curriculum to help us all understand how the world came to be what it is, how
We also know that Elmer had a light side. He was gregarious and very funny. He loved to visit with his friends, entertain and tell stories about his native
He was a great teacher in his own right. Before he devoted his full-time energies to peacemaking, Elmer taught at
Elmer's heart was as big as the ocean and his infectious smile lifted all of our spirits. His hospitality was all-embracing. A gourmet chef, Colleen and I, like many of you, were treated to five star meals he prepared.
A maestro par excellance of the piano, organ and keyboard, his gifts as a musician were endless. He produced a play called the "Insurance Company" and a composition titled "Dusk Leaves." Colleen and I can still see and hear Elmer playing at our wedding. Elmer was our choirmaster--he helped us to sing our songs of peace and freedom and to celebrate life in an unforgettable way.
Elmer’s life was centered in the scriptures and his faith was rock-solid. He believed and boldly lived out Jesus’ admonition that we must give our lives completely out of love rather to kill. In the face of a nuclear empire committed to total violence and global domination, Elmer’s commitment to nonviolent resistance was unwavering. He was a guiding light and companion to so many of us who picked up the hammer to enflesh God's dream for the human family to beat swords into plowshares and abolish war.
Elmer deeply cared about each of his family and friends. He loved and supported his dear Mother who lived in
Elmer's steadfast support for me and my family were unwavering following the deaths of my sister, brother, Dad and Mom. Last Saturday at this time, Elmer attended my Mom's funeral. We all knew of Elmer’s declining health and that he needed to take better care of himself. I had a good chat with him and he seemed to be doing better than the last time I saw him. But little did I, or any of us know, that Elmer would go home to God later that day. Although we all grieve his sudden death, we take consolation in knowing that he died where his beloved community was gathered and that he is now with God interceding for us with Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, Phil Berrigan, and the entire cloud of witnesses.
Elmer Maas was truly a man of abiding faith and love, a beacon of hope for our world. He was a man for the ages who was deeply passionate about life. I thank God I had the privilege of knowing such an amazing man. Thank you Elmer for the gift of your beautiful life. Your spirit will live on in all our hearts! Deo Gratias for Elmer Mass. Presente!!!
Eulogy for Elmer Maas
May 14, 2005, NYC
By Marta Daniels, his student, Juniata College
I am honored to be here today representing students, professors and administrators from my college—Juniata—that recently honored the work of students and professors (including Elmer Maas) for their civil rights witness 40 years ago. On March 19, 2005, a month and one week before Elmer died, the college celebrated him and others who went to
I am also honored to be here among so many valiant peacemakers who have been jailed for their witness for disarmament and a more just and nonviolent world.
I’m a writer, musician, peace activist and former felonious, criminally mischievous cellmate of Elmer Maas.’ I also lived for 10 years at the Community for Nonviolent Action in
I am here today because I was his student at
If he drove his old gray VW bug in NYC today, its bumper sticker would read: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”
Elmer Maas had a reputation as a strange professor—one who would step absent mindedly into wastebaskets during his lectures. “But,” [as one student of his (Gary Rowe) speaking for all of us said,] “for those of us who got to know him, to truly discover the intense genius of the man, he became a hero.“
Elmer taught at Juniata from 1962-68 and changed the world on that campus several times in the course of those six short years, challenging us and others to become more than we ever thought we were capable of becoming. And so, too, the college.
This small Brethren school with its Dunkard roots of no dancing—but also no war-making—theoretically offered the ethical and moral belief in pacifism that matched the philosophy Elmer embraced with his whole being. It was a philosophy he expressed by opposing the violence of the racist south, the militarism of the unending war-making nation, and the economic violence of structural poverty and despair.
At the time, the college would have preferred not to be reminded of its roots, and certainly not to have its roots planted on the front page of the New York Times and Life Magazine in the single most important civil rights protest action of the day—the 1965 Selma-Montgomery voter registration drives, which produced some of the bloodiest beatings and largest jailings of the civil rights movement.
The Juniata participation in this seminal event, landing the college in the news and causing some students to be expelled from school, was led by three professors: Elmer Maas, Don Hope, and
As his former student (Chuck Lytle) recalls, we were often thrown together with Elmer as he led us to new and strange places—like the office of the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) in Selma, the summer of 1966—to do voter registration work, after the glare of the cameras and focus of the news media were gone. “It was intense and grueling and very dangerous,” wrote Chuck, “and Elmer was a rock: focused and unwavering. This may surprise those who didn’t know him well, and who may have only seen his outwardly gentle demeanor. Underneath that soft exterior was an iron will and dedication to always do right, regardless of the personal cost. One couldn’t do better in life than strive to be like Elmer.”
Another student (Gary Rowe) recalls how students “adopted” Elmer. “He became our mentor and we quietly withdrew from the college curriculum every Wednesday evening to meet in his small apartment for real study—the books, the music, the art, the great ideas that authentically animated our interests as we discovered a larger world than we ever knew with Elmer as our navigator. One time we spent eleven weeks studying Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be…We became immersed in a dialogue about the very essence of what it means to be human. That Elmer would lead such a mission of discovery occurs in my memories of him as purely logical. That is what he was all about.”
In addition to civil rights work in the south, Elmer also led every anti-Vietnam war protest march and Pentagon action we had, organized our contingent of the Poor People’s Campaign encampment in Washington, and helped form SCORE – the Student Committee on Racial Equality—which worked locally on anti-poverty issues in central Pennsylvania.
Elmer was profoundly influenced by Martin Luther King’s April 4, 1967 speech linking poverty and racism to the war in
To give you some idea of the chaos surrounding Elmer’s life, one faculty colleague (Betty Ann Cherry) recalls the story of Elmer’s telephone problem: “Elmer cannot understand why his phone is not working. Under his bed were at least 50 copies of the NY Times Sunday magazine section, in which a mouse had made a wonderful nest—and said mouse had also chewed right through the phone wire! No one could call Elmer and Elmer could not believe that it was a mouse in the house that did it. He took a lot of kidding for that one.”
But “Clean for Gene” or not, the McCarthy Campaign in ’68 was Elmer’s last campus activity. That year his contract was not renewed for reasons never made clear. (Don Hope’s had not been renewed the year prior, and
Despite his departure, his widespread inspiration on campus had laid the intellectual and moral groundwork and momentum that led remaining faculty, students and administrators to form one of the first academic peace studies programs in the nation, in 1971. Juniata’s Peace and Conflicts Program (PACS) is today one of the nation’s outstanding, inter-disciplinary courses in higher education focused on the elimination of war as an option for solving human conflict, turning out activist peace-makers and non-violent conflict resolution providers. In my opinion, it is one of Elmer Maas’ legacies.
Whether through his teaching or his activism, he was a lightning rod for the times, yet belied by a demeanor Emily Dickinson called “...a little beyond…” as all who live from an original source seem to those who don’t live that way. The absent-minded professor for sure, but Elmer was one of the most mindfully aware people we had ever known, and we quickly understood we were in the presence of someone who could imagine new worlds in ways only original thinkers can.
Elmer had a refined commitment to right thinking and thus, right living, which, if you were ready to receive it, would change your life. As Abby Hope, the daughter of Prof. Don Hope, said, “his life force vibrated at a higher frequency than that of most other people.”
It also made it tough to be Elmer. The world was only too ready to resist him—to call him a dreamer and a romantic.
But as historian Howard Zinn says, “To be hopeful in bad times is not foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand, utopian future. The future is an infinite success of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
Elmer Maas lived in victory. He was victorious every day.
He was also a specialist in the GRAND THEORY OF UNITIES. In his mind, everything was connected, no matter how disparate. In that sense, he was a poet, someone who made comparisons of one thing to another, insisting that all things are related and comparable, and in the end making an assertion for the unity of all life.
One of my greatest memories of Elmer as my teacher is sailing out of his legendary Great Epochs in World History lectures, or his 3-hour seminars in text analysis, with my notebook filled with his intricate drawings of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave;” (“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”– Plato); my ears ringing with his text analysis of Mozart’s “Eine Klein Nacht Music;” and my mind’s eye filled with images of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with Prufrock walking the beach, his pants rolled up, asking: “Do I dare and Do I Dare? / Do I dare disturb the universe? / Do I dare to eat a peach?” Each of these texts shared one common theme and led inexorably to Elmer’s own “overwhelming question:” What is the meaning of life and what is right action for living it?
Elmer longed for understanding, for placing life within a context that could explain where we were and what the hell we were doing about it. (This, BTW, friends, is the basis for, and the source of, his unfinished seven-year curriculum.) For Elmer, it was the thought that “The hottest fires in hell are reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis.” [Edmund Burke]. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, those times are every single day.
I think he was so mentally present that he had no choice but to find the most meaningful and morally consistent ways to live and to act. And, in times of universal deceit, telling the truth, as Orwell said, was a revolutionary act.
Elmer was a revolutionary in the best sense of the word. He was a brilliant, insightful man, whose genius found expression not only in direct action at the tip of a nose cone, but also in his art—his inspiring and original musical compositions. The same hands that hammered swords to plowshares hammered elegantly on pianos keys to make extraordinary and beautiful music.
All of us who were his “activist” students participated in the production of his musical comedy that he co-wrote with Prof. Don Hope, called The Insurance Company, A Cantata in Illumination and Mime, which opened and closed on one day—May 15, 1967—on the Juniata campus. For the chorus, it involved members of the black community from
Elmer, who was only 31 when he composed the music and scored it for full orchestra, played selections from that musical satire this past March during the Juniata
“One of the most fun times I had with Elmer,” wrote a former student (Chuck Lytle), “was the night at his apartment when we played a version of the old Tonight Show, ‘Beat the Band,’ with a couple of us giving Elmer a song title to see if he could play it. I really got into it, but to no avail. It didn’t matter whether it was the late twenties’ Austin High Gang number ‘Big Noise from
Sadly, Elmer died before finishing his latest musical piece, “The Dusk Leaves,” originally written in the 1980s while in the
Like the curriculum he developed, comprising a seven-year course of study focused upon the “American national nuclear security state," utilizing the 4,000 books he had personally accumulated for the purpose, the syllabus for it will be left unfinished. In a very real sense, he had been developing that curriculum since his
Happily, Elmer Maas crossed paths in the sixties with
Elmer Maas was such a canary. We need to recognize and honor him for his canary service.
Elmer is gone, but we are left—a unique and committed community. We are here because of Elmer Maas. His death has brought us together now, but his life will always do so. We will remain joined—and forever changed—because of Elmer.
Poet Jane Kenyon says that in loss we can find solace. In her poem, “Let Evening Come” (from her book, Otherwise) she writes:
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
Be afraid. God does not leave us
Comfortless, so let evening come.
Our comfort in Elmer’s loss is found in this extraordinary community of people gathered here today because of him. Even in death he has provided our comfort. We share a part of him, and we will leave this place, carrying that special part with us, making us more than we could ever have imagined ourselves to be.
We say goodbye and thank you to Elmer now somewhere in what Galway would call “
Marta Daniels,
E-mail: marta.daniels@snet.net
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