Times Passes

Time has passed, indeed, and after the turn of the year it is now the season to return to projects left incomplete or unresolved, including this blog. The conflict over authorship—who exactly will be writing and more importantly editing this site—has been resolved, so we can proceed.

The following entry, composed in November, has been slightly edited by the new regime, but it still serves as a transition piece. We move now through the 1970’s and 80’s, and with the next posting, we will pick up the narrative in the mid-nineties. Or maybe the middle of the 00’s. From now on, the time will be intentionally blurry, to allow the narrative and the theological discussion maximum access to writers and ideas from the whole of the last thirty years.

One note: A number of you have offered suggestions for changing or developing this blog; in particular, there is a desire that it be made more interactive. You should notice a change in this direction beginning with the next installment. Now, “Time Passes.”


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“But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night.”

--Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse


I.

The dark room is hollowed out and empty, silent but for time. Back and forth, a grandfather clock’s swaying pendulum clicks in a back corner (yes-no, yes-no, yes-no in his head), a remnant from the glory days when the hillside stone mansion hosted parties here. Then, it was the talk of southern Vermont, what happened here in the ballroom. Now, the ballroom is a chapel of God. The dark waxed wood of the pews pulses and tiny-paned windows flicker, reflecting the light of the tabernacle candle, the only animation in the still room. The grim master of novices and his staff and the twenty-eight novices themselves, all but one, have gone up to bed after night prayer. The last door slams shut. Wind rushes down the mountain and into the courtyard, nudging and teasing the dust and its inhabitants hiding among the shadow cobblestones.

A willow, grown too close to the house, swings and sways in time with the wind, its leaves, pale spring green, scratching at the window. The novitiate cat, having detected motion in the chapel, beckons to be let in for the night as is his wont. He joins in the scratching from the other side of the room.

Given such a chance opportunity, the wind heaves the door open and the brindled cat enters in a dirty cloud of detritus. The door to the chapel is not to be opened and there will be hell to pay in the morning when Brother Protase, always the first up and at prayer so he can slip down to the milking barn, notices the scrum of dried leaves on the red carpet. The cat waits for a neck-scratch and then slides up the three steps out the room and into dim light of the corridor.

Windows throughout the building are cracked open this first warm night of late spring. A slight but definite breeze carrying with it hints of holifying incense and furniture polish follows the cat out of the room and into the wood paneled corridor, past brass sconces and leaded stained glass windows, up the plush carpeting of the formal front stairs to the dormitory rooms.

The door follows the sinuous moves of the wind but opens gladly, and the lone candle within dances in place before the old stone hearth, once the source of heat for this room now full of beds, its job now taken by a steam radiator in one corner, decked out in a fresh coat of silver paint that will be seasoned by fall. All winter its steady release of steam soothed novices’ sleeping minds, cluttered as they were with expectation and hunger, love and passion, and doubt. Tonight the wind calms souls stressed by discernment—Am I to be a priest? Do I have what it takes to be faithful to the religious life?—and bodies wearied by unfamiliar physical labor with field and cow, not books and debate. [“When God closes one door, he opens another,” Louise said, sweeping the dining room floor for the last time with uncharacteristic optimism as the men took the last of the stacked chairs to the truck out front. “My granddaddy used to say that.” “Your Indian granddaddy,” Gruff said as he hoisted the empty soup pot. “Right.”]

Two sets of French doors sit loosely on their hinges; no need to prop one open to enjoy the night air. He blows out the candle and pulls back the thin blanket and folds himself into the narrow bed, with a ridge of sharp lumps running down the center. No matter. He soon joins his brothers asleep in four other beds tucked into the dark corners of the increasingly chilly room. [Luke rolled over in his sleep in their seedy replacement/apartment and draped an arm around Jason, who noticed and smiled. A motorcycle stormed past down on the street below. His mind tonight was on Watergate. The end was surely near for that bastard.]

II.

It is the one good and happy distraction. On a hot and humid summer night in northern Indiana, he turns again in the damp bed. The large plate glass window is open as far as it will go, but tonight, no wind. Crickets, yes, even a nightingale across the lake, but no breeze, no relief. He listens for the next cycle. Eeep. Pause. Eeep. Pause. Three more cries, each followed by a pause, as the male hauls himself high as the stars in the night sky, then a hollow silence, and then the swoop. It sounds like nature’s sonic boom, he thinks, as the nighthawk falls straight to earth, braking his fall only at the last minute and swerving out over the great lawn and into the trees, no doubt to the admiration of his paramour. He has never seen this great act of courtship, only heard it, heard it many times in the summers here at the seminary.

But this is the calm before a storm. Off in the distance of the horizon there are no stars but there is fire: lightning strikes in three or four places simultaneously along the far edge of the plain. It is coming their way. The rumble of thunder is faint but as he lies in this narrow bed, alone, and thinks, he senses the approach of the storm.

He thinks. He thinks too much sometimes. Ellen, now a postulant in a convent in Louisiana. Is there such a thing as a copy-cat vocation? Is this a mistake? Always that. [“I can’t handle this,” Marian said to Carla as they walked up through Chaz’s apple orchard toward the ridge. They stopped and allowed themselves to be consoled by the clear and broad view of the river valley. “Not my husband,” Marian said. “Not so soon after the house closed. It’s too much. Isn’t it? It’s too much.”]

The nighthawk has apparently made its last run for the night and the thunder sharpens as it approaches, but he is numb to it. The rector had called him in today.

“Good news,” he had said. “The province has decided that you can keep going.”

He blanched. He hadn’t known he was in danger of dismissal from the seminary.

The rector caught his puzzled look. “No, no. To the doctorate,” he said. “We want you to keep going with your studies, to get a Ph.D.”

“In what?” he had asked.

“We’d prefer theology, of course,” the rector had said. “But anything will do. It’s your call.”

[“’Ordained to destroy the Church as we know it,’” Jason read and paused a moment to consider. “It has a certain bold flare,” he said, “but it’s probably not the best thing to put on your ordination announcement.” He handed back the draft. “Besides, I’m betting this new pope will beat you to it, anyway.”]

Years later he thought, well, Jason was right. The new pope did.

[Apologies to fellow admirers of Virginia Woolf; after almost forty years of savoring her prose, I could not resist. The citation is from the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955 [1927]) 192. Coming next: The Key, Part 2]