A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  He spent one whole Sunday afternoon casting lots from the Bible—saying a prayer for guidance, then opening a page at random and trying to find an answer in the Sacred Text. When this failed he made two little cardboard churches and labelled one CANTERBURY and the other ROME. He put them a few feet apart on the floor of his room and tied a blindfold over his eyes. He whirled round and round until he was giddy and then started crawling towards the churches with one hand groping in front of him. He blundered into a wall and found he couldn’t move. His willpower or something was all gone. He stayed where he was until late at night, and decided he had to see a psychiatrist. He had been weeping for hours without noticing it. He went to the bathroom and stood on the scales and saw he had lost a stone since his first doubts about Anglican orders.

  He chose a psychiatrist who was reputed to be an atheist—a Catholic or an Anglican might have been prejudiced. But the atheist was no use anyway. He made Drummond tell his whole life story and then insisted that his real troubles had nothing to do with religion. Drummond told the psychiatrist the main historical facts about the Reformation in England and asked him whether he thought Canterbury was a branch of the One True Church. The psychiatrist said a church was a group of people united by their beliefs and obviously no one church was exclusively true.

  In the end Drummond had worked out for himself that he could be converted to Rome without having to decide whether Anglican orders were valid or not. If they weren’t valid he would have made the right choice, and even if they were valid he would have lost nothing. The priest who received him into the Catholic Church had told him to wait for a couple of years before he applied to enter a seminary in case his old worries came back, but they never did.

  Adrian asked Drummond what he thought about the validity of Anglican orders now that he was safe inside a Catholic seminary. Drummond turned his pale-blue eyes away and stared at something far off—perhaps the Community of the Resurrection, where a handful of lonely men tried to imitate the great Catholic monastic orders but never realised they were worshipping a piece of plain white bread. He said, ‘That’s the one question you must never expect me to answer.’

  Adrian thought Drummond just then looked no different from any sanctimonious Protestant minister, and was sure the ex-Anglican would disappear from the seminary one night and sneak back to Canterbury.

  Kevin Gilchrist was twenty-one. He had worked in a government office in New Zealand for four years. Adrian thought he was the most manly of all the seminarians because he used to own a share in a racing dog and enjoy a glass of beer after work. He and Adrian became friendly after Adrian had told him a little about the rough mates he used to knock around with at St Carthage’s and how they were always trying to show him hot magazines.

  Adrian asked him one day how he had discovered his vocation. Gilchrist said, ‘You mightn’t believe this, but one night my boozy cobber said he had important business to do and would I like to come along and help him. He took me down to the slum parts of Wellington to a shabby house. The front door was unlocked. Inside there was a queue of men in the hallway. My cobber took his place in the queue and whispered to me to have two pounds ready. I was so innocent it took me a long time to work out what was going on. A big ugly fellow and a middle-aged woman were sitting at the foot of the stairs keeping an eye on us. Every few minutes a man came down the stairs and said goodnight to the ugly fellow and went outside. Then the ugly chappie told the man at the head of the queue to go upstairs and which room to go to.

  ‘When I was sure what the queue was for, I sneaked outside. My cobber was so drunk he hardly noticed me go. When I got outside I’d had such a shock I tramped three miles home to my boarding house to clear my head and think things over.

  ‘I knew I was at a turning point in my life. I had sunk about as low as a man could. The next step was into the gutter. I still went to mass every Sunday and said a few daily prayers, but that was all the religion I had left. Still, I had no doubt what had saved me that night in the nick of time—it was the grace of God.

  ‘All the way home I asked myself why God would make such a special effort to save me. Next Saturday I made a clean breast of everything in confession and started to lead a better life. The funny thing was, that didn’t satisfy me either. It had to be all or nothing for me. I’d scraped the bottom of the barrel and now I wanted to reach for the stars. So I contacted a Charleroi priest and asked him was it possible I had a religious vocation. He told me to wait and pray for six months, and here I am.’

  Adrian was confident that Gilchrist would go on to be a priest for the same reason that he was sure of his own vocation—each of them had tasted the pleasures of the world and found them not worth the price. Other students might be tempted to go back and try the pleasures they had never experienced, but Gilchrist and Sherd knew that sensuality led only to misery.

  Cleary and Drummond and Gilchrist were the only students who could describe for Adrian an actual incident that had prompted them to think of a vocation to the priesthood. Most of the others were not so precise or so candid when they spoke of their past lives.

  Terry McKillop was a twenty-year-old trainee accountant from Newcastle. Adrian had sometimes heard him saying he had left a girlfriend behind when he entered the seminary. One day on a hike Adrian got McKillop on his own and asked him what sort of girl she was.

  McKillop said, ‘She was a wonderful dancer. We had loads of fun together at dances and balls.’ Adrian waited to hear more but McKillop had nothing to say.

  Adrian said, ‘I suppose you took her to other places as well as dances.’

  McKillop said, ‘Oh, yes. I met her parents. That was the trouble really. Her mother was so anxious to marry her off—always dropping hints about the future and asking me about my accountancy studies. Then I sat down one day and tried to imagine what it would be like married and I knew I was meant for something better.’

  Adrian couldn’t decide whether McKillop had a genuine vocation or not. He wondered what sort of fun McKillop had had with his girlfriend at dances. If they had gone to casual dances where the lights were dimmed and the couples shuffled round with their bodies pressed together, then McKillop would have known what he was giving up when he rejected marriage. In that case he was likely to end up a priest. But if he and his girlfriend had only gone to old-time dances where the girl’s body was usually at a safe distance, then McKillop might decide one day to go back to the world and taste to the full the pleasures he had barely sampled as a young man.

  John Medwin was only fifteen but he claimed he had read nearly half of St Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. When he played ping-pong at recreation he chanted Gregorian antiphons under his breath. Each time he played a shot he stressed whichever syllable he happened to be up to. His opponent heard a loud sanct-ISS-imus or OMN-ibus just as he was trying to play his own shot, and sometimes told Medwin to shut up, which was against the spirit of charity that was supposed to pervade the recreation room.

  Medwin sang Latin hymns to Our Lady under the shower and while he was sitting on the toilet seat. He was the only boy who tried to talk about theology on hikes or at work in the garden. Some students believed he was a genius. Others nicknamed him the Boy Bishop and said he was a religious maniac. Most tried to avoid him, but Adrian often listened to him as a penance.

  When Adrian questioned Medwin about his vocation, the Boy Bishop started talking about grace and free gifts of God and labourers in the harvest and those who cast out devils in My name. The only information he gave about his own case was that from his earliest years he had been blessed with vivid liturgical dreams in which he himself came to take a more central part as he grew older.

  Adrian looked at Medwin’s cheeks and top lip. The Boy Bishop had not yet begun to shave. Medwin had somehow been preserved from experiencing a normal puberty. If so, Adrian could not judge whether his vocation was genuine until Medwin had had some dreams about pagan orgies and film stars instead of the liturgy.

  Phili
p Da Costa was the best all-round sportsman that Adrian had ever met. He was only seventeen but he had represented New South Wales in junior cricket and boxing. When the seminarians played cricket he hit twenty runs off the first over and then gave an easy catch to get himself out. At tennis he beat all the priests the first time he played them, but afterwards he used to return some of their serves into the net to give them a sporting chance.

  Adrian was irritated by Da Costa’s modesty. He could not believe it was genuine. When Da Costa hit up a dolly catch at cricket or pretended to be beaten by a ball from Drummond (who was hopeless at cricket) or jumped the net to congratulate a fellow he had allowed to beat him at tennis, Adrian remembered the boys from Eastern Hill Grammar, far away in the garden suburbs of Melbourne, who affected such gentlemanly manners but secretly lusted after the Canterbury girls. Adrian looked forward to the day when Da Costa showed his true self at last and swept every ball of an over from Drummond into the trees or served four straight aces to a priest and grinned at the spectators with not a trace of humility.

  Paul Kupsch from South Australia was the youngest student. He was fourteen and suffered from homesickness and didn’t care who knew it. Adrian was sure a fellow so young could have no real idea of what a vocation meant, and never bothered to find out why Kupsch had come to the seminary. The only time anyone took much notice of young Kupsch was at meals. Word had got round that Kupsch could eat as much as two or three grown men. When the servers carried round the second helpings, boys leaned forward to see Kupsch heap his plate. Every Saturday afternoon some of the students carried Kupsch into the kitchen and made him swing by his hands on the butcher’s scales. He was said to be putting on three pounds in weight every week.

  There were six other students including the Dean—all of them younger than Adrian. They were exactly what Adrian had imagined seminarians to be. They had been taught by the nuns at primary school and then by the brothers. They had been altar boys for years and had loved the mass all their lives. Their heroes were young priests who had stripped to their bathing trunks on altar boys’ picnics and behaved like he-men and ducked the boys in deep water. Their devotion to Our Lady had kept them chaste during puberty. They had danced with girls at school socials but never allowed themselves to be alone with any one girl unless adults were present. Then, at fifteen or sixteen, they had entered the junior seminary to realise their lifelong dreams. They were such healthy well-balanced fellows; their lives had been so normal and predictable that Adrian found them dull by comparison with chaps like Gilchrist, who had knocked around in the world, and Drummond, who had been through a dark night of the soul.

  Adrian was annoyed by the serene faces and uncomplicated motives of these ideal seminarians. He wished the Master of Students would impose some harsh burdens on everyone so the serene six would realise the seminary was not just a pious boarding school. He knew they would probably all reach ordination anyway, but he consoled himself by thinking what nasty shocks they would get when they started hearing confessions and learned what some young men got up to at an age when they (the serene ones) had been dreaming of celebrating their first masses.

  But a time came when Adrian had to admit that some of these six fellows were heroes in their own way. One Saturday afternoon when the students were weeding the front garden, some of them swapped stories of how their parents had tried to keep them at home a few more years before they entered the seminary.

  In each case there had been one parent who refused to let the boy leave home. Fortunately the boy had managed to win over the other parent, so that the prejudiced one gave way after a few months of quarrels and arguments. One fellow’s mother had cried every night for weeks until she saw she couldn’t make him give up his vocation that way. Another boy’s father had taken him on a week’s holiday in the middle of a school term and hired a fishing boat every day and talked for hours to persuade him that life in a seminary was unnatural for a boy of his age.

  But the best story of all came from a quiet South Australian named Brophy who was only fifteen. When Brophy’s parents were on their way to the station to farewell him, his mother had collapsed in the taxi. Brophy’s father and sister revived the mother in the railway waiting room, but then she threw her arms around her son and swore she wouldn’t let him go. The last thing he saw from the train window was the father holding her back from running after the train.

  After that, Adrian had more respect for some of the younger fellows, especially Brophy. Even Gilchrist climbing up from the gutter was perhaps not so heroic as the boy from South Australia who had broken his mother’s heart to follow his call from God.

  At five each afternoon the students assembled in the chapel for fifteen minutes’ meditation. When he had first seen MEDITATION on the timetable, Adrian thought they would simply kneel in silence for fifteen minutes while each boy meditated on the spiritual topic of his choice. It turned out that the Dean read aloud to the others from a book called First Stages in Practical Meditation by a famous German Charleroi. The book had detailed instructions for a hundred short meditations on texts and incidents from the Gospels. The Dean read the first step in a meditation and then paused. The students dropped their heads into their hands and meditated while the Dean kept an eye on his watch. After three minutes the Dean read the second step. The heads came up to listen. Then he paused again and the heads dropped for three minutes more.

  Adrian was impatient with these simplified meditations. He longed for a half-hour at least of unbroken silence so he could begin an arduous course of contemplative prayer. Instead of following the Dean’s childish instructions he used the fifteen minutes to think practical thoughts about his future.

  The wonderful thing about being a Charleroi student was that his future was clearly set out. The future he had once planned with Denise McNamara had been based on his own hopes and conjectures. But his future as a Charleroi was guaranteed by God Himself.

  At the end of the year he would pass his exams for New South Wales Leaving Honours. A week before Christmas the seminary would break up. Adrian would take the train back to Melbourne for a month’s holiday. It would be the last holiday he would spend at home—once he had entered the novitiate even his holidays would be spent as his superiors ordered.

  During his last weeks at home he would give away all his old toys and his model railway to his young brothers. He would do odd jobs around the house to compensate his parents for leaving them. (He need not do too much, because he would be saving them hundreds of pounds in board and lodging by leaving home.) Each Sunday at mass he would walk to the altar rails with the confident stride of an experienced seminarian. After mass he would stay in his seat making a long thanksgiving—not hiding his face in his hands like a meek layman but staring boldly up at the tabernacle to show he had a special relationship with God. He would not deliberately look for Denise McNamara, but if she happened to see him she would notice a difference in him and guess he had lived the past year under a strict religious rule.

  Of course he would visit his Aunt Kathleen. She would question him for hours about life in the seminary and the ways of the Charlerois. He would be guarded in his answers. He didn’t want to offend her—after all, it was she who first introduced him to his order—but things like the discipline and the straw mattresses were not fit topics for women’s gossip. Even on the subject of his devotions he would not say too much to his aunt. Already, with his meditations and his efforts to perfect himself, he was outgrowing his aunt’s kind of religion, which depended too much on holy pictures and relics and burning candles.

  He would like to spend a week with the McAloons at Orford. Whenever he spoke at the tea table the whole McAloon family would stop to listen. His uncle might even ask his opinion on the spread of world Communism or some statement made by the Bishop of Ballarat in one of his pastoral letters.

  Adrian would ask his uncle to drive him just once to some rocky beach near Cape Otway. He would not go into the water. It would detract from his dignity as
a religious if the others saw his skinny white body in bathers. While his cousins were swimming he would walk alone past a headland or in among the huge rocks at the base of a cliff. He would stand silently and prove once and for all that the Australian outdoors had no power to make him sin. After his year in the seminary he would have such control over himself that he could ponder on some spiritual topic in the very places where, twelve months before, he had struggled with thoughts of girls peeling off their wet bathers.

  In his last week at Accrington he would urge his parents to practise their religion more fervently after he had gone. As the parents of a priest they would have to set an example to their Catholic neighbours.

  And this time, when he boarded the interstate train at Spencer Street station, his mother would surely not give way to human weakness and weep in public. She would have had a whole year to reconcile herself to losing him for good.

  He would take the train all the way to Adelaide. The journey would be even longer and more stirring than his trip from Melbourne to Blenheim. The novitiate was in an outer suburb. He would feel strange and confused in an unfamiliar city, but they would surely send a priest to meet him.

  Each novice would have to take a religious name at the start of the year. Adrian was already preparing at the junior seminary for this. Every afternoon he stayed only a minute under the shower. If he hurried back to his room he had at least five minutes of spare time before meditation in the chapel. His room was only a few yards from the students’ library (a huge old-fashioned bookcase in a corner of the study hall). It was a rule that a student must ask Father Master’s permission before taking a book from the library—not because there were any improper books on the shelves, but to remind the student that even his reading came under the jurisdiction of his superiors in religion. However, Adrian absolved himself from this rule on the grounds that Father Camillus would not understand the peculiarly personal reason that drove him to the library each afternoon.