By Patricia Coll Freeman, CatholicAnchor.org
.- It’s easy to imagine a six-foot, tanned, 32-year-old Peter Hannah on the golf greens of Monterey, California, in textbook form, languidly driving balls 300 yards.
But instead of an Izod shirt and khaki pants, he’s wearing the long, white habit of a medieval Dominican friar — and he’s heading into winter in Alaska. He arrived in August from St. Albert’s Priory in Oakland for a year’s work at Holy Family Cathedral in Anchorage, Alaska, as part of seminary training.
“My first reaction to being assigned to Anchorage was, ‘Wow, that’s a long ways away from California,” Brother Peter Junipero Hannah told the Catholic Anchor.
But the would-be professional golfer, former college fraternity brother and convert to Catholicism already has traveled a long distance — through even the spiritual “desert” of the so-called “good life” — on the surprising path to freedom.
The American Dream
By most accounts, Brother Hannah was living the American Dream.
Born in Temple, Texas at 10 pounds, 13 ounces, he looked like a nascent Texas Cowboys linebacker. But a family move to the West Coast and a “generally slender frame,” he said, turned hopes of football stardom into a chance at PGA fame. Like his up-and-coming school-mate Tiger Woods, as a teen, Brother Hannah was perfecting his strokes on California’s sunny golf courses.
Still, life was well-rounded.
Brother Hannah’s parents weren’t “PhDs or anything,” he said, but they instilled in him and his sister a “love for learning.”
And they owned a set of World Book of Encyclopedias, whose volumes six-year-old Brother Hannah would pick up on his own and “just start reading.” That intellectual curiosity continues to this day. “I’m interested in everything!” exclaimed the religious brother.
Growing up, his Presbyterian family attended church every Sunday. But by high school – and though he never “explicitly” disbelieved or rebelled against God – Brother Hannah was “so interested in golf, I didn’t really want to do anything else.”
In 1995, the “naturally ambitious” and determined Brother Hannah entered the University of California at San Diego, where he majored in American history and played on the golf team – aiming for a lucrative, professional sports career.
“I wanted to have a good life, I wanted to be successful,” Brother Hannah said.
A gnawing angst
At college, he joined a fraternity – which meant camaraderie, leadership and philanthropy projects.
But frat life had a dark side. There were drugs, alcohol and denigrating attitudes toward women.
By junior year, the “pagan pastimes” were gnawing on his conscience — as was the impermanence of his academic, social and athletic accomplishments.
His goals were “not bad things in themselves,” Brother Hannah said. “But when perfect performance did not emerge, and was made less and less perfect by the increasing mental haze attending fraternity life, a deep sense of anxiety developed within me.”
“I knew deep within my soul that things were not quite right,” he observed.
In quiet moments, he acknowledged, “‘There’s something really wrong about the messages I’m getting. There’s an emptiness in my soul that needs to be answered, filled somehow.’”
Then, the summer before senior year, his father encouraged him to become an official member of their hometown Presbyterian church — a step he had not yet taken.
“Like a lot of young people today,” he told his father that he wanted to “study other religions first.” For Christianity, his dad recommended the book, “Mere Christianity.”
So after a round of golf, Brother Hannah went to Barnes & Noble and walked out with a copy of C. S. Lewis’s classic and the autobiography of Jack Nicklaus.
'Water in the desert'
Lewis’s book turned out “like water in the desert for me,” Brother Hannah recalled.
“It was like, ‘Wow, Christianity does have some things to say!’” and those things, he observed, “protect order in society, protect human dignity” in “wonderful ways.”
Although he had “never tried to live intentionally in a non-Christian way,” Brother Hannah said he hadn’t thought much about what living in a Christian way looked like.
He began to realize that, however unwittingly, he had been acquiring “a lot of the habits that many people in the world acquire.”
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