“They fought over the city for months,” the priest was saying. “Back and forth, the Russians and the Germans. A soldier who survived that battle told me about it. He said that he could look straight through whole city blocks of what had once been large buildings. There was nothing but rubble. Office buildings, apartments, factories: everything had been gutted and demolished by artillery fire from both sides.
“If you know anything about bombardment, you know that a single artillery shell can destroy only a small part of a building the size of this novitiate. Can you imagine the enormous amount of shells poured into that city to cause such widespread destruction? Can you imagine such enormous destructive power? And that was nothing compared to the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such power is beyond human comprehension. But it is part of our lives now, this threat of a thermonuclear war. It would be more horrible than anything that has gone before.
“Today, we all live with the knowledge that on any given day, if something goes wrong, the world can be destroyed in a matter of hours. The whole world. Destroyed. Today, or tomorrow, or the day after. It’s entirely possible. With that in mind, let us consider something even more powerful and destructive.”
The priest paused for a moment.
“Let us consider the true nature of sin.”
∗ ∗ ∗
The President of the United States went about his business that morning, pretending that all was well. He spent forty-five minutes with the members of the White House Panel on Mental Retardation and another half-hour with a man who was going to Paris to become the new ambassador to France. When that meeting was over, it was time for the President to join a score of government officials in the Cabinet Room where intelligence officers had set up their charts and photo displays. No one in the Cabinet Room was smiling.
“Let’s begin,” said the President.
∗ ∗ ∗
“Sin has become so familiar and commonplace that we humans can never see it plain,” said the man who played Father Samozvanyetz. “We can only try to comprehend the spiritual enormity of sin by looking at its physical effects, the way we try to estimate the power of an artillery bombardment by studying the damage.
“True, we can all be deeply shocked by sin, but only when we see its effects in its most horrible forms: in the dungeons and the labor camps of the Soviet Union, in the extermination camps of Nazi Germany. Then we are horrified and repelled. We can see the results of sin: the bodies of the victims, the mass graves. We see the effects of sin, not sin itself. We cannot see sin the way God perceives sin. If we could, we might understand that a single mortal sin can be as horrible as a hundred Hiroshimas.”
That was a new thought for Charley. It seemed far-fetched. But at his desk, later that morning, he decided that the priest’s strong statement made sense. He realized that Father Samozvanyetz was saying that the true horror of sin is in the spiritual realm, while human beings can see only its physical manifestations. So the priest was urging the novices to reason from physical evidence to spiritual reality. Charley could see that clearly enough.
He wondered if the other young men had grasped the priest’s meaning. But in the silence of the retreat, without any talking, there was no way to tell what the others might be thinking or how they might be reacting to all these new thoughts.
∗ ∗ ∗
A CIA briefing officer used the U-2 photos to take the President and the grim men in the Cabinet Room beyond the Cuban farm houses and the tobacco sheds, past the rocks and trees, to the alien objects that the photo-interpreters and the analysts had determined were Soviet SS-4 missile bases.
The President had questions for the experts. His expression was grave, but his voice was calm.
How long would it be until the missiles could be ready to fire? The experts estimated it could be a matter of ten days.
Was it likely that the Russians had sent nuclear warheads to Cuba along with the missiles? None had been found so far.
Were these the only missile bases in Cuba? It was likely that there were more to be found.
“Then keep looking,” said the President. “I want that whole damned island covered. I don’t care how many missions it takes.”
∗ ∗ ∗
Charley Coogan could not resist the temptation to dabble in the Spiritual Exercises. At first, he felt guilty about going against the will of his superior, but then he reminded himself that he was not a Jesuit novice and so Father Samozvanyetz was not his superior.
I’m just doing a job here, he told himself, and there’s nothing to keep me from learning how to meditate. As long as it’s not sinful and doesn’t mess up my job, I can do pretty much what I like. There’s nothing in the Ten Commandments against it. Where does it say: Thou Shalt Not Meditate?
So Charley plunged ahead and followed the novices along their spiritual trail at what he considered to be a safe distance. All he had to do was follow the instructions being given to the real novices and pretend that he was just pretending. He soon discovered that praying and trying to meditate in secret made his game more exciting.
That Tuesday, Charley stood at his desk, head bowed, eyes closed to shut out the light. He made the Sign of the Cross. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
He took his time. He could hear the other novices breathing, he thought. Otherwise the room was still, except for the tick-tocking of the pendulum clock on the wall.
“I am in the presence of God,” he told himself and let the thought sink in. No big deal. He was always in the presence of God because God was everywhere. Charley was just trying to become more aware of that.
He knelt down on his wooden kneeler and rested his folded hands on the edge of his desk. He frowned, trying to push his mind forward, and tried to remember the exact words of the Preparatory Prayer.
“Dear Lord,” he prayed, “please give me the grace so that all my intentions, actions and something or anything else may be directed purely to the service and praise of Your Divine Majesty.”
He added “Ad majorem Dei gloriam” because Father Samozvanyetz had said that the Preparatory Prayer was based on the First Principle and that the whole thing was summed up in the Jesuit motto: To the greater glory of God.
To or for? In Latin, ad could mean either. Or maybe both. He thought about that for a minute or so, realized it was a distraction and moved on to the First Prelude where he was supposed to make a mental image of Sin in his mind’s eye.
Because Sin was a condition or a state of being, not really visible, Father Samozvanyetz said they should try to imagine something real. So Charley tried to imagine his soul trapped inside his “corruptible body”, like the book said.
That didn’t work, so he tried to imagine that his soul was an exile, as Saint Ignatius had written, “among brute beasts.” He tried to see ugly jungle plants, thick and flaccid, clustered in steaming ooze with menacing creatures slipping through the shadows and the sickly sweet, humid air filled with the low growling of those brute beasts.
That worked better. Charley, with his soul imprisoned in his body, was staggering on alone through the fog, like in a jungle movie.
After a while he checked the Second Prelude in his Spiritual Exercises book:
“What I want and desire is shame and confusion at myself, seeing how many have been damned for only one mortal sin, and how many times I deserved to be condemned forever for my so many sins.”
That was hard. He had been going to confession regularly since he was a little kid, but he’d never got a penance more severe than an Our Father and three Hail Marys and a “try not to do that again” from the priest.
Charley’s knees began to ache, so he stood up to begin his meditation on the First Point: the First Sin. He recalled Father Samozvanyetz’s instructions to use the memory, the intellect, and the will in this exercise. Memory, first.
Okay, the First Sin was committed by the Angels.
Father Samozvanyetz had described the
m as “magnificent creatures with great dignity and will power and spiritual beauty and intelligence. They stood in excellence and brilliance in the vestibule of Heaven.”
But their Pride damned them, a sin of the intellect. Pride! How about that?
Charley could never understand the fallen angels. They had everything, right from the beginning of everything. But they messed up, beautiful and powerful and smart as they were.
Had God revealed the future to the Angels? Did they realize that, one day, God would become Man? Did they compare their angelic magnificence to Christ’s simple humanity?
Whatever it was, the Angels failed one single test. A single sin of intellectual pride and—Whammo! From All-Good to All-Evil, from Heaven to Hell, just like that!
But what did that have to do with Charley?
He thought about all the venial sins he had committed in his lifetime. They weren’t mortal sins, but they were still offenses against his Creator. Pride and disobedience, just like the Angels. The point, he guessed, was that Lucifer had been cast into Hell for one single act of defiance. And Charley had not. At least, not so far.
He became aware of the clock. He’d better hurry on to the next Big Sin or he wouldn’t be able to cover all the points.
He thought about the picture of Adam and Eve slouching away in shame from the Garden of Eden into the rocky desert, looking back at what they had lost. And at the big angel with his fiery sword making sure they wouldn’t be able to return.
“Don’t quibble about the apple,” Father Samozvanyetz had warned the novices. “It could have been anything. Two creatures disputed the Creator’s right to limit their actions. Pride, again. And Justice struck again. Man had used his free will to disobey his Creator. As a direct result of that willful defiance of Divine Law, corruption and death entered the world and became Man’s fate.
“But it was not God who brought disease and catastrophe and death into the world. It was Sin! And now we are all condemned to death, every single one of us. We must now earn our bread by the sweat of our brow and face hardship and discomfort and pain and danger and all the travails of life in the world. And not because Adam and Eve ate an apple! It was because Pride allowed them to exercise their free will to disregard the will of their Creator!”
The clock was racing ahead. So Charley rushed on to Ignatius Loyola’s Third Point: to consider the particular sin “of any one who for one mortal sin is gone to Hell—and for many others without number, for fewer sins than I have committed.”
Charley was on his knees again.
Was it really possible that there might be people suffering for all eternity because of a single unrepented mortal sin? Father Samozvanyetz said it had probably happened a lot during the War because so many people got killed so suddenly.
Charley wasn’t sure that made sense.
You’d think God would have warned them, somehow. If there’s nothing an Omnipotent God can do to spare an unrepentant sinner from the consequences of his sin, it’s almost like Sin is more powerful than God.
But Father Samozvanyetz had told the novices not to get into that. Words fail sometimes and make things less clear. When you’re trying to think about an Infinite Being, he had said, the fact that you have to use finite words and ideas makes everything fall short of the mark.
So just stop and go no farther without guidance. Just think about the doom that can result from one unrepented sin. And pray that you’re spared long enough to make a perfect Act of Contrition.
Or at least, Charley hoped, long enough to just say you’re sorry.
The electric bell suddenly sounded in the corridor.
The meditation period had ended. But Charley hadn’t finished the Third Point and he was nowhere near making the Colloquy because the time had gone by so fast. But the bell had rung and he had to stop. Next time, he would have to meditate faster.
∗ ∗ ∗
At the White House, the President and the men in the Cabinet Room were facing the fact that the situation in Cuba was going to get worse. The warning time for a missile attack on the United States had been a quarter of an hour. Within days, it would be cut to three minutes—or less.
The President said his worst fears had been realized. Khrushchev had miscalculated. The Soviet Union had pushed him beyond his political limits. There could be no offensive missiles in Cuba. The United States could not tolerate that. The missiles had to be removed, one way or another.
But how? That was the question. Some urged immediate air strikes on Cuba to destroy the missile sites. Others, concerned about a powerful Soviet response, urged caution.
The President said he wanted the government and military people in the room to explore all options and evaluate them before he made any final decisions. For now, everyone agreed, secrecy was the only effective weapon in the American arsenal. The President and his aides would give no sign that they had discovered the missiles in Cuba. The government officials would continue their deliberations, but not at the White House.
From now on, this Executive Committee would hold its meetings at the State Department to escape the notice of the White House press corps. While the committee explored and debated options, the President would stick to his scheduled appointments and public appearances.
With luck, his routine activity would mislead the Soviet Union and buy enough time to evaluate the threat in Cuba and decide what to do about it.
∗ ∗ ∗
That Tuesday night, the novices gathered in the chapel as usual. Father Samozvanyetz had allowed them to spend the day thinking, as deeply as they could, about Sin: the sins of the Angels and Adam and Eve, as well as their own.
Charley Coogan had tried his best, but it hadn’t felt right. He had closed his eyes tighter and frowned harder and tried to make it work. But he couldn’t.
How many of the others, he wondered, had really brought their will power to bear on the Colloquy suggested by Saint Ignatius? Had any of them really been able to imagine Christ hanging upon the Cross? If they did, had they really been able to pray as if they were right there on Calvary, speaking to the Lord “as one friend speaks to another, or as a servant speaks to his master?”
He sat in the chapel and took careful notes while Father Samozvanyetz led the novices through the Points of the Second Exercise. He listened hard and tried to understand. Wednesday morning, he would get up and try again.
The goal of the Second Exercise, Father Samozvanyetz told the novices, was “an ever increasing and intense sorrow and tears for my sins.” It was, Charley thought, an exercise for older and more experienced sinners, not someone just out of high school like himself. But he would follow the instructions and review his life, year by year, and try to feel cheap and small. That was the First Point.
Then he would try to weigh his sins, as directed, looking at “the foulness, loathsomeness and malice” that any mortal sin would have, even if it were not forbidden.
That would be hard. Charley was not a habitual sinner.
“One can almost understand men committing monstrous mortal sins,” the Master of Novices was saying. “They are seeking pleasure or wealth or honor or power. But what about those of us who commit petty acts of vanity and self-will for no particular gain? What do we have to show for it in the end? The approval of some other person, an insincere compliment from someone who makes no real difference in our lives? Yet, for such a small reward, how quickly we are willing to forget God our Creator.”
∗ ∗ ∗
As dawn broke Wednesday, the first U-2 soared high above Cuba on the first of six photographic missions that would be flown that day. There was no indication of any radar tracking, no scrambling of interceptor aircraft and, most importantly, no SAM anti-aircraft missiles were sent aloft. The Russians and the Cubans on the ground seemed oblivious to the U-2 spy planes looking down on them from the edge of space.
C H A P T E R • 18
Kneeling at his desk, Charley recalled the pleasure he’d always felt when his name appeared in
the sports pages of the Cleveland newspapers and how important he felt when his picture appeared. That wasn’t a sin. But he had to admit that he had a tendency to be self-seeking, self-serving and sometimes downright selfish. Not to mention proud and vain.
All were dangerous, Father Samozvanyetz had said. Small faults and self-serving habits could lead to venial sins. Repeated venial sins dulled the conscience and sometimes led to the mortal, soul-killing sins. Even if that didn’t happen, the priest had said, a mediocre life of habitual venial sin was despicable. It was just less loathsome than a life of mortal sin.
Yeah, thought Charley, that was probably right.
∗ ∗ ∗
Wednesday’s six U-2 missions had been plotted to cover the entire island of Cuba so that the photo-interpreters could more accurately determine the full extent of the threat.
The flights would continue indefinitely and so the photo-interpretation center would remain at full strength around the clock. The center had adjusted its schedules on the assumption that what had been discovered so far was just the tip of the iceberg, the first indications of a larger build-up in Cuba.
∗ ∗ ∗
Charley Coogan moved on to the Third Point of the morning meditation his Master of Novices had outlined the night before: “What am I compared to other men?”
“There were some petty criminals in the Siberian labor camps,” Father Samozvanyetz had said. “They were mixed in among the murderers, the political prisoners and the innocent. Those swindlers and purse-snatchers made our imprisonment even more miserable. Compared to what others had done, their crimes were minor. But they were universally despised.”
Charley didn’t think anyone despised him. He wasn’t a petty criminal. But he knew he wasn’t as great as he sometimes imagined himself to be. As an athlete, he was better than most, but not a great star. His brain was adequate, but his thoughts were far from brilliant.
As for his spiritual side? Charley didn’t dare compare himself to the novices. They seemed truly heroic in their own quiet way. He couldn’t imagine how they would ever be able to make the sacrifices they would be called upon to make. Compared to them, he was small potatoes, really.
Red Army Spies and the Blackrobes Trilogy Page 32
