Hell

by Tom Lewis

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A New Calling

  Sean returned home broken and hollow. For weeks after his return, he numbed his thoughts with alcohol and long walks alone through the port area. His friends were calling, but he didn’t want to see anyone. He wanted to turn everything off and withdraw to a place within himself where he didn’t have to feel anything. And that included Amy.

  He didn’t want to feel.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Amy told Sean’s mom, Cheryl, as they sat down for coffee one day. “It’s like he’s completely closed himself off to me and everybody.”

  Amy had become like a daughter to Cheryl over the years, and it broke her heart to see Amy so hurt and helpless. “You do know this has nothing to do with you,” Cheryl tried to assure her, but it wasn’t sinking in. So Cheryl tried it again. “Amy, honey, listen to me. This isn’t about you, or anyone else. Sean saw the devil over there, and it took a part of him that may not come back. You need to understand that.” And this time it sank in.

  “So what can we do?”

  “We can pray,” Cheryl said. “And we can be there for him when he needs us.”

  It had been two months since his return, and Sean found himself walking through a quiet neighborhood of Colonial houses and parks. It was there that he came across a small Catholic Church on the corner. It was built of red brick and white trim, set back from the sidewalk behind a neatly trimmed lawn. A sign out front said “Welcome to St. Francis.”

  Sean hadn’t been inside a church since Conor’s funeral, but something about this small church seemed to beckon him. Who knows, maybe God had some free time to chat.

  Inside, the church was simple and basic, with two rows of wooden pews, stained-glass windows, and a small altar at the far end. But what it lacked in frills it made up for with intimacy and charm.

  The church was empty at the moment, and Sean slid into a pew near the back, where a refreshing breeze from the door blew past. It felt pleasant and calming.

  Sean sat there for almost an hour, just letting his thoughts drift and unload. There were thoughts of Conor, and Amy, and even just life. He had been drowned in a numbness he couldn’t shake, and it was like the part of him that allowed himself to feel had shut itself off. But as he sat there in that small no-frills church, he felt that crippling weight lift from his shoulders. Was this what peace felt like? It had been so long, he could barely remember.

  He was so wrapped in that warm feeling of calm that he barely noticed when someone entered from a side door near the altar. He was a small older man, maybe in his seventies, and wore the brown habit of a Franciscan priest. Despite his apparent age, there was a zest in his step as he went about the church placing missalettes in the pew pockets. He had been so focused on his task, whistling as he went, that he failed to notice Sean sitting in the back. He blushed with embarrassment when he finally did notice.

  “Sorry about that,” the priest said with a touch of Irish brogue. “Didn’t realize I wasn’t alone.”

  “No worries, Father,” Sean said with a slight laugh. “I need to get going anyway.”

  “Not on account of me whistlin’, I hope.”

  Sean shook his head. “No. Your whistling was fine. It’s good to see someone happy.”

  “Well, let’s hope a little of it follows yeh then.”

  Sean nodded his thanks and headed out the back. He stopped on the way out and picked up a bulletin to take with him. He planned to come back.

  Sean was at St. Francis again the next day for the noon Mass. There were several dozen parishioners in attendance, and the same elderly priest was the celebrant. It was the abbreviated weekday Mass, without any singing (which Sean always hated) and with a brief homily that surprisingly held Sean’s attention.

  Sean stuck around after Mass to introduce himself. The priest was Father Ian O’Malley, an Irish immigrant who had come to America when he was just a little older than Sean. He had joined the Franciscan Order right out of high school and had been ordained a priest fifty-two years ago. And, as he put it in his Irish brogue, it’d been a helluva ride ever since.

  Father Ian spotted Sean in the pews a few days later and recruited him to read the first reading at Mass. Sean agreed. And it would be the words from that reading that awoke something in him.

  “Liked that one, did yeh?” Father Ian grinned knowingly as he and Sean spoke after Mass. “Always liked it meself.” It was a particular passage from Song of Songs in the Old Testament, and it had left Sean deep in thought.

  “Did it speak to yeh?” Ian asked.

  “What do you mean?” Sean asked.

  “Did yeh feel it in here?” Ian said, tapping his own chest above his heart.

  Sean thought about it. “Yeah. I guess it did.”

  “That’d be the Spirit talkin’ to yeh,” Ian said and handed Sean a missalette. “Why don’t you read it again out loud, the part that spoke to yeh, and tell me what it means to yeh.”

  Sean flipped through the missalette to the page for the reading. He scanned through the reading till he found the particular part that had stirred him, and he read it aloud: “‘Behold, my beloved speaketh to me: Arise, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come. For behold, the winter has past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers have appeared in our land, the time of pruning is come: the voice of the turtle is heard in our land: the fig tree hath put forth her green figs: the vines in flower yield their sweet smell. Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come.’”

  Sean closed the missalette, and found Father Ian with a thoughtful faraway look in his eyes. “Yeh figure out what it means?”

  “I’m not sure,” Sean said. “It feels like it’s there, but not quite.”

  “Don’t think about it up here,” the elderly priest said, tapping his head. “Let it speak to yeh in here.” He again pointed to his chest, right above his heart.

  When Sean arrived home later that evening, he dug out an old copy of the Bible his mom kept in the house. He read the passage again. And then reread it. Each time he felt the same lump in his throat, and it wasn’t until late that night he finally understood why.

  “It’s about death, isn’t it?” Sean said to Ian after Mass the next day.

  Ian smiled and nodded. “It’s about God callin’ a soul home to Him after death, and showin’ him all the wonders and beauty awaitin’ him in Heaven.” The old priest’s eyes had become misty as he said this.

  Sean let this sink in for a moment. It was powerful, and touching, and exactly what he needed to hear. “I lost my brother in the war in Afghanistan,” he finally said, swallowing a lump in his throat. “I’d like to think that’s how he was greeted when he died.”

  Ian laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Me boy. Yeh can count on it,” Ian assured him, and there was no hesitation at all in his voice.

  “You sound really sure.”

  “Course I am,” Ian responded. “That voice yeh felt in yer heart when yeh read that, that’d be God sendin’ yeh one of His love letters tellin’ yeh yer brother’s doin’ jest great.”

  Sean stopped by Amy’s on the way home from St. Francis that night, and the two of them went out for a late dinner down by the shore. Amy was shocked, but pleasantly so, to see him so alive. The gloom and despair were gone, and he was alive in a way she hadn’t seen in years. At least not since going off to war.

  Sean told her all about the small church he had been spending time at, and his talks with Father Ian.

  “Let me ask you something,” he posed to her. “Have you ever read the Bible and had a part of it jump out at you like it was written just for you?”

  “Yeah,” she answered with a big nod and smile. “Did it happen to you?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Just yesterday. And then again today. I talked to Father Ian about it, and he said it’s God sending us a love letter.”

  Amy’s smile broadened. It was such a beautiful way to describe it. “So when do I get to meet this priest? I want to thank him for helpin
g bring my boyfriend home.”

  Amy joined Sean for Mass at St. Francis that Sunday, and they stuck around afterward so he could introduce her to Father Ian. Ian was of course pleased to meet her, and even more pleased to discover she was of Irish decent.

  “An Irish lass, eh?” he told Sean. “You be sure to treat her like a queen.”

  Amy beamed and turned to Sean with a grin. “Make sure you take notes on this.”

  ****

  Over the coming weeks and months, Sean attended Mass at St. Francis almost daily, and he and Father Ian became fast friends. Ian had a great way of making God come to life, particularly with his examples and anecdotes. And Sean was also finding more of those passages that spoke to him on a personal level — God’s love letters, as Ian had put it.

  Things had rekindled with Amy as well, and Sean was reconnecting with old friends for weekends of football, baseball, and cookouts. He felt like the old Sean again, but with one glaring exception — and that came whenever the subject of future plans came up. He had none, and to be honest, nothing excited him the way discovering God did.

  God had saved him from the pathetic slump he had fallen into, and he felt an increasing need to share this.

  “Have you thought about becoming a deacon?” Amy suggested over drinks one evening. “Or teaching religious ed?”

  The truth was, he had thought of those options, but neither of them appealed to him. They felt like half steps toward something bigger and more meaningful.

  But a bigger what?

  Sean already suspected the answer but refused to admit it, because that answer terrified him.

  This turmoil within him continued for a little over a month before Sean finally accepted that he needed to talk to someone.

  “Question for you, Father,” he asked Ian over beers after Mass one afternoon. “How did you know you were supposed to be a priest? And don’t read anything into this. I’m just curious.”

  Ian chuckled. “Askin’ the question for a friend, are yeh?”

  Sean let out a chuckle himself. “Let’s just say yes.”

  “Well, I’d tell that friend of yers it was when I found meself askin’ that same question of a priest at me old parish back in Ireland. Fer a friend, of course.”

  Sean let out another chuckle. It was such a classic Ian response.

  “Not the answer yeh was hoping for, was it?”

  “Nope,” Sean said with a shake of his head. “Definitely not. So, did it all feel like it just came out of left field for you?”

  Ian nodded. “It usually does. Kinda hits yeh when yer busy makin’ other plans. But yeh know how that sayin’ goes. Yeh ever wanna make God laugh, just try tellin’ Him yer plans.”

  There was something frustratingly truthful in that saying, and Sean saw the humor in it. But he wasn’t amused. He could already see his life was on the verge of taking another huge turn.

  Ian watched the frustration in Sean’s face with empathy. He’d been there. “Tell yeh sumthin’ else that priest told me back then,” Ian picked up again. “And what he said was, ‘A vocation isn’t sumthin’ you go chasing after; it’s sumthin’ that comes calling after you.’”

  “What if you say no?”

  “He leaves that up to you. But yeh gotta figure He had some reason He came callin’ on yeh. Is that somethin’ yeh wanna say no to?”

  ****

  “I thought something like this might be happening,” Amy said as she and Sean strolled along the shore. It was where they had spent so many days together growing up, and even planning their future together. And now it was a future that would never come to be.

  Sean had fretted for weeks over telling Amy about what he increasingly felt was a calling to the priesthood. He had postponed it again and again, hoping that he would wake up one day and find it was all a fluke, that he had been let off the hook.

  But that fire inside him had grown, and he could actually picture himself now saying Mass and dispensing the Sacraments, and even telling a whole new generation of kids about these love letters God sends us. It could be wonderful for him, and amazing, and yet it meant closing a door he so desperately didn’t want to close.

  “How could you tell?” he asked.

  “The way you light up every time you talk about God. Have you talked to anyone about this?”

  “Just Father Ian.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said it ambushed him the same way. He said it’s not something you chase after; it’s something that calls you.”

  “Wow. So you’re really thinking about this.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

  “No.” She stopped him, but there was no anger or bitterness in her voice. Only a touch of sadness. “You don’t need to apologize, Sean. Not for saying yes to God.”

  “But I feel like I should. You didn’t ask for any of this.”

  “You didn’t either, Sean. But if God’s calling you to be a priest, I think it’s something you need to say yes to. We’ll just call it another chapter in our hopelessly star-crossed relationship.”

  “I don’t want it to be our last chapter.”

  They stopped walking. Amy turned to him and took his hands.

  “It won’t be. I will always love you, Sean. No matter what. And I want you to know you have my full support on this.”

  ****

  Sean entered the seminary that fall, at the same time Amy began graduate school. They exchanged birthday and holiday cards over the years, but neither of them saw each other when they were in town. It was an unspoken understanding they seemed to have, that it would be too painful on both of them.

  Their families, however, kept in close touch over the years, and kept each other updated on how their kids were doing. They each saw the other’s kids as part of their own family, and there had never been any bitterness or resentment from Amy’s parents that Sean had left Amy to become a priest. Amy wouldn’t have tolerated it.

  Sean handled his time in the seminary pretty well, especially for someone as phobic to commitments as he was. His biggest objection, however, was the heavy emphasis they placed on social justice issues, and the lack of focus on the getting to know God part that had attracted him in the first place. Why couldn’t they emphasize both? After all, he had joined the priesthood, not the Peace Corps, and this aspect of his training annoyed him. He had written to Father Ian to voice his gripes about it several times and laughed at Ian’s reply, in which Ian described much of modern theology as “a whole lotta poppycock.”

  Most detrimental, however, was the seminary’s failure to teach the subject of demons, other than to dismiss them as literary license and metaphors. That left Sean wholly unprepared when he would encounter one several years later.

  Sean was in his late twenties at the time of his ordination to the priesthood, and his first assignment was to the small parish of St. Matthew’s in Capetown, Maine.

  St. Matthew’s church sat adjacent to its high school, and both were built of the same red brick architecture, with thick elm trees shading their grounds. And while it was considerably larger than Ian’s tiny church back in Kenneth Point, Sean found it had the same welcoming intimacy.

  The pastor was an elderly priest named Father Jenkins, who reminded Sean a lot of Father Ian (but absent the Irish brogue). They were both traditional in their faith, and had no qualms at discussing it over a pint of beer.

  Sean was brought in to teach religious education at the parish’s high school after the previous teacher, Mrs. Campos, had resigned suddenly. He never learned the full story behind her sudden departure, only that she felt there was something disturbingly wrong with one of the students — a girl named Cassie Stevens.

  Cassie had once been a model student, described as a sweet, albeit shy, girl. All of that changed after her dad, who had taught physical education at the school, had died of a sudden heart attack.

  Sean tried to talk to Mrs. Campos about her concerns over Cassie, but Mrs. Campos had declined, statin
g only: “They’ll know you’re talking about them, Father. And that won’t be good for you. Best to leave it be.”

  With that ominous warning in mind, Sean had no idea what to expect as he took on his role as teacher in the early months of Cassie’s junior year. As he entered the classroom that first day, before having even looked at the seating chart, he knew which of the students was Cassie. She was a small girl sitting in back, slim and maybe five feet tall, with black dyed hair and thick eyeliner that clashed with her pale skin.

  She watched him as he crossed the room, and there was something unsettling in her stare; he felt like she was sizing him up.

  He stepped behind his desk and was unpacking his books when a voice spoke from the back of the room.

  “Think you’re ready for us, Father?”

  Before even looking up from his books, he knew it was her. And when he finally did look up, he saw her staring at him with an unspoken challenge in her eyes. He also noticed, almost absently, that the other students were averting their eyes away from her.

  “Guess we’ll see, won’t we?” Sean replied.

  She merely grinned. “Guess we will.”

  At the time, he had assumed the “us” she referred to meant the other students. It would be much later that he realized she had meant something else.

  ****

  Amy had attended graduate school in New York, where she received her master’s degree in English literature. She had been hired after graduation to teach creative writing at one of the State University campuses. It was only a four-hour drive to Kenneth Point, so she drove home often to see her family and friends.

  Amy and Cheryl McCready had stayed close over the years, and they always arranged to meet for coffee when Amy was in town. Cheryl had been as heartbroken as Amy that she and Sean hadn’t gotten married, but she still cherished Amy as a friend and happily updated Sean about her whenever he asked. Which was often. She knew the two of them still exchanged cards and gifts for each other’s birthdays and holidays, and sent letters and emails back and forth.