Remembering Dr. Michael Ford

It was with great sadness last week that I learned from a reader about the recent passing of one of our featured contributors, the British author Dr. Michael Ford.

Michael and I began corresponding in 2017, when he wrote requesting an interview with my friend and mentor, Brother Victor-Antoine d’Avila-Latourrette, for his website Hermitage Within. As Brother Victor was suffering the effects of a stroke at the time, I helped transcribe his responses to Michael’s thoughtful questions on contemplation and the monastic life. Michael was an avid reader of Brother Victor’s work and had a special affinity for Blessings of the Daily, a 2002 book of reflections following the cycles of the seasons and the liturgical calendar.

After the interview was published, Michael and I continued our correspondence. I found that he was quite an accomplished writer himself, having authored multiple books on Henri Nouwen and a biography of Father Mychal Judge. I was later to learn that he worked at the BBC for many years as a journalist. It was typical of Michael’s humility that these professional accomplishments were never presented overtly, as if he was sharing the top line of his curriculum vitae, but only emerged through the long course of our email exchanges.

It was one of his books on Nouwen, in fact, that would form the basis for our first writer-editor collaboration. When I came to Today’s American Catholic in 2018, I reached out to invite him to contribute work when and if the Spirit moved. He promptly offered an extract from Lonely Mystic, his then-recent “portrait” of Nouwen, as a place to begin. We published the extract in our January–February 2019 issue, and after sending a complimentary printed copy “across the pond,” I didn’t expect to hear from him for quite some time.

How surprised I was, then, when, little by little, new pieces began arriving to my inbox week after week—profiles of lay and consecrated contemplatives, artists, musicians, and writers; reflections on the virtues of patience and compassion; traditional reportage on humanitarian organizations and war-relief efforts—all united in their consistently high quality and the professionalism of Michael’s delivery. He would often enclose photos to illustrate the pieces, and on more than one occasion he would follow up to double-check a detail or confirm a quote. In the variety of his selections, his attentiveness to detail, I began to associate him with the scribe mentioned in Matthew 13:52 who “is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old.”

In the months and years ahead, our correspondence evolved to encompass all manner of subjects, from the latest books we were reading to recollections of his travels in America. He was especially gracious in sharing his understanding of journalism as a vocation, one with a spiritual and even ministerial component, as well as practical tips such as his advice to “fillet and extricate the most salient stories” when confronted with a large amount of information. Journalism has always felt more like a literary science than a literary art to me, but through his work and example, Michael showed me that it is much more than just the reporting of facts: it is an occasion to listen deeply to others, to set oneself aside in service of another narrative, to practice humility and simplicity through the careful, well-chosen deployment of quotation and observation.

One further item merits comment: as Michael and I never met in person, nor ever spoke on the phone or video-conferenced, our friendship developed entirely through the written word. This feels appropriate to his journalistic vocation, but also signals something deeper: the power of text to bring people together, even in a time of degraded communication when words are so often used to misinform, cajole, deceive, or divide. It is a reminder that—as another devoted correspondent, Saint Paul, once wrote to the Ephesians—the Word nourished in silence and nurtured from within can “preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.”

Michael Centore
Editor, Today’s American Catholic

Image: Michael Ford interviewing Mother Dolores Hart at Regina Laudis Abbey in Bethlehem, Connecticut, in 2006.