The Patience of Vegetables and Saints, II

There he was, Travis, driving a beat up old pickup truck across campus on a late spring morning. He had never driven a truck before and was a bit taken aback when Father Jonah asked him if he wanted to take the wheel. Taken aback and, of course, thrilled. As the truck rumbled and clanked up dust over the dirt access road in the shadow of Reisendorf Hill, he bounced a bit more than strictly necessary on the straw bench seat. This was university property he was driving; his senses were alert, and he could smell the freshly cut grasses drying in the fields they passed, waiting to be bailed for the barn.

They reached the edge of campus and Travis turned left onto Red Mill Road and headed up and out of the valley. Damn, he thought but of course did not say out loud. Hot damn.

Jonah was telling him where they were going, and why, but it was hard to pay attention, what with the sun and all the pale spring green and the yellow flowers in the fields and the traffic . . . well, there wasn’t that much traffic . . . hard to pay attention until he caught Jonah saying, “. . . and then, out of the blue, she died.”

“Huh?” He turned to Jonah. “I’m sorry, I missed that.”

Jonah paused and stared at the road ahead as it wound up the hill, and Travis could see the hint of a smile that indicated that the priest knew he hadn’t been paying attention, and that it was okay.

“I was saying,” Jonah said as he turned to him, “we’re going up to Sand Lake to the Martin farm to pick up some canned goods for the house.”

Travis nodded. “But who died?”

“Charles Martin—the farmer? His wife,” Jonah said. “About a year ago, she was in perfect health, but suddenly she started canning like she had never canned before. Fruit, tomatoes, anything she could get her hands on, she put up. It got to the point where he was stacking canned food in the barn.”

“Is that safe?”

“Hell if I know,” Jonah said. “I doubt he’d do it if it wasn’t.”

They drove a way in silence before Jonah picked up the story.

“Then, when she had finished canning every foodstuff she could find, she went to bed one night and died in her sleep.”

“Whoa,” Travis said. “What happened to her?”

“Doctor said her heart just stopped.”

“How . . . ?” Travis wondered. “She knew she was gonna die and so she put up all that food for her husband before she left?”

“Her husband and their four sons,” Jonah said.

“Wow,” Travis said. And then, “But if he has a family, why is he giving all this food to the house?”

“It hurts too much to have it around,” Jonah smiled wanly. “He said every time one of the kids went into the pantry—or the barn—for some tomatoes and brought it to the kitchen, the sight of the jar near broke his heart all over again.”

Travis felt the heaviness of the man’s sorrow, but it was at war within him with the bright sunshine and crisp morning air.

“It’s been over six months now,” Jonah said, “and I guess he thinks this is what he has to do to move on.”

Travis thought about the man, a widower with four kids. At the Troy Road, Jonah gave further directions, and they sat in silence as they drove along the ridge on the other side of Reisendorf that offered them an unobstructed view of the city and the river below.

“Tell me more about Fourth Street,” Travis said, hoping to lighten their mood to match the glory of the day.

“What do you want to know?”

“Well,” he said. “How did Love in Action get started? And who is Carla? I heard people talking about her as though she was pretty much in charge, but she hasn’t been there the two times I’ve volunteered.”

Jonah paused before speaking, almost as though he were hesitating.

“Am I asking something I shouldn’t?”

“No, not at all,” Jonah said. “I was just thinking that you would be a great reader for the manuscript Jason is working on. It’s about Carla and the others and how they first met.”

“Far out,” Travis said. “Jason’s writing it all down?”

“Well, he’s trying to.” Jonah shook his head. “It’s hard for Jay to sit still long enough to do the writing.”

“Jason’s an odd guy,” Travis said. “He’s, well, he’s . . . “

“He’s your first homosexual, right?”

Travis thought he would blush, but he didn’t. “He’s so quiet,” he said. “I haven’t heard two words out of him in two visits.”

Jonah’s laugh—more like a sudden bark than a laugh—surprised Travis. “Jason quiet?” He laughed again.

“I get the impression he’s kind of shy,” Travis said.

“Just the opposite,” Jonah said.

“Now I’m confused,” Travis said. “Are we talking about the same guy, Jason Santini?”

“We are indeed,” Jonah said. “You’re just catching him at a bad time.” He directed Travis to take a right at the light. “Jay will come around when he gets out of the funk he’s in.”

Before Travis could pursue this, Jonah cut him off.

“There’s the turn to Martin’s farm,” he said.


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


They found Chaz Martin in what Travis would come to know as an uncharacteristic position—not at work, but sipping a glass of what looked like iced tea on his front porch. He was a short, compact man, well built, maybe a little younger than Travis’s father, but not by much. His hair was receding and flecked with gray, but Travis could feel a vitality he didn’t sense in his father, who had a desk job in Portland. This was a man at home outdoors, tanned and strong from hard labor.

“Padre,” the man said, standing and beckoning to them. “Come on up.”

Jonah introduced Travis as a volunteer from GBU and Chaz asked them if they wanted something to drink.

“I’ve got tea here,” he said. “I don’t drink hot beverages. But I can make coffee for you if you like.”

They both declined and then sat on two of the Adirondack chairs that lined the broad front porch.

“A good school, GBU,” Chaz said. “I’m hoping my oldest will go there next year.”

“You have four boys, right?” Travis asked.

“Hey, you’ve been doing your homework,” Chaz said to him. “Yeah, four of them. And four is a trial, I’ll tell you that.”

“Not as bad as four girls, I bet,” Travis said. “Talk to my folks. They had me and then three daughters. Talk about your trials.”

Chaz turned to Jonah. “I can see why you recruited this one,” he said. “You talk to him and he’s right there with you.” And when Travis looked surprised, he added, “I do my homework, too, kid.”

“Father J told you he recruited me?” Travis asked.

“Sure he did,” Chaz said.

“And no,” Jonah said, “I didn’t tell him about the mermaid.”

“What mermaid?” Chaz asked.

“Another time,” Jonah said. “Hey, I have class in a little over an hour. We’d better get that truck loaded.”

Chaz got up and called for his son Jack, who came from inside the house. He was a slightly smaller version of his father, skin brown as a nut and sporting a full head of chestnut curls, just like mine, Travis noticed; hell, we could be brothers. Except Jack was apparently shy, for he blanched white as the proverbial ghost when he was introduced to Jonah. Because he was meeting a priest, maybe?

“Why aren’t you in school?” Jonah asked him.

The boy was obviously uncomfortable, but said nothing.

“Jack has a bit of a temper,” Chaz said. “Got into a fight with another kid a year ahead of him, and got himself a nice one-week suspension so he could help his dad on the farm full time, instead of just doing his usual chores.”

The two boys went off to the truck to take it down to the barn and fill it while Jonah and Chaz resumed their seats on the porch.

“You don’t sound very mad about Jack.”

“Nah,” Chaz said. “He’s a good kid.”

“But violent?”

“Actually, no, not particularly violent.” Chaz looked out at the flower garden that spread out from either side of the path to the front of the house, in lieu of a lawn. “A lot like his mother, though.”

“How do you mean?” Jonah asked.

Chaz smiled and sighed. “You remember Janie, her temper when she got it into her head that someone was a victim of injustice.”

“I do remember,” Jonah said. “She was the one who originally found Carla the house on Fourth Street.”

“You know why Jack got in trouble?” Chaz looked at him. “He beat up a kid who is, apparently, a notorious bully. A real thug. Would have beat the shit out of him, actually.”

“Let me guess,” Jonah said. “The kid wasn’t bullying Jack, was he?”

“Course not. No one bullies my guys.”

Two swallows swooped down from a cherry tree by the road and caught the men’s attention for a moment.

“Why haven’t I met Jack before? He’s old enough to come down to the house to help out, and if he’s like Janie . . . .”

“Baseball’s his love and probably gonna be his life, at least for a while,” Chaz said. “If he gets into GBU or anywhere else, it’ll be on a baseball scholarship.”

“Where’s he play?”

“Where doesn’t he play?” Chaz said. “He and his buddies find games everywhere. Though lately . . . .”

A door slammed and the two men watched the boys close up the barn and secure the truck, talking all the while.

“Lately there’s this girl down in Rensselaer that Jack met, and so I think he and his buds have been spending more time down there.”

“Jack’s in love?”

“Anything but,” Chaz said. “He says she’s one of the best ball players he’s ever met. Almost as good as he is.”

“Now that is rare praise for a teenager,” Jonah said as the truck trailed dust up the hill to the house.

“He ever play down near the church?” Jonah asked. “In that big lot that Monsignor commandeered for parking?”

“Not that I know of, but it wouldn’t surprise me,” Chaz said as they got up to meet the truck.


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++


“Thanks for not blowing my cover,” Travis said. “About the mermaid.”

“You are welcome,” Jonah said. “Seal of the confessional.”

“Say, did you see how Jack turned all white when his dad introduced him to us?”

“I did.”

“I found out why,” Travis said, with a bit of triumph in his voice.

Jonah stared ahead and said nothing for a time.

“Did it have anything to do with baseball by any chance?” he asked.

“Now how did you know that?” Travis was way too often amazed at what adults seemed to be able to know with no preparation whatsoever. "He wants to talk to you."

"I figured he would."

And that was how it came to be that Jack, Son of Chaz, eventually nicknamed "Jackson," came to make regular visits—after school hours and baseball practice—to the Love in Action House of Hospitality.


[“The patience of vegetables and saints” is a line taken from the poem, “The Lily,” by Mary Oliver, found in her book, Why I Wake Early (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004) 25]

[Next: Notes from The Devil’s Daybook]

The Patience of Vegetables and Saints, I

He had never noticed before how many shades of red shimmered at the back of the church. The window faced east and at just this time of the year the sun slipped over the top of the Fairweather Arms two blocks over past the parking lot, poured through the maple leaves bristling in street-dirty morning wind coming off the river and up the street, and set the glass to dancing.

It was oddly appropriate, the colors of the window mottled and quivering, overlooking the stolid church interior below. There she was—the Magdalene—her crimson clothes billowing pure and radiant in the stained glass wind. The artist (Carla’s brother Luke) had tried and, yes, somehow had succeeded in capturing just the right posture for a comely woman who is the embodiment of the wonder, who has lost hope and then run smack into it in, of all places, the land of tombs, the place of putrefaction and death.

Her black hair, streaked with light and caught by the pure wind, slipped out from under the cloak at just the moment it began to slide away from her—

“Um, Father.” A gravel voice by his side trying to whisper. Tom Ulder, the seventy-seven year old altar “boy.” “Are you all right?”

He nodded and picked up where he had left off. He did know where he had left off. He wasn't that far gone, lost in thought, lost in the lady’s crimson.

He continued the prayer.

On the night before he died, he took the bread, broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying . . .

He raised his eyes to follow the host he was elevating and this time the distraction was not mental, not the diversion of a beautiful windblown scarlet woman standing on a cliff. This time he was struck blind.

What the hell? he thought but had the presence of mind not to say, as suddenly he was indeed blinded by a light that he had the presence of mind to blink away. He shifted from one foot to another and the light was gone. He finished the prayer with spots before his eyes, but a clear head.

His meditation after communion, the quiet one he entertained himself and God with as all sat in the church in silence, brought him back to that great, maligned lady, the Magdalene, standing up over the choir loft in her serenity, in the holy wind of spirit.

++++++++++++

“It's a hole, all right.”

He gasped involuntarily in fright. The woman seemed to have materialized behind him. It was unclear to him how a woman that big could move so quietly in an empty stone church. They were up in the choir loft after mass, just under the damaged stained glass window.

“I can see that, Gladys,” he said. “What I can't see is how it got there.”

“Try this,” she said and handed him a baseball. “If it was a golf ball it would be a hole in one.”

“Where the devil . . . ?”

She pointed to a corner of the loft where the cobwebs had been disturbed.

“A nice, clean shot,” she said as she stooped with difficulty and retrieved the perfectly round gold piece of glass the ball had punched to the floor.

She handed it to him. Clean indeed. He had no idea the window glass was that thick, an inch or more. He cradled the piece of color in his hand, caressing it and enjoying the feel. It had the heft and slick surface of a piece of cooled, molten liquid. Which is, of course, precisely what it was.

“But why would anyone throw a ball . . .?”

“Well, as you may recall,” she said as she turned to go, “the rigors of youth do not usually include reading signs closely.”

He looked at her, bewildered. Why did this woman insist on speaking in riddles?

“The parking lot,” she said. “Until the city gets the funds to build a playground down here someplace, that's where the kids are gonna play ball.”

She took a deep breath; she was already focusing on the next thing: she would now have to take the stairs.

“The sign the pastor put up before he left, remember?”

He did. It was an embarrassment, but he was just filling in on weekends until the next pastor was appointed, so he didn’t feel he could remove it.

“This is a parking lot!” it announced (with exclamation point). “Do not skateboard! Do not play ball! Do not loiter! Do not park here unless you are going to Church.”

Ah, he thought, priests. He could have at least dropped the do-not's and replaced them with thou-shalt-not's. It was a church parking lot, after all.

“Has this happened before?” he asked, but she was already hefting her body down the spiral stairs.

“Nope.” Her voice echoed up the narrow stairwell.

“Any ideas who did it?”

“Yep.”

[To be continued. In the Roman rite, July 22 is the Feast of Mary Magdalene, Apostola apostolorum, “Apostle to the Apostles”]

The Tale of the Purloined Mermaid

“Instead of a mid-semester examination for Introduction to Christian Theology, I want you to do a little field work and then write a report. Review the notes you took during our discussion about the nature and purpose of religious art and the way it has shaped Christian faith through the centuries. Then take a walk around the campus, noting the different kinds of artwork that have been installed over the last century. Find one that particularly engages you and sit with it a bit. Afterwards, write an essay describing the art and speculating on its power to influence the members of the GBU community. Don’t be afraid to include your own reaction to the piece; for this assignment, you can use the personal pronoun ‘I.’”

Travis O’Connor’s mood was as clouded as the late March sky. He was, by his own admission, probably a bit too serious for a nineteen year old, but this was different. He was in trouble.

Travis walked down Fourth Street checking the number over each door. This was not a part of Rensselaer he had ever seen before; he was, as his grandmother said, “a good boy,” and this was not a neighborhood where good boys wandered. Down by the river, the air was stale and unhealthy, and smelled of gas fumes and burning coal. The afternoon was dark, the sidewalks’ snow never shoveled; ice and soot now covered his shoes and much of the lower part of his jeans. He was cold and forlorn, Travis was, full of self-pity; he was right on the edge of crying, this good boy, something he couldn’t remember doing once since the fourth grade, or maybe when his grandfather had died junior year of high school, not even when his parents and his girlfriend left him on GBU’s campus last fall, completely alone for the first time, and hundreds of miles from their home in Maine.

He shivered and shoved his hands deeper into his pockets. Get on with it, he thought. The address he was hunting for 108 Fourth Street.

He saw it from a block away, or at least he hoped it was 108, the stretch of immaculately shoveled sidewalk across the street. He spotted the sign over the door, “Love in Action,” painted in rough red strokes, and his gloom lifted a bit, but he was almost run down by a milk truck as he crossed the cobble-stoned street and then almost slid into a woman busy in front of the building. She was sweeping the icy sidewalk with a broom. She was short and she was old; with a gray wool blanket or shawl drawn tight around her shoulders, she looked like a peasant out of one of the Dostoevsky novels he had been reading since he had learned of the Russian novelist in freshman lit.

The two of them stepped back at the same time and she looked up at him in silence. He couldn’t tell if she was angry or drunk or simple; she just looked at him, no, she looked through him, and then he was scared and cold all over again. He looked over her head to the sign. “Love in Action.” He knew the reference; Father Jonah had told them in class. It was from Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, quoting someone else (he couldn’t recall who): “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing.”

They stood there facing each other in silence, he and the woman. Her eyes were dark, her hair silver white and she had the look of . . . what? Was she an Indian? She had the heavily creased, leathered skin of an old Indian, the kind Travis knew from westerns on TV. But what would an Indian be doing in upstate New York sweeping sidewalk ice clean of grit?

She spoke first.

“You born in a barn?”

“I beg your pardon, ma’am?”

She stared at him as though sizing him up.

“You ‘ma’am’ me fine,” she said. “But you gonna let an old woman sweep this sidewalk without even offering to help?”

He knew who she was. Father J had told him about her.

“You’re Louise, aren’t you?” he said.

Now she was really sizing him up.

“You’ve got the advantage, kid,” she said. “Who the fuck are you? Should I know you?”

Dirty Louise, Father had said. Swears like a coal miner but has a deep heart. He relaxed and decided to go along for the ride. He tried to take the broom from her, but she held it firm.

“Answer the question, asshole.”

“I’m a friend of Father Jonah’s, a student of his, really, at Greenbush University,” he said. “He told me about you one day after class.”

“That bastard talking about me again?” She shook her head in the direction of campus, up the hill and out of the valley a couple of miles. She did not look amused but, for the moment at least, Travis had found his center again, and he smiled and he reached for the broom. This time she relented.

“He’s inside,” she said as she turned to the door. “I’ll tell him he has a visitor. A rude visitor.”

Travis cracked the crooked grin that he knew could melt a heart in the right circumstance (which, of course, this was not) and shook the cold out of his hair and commenced to sweeping he knew not what off of the ice and into the slush of the gutter. The snow back up in Maine, a carpet of crisp white even at this time of year, was completely different from what collected and congealed on the streets of this part of Rensselaer; Maine might as well have been sited on the moon as far as he was concerned now.

When they found out, his parents would probably disown him.

He felt rather than saw a figure behind him and looked up. Jonah was standing in the doorway watching him, the good boy, a tall rail-thin college freshman with a glorious mop of brown curls, and a precocious talent for theology, brushing air along ice.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Jonah asked him. “I figured as much.” But he was smiling.

+++

Once inside, Travis was immediately put to work by Louise.

“We have seventy guests coming for dinner, kid,” she said, “and we’re short about three hands.”

She pointed to a bread knife and a bag of, well, they were baguettes, a bag of baguettes. “Cut ‘em into pieces about two inches long.”

He got to work. The crusts were hard; hell, this bread was almost stale and pieces of crust flew everywhere, no matter how carefully he tried to cut it. Father Jonah returned to salad prep, shredding lettuce and dicing vegetables into a large aluminum bowl. Before long, Louise and another man no one bothered to introduce had placed red checkered table clothes on the rows of tables that filled most of the room. A huge man carried an equally gigantic pot of what looked to be minestrone soup. The man was solid with bulging muscle and heaved the pot onto the serving table next to Father Jonah as though it were empty.

“Hey, sailor,” Louise shouted to the giant. “Aren’t you supposed to be watching your back?”

“For cops and evil doers, yeah,” he said, and then noticing Travis, he nodded his head in silent greeting and returned to the kitchen.

The guests who had lined up on the sidewalk were suddenly let in by the man Travis did not know and for the next half hour he was too busy serving them to even think about the weirdness of the experience.

The dinner was over, the guests departed. Windows had been heaved open in the kitchen and the night breeze off the river was doing what it could to replace the ripe stale air with what passed for fresh down here by the greasy Hudson. The dishes were cleaned and stacked away. Everyone had pitched in, and Travis knew that the giant was a man named Gruff (not a sailor exactly, he explained, but a member of the merchant marine who worked out of the Port of Albany across the river and volunteered for kitchen duty when he was in town) and the other, quiet man whom he did not really meet until taking a place next to him at the sink, was a poof named Jason Santini. Travis had never met a homosexual before, at least none that he knew of, but what with all of the strange experiences he was having tonight, that was just another one to throw onto the pile.

“I lost you for a while,” Travis said to his teacher, who was pouring himself a last cup of coffee from the urn before Gruff hauled it to the sink to be washed. “Did you leave?”

“I was here the whole time,” Jonah said. “I think you more likely lost yourself.” He sat down at a table nearby and signaled for Travis to join him. “Now, talk to me,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

And Travis did. He found it surprisingly easy to tell the story, probably because he was pretty tired after working this dinner shift. And because he admired this wirey old man with the delicate hands folded around his coffee cup. Admired and trusted him completely.

“You already know what I did and why I did it, don’t you?”

“It was my lecture.”

The priest brushed a hand through his thatch of gray hair, and waited.

“It was.”

“When I told you about the crucifix up by the Big House,” he said. “The crucifix and the mermaid.”

Father J’s enthusiasm about the nature of sacred art had been almost contagious, the way he went on and on about its creation, placement, and how veneration of religious beauty built up the community’s sense of itself and even healed the soul. Travis had been transported for a moment, utterly convinced. But then Jonah’s tone changed and he reminded them of the garden next to the main administration building—the estate building around which the rest of the campus had grown. For decades the prayer garden and the grotto down by the back entrance of the college had been the two best places to pray, he said. And to neck, he added without any sense of judgment, reminding Travis why he was so attracted to this teacher. But the garden had been desecrated, and by a priest of all people, a recent president of the college who, at the conclusion of one of his frequent trips to parts unknown and far away had returned with a statue of a naked mermaid which, after minimal deliberation, he had installed in the midst of a fountain outside his office window. In the prayer garden.

Travis had walked through the garden hundreds of times on his way to the athletic center but had never noticed the desecration. Now, he could not get it out of his head. From his vantage point on the cross, Christ now looked down and in his last moments contemplated the fulsome breasts of a woman with the tail of a fish.

And so one moonless night, the mermaid disappeared from her fountain.

The campus police was alerted. The president was furious.

“You knew it was me,” Travis began, “because . . ..”

“Your essay was rather, how shall I say, declarative,” Jonah said. “And then you showed up here like a guilty puppy.”

“I’m doomed,” Travis said. “I’m here on scholarship. If they find out it was me . . . .”

Across the river a train whistled, heading south to New York or west to Chicago, either way slipping away into the cold, dark night.

“Let me see what I can do,” the priest said, getting up from the table.

And so it was that a naked mermaid was discovered undamaged a few days later contemplating a patch of ground in one of the back fields of campus and was quietly put into storage in the old milking barn nearby. And so it was that the Love in Action House of Hospitality acquired its newest worker.

[Up Next: The Patience of Vegetables and Saints]

Introduction

"Imagine him, speaking,

and don't worry about what is reality,

or what is plain, or what is mysterious."

---from Mary Oliver, "Logos," in Why I Wake Early

In an earlier incarnation, I served as a chaplain to a pack of nuns who ran a college up in New Hampshire. One Sunday I was asked to preside at a Mass for all of their sisters in the state and found myself preaching to over three hundred women, most of whom, I had no doubt, possessed a better spiritual pedigree than I, and more of a reason to be up front talking.

The gospel for the Mass was one of the stories of Jesus calling his first disciples into service. You know the story: Jesus, while strolling along the Sea of Galilee, comes upon two sets of brothers—Peter and Andrew, and Zebedee’s sons James and John—and completely without warning and with no introductions, challenges them: “Come, follow me,” he says. And they do.

Now, I ask you: what would you say about this gospel to three hundred nuns, three hundred people who had already heard this gospel as a personal invitation to drop everything and chase their Lord down the beach?

I punted.

Assuming I could beg forgiveness later, I stepped into the center aisle of the church and walked over to Sister Pauline, a younger member of the congregation who I figured could roll with whatever I doled out.

Her raised left eyebrow signaled that she knew something was up.

“Yo, Pauline,” I said. “I need a visual aid. Will you help me out?”

“Yes,” she said. Pauline talks like that. Very direct and to the point.

“Come on up,” I said, the way they used to in one of those pre-Survivor reality shows (remember them? Supermarket sweep was my favorite), and she got out of the pew and stood next to me.

I positioned her facing the altar up front and then stood as close as decently possible in front of her, also facing the altar. Her face was practically nestled in my back.

“OK, Pauline,” I said. “Follow me.”

But I didn’t move.

“Um, sister,” I said. “Follow me.”

Again, I didn’t move.

“Pauline,” I admonished her, back still in her face, “you said you would help me out.”

“I will,” she said.

“Well, I said ‘follow me’” and I still didn’t move.

Now, Sister Pauline has a short fuse sometimes; indeed, I was counting on it, and it wasn’t long before she blew. I turned to her and with cloyingly exaggerated exasperation, asked her, “Why aren’t you following me?”

“Because you aren’t moving, asshole!” she replied. Actually, she only implied the asshole part with her eyes and tone of voice. Many of my nun friends are good at this, implication.

I thanked her and she sat down.

Before I opened my mouth to “preach,” Pauline and her sisters had gotten the point. You can only follow someone who is moving; if the person stands still, so do you. And if there is one thing that Jesus hardly ever does in the gospels it is stand still. To follow him, therefore, means to move.

We are not talking “profound original insight” here. Long before Dante famously reached the middle of the journey of our life and found himself in a dark wood, or Chaucer’s colorful collection of characters set off on their pilgrimage to Canterbury, the followers of Jesus characterized their lives as a journey. Recall the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus at the end of the gospel of Luke. As it does in English, the Greek word for “road” (hodos) bears a number of shades of meaning; in addition to the macadam-covered space outside your house, hodos could mean a way, a path, or a journey, and we find that at least some of the first Christians referred to their new way of life as “the Way,” (see Acts 9:2), using the same Greek word.

To follow Jesus is to chase after someone on the move.


I had lunch yesterday with my friend and former student Clarissa, a bright and beautiful woman in her mid-twenties.

Her email message last week was characteristically brief: “What do you know about Unitarians?”
Clarissa’s a Catholic and not primarily a student of religion—she was an English major and is a gifted writer—so I knew the query was more than idle. She couldn’t be marrying a Unitarian; if she had gotten that close to someone, I would have known about it.

Once we had settled into our booth and ordered lunch, she clarified.

“It was the clipboard,” she said. “Another damn clipboard!”

“A clipboard. Say more.”

Though she is out on her own now, Clarissa still goes to church most Sundays at her parents’ suburban parish west of Boston. And the people of the archdiocese of Boston find themselves, willingly or not, in the middle of a number of dust-ups concerning some of the most disturbing social controversies of our day. As one arrives for Mass, it is not uncommon to be accosted by a petitioner in the vestibule of the church, someone carrying a clipboard.

“For weeks now,” Clarissa said, “they’ve been strong-arming us about gay marriage.”

I had heard that the archdiocese was spearheading the movement to insert a ban on gay marriage into the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, the first state, as you surely know, to recognize and protect the right of every citizen to marry any other citizen s/he chooses.

No one strong-arms Clarissa for long.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Oh, Dad, don’t worry,” she sighed, using her usual appellation for me. “I just pushed the clipboard back at the guy and told him absolutely not.”

She sipped her iced tea.

“I wanted to deck the guy but my mother was with me.”

“That’s nice,” I sighed in return.

“For God’s sake,” she said, her anger rising. “My sister, my mother’s other daughter, is a lesbian. How would you feel in my mom’s place, a faithful Catholic all her life, faced with those damn clipboards?”

“So,” I said. “Fight or flight. To the Unitarians, perhaps.”

“I want out,” she said. “Even my mother wants out. But we don’t know where to go.”


For decades now I have been a professor of religious studies. Lately, though, I have felt more like a first responder at a disaster as people crawl out from under the debris of their collapsed churches—not by any means all of them Catholic. Clarissa curses the clipboard. A friend, his brother molested by a priest, is scandalized at the idolization of a pope who turned a blind eye to the abuse. Another friend realized one day, as he was reading a brochure for mutual funds, that he could have been reading recent theology. He calls it “investment grade Christianity:” work hard, believe the right things, and by the time you die, what you have done will have compounded into eternal salvation. Save early, though.

The list goes on and on: people upset by the latest denunciations of self-styled pastors like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell; a president who venerates the Prince of Peace at Christmas but claims the right to wage pre-emptive war; bishops who say they work for justice but build palaces for themselves while at the same time locking down church property on cold nights rather than allow the homeless a place to sleep.

People turn their backs on the hypocrisy of the snake oil salesmen and the sanctimony of politicians and hierarchs and look for . . . for what? For something new? Not really. Most folks don’t want a new religion. They seem to want the religion they grew up with to grow up with them. They hang on as long as they can, but then they walk.

They instinctively know that they have to keep moving.


It is not my intention here to analyze how the churches got to this point. Nor is it my desire to smooth over discord and dismay with false hope. We live in perilous times and many American Christians find themselves shivering through a deep spiritual winter.

What I do want to do is share with you my own journey. Not the tortured path that led up to the collapse of my own religious devotion, which was—considering my rigorous training as a priest and biblical scholar—surprisingly without guilt, drama, or even much rancor. No, the journey I want to share with you is the one to which I found myself invited after the collapse of what was.

Late in his very long life, Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s husband, wrote a series of memoirs; with the last volume, he summarized his life in a single title: The Journey Not the Arrival Matters. Very true, up to a point. But just to let you know in advance: the journey I am on, the one I want to share with you, does arrive somewhere. “Behold,” the enigmatic figure of the Lord proclaims in the biblical book of Revelation, “I make all things new.” I am convinced that, with respect to matters spiritual, no, with respect to everything that is important to us, we live in between what was and what will be. Perhaps that is the state of affairs perceived by every generation, but certainly our time, our interval, is unique; no generation before ours has had the ability to see through a hundred billion galaxies back to the origins of the universe, and no generation, not in recorded history, anyway, has found itself in ringside seats as our little part of that universe prepares to wipe clean from the world the climate and environment that make civilization a possibility.

How can we live in the mean time?

What I hold before you, audacious wretch that I am, is a way—bold as I am, I will suggest that it just might be The Way—to journey to a safe place, a place to thrive, even, as one attempts to live out a Christian’s life honestly and faithfully, in the mean time, in this mean time, as we await the birth of all things new.

One thing about what follows: This will not be an autobiography, but a novel. And so you should know: aside from a few incidental prompts to get the action going, none of what will be recorded here ever happened.

But all of it is true.

Oh, and one last note of introduction: I invite you to think of this blog as an interactive “novel of ideas,” as well as a work in perpetual progress, always evolving, never done. Sort of like each of us. I am looking for your reactions, your comments. This takes place in the seventies (at least for now, it does). Were you around then? If so, is it accurate? Any blatantly false notes? Please keep in mind that I am an educator, not a novelist, so forgive me if the prose stumbles, the plot lumbers along too slowly, or when I post links and books for further reading and reflection for those so inclined. My goal is to entertain, but moreso to encourage a small community of readers to think about the issues the story will raise. Feel free to comment on what I write in any of its aspects, and also to react to comments that others post. I anticipate that I will be presenting some challenging stuff here, not at first, but eventually. To follow Jesus, in my understanding, is not to undertake a comfortable (or comforting) journey into what is known. I hope that any who read and react will do so with care, but also with charity.

The content of this blog is original and copyrighted by the author, 2009.

[Coming soon: The Tale of the Purloined Mermaid]