54. Thoughts Of The Future

Mrs. Spartano is no longer alive.  The poor women died in her sleep soon after I moved out and came up here to Our Lady’s.  I was allowed to go to her funeral.  I wore my good monk’s robe, the one I call my Prom Robe.   My comical mother  gave me the robe in a strong thick box and called it my trousseau.  It's final use will be that of a shroud,  just like the suit we kept for Dad to wear in his casket.    

The robe is of fine wool and I have seldom had any occasion to wear it.  But I suppose it will help me look my best someday when  I’m standing around outside the pearly gates waiting for St. Peter to bring the keys.

I don’t remember my short life with Mrs. Spartano to have been all that pleasant, but if the Brothers and I get kicked out of here, I would be happy to go back to such a place.  A simple room is all I need.  I’ve been without personal possessions now for so long that I would find them a bother.  I'd like  shelves for books.  I would like a car, if I could afford one.  Maybe I could get by with a bicycle.  However, my balance may no longer be good enough for riding a bike, come to think of it.   If I can afford a car I can drive upstate to a shrine I’ve wanted to visit for many years.

I never spent much time thinking about the future, but these days I do.  It will not be pleasant to have to live anywhere  but here at Our Lady’s.   When thoughts of our future eviction come to mind, I feel hurt and resentful.  I’d like to take a boat over to Ireland and give those idiotic men a piece of my mind.  I’m sure they’d be impressed.  They’re not the old guys I remember from almost forty years ago, however.  There’s a new breed over there.  Maybe they’re MBA’s and they probably have everything figured out.  To whose benefit I don’t yet know. 

 Merle Haggard 

53. A God To Not Worry About

Greta in Poughkeepsie wants to know if I’m an atheist!  I wish!   Most atheists I’ve known had the sense to begin all over again at square one, throwing out the trash of their upbringing and setting a course for what they hoped was The Truth.  Most have done so early in life, the best time to take out the trash.  Early in life leaves you plenty of time to change your mind ... should the spirit move you, so to speak.   I refer to inquisitive atheists, of course, not those who are intellectually lazy or who read only Bertrand Russell.

Somewhere on the long road I’ve traveled in my life I have found peace.  It’s not a fish I can always hold on my line while I’m trying to reel it in, but at my age I have finally learned to trust a power that cares about me.  I suppose I’m like anyone else who has taken the idea of God seriously.  I have seen the terrible avenger of my childhood transformed into a caring father.  Certainly, one of us must have changed.

In a nutshell, it’s been a long but worthwhile trip up here from the jail of my youth.  Enough scary things happened to me as a child that allowed feelings of real fright to transfer to my religion.  Being left alone,  a first haircut, going to the dentist … whatever it was …  I well knew the stomach-dropping feeling when I felt defenseless and lost forever in a storm of terror I could not escape.  I knew the worst could happen.  The pit of hell, belching forth a stench of burning with all its demons and fire could open up to swallow me as I hysterically tried to claw my way back up the slope crying, “But I only ate one hot dog on Friday!”

Much of my childhood up to age 12 was spent worrying about my moral peccadilloes.  I knew that the occasional swear word, disobedience and fighting with my brothers were Venial Sins and weren’t serious enough to warrant a ticket to Hell, thank goodness, but Purgatory wasn’t a great destination either.  When I infrequently thought about growing up,   I guessed the most prevalent Mortal Sin … the wages of which were to burn in hell for all eternity … would have something to do with sex or girls or something like it, but none of these things were of very much interest to me at the time.

One can imagine my shock  and dismay to  discover at puberty the gaping maw of the Evil One’s kingdom was opening again as I struggled with the terrible sins I found so attractive and impossible to defeat.  I spent the entire year of my 8th grade in real panic,  dejected over getting so far in life only to crash and burn, my mind in the gutter and my hands too deep in my pockets.

As an adult,  I overcame these childish fears.  I have found a God I can trust.  I can probably tell you much about what wise men through the ages have said about God, but I cannot tell you actual details about him or her or it.  She is beyond my understanding.  When it comes to my welfare, he is beneficent or so I am convinced.   I don’t know where I’m going after I die, if anywhere. I don’t need to know.  (Heaven is tradition, not a dogma of the Church.)  I have chosen to believe I am in the careful hands of a being who loves me and a being I don’t have to worry about offending.  I no longer have a God to worry about. 

A group of scientists and thinkers, some with more pomposity than our beloved Churchmen, now call religion and spirituality a Memeplex,  an intricate mix of behaviors and beliefs from quark theory to rock and roll to religion that results from humans having imitated each other since time began.  Much has been written from a Darwinian point of view treating why we are here.   But the concept of the  memeplex doesn’t quite explain why  music and sunsets pull on our heart strings and cause us to whisper a little prayer to a God who isn’t supposed to be there.  Nor could Darwin.

Beach Boys and Lorrie Morgan - Don't Worry Baby.
When you can no longer get it up (your voice,) you find someone who can.

52. On Our Own

I’m never annoyed  to be consistently chosen to go to the hardware store when there’s a need for a part.  And it’s always a toilet part.  The lady behind the counter probably thinks I’m fixing the same toilet over and over and that I must overuse and abuse it.  But I hesitate to explain myself, that I'm the buying agent for twenty two of the oldest toilets on the mountain.   I’m reminded of my bachelor uncle who was embarrassed by the sound of a revolving roll of toilet paper when the bathroom was in use.  He went down to his basement workshop and invented a noiseless roller.   But he was too embarrassed to patent it.

I suppose someone has to interface with the outside world and an older Brother is a good choice, since he possesses a degree of maturity.  Or something like that.  And after all, I did work in a hardware store for a short time years ago.  I remember counting a lot of nails before a customer explained to me they were sold by the pound.

We inmates of OLWS seem to doing a lot of  outside errands lately.  I drive Agnes around and am free to explore the countryside on my own while the abbot is meeting with “his woman” and planning the sale of the monastery.   Raiser has been doing office work at the local parish church one day each week since he ran out of research ideas and made himself a nuisance in the Pit.  Also, Bouncer tells me he will soon be allowed to drive the SUV.  I wonder if Agnes is re-introducing us to the outside so life in the world won’t be a total shock.  That might mean Agnes and the Gang of McFour plan to kick us out and leave us on our own in Saugerties, a somewhat scary thought.  Of course, it also means we won’t be welcome in Fermoy, County Cork, Ireland.   And certainly no American brothers could afford to take us, given the financial problems common to all religious orders today.

I’ve always thought of myself as an independent person.  But with the specter of life in the world facing me,  I realize how dependent I’ve become on my brothers.  I suppose the great Benedict could have meant for monastic life to be that way.  But he didn’t have his monastery sold out from underneath him.  The world is a scary place.

Or maybe we could put a little band together ....


Rush - Working Man



More Rush - Spirit of The Radio

51. Irish Catholic Sex (2 of 2)

The Catholic Academy was run by a group of seemingly stern nuns who were quite strict with  the girls, but warmer toward the boys.  As an example of the  female plight at the Academy, the accepted hemline for the heavy wool jumper uniforms at that time was somewhere around the knee and anything shorter was evidently a major offense.  Snap inspections in the classroom would begin when the Principal Nun burst into class and directed all the young women to kneel down next to their desks to show that their hems touched the floor.  Backs straight, young ladies, no crouching!  If she was wearing a sweater, a girl might surreptitiously undo her side zipper to get an extra half inch of hem.  But mostly the girls relied on rumors of coming inspections and set their hems using only  pins so they could be adjusted downward when an impending Hem Raid was suspected..  During my entire time in high school, I never saw a girl with a permanently sewn hem.

The nuns looked aside as boys and girls dated, but “going steady”  was practically forbidden.  Despite the proscription,  boys and girls together did what you know they did and to signify their steady status a girl wore her boyfriend’s class ring  suspended on a fine chain about the neck outside of her uniform, but only after school hours.  During classes it was worn under the blouse against the skin so as not to attract the attention of the nuns. 

Use of one’s time was strictly regulated too.  In addition to absolutely no study periods,  after-school activities often revolved around one religious activity or another.  For the girls, there was the Sodality of the Holy Virgins of the Order of Mary,  honoring a group of  French nuns who were said to have been martyred for their faith in the 1400’s.  But some sources say they became dissolute and  fell into disrepute, an excuse for the boys to call Sodality members the Part Time Virgins.

For the twenty or so senior boys, there was the Society of Thomas DeTragia, a 15th century French altar boy killed by a crazed Protestant Englishman.   Attendance at Tuesday after-school meetings was mandatory.    The STD’s, as we called  ourselves, got together in a room for the stated purpose of  conducting a Chapter of Faults, and I’ve explained before that it’s an old monastic custom that resembles an open confession of one’s misdeeds to your peer group.  We were allowed to meet by ourselves because no nun was crazy enough to chaperone us.  Meetings would begin with all of us standing around in a circle in semi serious prayer for no more than 30 seconds.  Then someone would pull out a pack of cards and some would play while others hung out the huge old Victorian windows and smoked.

I have no idea how many couples “did it” in my Catholic high school.  I didn’t, but thank goodness thinking about it couldn’t get you in trouble.  There were two unwanted pregnancies that I was aware of and I do remember girls in my class secretly visiting a young woman who quit school to have a baby.  But I’ll bet STD’s …  the real ones … were contracted far less frequently than they are among today’s high school kids.

There’s an aspect of my adolescent stirrings and my Catholic high school education that I often forget.  Riding herd on our hormones and immature behavior  were the stalwart nuns as they tried to help us make the best decisions for ourselves.   These women were true radicals in medieval dress.  Independent-minded and very well educated, some from wealthy backgrounds, they devoted their lives to working in hospitals and jungles.  But they also lived in communities in eastern factory cities and pulled working class children up from the old neighborhoods to a worthy life through a decent education.    They worked tirelessly and put up with a lot.  Strict with the girls, they taught us boys to respect our fellow women students and their academic achievements and accomplishments.  School organizations had just as many female officers as male, providing an early taste of an equality of the sexes.

And they had another goal.  As Sister Mary Joseph said to me once in an unguarded moment of exasperation when George and I faked a fall from the fire escape, “You are the worst kid I ever taught.  How am I supposed to get you into Heaven?” 


Roy Orbison - My Prayer

50. Irish Catholic Sex (1 of 2)

I’d say I had an ordinary childhood.  I dated girls, got drunk on occasion and eventually became a contemplative monk.  I’m not saying all my brothers traveled the same route as me.  Some of them never came closer to sex than Playboy magazine, that staple of  young manhood that taught us what women really looked like with their clothes off.  Really.

In truth, I didn’t get much closer than “girlie magazines” myself.  Sex wasn’t a permissible  topic in our Irish Catholic home when I was growing up in the 1950’s.  No one in my memory ever brought it up.   Anything that even smacked of it was quickly squashed.  I remember my father turning off the car radio one Sunday afternoon when Peggy Lee began to sing “Fever! ….  Fever all through the night!”

In fact, I first came across the three letter  word as a youngster while completing an application for a free Polio shot at the old  Health Clinic a few blocks from the business district of my home town.   There was a fill-in  line on the application that read simply, “Sex”.   I looked at the woman clerk across the counter from me and pointing to the line on my card said, “I don’t get this.”  Not realizing what I meant, she laughed and said, “Neither do I !”  Then, seeing my confusion, she leaned forward and  said in a whisper, “It means whether you’re a girl or a boy.  Put down an M.”   I didn’t know how  an “M” could mean boy, but  I did as I was told.

Now, you may think me a bit slow, but I was a newspaper-reading 9 year old holding  the second highest grade average in my class at school.  So you can imagine how little the word “sex” was actually seen or used at that time in America.  Desi and Lucy slept in separate beds on their TV show.  In any Hollywood-style passionate kiss,  the camera faded to black if the couple tilted over more than 35 degrees from the vertical, 25 degrees if they were in a bedroom, even if they were standing up and the beds were made.   Just reading the movie titles in the Legion of Decency’s  C category (for Condemned!)  was good for a little quiet titillation.

Since many of us wouldn’t be here without  sex being easy and instinctual,  it is unsurprising that even when young we were excited about it, sought it in one form or another and yet didn’t know anything about it.  Not exactly. 

A few years later on a Friday night toward the end of seventh grade, my boyhood friend George and I got dressed up in shirts and ties (pink and charcoal)  and walked from our neighborhood to our first dance.  Each year a group of girls called the Children of Mary put on a dance at our Catholic school.  Seventh and Eight grade students were invited.

Standing on the sidelines,  I was unable to bring myself to ask any girl to dance. I was telling myself yet another imaginary reason why I had come here … to write a story on the dance for the school newspaper, to count the missing light bulbs in the ceiling while on special assignment from the janitor …  when a girl I’ll always remember came up and asked me to dance.   I was so elated to have the “male burden” of having to ask pass from my shoulders that I almost sighed audibly.   Her was name was Maureen. She wasn’t the prettiest girl in my class at school and she was an inch taller than me,  but  we marched out onto the dance floor and I was glad I had practiced a step my mother called  the Foxtrot, first with myself and then the previous afternoon with George’s older sister, who smelled strongly of  chewing gum and Clorox as we leadenly stepped through our drill while standing 3 feet apart.

So that night I put my 13 year old arms around Maureen and we danced … sort of.   The first thing I noticed was that she was warm.  Like a really nice kind of warm.  I could smell a little perspiration from her neck along with a flowery perfume that  smelled delicious.  She didn’t seem to be the same Maureen I saw daily in class chewing on her pencil and lost in her roomy school uniform.  This Maureen had boobs!   They were pointing right at me and I was trying to keep my distance from them.  I must have looked like I was either leaning back from the edge of a cliff or afraid she was going to rub something off on my new tie.

Years later I realized that Maureen was the first person in the world I had ever put my arms around.  Oh sure, my mother put her arms around me, but I was a man before I embraced her in a hug.  And I certainly never put my arms around George!  He would have knee’d me.  Putting my arms around Maureen was an intimate thing, really, even though it is often treated  as commonplace.  We come into each other’s space, get a whiff of each other’s aroma and feel the warmth if we linger a moment. It’s bound to leave an impression the first time.

Of course, more sex was on the way … sort of  … when I entered the whirlwind of catechism and hormones that defined  our local Catholic High School.  Here the boys and girls were regarded as little sinners on their way to becoming bigger sinners, unless they had a 95+ grade average and could bring honor (and donations) to the school.     Continued.


Wham and their All Girl Audience - Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go

49. Boys

It is good to be a boy.  Boys are interested in experience, not creeds as men would be. Boys are at home with uncertainty and surprise, and so are more likely to find their own guidance.  As boys, we easily sense wisdom, and at the same time wisdom can make us boys.

I’m reminded of a dream I had in my early twenties before joining the Order.  In it, I was with a group of men as we crossed a bright green pasture.  Coming to the edge of a wood, we entered on a path we hoped would take us to a refreshing waterfall we’d heard about and wanted to explore and enjoy.  I felt awkward and a bit guilty, thinking I should be busy with men’s work, with aims more serious than rambling through the countryside on a summer day.  Then I looked around and saw we had all become boys.   

An intriguing object lay ahead, just off the path and  next to a tree.  It seemed a marvel and totally captured our imaginations.  I could see only small areas of it in my dream, never the whole.   Its bright metal parts and latches and gears and small wheels appealed to my young boy's heart,  more so than a treasure chest of gold and silver. But when we began to excitedly speak of it, I found that none of us saw exactly the same thing.  Wondering what the object was,  we began to guess who made it and what it was used for and how it got there.  Anyone’s opinion was fair.  Some ideas were serious, some quite funny, and we found ourselves laughing both in agreement and in disagreement.  We’d seen nothing like it before.  No one claimed any special knowledge of  “the Wisdom,” for that’s what we began to call the object, because boys name things with words that sound important and with phrases that pop into their heads.   Of course, some boys were adamant about the purpose of the Wisdom, but we recognized that none of us knew for sure.  

When we had conjectured long enough and the sun reached its zenith high above us, it was time to get on with the journey. No boy in the dream thought to take the thing for himself, to own it and keep it on his dresser or next to his bed at night like a favorite baseball glove.  It was somehow apparent the Wisdom belonged where we found it, by the wayside on the journey, always there for anyone who would appreciate it.  The Wisdom appeared to have no purpose, and seemingly nothing to reveal, except to awaken our wonder, and certainly our delight.  And one more thing.   The Wisdom had made us boys again.


Of all the impersonations of Buddy Holly,  I think Gary Busey did it best.

48. Owls

I applied to come back into our Order in 1980 and was allowed to “associate” beginning in 1981 when I was assigned to a location or “house” as we call it.  I’d only heard of Our Lady;s at West Saugerties  when the monastery was mentioned … not often ... in our Order’s worldwide newsletter. OLWS  (we often say “owls” even though it’s not quite the word)   has been the only cloistered group in the Order, having been independent for over a century before our adoption (as a favor to someone in Rome)  into the gang of rough and ready Irishmen based in County Cork.   The Order really didn't know what to do with contemplative scholar assistants, since it normally recruited men from  Ireland, Wales and America like my former self to work in dangerous mission fields.  The only solitude we foreign missionaries ever got was in an outhouse on the edge of a native village.

When I was told I’d be assigned to the OLWS,  I was not disappointed.  I had no idea what I would do here, but I was in dire need of solitude.  However, the total quiet of a monastery halfway up the side of a mountain would not be available to me until I went through a period of what’s called “association.”  As a former brother, I probably would not have had to go through that phase, but I'd been away a long time and I think the Order was unsure of me.  So was I.

The idea of “associating” with a group  (and each order of brothers may have a different name for the process)  is for the house and the aspirant to look each other over and  for the latter to continue to discern his vocation while he makes a major break with the world.    For me, this took about a year, during which  time I was not living at the monastery.    Why the Abbot at that time did not invite me to live with the Owls after the customary six months I was never told.

So I continued to stay in town, renting a room  from Mrs. Spartano and trying to sleep there at night while I lay awake listening to the old woman tossing in her bed down the hall,  wheezing and snorting her way to the morning.  I spent most days up here on the mountain at Our Lady's, but I also I worked part time in town scrubbing pans at the hot dog place to pay for my room.  I ate supper most evenings at Our Lady's.   I found the brothers to be convivial and courteous, whether working or supping with them.    In the late evening after Compline (the last prayer of the day,)  I drove my old Chevy back down to the village.  It was Bouncer who convinced the Abbot to let me come live in the community,  but not before a year had passed.  

I’ve been here at Our Lady's about thirty years.  I’ve worked at the lowest of tasks and I've aided those at the universities who I think are good scholars.  I’ve watched the trees grow taller here on the mountain and I’ve seen some of them shrivel in  old age and keel over, replaced by the young shoots bursting out from the forest floor.   I’ve helped some of my brothers to die and I’ve helped nurse some back to health.  We’ve all done that.  We’re brothers.

Sometimes I think we’re just a bunch of  boys on a camping trip ... a hike through the woods ... and no one truly knows the way.  Each of us is sure we can figure it out, however, and so we each have our strong opinions and we have been known to voice them with gusto.  Even when no one asks! 

No Particular Place To Go - Chuck Berry