Rev Fr Ernest Gaspard S J by DISCIPULUS.

 Courtesy: L. K. Hettiarachchi, Friends of SAC 1950/1960s Photos FB

Courtesy- THE ALOYSIAN MAGAZINE 1962-1965
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Rev Fr Ernest Gaspard S J
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NONE of the several photographs of Revd. Fr Ernest Gaspard S.J. that I have seen gives one an insight into the man. Man is italicized with deliberate intent, for Fr Gaspard, as I see him, was a man, a complete man and a man above all else. Endowed with exceptional gifts, he had, like all men, his weaknesses as well and offered no apologies for them, nor wasted time in regretting them. Instead, he used everything he had - and he had the most conflicting potentialities in him - in the cause of his ideal. His was a complex character and one had to live with him, argue with him, need him and be disliked and appreciated by him, to understand something of him who was one of the most lovable characters I have ever met.

There was nothing loose or disjointed in Fr Gaspard. His body was a compact mass of muscle, flesh and bone. He was aware of his strength and recoiled from nothing when need arose. I can still see him, past his sixtieth year, a man used to desk and books, shovel in hand, filling and carrying bags of sand to construct A.R.P. trenches during the air-raid scare of the last war.

He and a companion of his fell from the Cathedral belfry one day and in the course of the fall he had the presence of mind and summoned the strength to push aside a ladder that would surely have fallen upon them with fatal force. In the attempt he injured himself severely, but he had saved his friend and himself “It was the natural thing to do" was all he said. He had a voracious appetite, and he indulged in it, but was never fastidious about the fare that was served.

Load never bothered Fr Gaspard. If it meant burning the midnight oil he did it and that was that. The more he was loaded with work the more he would draw on his hidden reserves of strength and never did he say no. Fr Gaspard, in his room, surrounded by mountains of paper, is the best illustration of his personality. It was no indication of disorder or neglect. It only meant that he was always accepting new tasks. It was a problem for a visitor to find a seat in his room, not for lack of chairs, but because every piece of furniture was stacked with sheaves of paper.

His strength of will matched his physical strength and he was often convinced that the tasks others decided upon only he could execute. He never minimized the size of a task he undertook, nor did he underrate its difficulties. Instead, he set himself to surmount them. Unlike other characters of tempered steel, he did not expect from those around him an output of work as great as his, and yet he knew to discern slackness from physical weakness. At the same time his influence was infectious and often one found himself doing along with him what one thought beyond one's capacity. Perhaps, at times, he over-estimated the strength of his collaborators, but he never failed to galvanize them.

Such a formidable combination of strength of body and resolution of will necessarily resulted in stubbornly held opinions. But he was also the instinctive enemy of pose, pretense and double dealing. Small wonder that his best friends were the little ones, the poor and the underdog. In this sense he was biased against the minions of privilege and perhaps quite a conscious of his bias though he never despised anyone.

He had an endless queue of visitors who came to draw on his rich & .........wisdom and experience. They came to him not only because of his instinctive sympathy for them but also and perhaps specially because they found in him a pillar of strength on which they could lean securely. His advice, when sought, was given freely, but with brutal frankness, regardless of whether it would be accepted or not.

Since Fr Gaspard himself never made a parade of his mental qualities they need not be recounted here beyond saying that his was a simple intelligence with no love for subtlety and sinuous argument. The clear premise and the direct conclusion were the stuff of his logical mind. He did not, e.g. savour Chesterton's verbose paradoxes nor did the type of humour found in present day Punch appeal to him, In truth, his mental qualities though remarkable were by no means unique and it is not in them that we must look for the secret of his unique personality. When shorn of all that is ordinary Fr Gaspard's personality resolves itself into a combination of strength, singleness of purpose and deep sympathy. It is body, mind, will and heart combined to make up a man, a real man, one that could have led armies and moved peoples if his talents had been turned in that direction.

When we have said all this we have only scratched the surface, only considered the natural constituents of his personality.

To discover the secret spring from which the roots of his personality drew their sap one must penetrate deeper and be prepared for surprise. Fr Gaspard, notwithstanding his appearances to the contrary, was a man in love, head over heels in love; in fact, so smitten by love that he would have moved mountains for his beloved — and his beloved was Christ. It was no mere natural impulse that made him burn the midnight oil or spend himself for others. His heroic patience, his desire to shun popularity and his avidity for work, were not native to him. Only his closest friends knew the secret. It was a privilege to listen to him speak of the Passion of his Lord and Master, Jesus. The love of Christ will not mean much to those of Fr Gaspard's friends who do not share his faith, but it will enrich their knowledge of Fr Gaspard with a new dimension. Like anyone in love Fr Gaspard considered nothing too much, nothing too little for his Master. For his Master he lived, for Him he worked, for little else. Him and with Him he suffered. He cared for.

His friends attempted to found a scholarship in his honour on the occasion of his Silver Jubilee as a teacher at S.A.C. The attempt failed. What irony that this man who spent his life for his friends was not sufficiently popular with them to be presented with a scholarship for his boys! By chance Fr Gaspard learnt of the attempt and its failure. It hardly touched him. He laughed and carried on his life of service.
The Passion of Christ was no cold narrative for Fr Gaspard but a living drama of which he himself was an active participant. This love for his Master, this love both human and divine, was the lynchpin that held together all his contradictory qualities and converted even his human failings into assets. Take away this passionate love of Christ and you are left with an absurd cumulus of incompatible qualities buried in a mass of meaningless work. See him as one in love and everything in him acquires meaning, perspective and proportion, and there emerges a lovable figure who drove himself relentlessly through life only to reproduce in himself the image of his Master.  As he advanced in years, he also came closer to his divine ideal and his manners mellowed. He worked furiously to the end but a certain charm came over him which was foreign to his earlier years. One no longer argued with him, one just enjoyed his company.

As he was laid to rest on Good Friday morning, 1963 in the windswept cemetery of Dadalla to which he came so often to assist at the obsequies of his friends, it occurred to me that death hardly described the event that had happened to Fr Gaspard. Fr Gaspard's death was not the crash of a mighty oak, it was the gentle passing away of the lover into the arms of the beloved.

DISCIPULUS.