A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  ‘An example of a wrong intention would be, for instance, to want to be a priest as a way of advancing yourself in the eyes of the world. But thank God in these days it’s very rare for anyone to offer himself for the priesthood for reasons like that.

  ‘And that’s really all there is to it. If you have good health, the right level of intelligence and a right intention, you’ve almost certainly got a vocation to the priesthood. The trouble is, too many young fellows think they have to get a special sign from heaven. They expect an angel to tap them on the shoulder and say, “Come on, son, God wants you for a priest!” Or perhaps they think they’ll have a vision some morning after mass, and see Our Lord or Our Lady herself beckoning to them. Nonsense! All the priests I know have been thoroughly normal young chaps like yourselves who realised one day that they had all the signs of a vocation. Then they prayed and thought about it and talked it over with a priest and that was that.

  ‘Sometimes a fellow can realise he’s got a vocation in funny ways. One of our outstanding young priests always maintains he got his vocation at a dance. It seems he was standing in a corner watching all the happy young people enjoying themselves around him when he suddenly realised that all this was not for him. God was calling him all right, and compared with the life of a priest, all the pleasures of the world seemed worthless.

  ‘Some men say they knew from the time they were small boys that they had a vocation. Others never realise it until they’re grown men—sometimes years after they’ve left school. The idea that God is calling you can grow on you slowly or it can hit you like a flash of lightning. There may be someone in this room right now who has never before asked himself this simple question, “Is God calling me to be a priest in the Archdiocese of Melbourne?” If any one of you is in this position, it might be a good time now, when you’re approaching your last year of school and wondering what you’re going to do with your life—it’s a good time to ask yourself seriously and honestly, “Is God calling me?”

  ‘Boys, would you each take a pencil and a piece of paper and write down something for me. For the sake of privacy I must ask you all to write something. If you can say in all honesty that you definitely don’t have a vocation to the priesthood, just write “God bless you, Father” or something like that on your paper and don’t put your name. If you’re at all interested in the priesthood, just sign your name and write the word “Interested”.

  ‘Those who are interested can have a chat with me in the brothers’ front parlour some time today. I’m not a salesman, remember. No priest would ever dare to put pressure on a boy in such a serious business as this. If you care to have a chat with me I’ll arrange to send you some literature and leave you my phone number if you want any further advice from time to time.

  ‘Now, would every boy write on his paper and fold it up small and pass it to the front, please.’

  Adrian wrote, ‘Definitely interested—Adrian Sherd.’ He folded his paper and passed it forward. Then he sat back and told himself he had just taken the most dramatic step of his life. But then he remembered you couldn’t make a decision as important as this without a lot of prayer and thought. Yet the young man at the dance had decided in a flash that he would give it all up. (Some of the girls in their ballerina frocks would have been almost as beautiful as Denise McNamara.) And now that man was an outstanding young priest and the girls were all happily married to other chaps.

  Soon after lunch a message came for a certain boy to see Father Parris in the brothers’ parlour. The whole class watched him get up from his seat and go. They were not surprised—he was quiet and solemn and he objected to hearing dirty jokes.

  Adrian waited for his turn to visit the priest. He was worried about Seskis and Cornthwaite and O’Mullane seeing him leave the class. He saw them putting up their hands and saying, ‘Please, Brother, Sherd can’t talk to the vocations priest—last year in Form Four he committed nearly two hundred mortal sins.’

  Father Sherd stepped up to the pulpit to begin his first sermon in his new parish. He saw the three of them grinning up at him from the back seats. They were ready to heckle him with shouts of ‘What about Jayne and Marilyn?’ They had already sent an anonymous letter about him to the Archbishop.

  But God would keep their lips sealed. He would never allow one of His own priests to be reproached in public for sins that had been forgiven years before. And how could Seskis and the others speak out without revealing their own guilty secrets?

  When it was Adrian’s turn to leave the classroom, he stood up boldly and strode to the door and silently offered up his embarrassment as an act of reparation to God for the sins of his past life.

  Adrian said to the priest, ‘My story is probably unusual, Father. When I was at primary school I served as an altar boy for years and developed a great love for the mass and the sacraments and often wondered whether I might have a vocation to the priesthood. But I’m sorry to say a few years ago I fell among bad companions and had a bit of trouble with sins of impurity—not with girls, fortunately, but on my own—mostly thoughts, but sometimes, I’m sorry to say, impure actions.

  ‘Luckily I never gave up trying to fight against these sins and I’m happy to say that now for a long time I’ve led a normal life in the state of grace. I’ve thought a lot lately about the life of a priest, and I’ll certainly be praying about it before it’s time to make up my mind next year about entering the seminary. But I sometimes wonder if my past sins would mean that I couldn’t possibly have a vocation.’

  Adrian was surprised at how calmly the priest heard him out. Father Parris said, ‘Take my advice and forget all about whatever you might have done years ago. You know your sins have all been forgiven in the sacrament of penance. What counts now is the sort of fellow you are now. Keep on praying to God and Our Lady and you’ll soon find out what’s expected of you.

  ‘Now, let’s have your name and address and I’ll send you a booklet about the life our young fellows lead in the diocesan seminary. Have a good look at it and just go on quietly with your studies and have a chat to your parish priest from time to time. And next year, if you’re still interested, we can talk about your applying to enter the seminary.’

  The priest looked at his watch and consulted a list of names in front of him. He said, ‘Now, would you ask John Toohey to see me when you get back to your room?’

  When Adrian left school that afternoon he knew he could catch Denise McNamara’s train if he strolled down Swindon Road to the station. But he walked into the Swindon church and knelt in one of the back seats.

  He saw how the last few troubled years of his life were really part of a wonderful pattern that could only have been worked out by God Himself.

  First came the year of his American nonsense—it revolted him now, but its purpose had been to show him that sinners were never happy. Then came Denise’s year. God had arranged for him to meet Denise because at that time the influence of a pure young woman was the only thing that could have rescued him. Now, Denise had served her purpose. The terrible scene in her lounge room only a few nights before had proved that she no longer had the power to keep his lust in check. It was God’s way of warning him not to rely on a mere woman to save his soul.

  Now, after a year without sin, Adrian was the equal of those average Catholic boys of good moral character that the priest had talked about. The next part of the pattern was becoming clear. He was almost certain he had a vocation to the priesthood. Like the young man on the dance floor he had sampled the joys of mixing with the opposite sex and found them shallow and unsatisfying.

  He still had a year to wait before he could enter the seminary. He would devise a scheme of meditations on his future as a priest to sustain him through his year of waiting.

  Adrian knelt and prayed until he knew he had missed Denise’s train. Then he left the church and hurried to the station. He decided to visit the church each afternoon until the end of the year to spare himself and Denise the embarrassment of meeting again aft
er it was all over between them. She would be puzzled for a while, but a girl so beautiful would soon attract other admirers. And one day, eight years later, she would open the Advocate and see pages of pictures of the newly ordained priests and realise what had been on his mind when he stopped seeing her on the Coroke train years before, and forgive him.

  In the last weeks of the school year, Adrian had to spend most of his time preparing for his Leaving Certificate exams. But every night before he began his studies he allowed himself to consider his future as a priest.

  He lifted the well-polished bronze knocker and rapped at the door of a comfortable double-fronted solid-brick house in a peaceful valley of a suburb beyond Camberwell. The middle-aged woman who answered the door was a stranger to him, but when she saw his Roman collar she said, ‘Come in, Father.’

  Reverend Father Sherd remembered that a priest should never give occasion for scandal. He asked the woman, ‘Are you alone in the house, madam?’ When she said yes he began talking to her on the doorstep, where the neighbours could see them if they were peeping from behind their front curtains.

  The woman and her husband were lapsed Catholics. She admitted to Father Sherd that they played golf on Sundays instead of going to mass. Father Sherd chatted amicably to her for a few minutes to show her he was human. Then, when he saw that she was off guard, he gave her three minutes of his best preaching.

  He used all his most powerful arguments—the infinite mercy of God; the joy of the angels in heaven when a sinner repented; the sufferings endured by Christ to redeem every member of the human race; and many more. When he had finished, the woman bowed her head. He allowed himself to touch her gently on the arm as he said kindly, ‘Tell your husband I’ll be expecting you both at mass next Sunday.’

  As he walked down the path between the neat beds of standard roses, he reminded himself that his success with the woman was not due to any ability he might have possessed but to the grace of God working through him.

  A booklet with the title The Priest came in the post to Adrian from Father Parris. It was made up of articles written by young priests of the Melbourne Archdiocese. Adrian was especially interested in the articles describing life at the seminary where the young priests had trained. This was the life he himself would lead for seven years after he had left school.

  The seminary was surrounded by quiet farmland a few miles past the western suburbs of Melbourne. The students were safe from all the distractions of the city. Instead of reading about the Cold War and the bodgie gangs in the Argus, they got up before six each morning and went to mass. They had hours of lectures each day. They called their teachers ‘professors’. The place was like a university except that the seminary courses were longer and harder. And instead of the merely descriptive sciences such as physics and chemistry, the seminarians studied the Queen of Sciences—theology. Adrian wondered how he could wait a whole year before he threw himself into the life of the seminary.

  Several articles in the booklet were written by young priests to describe their experiences in their first parishes. They could hardly express in words the joy and excitement of their first masses and the satisfaction that they got from administering the sacraments to people.

  Father Sherd settled himself in the dark confessional. He adjusted the violet-coloured stole around his shoulders and pulled back the wooden screen near his head. A young man began his confession. Father Sherd kept his eyes closed to avoid embarrassing the penitent.

  The fellow confessed impure thoughts about the young woman who worked beside him and occasional impure actions by himself. Father Sherd advised him to keep his eyes on his own desk at work and to take up a hobby to occupy himself in his spare time at home.

  The fellow said ‘What hobby did you take up to cure yourself, Sherd?’ It was O’Mullane grinning through the grille of the confessional.

  What could the young priest do? Force O’Mullane to confess the additional sin of sacrilege for having shown disrespect to one of God’s anointed priests? Tell him the true story of how a good Catholic girl had saved him, Sherd, from a life of sin and then bind O’Mullane under pain of mortal sin never to repeat the story outside the confessional? Ask the Archbishop for a transfer to a quiet rural parish where O’Mullane and the others would never find him? But the list of priests’ transfers was always published in the Advocate. O’Mullane or Cornthwaite or Seskis would read about his transfer and drive to his parish to torment him. If ever they were short of money, they could try to blackmail him—five pounds each week from the collection plate or else they would print the story of his past life on a duplicator and leave sheets on all the seats in the church before his Sunday mass.

  Adrian worried whether he was truly suitable for the priesthood. He knew that Canon Law would not allow a man to be ordained if his appearance was likely to cause amusement. (This law was hard on devout young men with St Vitus dance or huge warts on their faces. But its purpose was to preserve the dignity of the priesthood.) If the enemies of the church got to hear about the pranks being played on young Father Sherd, other clergy might be subjected to disrespect.

  Adrian visited his Aunt Kathleen. He remembered the many occasions when he would sit in her front room among her altars and flickering fairy lights, asking her about indulgences and reliquaries and other esoteric Catholic subject matter while inwardly he was like the Pharisees in the Gospels—a mass of corruption. Now, at last, he could look her in the eye with nothing to conceal from her.

  He said, ‘I’ve been wondering lately whether I might have a vocation to the priesthood, but whenever I think of the daily life of a priest in his parish it doesn’t attract me. I mean, being for years in some suburb like Accrington and trying to preach to people and save their souls but they remember me when I was a schoolboy in short pants.’

  His aunt did not answer at first. She bowed her head and moved her lips. She walked to her statue of Our Lady and murmured something. Then she sat down beside Adrian and said, ‘No one can ever say I’ve tried to influence any of my nephews or talk them into vocations. All these years, I’ve deliberately said nothing to put the thought into your mind. But now I can tell you my great secret. Every day since you were born, I’ve prayed that you or one of your brothers would be called by God. And now that my prayer has been answered, I’ll see that nothing stands in your way.’

  She looked hard at him. ‘Now, who’s been talking to you about the life of a secular priest? They’ve sent their vocations salesman around the schools, have they? And I suppose he told you the secular clergy have got first claim on you, and the religious orders shouldn’t come poaching on the seculars’ territory.’

  She got up and walked to a corner of her bookshelf. ‘I’ve left these here for ages, hoping you’d take an interest in them, but you were always more interested in my magazines whenever you visited me. The poor old Orders never get a chance to reach you young chaps in secondary schools.’

  She was holding a stack of booklets and pamphlets. She dealt them like cards all over her coffee table and said, ‘Last year, when they held that big Catholic Life Exhibition in the Exhibition Buildings, I went to every one of the stalls run by religious orders of priests and collected their vocations literature. Young fellows just don’t realise what a wonderful life they could have in a religious order instead of being stuck for year after year in a dreary parish.’

  Adrian and his aunt spent all afternoon comparing the different orders that he could join. Mostly, he leafed through the pamphlets and booklets while his aunt talked. It was like learning about the histories and traditions and club colours and mottoes and past champions of the various clubs in some glorious football league, and savouring the pleasure of deciding which club to give your allegiance to.

  Some orders had special devotions or aims. The Blessed Sacrament Fathers dedicated themselves to the perpetual adoration of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament—at every hour of the day or night, a member of the order watched and prayed before Our Lord exposed on th
e altar in the chapel of the monastery. The Carmelites spread devotion to Our Lady under her title of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and promoted the wearing of the miraculous scapulars (brown, red, white, blue and green) that she had given to St Simon Stock when she appeared to him in a vision. The Columban Fathers worked all their lives as missionaries with the aim of winning over the whole of Asia to the church. The Dominicans were the intellectuals of the church and were often to be found in the great Catholic universities of Europe. The Redemptorists were famous as orators. They travelled from parish to parish conducting missions. Some of their sermons about the punishments of hell had converted lifelong sinners. The Passionists had a special devotion to the Passion of Our Lord—his sufferings during his last days. Each Passionist, in addition to the usual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, took a vow to spread this devotion worldwide.

  Some orders had attractive habits or emblems. Adrian admired the sweeping white robes and black capes of the Dominicans. The brown of the Franciscans was quietly distinctive. The Redemptorists wore peculiar collars that looked as if they were missing a button. The Passionists caught Adrian’s eye in their black robes with a striking white badge over their hearts.

  When Adrian had made himself familiar with the uniforms and special devotions of the different orders, he spent a pleasant hour with an atlas of Australia, studying the location of their provincial houses, monasteries, seminaries, retreat houses and priories. He was especially curious about the places where the students and novices spent their years of training. He was delighted to see that most orders kept their students well away from the capital cities, in converted mansions or huge brick buildings with cloisters and a private chapel and rows of windows overlooking a formal garden and views of farmland or distant mountains.