Wheat That Springeth Green

  So Joe and some others, in quest of holiness, had gone into spiritual training, which had its physical side. “Detachment!” the retreatmaster had cried, and they gave up their attachments—smokes, sweets, snacks, snooker, and handball were Joe’s—and haunted the chapel. They were a dozen or so in number, kneeling in prayer and meditation by the hour, some, though, sitting from time to time—Mooney and Rooney, for example; not Joe, though, and not Cooney, and not Hrdlicka. But the way of the world is also the way of the seminary, and the number of those who kept vigil in the chapel, kneeling or sitting, daily diminished—down to five only a week after the retreat.

  The five of them—Joe, Cooney, Hrdlicka, Mooney, and Rooney—came in for a lot of headshaking from their peers, were called quietists, “detachers,” and so on (only to be expected if you knew anything about the history of the Church, the intramural dogfights between ascetics and timeservers), and were also a source of concern to some of the high-living faculty and the Rector. It was believed that the Rector enjoyed the favor of the Archbishop but not of his reverend consultors, who remembered their days in the seminary and were unhappy about the way the place was being run now—as a club, they said. So the ingredients were there, at the seminary and close by, for trouble—which Joe did all he could to avoid.

  He counseled the members of the little band (they seemed to regard him as their spiritual director) to use their heaven-sent opportunities, which were many, to turn the other cheek. And he gave good example whenever he could, as when he was called “Holy Joe” or just “Holy.” (“Hi, Holy!” Deadass Boekenhoff greeted him every morning in the lavatorium, and Joe, though tempted to answer something else, would murmur politely, “Good morning, George.”) But not all members of the little band did so well. Mooney and Rooney, who were both sorry later but cited St Peter’s bad example in the Garden of Gethsemane in extenuation of themselves, had exchanged sharp words and shoves with their persecutors. Mooney and Rooney had also fallen behind in their studies, as had Hrdlicka, owing to the hours they spent in the chapel. The three of them had to be tutored by Joe and Cooney, who were excellent students, and Mooney and Rooney were now keeping up. Things still looked bad for Hrdlicka scholastically—he, however, was making great progress spiritually. There were times in the chapel when Hrdlicka appeared to Joe to be out of this world, in a state of mystical ecstasy, reminding Joe of an old picture of St Aloysius with halo, lily, scourge, and upturned eyes.

  And then, one evening early in December, Hrdlicka came to Joe’s room and said, “I’m thinking of leaving the sem.”

  “What!”

  “For the Trappists.”

  “Oh,” said Joe, less gratified than relieved. “That’s different, Al. That makes sense in your case. Well, well. The Trappists. Pretty quiet about it, weren’t you?”

  “I didn’t know if I’d get a reply when I wrote. That’s why I didn’t say anything.”

  Hrdlicka handed Joe the reply from the Trappists, and Joe read it, surprised to see that they had a typewriter. “So now you need a letter of recommendation from the Rector, Al. Told him yet?”

  “Not yet, Joe. I thought I’d tell you first.”

  This pleased Joe, as spiritual director of the little band, but, mindful of higher authority, which he knew from his reading was where so many good men had gone wrong, he said, “Better tell the Rector, Al. Tell him right away.”

  Hrdlicka went off to do this, but he soon returned—so soon that Joe assumed the Rector was out. Then he saw what Hrdlicka had in his hand—the hair shirt.

  “Joe, he says I should think it over for two weeks. He’ll give me a letter of recommendation then, if I haven’t changed my mind. Says in the meantime I can wear this.”

  Joe felt the hair shirt, as he hadn’t that evening in the Rector’s study, first with his fingers, then with the back of his hand, and said, “Whew!”

  “Joe, I think the Rector figures I wear it I’ll change my mind.”

  “You won’t,” said Joe, and he was right.

  A few days before Christmas, on a Wednesday afternoon (Wednesday afternoons were “free” at the seminary), Hrdlicka departed for the Trappists with a letter of recommendation from the Rector and also with the hair shirt—a going-away present from the Rector. Joe accompanied him to the railroad station.

  Since they were there early, Joe having hailed a cab while they were waiting for a bus, they sat down and talked. Presently, Joe was asking Hrdlicka for the hair shirt! He said there would be God’s plenty of such where Hrdlicka was going. Hrdlicka was willing in principle to oblige Joe but not in fact, because he was wearing the shirt. (Joe had thought it was in Hrdlicka’s suitcase.) Joe agreed that it might be awkward for Hrdlicka as a novice, even before he took the vow of silence, to ask the Trappists to mail the hair shirt to a friend, but neither Joe nor Hrdlicka liked the idea of just giving up. Then “Hey!” cried Joe, and told Hrdlicka his plan. They went to the men’s room, into adjoining stalls, where they undressed from the waist up, and Hrdlicka passed the hair shirt over the top of the partition to Joe.

  That was how Joe got the hair shirt. The only bad thing—something that made Joe ashamed of himself when he thought of Thomas à Becket—was that he’d succumbed to fastidiousness in the stall, and had emerged from it with the hair shirt in a pocket of his overcoat, and had then deceived the simple Hrdlicka by squirming and saying, “Whew!”

  For his penance, Joe had walked back to the seminary, three miles against a north wind, ears freezing all the way, save for a minute or two in a little grocery where he stopped to purchase a box of Rinso.

  Wearing the hair shirt was like coming from a really careless barber and being pricked by clippings on a hot summer day, only much worse, and so Joe, being human and not a masochist, was glad when he could take the thing off. This he did at night, hand-washing it in the utility room—too much traffic in the lavatorium—and leaving it to dry on his radiator, over a towel, as he would a woollen sweater.

  As a discomforter of the flesh and a strengthener of the spirit, the hair shirt probably did the job, but Joe was still where he’d been before with respect to growth in holiness—still stuck in the first stage of his hoped-for spiritual evolution, in the purgative “way”—and was afraid he’d never enter the contemplative way, not to mention the unitive. The little appetizers of spiritual delight that Joe had read were not infrequently vouchsafed to the beginner—though they were not to be mistaken for the banquet itself, for they would soon be withdrawn—were not vouchsafed to him. He wasn’t giving up, though. He was still in there—in the chapel for hours every day, trying, praying.

  Mooney and Rooney were also doing hard time in the chapel, but they, unlike Joe and Cooney (who said, however, that wearing a hair shirt was taking an unfair advantage, like wearing brass knuckles), were openly complaining, wanting results—especially Mooney.

  “Joe, I’m not getting anywhere.”

  “Let’s go for a walk, Chuck.”

  During this period of crisis with both Mooney and Rooney wavering, Joe often took one or both of them for a walk around the seminary grounds. When it was really too cold to go for a walk, as it often was those days in January, Joe would say they’d be better for it, for the discomfort, and then Mooney, if not Rooney, would go gladly. Mooney could see that mortification was not an end in itself but a means to an end, a smelting process that got rid of what was worst and left what was best in a man, which was something that guys much brighter than Mooney, guys who called the little band “spiritual athletes,” just couldn’t see, or wouldn’t. Unfortunately, in his reading, and he was not a great reader, Mooney had a taste for the flashy—Blessed Angela of Foligno punishing herself by drinking the water in which she had washed the sores of a leper, St Ben Joe Labre retrieving the lice that left him and piously putting them up his sleeve, that sort of thing—a taste that Joe did not share (and hoped he never would, however much he grew in holiness). “Chuck, your eyes are bigger than your stomach,” Joe told Mooney, and quoted Po
pe Pius XI: “‘Sanctity is the chief and most important endowment of the Catholic priest,’ Chuck. ‘Without it other gifts will not go far; with it, even supposing other gifts to be meager [Joe’s italics], the priest can work marvels.’” Joe prescribed more prayer and renunciation for Mooney. “I saw a Baby Ruth wrapper in your wastebasket, Chuck.”

  In this manner, his words vaporizing in the icy air, Joe spoke to Mooney, and sometimes to Rooney, on their walks around the seminary grounds, stopping here and there to make a point. His favorite place to stop was a spot from which they could view, across the road, a billboard advertisement showing an amiable old clergyman (obviously Protestant, but no matter) sniffing the air as he passed under a windowsill on which a freshly baked pie was cooling. “There you are,” Joe would say. “That’s how most people see the clergy. And they’re right.”

  It seemed to Joe that the billboard, taken with his commentary—he was scathing on the subject of the beery little evenings in the Rector’s study—had a steadying effect on the wavering Mooney, but as time went on it was hard to get Mooney to stop at that spot, and impossible when Rooney was along. In any case, the billboard was changed. And Rooney—saying, “I’m sorry”—resigned from the little band.

  The next evening, as Joe was about to leave his room for a siege in the chapel, Mooney dropped in.

  “Joe, I’m not cut out for this,” he said. “I just want to be a good priest and maybe work with the poor.”

  “Chuck, you can’t give what you haven’t got—even to the poor.”

  “Yeah, I know, Joe.”

  “So there you are, Chuck. And Thomas Aquinas tells us, Chuck, that ‘to fulfill the duties of Holy Orders, common goodness does not suffice; but excelling goodness is required; that they who receive Orders and are thereby higher in rank than the people may also be higher in holiness.’”

  “May?”

  “He means ‘must’—you know how cagey he is.”

  “Yeah. But I’m not getting anywhere, Joe.”

  “Chuck, I’m not getting anywhere. And Cooney—I happen to know he’s not getting anywhere. So there you are.”

  “What d’ya mean, ‘So there you are’? Joe, I wish you wouldn’t always say that.”

  “We’re all in the same boat, Chuck. That’s what I mean.”

  “Joe, maybe we don’t all want to be in the same boat with you. Ever think of that?”

  “Rooney, you mean?”

  “I mean me. I’ve had it,” said Mooney, and turned away. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Joe, sounding smug, but really hurt.

  And so the little band was down to two—if that. The next evening, at a lecture in the auditorium, Joe asked during the question period, “Father, how can we make sanctity as attractive as sex to the common man?” (after all, the speaker had quoted Léon Bloy: “There is but one sorrow—not to be a saint”), and Cooney, who was sitting beside Joe, laughed right along with the rest.

  Early the next morning Joe was summoned to the Rector’s office, where the tobacco clouds were already building up, churning in the winter sunlight, and the Rector, like a nice old gray devil in his element, head smoking, hand smoking, waved Joe to a chair.

  “Joe, I understand you have my hair shirt.”

  Joe weighed the Rector’s words before replying, “No, Father.”

  The Rector smiled. “I’ll try again. Joe, I understand you have the hair shirt I gave Mr Hrdlicka.”

  Joe was weighing the Rector’s words when the Rector interrupted. “Yes?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Well, Joe, I want it back.”

  Joe was weighing the demand in the light of his circumstances. “Now, Father?”

  “You’re wearing it, Joe?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Tomorrow morning, then. Same time, same place.” And the Rector smiled, ending the interview.

  Joe rose and left, thinking how well he’d handled himself and that the Rector had probably expected his ownership of the hair shirt, his right to impound it, to be disputed. This was far from Joe’s mind, armed as it was with examples of heroic obedience—the example, say, of St John of the Cross (among mystics one of the all-time greats, perhaps No. 1), who had been jailed by his superiors and fed stinking fish.

  That he had been summoned to the Rector’s office was widely known, Joe discovered between classes that morning, though he’d told nobody but Cooney, and he’d asked that Cooney keep to himself what happened at the interview. Evidently Cooney did, for the questions that Joe fielded throughout the day, though probing, were uninformed. Whether he’d been called to Rome to defend himself—that sort of thing—and the usual half-serious references to Manichaeism, Jansenism, “detachismus,” and so on. The hair shirt was mentioned, but not significantly.

  As Joe washed it that evening, he speculated on the possibility of keeping the hand-over to the Rector a secret from everybody else (except Cooney), at least until such time as the event would have lost its news value. Wouldn’t that—keeping it a secret—be best for all concerned? “Hair shirt? Oh, I no longer wear it, and haven’t for some months now. I’m just like you now, Deadass.”

  The next morning, at the same time, same place, Joe dutifully appeared with the hair shirt (concealed in a plastic bag) and then learned that the Rector had suffered a heart attack in the night and was in the hospital. Saying a prayer for the Rector, Joe returned to his room with the hair shirt and, leaving it in the bag, put it in the bottom drawer of his dresser, where he’d once kept some of his attachments—peanuts, popcorn, candy, cigars, cigarettes—and then he visited the chapel, as was his practice nowadays before going to his first class.

  Between classes he read the notice on the bulletin board stating that prayers were requested for the Rector, who, if all went well, would be back at the seminary “soon”—which Joe interpreted to mean weeks. Saying another prayer for the Rector, Joe dashed up to his room, and shortly thereafter dashed down to his next class, itching again, wearing the hair shirt.

  Early that evening the news broke—Cooney told Mooney, and Mooney broke it—that the Rector had on the morning of the night he was stricken ordered Joe, under pain of sin, to forswear and deliver up the hair shirt. This was substantially true, but Joe toned it down for his visitors. He had a number of them later that evening after the news broke—the last being Mooney, who had been avoiding Joe ever since he apostatized from the little band.

  “Oh, to think that the Rector wanted you to give it back!” Mooney said. “And now! Joe, are you wearing it now?”

  “For the time being, yes.”

  “Keep it on, Joe. Don’t take it off.”

  “At night I have to. I have to wash it.”

  “Joe, I wouldn’t.”

  “I would, Chuck.”

  “But Joe—for the Rector!”

  Earlier visitors had made it clear to Joe that they were no less wary than before of his hard-core spirituality but now considered him deserving of some sympathy, which Joe had assumed was all anybody had in mind where he and the hair shirt were concerned, when along comes Mooney with this crazy—what if it spread?—this superstitious idea that the Rector’s life might depend on Joe’s wearing the hair shirt.

  “So I wouldn’t, Joe. Oh, to think!”

  “Don’t,” said Joe, silencing Mooney, and went down to the chapel, where, for a change, he was not alone. Evidently Cooney was still suffering from “bursitis of both knees,” for he was absent, but there were quite a few others on hand that evening—a dozen or so, among them Rooney and Mooney.

  Joe was the last man to leave the chapel that evening, the only one to stay very long. So it seemed that the others had only dropped in to say a few prayers for the Rector, and what Joe had feared, after hearing what he had from Mooney, that clunkhead—that the little holiness movement had revived and was drawing its strength from his not taking off the hair shirt —was not the case, thank God.

  Joe washed it that night, as he would have
done in any event, and when asked the next morning by Mooney if he’d slept in it said, “No,” curtly. And likewise when asked the following morning. The next morning he wasn’t asked.

  “I hear the Rector’s out of danger,” Mooney said.

  “Thank God,” said Joe.

  The days passed, and as far as Joe could tell nobody but Mooney, who was now acting as if he hadn’t, had ever expected him to wear the hair shirt constantly for the Rector’s sake. In fact, the hair shirt wasn’t mentioned to Joe these days, even lightly, which was odd. And there was something else odd—easy to detect, hard to define. Joe noticed that certain guys never really looked at him—they looked to one side of him, or over his head, or down, but never in the eye. He went to see Cooney about it.

  “Did somebody say something?” Cooney asked.

  “No. I wish somebody would.”

  “Don’t let it worry you.”

  “Then there is something!” said Joe. Even his best friend wouldn’t look him in the eye!

  “Joe, there are those . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Who have never approved of you for wearing the hair shirt—for reasons you already know. ‘Singularity’ and so on.”

  “Yes? Yes?”

  “And now there are those—they’re the same ones, plus quite a few more—who disapprove of you for wearing it. Am I right in thinking you’re wearing it now?”

  Joe nodded.

  “Well, the idea these guys have is that you were ordered not to wear it, and are therefore in flagrante delicto.”

  “Not so!” said Joe, and gave Cooney a true account of the interview, as he had before, and again spoke of his attempt to comply with the Rector’s demand—“request,” he said, was probably a better word for it.