So, a few days ago Sally came to visit and have a look around the monastery. If indeed this Sally is my guardian angel, it is truly bizarre! Before Agnes set out with her on a tour of the facility, he asked me to round up everyone and assemble them in the Pit, where most of us were working anyway. Fifteen minutes later Agnes brought my angel to the top step overlooking ten quizzical monks. His introduction of Sally was perfunctory and short.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I’d like to present Ms. Sally Prendel. She is a real estate broker and she will be working with us on our financial problems.”
Waiting for more information, a few of us glanced at each other with looks that were just short of derisive. We waited to finally hear something about our future, which by now seemed more dark than ever. But Agnes quickly ushered Sally out from our presence. Still under the Rule until after supper, we remained quiet. We weren’t conscientiously keeping the silence. We were too shocked at being told nothing. I thought of my older brother’s term for this style of managing employees in his corporate world: Mushroom Management. “Keep ‘em in the dark and feed ‘em horseshit.”
I went looking for Terd when I noticed he was not with us in the Pit. But he wasn't just absent. He had departed.
Despite what many might think, Christmas Day did not find myself and my Brothers sitting around a manger scene set up in our Scriptorium. True, we spent what can be called an ordinary day and also had our usual meal of lima beans and rice, but there was a festive feeling to the day nonetheless.
However, can you imagine how tired we're getting of beans and rice? In my opinion, Lima beans are the most odious of legumes. And that's without consideration of their effects. Eleven full grown men on a diet of those green devils produces a pall of bad air from one end of the Chapter House to the other. Coming into The Pit the morning after the previous day's vapors have aged overnight can be an unsettling experience. I can't imagine the reaction of a visitor getting a nose full. They’d think they were visiting a crypt!
Still, food is food and none of us ever feel starved. There's too much gas to feel empty. And so on Christmas we were festive ... for a bunch of monks ... while we ate our dinner and afterward sang hymns and the old Bing Crosby Christmas tunes. But the highlight of the evening, as it is every year, was Harpo's rendition of Blue Christmas sung in the great style of Porky Pig, including the lisp, the stutter and the ribald asides. Harpo does a great rendition of what Father Guido Sarducci called "the worst Christmas song ever." Maybe that's why we love it.
I don’t know what will become of me. For some time I have been wondering if living with the same ten men for so many years was good for my soul. How can God speak through his people to my heart when I’ve essentially excluded the entire world, aside from those few brothers. And now I discover we may be forced out of our home and off our beloved mountain. You’d think I’d prefer to stay or go, one or the other, but I can’t make up my mind. I don’t want to leave here. But at the same time, something inside tell me I will.
I can feel the anxiety roil my stomach as my mind wends its way through the puzzle of Agnes and Terd. It just seems that something bad lurks beneath the surface of those two. But I’m not a person with a positive outlook and perhaps I am imagining more trouble between them than actually exists.
I don’t know how I will ever forgive those responsible for shutting down the monastery and kicking us off the mountain. I don’t know how I can forgive someone for that. But there’s nothing I can do.
I worry a lot. I’ve always been a worry wart. Even when I was a kid. I’m sitting down here in the cellar looking up through the tiny window at a surprising blue sky. Big puffy white clouds drift across my time machine and take me back. Back to other days when I worried, sometimes without quite knowing what I worried about.
On a crisp fall day just before Halloween, we sat in school on the edge of our seats, watching the clock. The city firemen were due to arrive at 10:00 a.m. for their annual visit. Sister Majestyeria worked her way down my aisle, asking questions from the Baltimore Catechism, the answers to which I was supposed to have memorized the evening before. If Sparky the Fire Dog and the men from the Engine Company Number 4 didn’t arrive soon to save my sorry little ass, I'd have to fake an answer to question number 374, "Why must we take more care of our soul than of our body?"
Just two seats in front of me, Mary Ellen McMeany parroted a perfect answer to question number 372. In her deadly serious ten year old voice, she intoned, “The sixth commandment forbids all unchaste freedom with another’s wife or husband.” I couldn’t imagine what my Mom would do with another lady’s husband, but this thought was interrupted when outside our second floor window a sixty decibel siren blast rattled the window panes and sent 52 highly strung fifth graders right off the top of the excitement scale. Blown out of our seats, we almost mowed down the screeching nun as she attempted to restore order. She had to get us down the stairs and out the door without injury into the arms of Sister Saint Buonfiglio of Monaldo, known to us as Sister Bunny. The old Italian nun would perform the minor miracle of ensuring we behaved like little scholars instead of howling chimpanzees.
As the firemen set up the truck's microphone and speaker, the entire student body somehow became arranged on the grass strip between the school building and the parking lot. Nuns moved among us like Chain Gang deputies, but without the whips and shotguns. Soon we were ready for the smartest kid in eighth grade to deliver her “Fire Safety” talk. The thirteen year old young woman’s great grandparents began a dynasty of wizards in the last century and it had produced high IQ descendants ever since. Each of the family’s generations played a role in the great affairs of our fair city. Kathleen would in the coming years continue her family tradition by running for office and becoming one of our rulers, judging our legal transgressions and prosecuting the worst of us. This kid was so eloquent, she’d been on the speaking circuit since third grade. Kathleen had few friends. She evinced warmth and compassion, but was rather needy and could be quite adamant. When her mother didn’t produce the requested baby sister, the girl asked for a dog and named it Mary Margaret.
Kathleen’s speech, “Fire Safety in the Home, School, Church and Beyond,” treated the specter of accidental fires breaking out in your kitchen, in the school’s lunch room, and on our church’s candle-lit altar. This last possibility jarred me, frankly. I had never considered the inherent danger of attending Mass, especially a high mass, when candle lighting shifted into high gear. I made a mental note to spend some time thinking about balancing the need for liturgy and the sin of putting myself in the way of mortal jeopardy. I reasoned it was an apt topic for consideration. Too bad it wasn’t spring, when I always began a list of interesting topics to ponder while imprisoned at The Stations Of The Cross after school each Friday afternoon during Lent. The year before, I spent Friday afternoons between stanzas of Stabat Mater trying to recall every line in the film, “The Glenn Miller Story.” By Good Friday, I was two thirds of the way through the script. I saw the movie four times. I was in love with June Allyson.
After reviewing all of the terrible fire possibilities on her imaginary tour of school and church, Kathleen’s talk turned to a brighter scene, with babies and young children playing and laughing, tumbling down the hills in the back yards of cute little white houses on tree-lined streets, populated with the homes of attorneys and senior level bank employees. In one such house dwelled Billy and Mary Magdelen and Mom and Dad. The little family lived an exemplary life and prayed the rosary each evening, before watching the News with John Cameron Swayze. But Dad forgot to have the furnace maintained one year and the house blew up.
“Ka-BOOM!!” shouted Kathleen into the microphone, as she stood on a makeshift pulpit just aft of the fire truck’s cab. The Lieutenant, leaning against the fire engine’s intake valve, jumped when the girl bellowed. She was a hefty young lady and had a prodigious voice that would have eventually served her well as a fifth grade teacher, had she not become the District Attorney. The girl followed her exploding sound effects with the whooshing noises of debris flying through the air. Some of the younger children in the crowd began to look frightened..
Kathleen continued her parable. Dad was still at work. Mom had been in the basement doing the laundry, but now pieces of her were arriving steadily in heaven. The children sat down in a snow bank (after all, this was Utica) and cried their little eyes out, knowing Dad would be angry when he finally arrived to find a 30 foot crater where his home once stood. All this grief was the consequence of not keeping a list of home maintenance reminders. “How terribly, terribly sad,” Kathleen said, leaning on the fire truck’s safety bar, a young prosecutor in the making.
Sparky the Dalmatian was apparently quite touched by Kathleen’s tale. He began wailing and whimpering and snuffling until the Lieutenant lovingly took hold of the dog’s collar. It could have been my imagination, but the man seemed to twist the choker rather tightly. Sparky’s crying stopped abruptly with a little screech, but he soon got loose and jumped off the truck into the crowd of children. Our cries of surprise and delight quickly turned to disgust and laughter when Sparky lifted his leg against the black skirts of Sister Bunny.
Finally finishing her talk, Kathleen smiled broadly, looked around the crowd and said, “Thank you all very much for coming to see me. I am extremely grateful to have been chosen from among hundreds of children (true, if you counted everyone all the way down to kindergarten) to deliver The Distinguished Annual Fire Safety Lecture at this prestigious institution.” (That would be our elementary school.) With that, she jumped from the truck, alarming the Lieutenant, who was now holding on to Sparky for dear life.
The students began to grow restless as their minds turned to warm baloney sandwiches and government subsidized milk in tiny bottles … 2 cents for white, 3 cents for chocolate. Even the nuns looked tired. The firemen reminded us once more not to play with matches. They revved up the siren one last time as we all held our hands over our ears. Another successful visit from the city fire department came to a close.
My mind turned from the fire trucks to other topics. Question No. 372 had begun to bother me a little and I wondered why Mom seemed so pleasant to that man in Woolworth’s last week. She told me he was a friend of Dad’s. Ah well, it was my favorite time of year and I tried not to ruminate so much in good weather. Later that morning, I wrote a note about the Woolworth’s incident on a candy wrapper and stuck it in between the pages toward the back of my catechism. We wouldn’t get there until March, and that was an eternity of time, far away into the future. Who could guess? By then, anything might happen. The church could go up in smoke, Mom could run off with the milkman and Sparky could get accidentally strangled.
I've had a lot of time to think about Immy over the years, and not just about taking her for a drive and parking in a lonely spot, something she allowed only once that I remember. Thank God the girl protected us both by refusing my advances when they went too far for her sensibilities.
About twenty years ago my mother told me she was proud she and Dad were able to send my brothers and I to Catholic schools when we were kids. In a familiar manner of loving derision I said nothing but began to pick my nose, which always got her laughing.
“Well, it’s true,” she said. “And certainly as a Brother you can tell me at least one thing your Catholic education did for you.”
With a twinkle in my eye, I said, "Well it limited me to dating girls who wouldn’t put out.”
“You think I didn’t know that?” she said.
Immy was a strong young lady who knew what she wanted from life and it didn't include getting pregnant by some numbskull who would be forced by the society of his time to forfeit plans for an education and instead get a factory job to pay the rent on a cold water flat.
Immy was smart and she knew it, and had been encouraged from an early age to go beyond her mother's horizon ... by her mother, among others.
My Mom continued to send newspaper clippings to me each time Immy was featured in our local newspaper, which was often, due to her mother's new hobby as a PR agent. Mom must have thought I would fondly remember Immy as I might boyhood friends George or Frank. Why she did not sense my hurt is beyond me. Mom was not a mean person.
Anyway, according to the articles Immy became an attorney in Washington and rose to high levels in the government, eventually taking political clients with her into a law partnership that became very successful. She married twice and mothered twin daughters whose weddings were featured in the society news for days on end. Not once did I entertain a fantasy about being her successful husband. Neither the first nor the second.
On Saturday, I rose and looked out the window at a wonderful world of white swirling snow. Maybe I should have called to confirm our date, but I got dressed and borrowed my father’s car and drove to St. John’s. I had to park a block away. The rotten weather could not spoil the first snow of the winter for me.
Outside the church, a gusty squall was churning up snow in the slushy street. The wind nudged me in through the huge brass plated doors, past Holy Water bowls the size of bird baths, and down the long nave into the old church. Walking among the pews, I felt the immensity of the structure as small sounds echoed about me to accent the silence.
Looking around the huge and ornate house of worship, it was apparent that in the 19th century God and Mammon had run neck and neck in a race that God must have lost. Gold filigree wound around carved columns that arched up and over a 25 foot high altar. The white marble floors shined as bright and clean as my soul on the day of my christening, when Uncle Harry carried me up the steps to the gold baptismal font. One more Catholic soldier reporting for duty in a line that extended back to my ancestor Patrick’s baptism here in 1830. Afterward, my mother must have carried me back down the marble steps and past Stations of The Cross, each carved into the grey stone walls. If the morning had been sunlit, the high stained glass windows would have provided wonderfully colored splashes of reds and greens and gold to wash down the steps and out onto the expanse of white floor.
I looked up to the yellowing chandeliers and imagined the great empty space that rose above me to the vaulted ceiling held the souls of countless men and women who had vowed their obligations to God and their love to each other. Many were my family, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, grandparents and great grandparents. One life after another consecrated to something that could only be felt in such surroundings. Hands holding each other tightly at the altar in marriage. Hands holding the oil and water of baptism. And then letting go as the hand of the one left behind touched the casket for the last time in that awful and lonely moment of goodbye.
On this day, as the snow outside sifted up against the stained glass and I waited for Immy, the church was cold and dark and empty. I sat and thought of the young woman who had meant everything to me just a few years before. And I thought about our futures. I did not know which missionary field I would serve in the future, but I prayed for those placed over me in the Order to have an anointing on them when they made decisions for me. And I said a prayer for Immy’s future, whether she married a boy provided by her Italian mother’s army of aunts and cousins or if she chose a dumb Irishman like myself from her father’s Hibernian lodge. If she showed up today, I would frankly be surprised. Something in her voice on the telephone told me that before today she would decide to not come. I think Immy knew we weren't right for each other, but did not have the words to tell me. Her sense of the world was much more practical than mine and I suppose she didn’t want to spend her life pulling my head down from the clouds. Romance and hormones can often rush toward a union that proves disastrous for two young people. The lucky couples survive it. And I was lucky to avoid it, but I felt anything but blessed. I had understood little when I felt my world end at her goodbye four years before. And now a young man of 22 years, the sting of it was still with me as I sat in the cold church that Saturday morning.
As midday approached, the pews began to fill with people. I had forgotten there was a Mass at noon. Soon, a crowd of worshippers began to assemble behind me as they prepared themselves for the Advent service. Since I had sat down at the very front, I had no idea who was behind me. I wanted to turn around and scan the congregation, but I didn’t.
Immy never came to the church. But that was OK, because I had the answer Bert had asked me to seek. I still loved Immy. I could feel the loss of her affection nagging me. But I could survive. I didn’t know how long I would carry the loss with me, but I somehow knew I would go on with life and find my way.
I happened to look to my right at one of the smaller altars along the side wall of the church and I noticed a new statue. I stood and shuffled sideways on the kneeler past the Asian man and woman who had sat down next to me. Exiting the pew, I walked across the church to the statue. A small sign on its base said the image was of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks. I remembered reading about her life among the Mohawk Indians in Central New York State. She had been disfigured by small pox and while growing up was the butt of jeering and ridicule by the adults and children of her tribe. But when she grew to be a young woman she became known as a wonderful storyteller who loved children. The little ones followed her around asking for stories and she kept them entertained, but her adult peers still persisted in their mocking. She became a Christian and legend has it that when she died at a young age in April of 1680, moments after her death her face was wonderfully transfigured into that of a lovely young woman. I knelt down and said a prayer to her, or to the spirit she represented, the spirit that fills the universe, the spirit that we can only perceive as one person at a time, be it God, Mary, St. Francis or (for some) Elvis. Without further defining a theology and wrapping it around her, I asked her to be my friend. To look out for me and to help my guardian angel, who is also of the same spirit (but is better looking than Elvis.) I have felt a special kinship with Kateri ever since. But it would be years before I realized we had both survived an airplane accident.
One of the last things I did before entering religious life was to call Mary Immaculata O’Toole, the girl I dated in high school and occasionally in college. Immy was my only serious love. As I look back, I’m sure I was never more than a date to her, but she wasn’t just a date to me. At one time I thought we’d spend our lives together. But in the summer after high school just before I left for college, Immy told me we were through. The news wasn’t a surprise, but it hurt. Later, when we were both home from college in the summer we occasionally went out together, but with the understanding we were only friends. At least, that was Immy’s understanding.
It was my college spiritual director who suggested I have one more meeting with Immy before I pursued the life of a Brother.
“What the hell for?” I blurted out.
Bert looked at me as if I were dense, surprised at my reaction. “Call it closure,” he said. “After all, the young woman obviously meant a lot to you.”
“That’s the past,” I said, “when I was a kid.”
Bert peered over his glasses at me and then shifted around in his chair and looked out the window, across the college’s quadrangle of lawn and sidewalks. He was a large man, a Lutheran minister and a former Army Chaplain who didn’t suffer fools easily. He was not of a pastoral bent, but was rather more directive. The afternoon sun was streaming in through the glass on a late winter afternoon. He probably wanted to get outside and frankly I was finished with this conversation.
“Do you realize,” he said after a moment, “how many young men of antiquity found the love of their life and fathered the girl’s children before age 18?”
“I didn’t do anything to father any children,” I said, sort of smugly.
Still …” he said. “Let’s be realistic. Do you think a 16 year old can’t have an important love? Even a life-changing love?”
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“Go see her,” Bert said. “Don’t tell yourself you don’t love her, not until you see how your emotions react when you’re with her for an hour. And then if you’re still not sure, well … just be sure you can live without her. For five years, anyway.”
When I went home at Christmas, I made the call. It was a tough task. I didn’t want to start that memory in my heart beating all over again. And also, I didn’t look forward to telling Immy I was going to be a Brother. I had revealed my plan to a few casual young woman acquaintances in the 6 months prior and received strange reactions, not the encouragement I would have expected. If Immy looked at me like I was less than a man, I’d feel terrible. Truthfully, I often felt like a very strong man when I thought of the dedication this life would require.
I dialed Immy’s number and her mother answered. The lady who had been so nice to me in high school didn’t bother to act like she remembered me, but I’m sure she did.
“She’s here. Wait a minute, please,” said the housewife who had just plummeted to the bottom of my favorite older woman list.
I visualized Immy and her mother sitting across the kitchen table from each other and that was confirmed by Immy coming on the phone almost immediately, except for a slight delay while I imagined Mom holding the phone away from her ear and rolling her eyes in disdain.
“Hello?” said Immy. “Oh, Hi! Where are you? Here in town, really? Uh huh. Uh huh. Oh. Well … I’m not home for very long, so I’m really busy most nights … every night, come to think of it. Ha ha!”
“How about Saturday morning?” I said.
“Well … OK,” she said. “I guess. Where? I’m on a diet.” That meant she didn’t want to get stuck with me through too long of a lunch.
“How about St. John’s Church?” I said. I was reacting sarcastically to her avoiding lunch with me, but decided as I spoke that St. John’s was probably appropriate. I’d been to so many funerals there.
“Are you serious?” she said.
“Sure,” I replied. “I’m not in town for very long either. It’s my family church and I’ve been wanting to visit.”
“Wow,” she laughed, a real laugh. “What a date!”
“Ten o’clock OK?” I said.
“Two hours to pray before lunch?” she said. “Is there so much to pray about?”
“OK, then between 10:30 and 11:00,” I said. “I may get there a little early.”
“You probably need the prayer more than me!” she said, brightly
I wouldn’t be the first religious brother or priest to have fallen for a girl, but I might be the first to fall for my guardian angel. And I sure as hell am the first to have my guardian angel parading around as a real estate broker.
I’m not kidding. It absolutely has to be her. I walked right up to her as she stood by her car and looked her in the eye. She quailed a little, but stood her ground and stared at me as if to dare me to say anything of our previous meeting. Or I suppose it’s possible she’s a human and she was just reacting like a strong young woman. But dammit, I’m sure it’s her. Pretty sure. How could it not be her? Even the same name! I’m not that batty. Pretty sure I’m not.
Women are a bother! Terd once said that if God had made a third sex, women would get far less attention.
Most of us monks have been attracted to women, although a few didn’t care much for them in the first place. I hope it doesn’t surprise any readers that a quite normal religious Brother might have a heart that loves and falls and breaks just like other men. However, our vocation is usually more important to us than walking the path of marriage in conjugal bliss. There were only one or two women in my life that I remember with romantic fondness, and occasionally on a beautiful spring evening more than fondness. Then there are the few who existed only in my mind, like Sara. Not the real Sara, of course, but the Sara who would choose to fly fish on her honeymoon and who can tie a mean attractor fly while she stands in the middle of the stream. And yes, of course, the imaginary Sara who has all the standard equipment.
I think I mentioned that in our Order we renew our vows every five years. There have been times in the past when I thought about not renewing. Maybe I’d find a job somewhere and settle into the landscape. It’s possible my idea of being a confirmed bachelor might change when I found myself figuratively rubbing against a pleasant woman and …. well, you know.
