“Hello! My name is Brian Gillen. Brian Patrick Gillen. Born and raised in Rockaway Beach. I grew up here, and it was great. It was a great place to grow up…I remember as a kid, we always looked forward to turning 16 so that you could take the lifeguard test. And I just remember just, you know, loving the ocean, and that’s what made me become a water man–a water person.” I talked with Gillen on the lifeguard chair during a slow day on the beach.
On growing up on the peninsula, Gillen said, “Rockaway is definitely a weird place to grow up in. It’s a great place, but it’s a weird place. It’s–you’re growing up in New York City, but you’re also on a peninsula that, to some extent, has a small-town mentality and a me-versus-you kind of ‘Keeping Up With The Joneses.’…So it was only ‘til I, like, left; you know, I also lived in Japan for two years…I had a roommate who was from Japan, and he kind of taught me a little bit of Japanese. Because I started at Beach Channel High School, but I got kicked out. And I ended up in a boarding school out in Pennsylvania. [But] that’s a different story. Yeah, and it was a very international school. And I think that’s when I started falling in love with languages. Because before [cell]phones, we’d line up on a Sunday. You were allowed to call home. And I would just listen to everyone speaking Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, French, everything. Anyway, I learned a little bit of Japanese when I was there. Then in college, I went to State University of New York at New Paltz. And you needed a certain amount of credits in a foreign language…”
Gillen talked about Japanese and living abroad until he suddenly remembered his original point, “Oh! It wasn’t until I, you know, after I left Rockaway, I just realized just how different things are,” he continued. “One thing I realized is there is a little bit of a particular edge to growing up in Rockaway that I like. I admire. To this day, I enjoy it when one of these young guys [at lifeguarding] says something vicious to me. It cracks me up. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, yes.’ But I also realized you don’t treat people like that outside of Rockaway. It’s a particular Rockaway thing. It’s like lifeguarding. Unless you’re in it, you don’t realize the world you’re in. Same thing with Rockaway. It’s like, you have to be in Rockaway, too–or when I had friends come visit, they’d be like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe that guy said that to you,’ or, ‘I can’t believe you allow yourself to speak like that to people. I’m like, no, it’s all a joke. Yeah, she gets it. She’s from Rockaway. Or he gets it. He’s from Rockaway. There’s no disrespect. It’s how we commune with each other on some level. [Maybe] sometimes it’s bad, but for the most part, it’s always in a good, fun way.”
A man of letters, Gillen was always driven by curiosity. In addition to a long, varied career as a teacher, Gillen got a PhD in theology and wrote two books. “I did that [theology PhD] in Rome. And no, I was never a seminarian. I was bouncing around between jobs, you know, after college. And you know, I had a sister who passed away, and so I was really kind of searching for, you know, the meaning of life. I realized you don’t have a thousand years. And so, um, my brother, you know, encouraged me; he said, ‘Why don’t you go check out this program over in Rome? … And so that sounded nice to me– ‘Oh, a year in Rome?’ So I went there, and I just fell in love with the university. Like it was taught by these old Dominicans, these old-world, old-school scholars [of] St. Thomas Aquinas…. and these guys would argue with each other in Latin. And it was–I just loved the classes. It was like history, philosophy, spirituality, and I just loved it…Um, I did my masters’ there, I did my licentiate there, and eventually, uh, I defended my doctorate over there–summa cum laude,” he laughed. “It was called ‘A Theology of Wonder–’ and eventually became a published book– “A Theology of Wonder: G.K. Chesterton’s Response to Nihilism.” I know it’s a little wordy, but,” Gillen shrugged. “I don’t know G.K. Chesterton. He’s great.” He just finished a second book, also inspired by Chesterton. “My idea was to write a Chestertonian fairy tale. So I returned to the classic kind of fairy tale where evil is presented to children. Not to scare them, but to show them that there’s something more powerful than evil called goodness.
“I like, I love writing and learning and just being inspired by others and just kind of like looking at some ancient, you know, blowing the dust off of some, like, old spiritual gems in Catholicism; seeing how the mystics, you know, lived their lives. And when you get into that, you see it’s not very much different from what goes on today. You know, fighting corruption, fighting evil. Not much has changed in the big wide world. And just trying to remain inspired. As I get older, sometimes that gets harder. But you always find something. I guess I like being inspired. I like being excited about someone or something, or, um, learning something new, I guess, or finding a good book, which seems to get more and more rare.”
In addition to his academic endeavors, Gillen has been lifeguarding every summer for, “I don’t want to date myself, but about a thousand years. Give or take a few decades…about a thousand. Even when I was going to school in Italy, I’ve always come back to Rockaway, you know, to make some money and lifeguard. I’ve always loved this job. One thing I’m absolutely looking forward to is, you know, I love lifeguarding so much. It’s been a huge part of my life, and I’m absolutely looking forward to the end of the corruption that’s institutionalized and inherent in the New York City lifeguard management,” he said. “I would love to see it back the way it was when I first started lifeguarding, where the chiefs and the lieutenants, they were all swimmers, they were all authentic lifeguards, and I would really love to see lifeguarding return to its authenticity and to go back to the prime directive of saving lives instead of just, you know, all these corrupt people who can’t swim, um, fleecing it.”
Gillen ended with this, “I’m so grateful to have grown up in Rockaway because it’s often a unique experience, a little bit of edge on the world. I think it’s made me stronger and a little more streetwise than a lot of my other contemporaries who I’ve met in other colleges and universities. And also, Rockaway has such a great spirit. And a spirit and a fun for life. And I remember when I was studying Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Aquinas said that you have a moral responsibility to have fun with your life, to have joy in your life. And I always felt like that’s something that’s always been very true of people in Rockaway. And so if I’ve said anything negative about Rockaway, I want to end on that note: that in the end, I love Rockaway and I love its people. And I’m so grateful that I had the privilege and the honor of growing up here.”
