Catharine Maner Lucas

Catharine Maner Lucas was born on September 7, 1939, in Seneca, South Carolina to John Paul Lucas, Jr. and Maria Garlington Martin Lucas. Catharine was the second child of six children (Conway, John Paul III, Maria, Eugene and Maner Martin) and spent her earliest years in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Catharine was raised as a Methodist. At the age of 16, Catharine attended a 6-week American Friends Service Committee workcamp in Yellow Springs, OH. Catharine was the only Southerner at the work camp and was intrigued by the liberal ideas of the other campers. She later adopted Quakerism as her own, though she didn’t officially become a member until much later in her life.

Catharine graduated from Myers Park High School in Charlotte, NC in 1957, then attended Bryn Mawr College. She studied Philosophy and was an active singer, performing with major orchestras. She graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1961 with Honors in Philosophy, and moved west to attend graduate school at University of California, Berkeley, where she found deepening joy in music. She switched her academic focus from Philosophy to Music, studying classical piano. During this time Catharine began teaching drama to children at various Berkeley playgrounds. It was during this time that Catharine began attending Berkeley Friends Meeting.

Catharine recalled that during this time she felt socially pressured to “partner up.” She fell in love and married a gentle folk-dancer, and became pregnant with their son Steven, who was born August 12, 1964. They soon divorced, and soon thereafter Catharine married Scott Keech, the news director at KPFA, Pacifica Radio in Berkeley.

In the early 1970s, Catharine, Scott and Steven moved to England and later to the Netherlands, where Scott was hired to report on the "Irish troubles," and Catharine taught English at the American School in The Hague. She wrote that “[I] could have been born with ‘English teacher’ tattooed on [my] forehead,” because she felt that this job suited her so well. In 1976 she returned to enter the PhD program in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley. She joined the staff of the Bay Area Writing Project, speaking at conferences, giving workshops, conducting research on teaching and evaluating adolescent writing. The Bay Area Writing Project and Catherine's contributions to it had an impact on the instruction and assessment of writing throughout the state of California and beyond for over 20 years.

At the Asilomar English Teachers Conference in 1978, Catharine met and fell in love with Mary Ellen McNelly (“Mem”). She and Scott dissolved their marriage; Catharine and her son Steven moved into a new home with Mem. Soon after completing her Ph.D. in English, she was hired by San Francisco State University in 1982, where she taught until 2005. Even with the constant need to read and grade papers, Catharine loved to teach writing. It was a time when an increasing emphasis was put on the teaching of writing within the discipline, which changed the focus of how she taught writing, designing a new Master of Arts program in English Composition. This reaffirmed how much she enjoyed teaching college English teachers how to teach writing.

After having attended and actively participated in Berkeley Friends Meeting for 20 years, Catharine became a member in 1981, at the age of 42. Members from that time speak of Catharine’s ministry as poetry. As a member of the Marriage & Personal Ties Committee, she restarted the Oral History Project, which continues today. She was an active member of the Nominating and Final Affairs Committees, and of many Clearness Committees. Catharine was a good listener and elder for many in the Meeting.

In the mid-1980s, Catharine and Mem applied to be married under the care of Berkeley Friends Meeting. Berkeley Meeting had been wrestling with the concept of same-sex marriage for several years without reaching agreement. After a difficult and sometimes contentious process that continued for more than two years, the Meeting approved the request, and on January 9, 1988, Catherine and Mem became the first same-sex couple to be married under the care of Berkeley Meeting – nearly three decades before the US Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision recognizing a constitutional right to marriage equality. With this event as a precedent, the Meeting was able to approve subsequent same-sex marriage requests without difficulty, thanks in large part to Catharine’s vigilant tenacity for marriage equality.

Soon after their marriage, Mem (who by then had changed her name to Anna Page Lucas) became ill. By 2001, Anna relocated to Mt. Shasta, following her own Buddhist path; she died of cancer in 2005. Catharine attended Anna’s posthumous ordination as a Zen monk. Catharine continued to have a fraught relationship with her son Steven, which they ultimately repaired after many years of difficult work.

By late 2011, Catharine felt unable to continue as a member of Berkeley Friends Meeting. She became more deeply connected to the Berkeley Zen Center, and in 2011 Catharine requested release from her membership in Berkeley Friends Meeting. In her letter requesting release from the Meeting she wrote “I find myself hoping my friends in Berkeley Meeting will know that, wherever I am, there is some corner of a Buddhist heart that is forever Quaker.” The Meeting released her from membership on February 12, 2012.

Catharine moved into Friends House Santa Rosa in 2018. In her self-introduction as a new resident there, she wrote: “So, here CL is, for the duration, resting deeply. Healing spirit and soul among Friends. She brings a slowing of energy, a diminishment of ambition, a capacity for grief, willingness to sing, gladness for sunny mornings and sun in the maples outside her door, and gratitude to all for your kind welcome of both herself and her little dog, Dogen.” Catharine was an active participant in the Friend House community, initiating and implementing extensive improvements to the library there as a member and clerk of the library committee. She organized poetry nights and invited guest poets to come to Friends House twice a month to share their works.

Just prior to her death in 2025, Catharine completed her (unpublished) autobiographical novel Five Summers of Maner Louise. Throughout her life she had poems and short prose pieces published in many journals and magazines. After a stroke and a subsequent fall, Catharine Lucas passed away peacefully in the early morning hours on October 10, 2025, at the age of 86. She is survived by her son Steven Keech.

She lived a life of courage, curiosity and compassion.