Manchester College Oxford Chapel Society

Profile

PROFILE: MARY ANN CARDY by Bob Redpath

Mary Ann Cardy’s life journey began on the bank of the St Joseph River, 20 miles outside Elkhart in northern Indiana, about four hours’ drive east of Chicago. Her father had grown up on a farm in Indiana, and after he came back from serving in the US Army in the Pacific during World War II he married his high-school sweetheart, Mary Ann’s mother, and settled in the area where they had both grown up. Mary Ann is grateful to her father for insisting that she and her brother Jim, two years younger, should grow up in the country. Free to explore the woods and the river, she learned to appreciate nature, the light, the clouds, animal and bird behaviour, and especially the sounds of nature that she heard through her bedroom window on Spring mornings.

In 1965, encouraged by her school chemistry teacher, Mary Ann enrolled at Purdue University, known for its science department. In 1967, halfway through her degree programme, she married a fellow student who was graduating in physics and destined for graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley. She was accepted in the Social Science faculty there, becoming far more interested in her studies than she had been at Purdue. However, within a week of her arrival at Berkeley, she was innocently listening to a Vietnam War protester at a campus rally when the police tear-gassed the students. Mary Ann remembers her fear at finding herself in a crowd, fighting for breath. Other incidents on the campus became world news, interrupting the whole study programme of the University. Governor Ronald Reagan sent in the California National Guard to prevent students from turning university property, intended as a car park, into a People’s Park. Mary Ann was among the young women who approached the national guardsmen and laid carnations on the barbed wire, and she remembers talking with a young National Guardsman and realising that he too was afraid. Classes were shut down, and students met with their teachers for informal classes in private homes. Mary Ann says that she learned a lot in this setting from the direct interaction between teachers and students.

She graduated with a BA in 1971 and entered the Master’s degree programme in education, training to be an elementary-school teacher. However, her marriage foundered and in 1978 she and her husband were divorced. This was her toughest decision, taking the risk that she might not find another partner or ever have children. But she certainly does not regret this experience of marriage, as it took her to California, which widened her world perspective, and it showed her that a person’s happiness is not dependent upon intelligence, or a good job, or material possessions: it depends on an inner decision to accept oneself.

Mary Ann’s initial placement as a teacher, in a school in Oakland where every student was African American, was challenging. She realised that her youth in Indiana had been very sheltered from the political realities of life in the USA.

In 1983, in Santa Barbara, California, Mary Ann first came into contact with Unitarianism; she also made links with New Thought and the Unity Church,¹ which was across the street. It was during this period that she became a consultant in teaching courses in Self-Esteem — her most important career development. She presented self-esteem trainings for teachers, parents, and teenagers.

In January 1985 she met John Cardy, another physicist, at a concert in Santa Barbara. Born in Norwich and raised in Blackpool, John had been invited by the University of California, Santa Barbara, to build up the physics programme. John’s novel way of proposing to Mary Ann was to take her backpacking in the Rocky Mountains: they hiked to Divide Lake (altitude 7,229 feet) in the Wind Rivers of Wyoming, where he asked her to marry him; by November of the same year they were married.

John was eventually nominated for membership of the Royal Society, which led to an invitation to join All Souls College, Oxford, where he is still is a Fellow. He and Mary Ann came to Oxford in 1993, and over the next ten years she taught special-needs students at the secondary school of St Augustine in Iffley village, co-ordinated a city-wide programme for disaffected and problem teenagers in Oxford, and taught basic maths at the College of Further Education. This work stopped in 2002 when they bought their house, which needed major renovations.

Mary Ann feels very much at home in the Chapel Society; she appreciates the spiritual challenges of the preachers, and the openness of our religious thought. Her only complaint is that the hymnals do not have the music written directly underneath the words. (This was one of the reasons for the recent formation of the choir.) Mary Ann says her life journey has taught her to be her own person. Even though both her husbands were excellent in their fields, she learned not to surrender to their authority just because they were academically brilliant. She has learned to have the courage to talk to anybody and, if necessary, to stand up to them. It has been, in her words, an organic journey, a journey that she didn’t plan or control; a journey that has not ended, as she continues to re-evaluate her life. She feels that this is very Unitarian.

1. New Thought originated in the late 19^th century in the USA. A deliberately optimistic scheme of life, it is concerned with the effects of positive thinking, healing, life force, and personal power. William James called it “the Mind-Cure movement”. The Unity Church is one of three branches of the New Thought philosophy. For further information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Thought.

May 2009