by J.F. Powers
Toohey, standing by the doorway to the sanctuary, suddenly moved out into it, ringing the bell, but Joe, while dialoguing with the man, had also been keeping an eye on the fink, and wasn’t left at the post. And so the eleven began.
Celebrant read the right prayers, made the right moves, but fortunately for him and the congregation (and for celebrants and congregations everywhere) the efficacy of the Mass depends on a gift of God as irreducible as it is unreturnable, and not on the mental state of the celebrant, who, in the case of this one, deficient, distracted, was like a man drifting down a river in a boat without oars, blind to the scenery along the shore, hearing the roar of the cataract ahead.
When it was time for the sermon, celebrant and server settled down on the sedilia, while preacher came out of the sacristy and climbed into the pulpit. He read the announcements, he preached, he returned to the sacristy—all as before.
Celebrant returned to the altar and soon heard, as before, the sounds of the regular collection. After the ushers retired (the dangerous time), there was silence in the body of the church—gratifying to celebrant. Celebrant then heard, of all people, server addressing the congregation: “Father and I, both of us newly ordained and from this parish, will now take up a special collection. The pastor has asked us to do this. So be generous, good people,” whereupon celebrant turned away from the altar in despair, saw an usher with two bas-kets moving up the middle aisle, saw server open the gates in the communion rail and then stand there waiting for celebrant.
Who, coming to the usher, took the basket from him (server having already taken the other) and did one side of the middle aisle (Hi, Mom; hi, Dad) while server did the other. Returning to the front of the church by the side aisles, celebrant by one, server by the other, not forgetting that they’d done only half of the wide middle sections, they worked back as before so people could see them. And likewise they did the side sections, front to back after which they came up the middle aisle together, left the baskets at the communion rail, on the altar side, making it easier for someone (at this Mass, Father Stock’s assistant) to come out of the sacristy and take them away, and harder for someone in the congregation to run up and grab them. Then the Mass resumed.
After Mass, in the sacristy, nothing, just nothing, celebrant’s silence saying, “You win, I lose, you fink,” server’s saying, “Did my duty and, thanks to me, you did yours, buster,” server leaving first, celebrant about to leave—people were waiting for him and his blessing on the church lawn—when he reached out and reclaimed (it was still there) the envelope. Oh, that he hadn’t! For the envelope, like his offering now, was empty. And to stoop further, instead of wadding up the envelope and throwing it on the floor, he put it back on the counter, just so.
6. OUT IN THE WORLD
JOE WAS GENERALLY avoided during his last years at the seminary—sometimes referred to as a gadfly, which he didn’t mind, sometimes as a pain in the ass, which he did. His unpopularity was flattering in a way—in the light of “If the world hate you, know ye that it hath hated me before you,” but that was pushing it in Joe’s case. Besides, too many freaks and losers took comfort in Scripture, and Joe didn’t see himself as either. Coming from a family more than just well-to-do, and unlike most of his classmates (but like St Augustine) having lived some before entering the sem, he couldn’t be looked down on, nor could his views be gainsaid on the ground that it was a species of pride for him to cite Doctors of the Church in support of them, though this was often tried by his critics. “Pride?” he’d replied. (He’d replied a lot at the seminary.) “I’d cite you guys if you ever said anything worth citing.” That was his style.
It wasn’t so much his all-around unpopularity as something said to him in the confessional (“We have to watch ourselves. A holier-than-thou attitude toward others doesn’t become us in the sight of God”) that made Joe decide, about a month before ordination, to show more charity toward others. Maybe there hadn’t been time enough for others to notice the change in him, though, for he was still generally avoided.
About a month after ordination, at the class’s first little get-together, to which he had to be invited (he did see it like that) and which was held in a private room in a restaurant, Joe watched himself (that is, shut up) and listened to the clerical shoptalk. He enjoyed it too, though not as much as some of the others at the big table for twelve. Mooney and Rooney gloried in it. But it went on too long, and thinking, Oh-oh, here I go again, Joe said, “W. G. Ward. That name mean anything to you guys? No? Well, Ward, and not Newman, was the first convert from the Oxford Movement. He says any priest without personal knowledge of Christ, which knowledge can only come from contemplation”—Joe had supplied and stressed that part to make his point better—“ought to seek out some desolate island so as to live alone and do no harm.”
“Words,” said Cooney, these days cultivating a worldlier-than-thou attitude. “Hard words, Joe.”
“No harder than those of Our Lord to Martha,” Joe replied.
“But you’re not Our Lord!” cried a couple of deep thinkers at the table. Joe ignored them. He quoted from Luke 10, where Martha complains that she has her hands full serving Our Lord and the Disciples and could use some help from Mary, who sits listening to the conversation, and Our Lord replies, “Mary hath chosen the best part.”
“Try telling that to the Chancery,” said Rooney, who had earlier been complaining or bragging about having to do all the work in the parish where he was the assistant.
“Contemplation’s all very well,” said Mooney. “Some of the saints, I know, went in for it. But it’s still an extra. We have to make a distinction, Joe, between following the counsels of perfection and doing the job—and a mighty big job it is—we’ve been ordained to do. How many of us can do both?”
“That so-called distinction is the biggest out in all theology,” Joe replied. “Why not do both? At least try.”
“You’re doing both at Holy Faith?” said Rooney.
Cooney cut in, “According to Lefty Beeman” (a problem priest, always on the move; formerly at Holy Faith, he was now a curate at St Isidore’s with Cooney), “the assistant at Holy Faith does the job, the pastor does the contemplating.”
Joe replied, “Well, of course, I haven’t been there as long as Beeman was. How long was he there? Six months?” This was not only cruel but wasted, and Joe, regretting it, shut up and listened to the others discuss the situation at Holy Faith.
“Two oddballs in one parish.”
“Certainly an odd appointment.”
“Crazy.”
“Not fair to Joe—as a new man, I mean.”
“Not fair to the pastor, you mean.”
“Not fair to the parishioners.”
“The Archbishop’s slipping.”
His appointment to Holy Faith, as assistant to Father Van Slaag, the only known contemplative in the diocese (among pastors), was not crazy, Joe believed. No, the Chancery must have heard of his hard times at the seminary, where he’d been the only known contemplative—he didn’t really qualify as such, he knew, unless maybe by desire, but he did have that reputation—and the Archbishop must have decided to make it two of a kind at Holy Faith. It was an odd appointment, perhaps, but it appeared odder than it was to those who recalled the efforts of the old Archbishop to strike a balance in parishes by pairing athletes with aesthetes, scholars with dunces, fat kine with lean. The new Archbishop was said to believe that his priests had enough to do without working out on each other; not that it was his policy to accommodate everybody—poker players, hi-fiers, photographers, astronomers, activists, liturgists—and not that some of his appointments didn’t smack of old-fashioned therapy: a lush in the suburbs who’d lost his driver’s license could find himself walking the corridors of a five-hundred-bed hospital in the city as a chaplain under the thumb of nuns; a big spender could find himself operating under the buddy or commissar system, with an assistant empowered to act for him and the parish in all money matters over two d
ollars and fifty cents.
Joe believed that his appointment, in a similar way—not, of course, in the same way—showed special concern on the part of the Archbishop, by whose wisdom and grace both pastor and assistant at Holy Faith were spared that heckling suspicion that is the lot of contemplatives, and even more of would-be contemplatives, in the modern world. With no need to apologize or explain, as each would have had to do with almost any other priest in the diocese, they could get on with or, in Joe’s case, down to the job of working and praying for their personal sanctification and salvation (and their parishioners’). And that was what they were doing, though not everything was perfect at Holy Faith.
There was the problem of the housekeeper, Mrs Cox, a plump tough-talking TV fan, who called Father Van Slaag Van to his face and Slug to her friends on the phone. (And Joe was pretty sure he was the one she referred to as Shorty.) There was the problem of Mrs Cox’s dog, Boots, a female bull terrier that would go for your ankles unless you carried a weapon. (“She’s all right,” the housekeeper would say with a hearty laugh. “She just hates men.”) Joe had found a cane in the umbrella stand and took it with him whenever he left his bedroom.
There was also the problem of Father Van Slaag. Joe, for his part, had hoped to spend most of his free time in the church, in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, but Father Van Slaag was already doing this—the man practically lived in the church. Pastor and assistant at first were absent from the rectory for long periods, until Joe asked himself, “Shepherd, what of the sheep?” This question, which could have come from Satan (who would doubtless employ any means to get a priest off his knees and out of a church) or from the Archbishop, was resolved for Joe after he discovered that he couldn’t concentrate, let alone contemplate, when Father Van Slaag was in the church, as he was whenever Joe went there. Not wanting to ask when his free time was, or when Father Van Slaag’s wasn’t, Joe moved an old prie-dieu, which had been serving as a plant stand, into his bedroom. He now carried on from there with his spiritual exercises, and also—not the least of his duties—answered the phone there, more often than not while kneeling at the prie-dieu.
So, though not in the church much, Joe was on his knees a lot. When he discovered the state of his knees, however, which were only lightly callused (nothing like those he’d once seen on a visiting Trappist monk in the showers at the seminary—horny gray growths like the chestnuts on the legs of a horse), Joe felt he had a long way to go. The question was whether a diocesan priest—not the really rare one, like Father Van Slaag, but the merely unusual one, like Joe—with his ministry in and to the world, which would rub off on him, could ever go very far; whether in time, after constant, close association with parishioners and coming under their subtle influence, he wouldn’t cease to be spiritually, perhaps even mentally, an adult. What was true in other fields of human endeavor at the highest level, in the arts and sciences and sports—namely, that success involves a hell of a lot of slogging—just had to be true, Joe believed, in the field of spirituality: not a crowded field but the trickiest of all to get anywhere in. The notion, so popular nowadays, that the best kind of spirituality just happens and is the by-product of routine apostolic activity, or, as some of Joe’s critics at the seminary had claimed, is actually the same thing —well, Joe hadn’t believed it then and didn’t now.
“The priest’s life,” Joe said at the class’s next little get-together, to which he’d received what had seemed to him a last-minute invitation, “any priest’s life, anybody’s life, in order to be fruitful in this world, to say nothing of the next, has to be rooted in contemplation. This is especially true of our life, which otherwise becomes one of sheer activity—the occupational disease of the diocesan clergy.”
“Look,” Rooney said. “I don’t want to listen to that stuff tonight. I’m here to relax. You guys don’t know what it’s like to run a four-hundred-family parish all by yourself.”
“That so?” replied Joe. “Happens to be what I’m doing at Holy Faith.”
“Another parish heard from,” said Cooney.
“Bob,” Mooney said to Rooney, “we all have our crosses to bear.”
“I still don’t want to listen to that stuff tonight,” Rooney said. “I had a tough day.” So Joe shut up, and the clerical shoptalk, which he’d only cut into because it had gone on too long, continued.
At the very end, when Joe was leaving the restaurant for the parking lot, he was approached by Rooney. “Sorry, Joe,” Rooney said. “But I had a tough one today.”
“Bob, I know what you mean.”
They went out to their cars together.
In the weeks that followed, Joe and Bob saw more of each other than they ever had before, except for that short time at the seminary when Bob had embraced the contemplative life. Joe hoped that Bob was having second thoughts about the active life, that it wasn’t only their plight as overworked assistants that had drawn them together again, but in any case he had a friend in Bob. They knew each other’s phone number by heart, and frequently met in the course of their duties—Bob pausing at Holy Faith on his way home from downtown, Joe at St John Bosco’s, Bob’s parish, after visiting the hospital nearby.
St John Bosco’s, unlike Holy Faith, was a new plant, with paid secretaries, the latest in equipment, and programs and organizations galore, many overlapping. The parish was too much for one man—even for him, Bob said, unless he was there every minute, which he couldn’t be. The pastor, Monsignor McConkie, or Mac, as Bob called him, a handsome silver-haired glad-hander, who had long ago joined everything joinable and now acknowledged when he got up in the morning, if he did, that he was in too deep and had a serious drinking problem, expected Bob to “represent” him and the parish at functions that Mac was under both doctor’s and confessor’s orders to stay away from. The worst ones—worst because there was no end to them—were service-club luncheons at downtown hotels. Bob attended three or four of these a week, and it was usually after one of them, in the middle of the afternoon, in high spirits or low, that he paused at Holy Faith.
Joe, usually in the office at that time of day—he’d moved the old prie-dieu down there—would make a drink for the visitor, as was the practice at St John Bosco’s, and they’d discuss what was uppermost in their minds: Boots, if she’d gone for Bob on the way in; Mrs Cox, if the TV in the living room was coming through well; or problems of universal concern. One of these was church finance, a subject that Bob had ideas about and that Joe, though he’d scorned it and clerical bookkeeping at the seminary, now felt he should interest himself in. To judge by some correspondence from the Chancery in the files, nobody else at Holy Faith had done so in recent times. What could be said of the take at Holy Faith—not enough—could also be said of organizations: only two, the Holy Name Society (men) and the Christian Mothers (their wives). Reluctantly, Joe would agree that something should be done about Youth or, anyway, about Young People and Young Marrieds—Bob had ideas about all these—but then Joe would renege and say he didn’t want to bite off more than he could chew: a veiled reference to the situation at St John Bosco’s.
“Heaven forbid!” Bob said. “Still, we’re in the same boat, Joe.”
That they were in the same boat (a commonplace in their discussions) and that Bob was having a rougher ride Joe would accept, but he couldn’t agree that there was so little to choose between those responsible for their plights—between, if you didn’t count the Archbishop, a mystic and a drunk—as to make no difference. One afternoon, Joe told Bob that it was the Father Van Slaags, oddly enough, and not the Monsignor McConkies, who kept the world going, who, by their feats of prayer and abnegation, stayed the hand of God. This, though he didn’t like to hear it—noncontemplatives never did—Bob knew to be the accepted and time-honored belief of the Church.
Joe would have made his point even better had he spoken of what he’d seen the night before, when he’d gone to Father Van Slaag’s room to complain about Boots and Mrs Cox’s TV, only to change his mind a
nd ask permission to order Sunday-collection envelopes from another supplier, and then to retire to think, as he’d been doing ever since, on what he’d seen through the gaps in the old, almost buttonless cassock that Father Van Slaag wore for a nightshirt—the horny gray growths on the knees, the dogtooth wounds on the ankles. Dear God! What Joe had wondered about ever since coming to Holy Faith was clear to him then: why Father Van Slaag did nothing about Mrs Cox’s dog and TV. He was using them, these crosses, as a means to sanctification and salvation—making life make sense, which it otherwise wouldn’t. Out of prudence, and out of reverence for Father Van Slaag, Joe didn’t tell Bob or anyone else what he’d seen that night, but thereafter, whenever Bob said that their pastors ought to be put away—Mac in a sanitarium, Van in a cloister or cave—Joe was silent, brooding on those ankles and knees in awe and humility. He had decided that Father Van Slaag was—and not just in the sense that the word applied to anybody in the state of grace but in the sense that it applied to the big-time mystics and martyrs—a saint.
