A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  The night after his grape juice had fermented, he pretended to be sleeping on his stomach in bed. While the Jap guard was walking up and down outside with his bayonet exposed, the priest began to whisper his mass. He used the teaspoon for a chalice and the watchcase for a paten. He knew the prayers of the mass by heart, so he didn’t need a missal. He ran a terrible risk—if the guards had suddenly burst in and found his drops of wine and speck of bread they would have killed him on the spot.

  Adrian understood how a priest could take such a risk for love of the mass. But he also understood the priest in a very different story that a brother had once told. One morning this priest found himself experiencing a terrible temptation during mass. At the moment of consecration he suddenly doubted that the bread and wine really did change into the Body and Blood of Our Lord. Like all Catholics, he knew the appearance of the bread and wine never changed—only their substance. This had never puzzled him before, but now that his faith had begun to waver he couldn’t see how it was possible. Each day at mass his doubts grew worse. Fortunately he had the sense to pray about it. He asked God on his knees to give him back his faith in the Blessed Eucharist.

  One morning just after the consecration he looked down and saw on the white altar cloth a little pool of scarlet blood. Drops of real blood were trickling from the consecrated Host. God had rewarded him with an unmistakeable proof that He really was present on the altar.

  Adrian would never expect to be favoured like that with a sign from God. Luckily his own faith was strong. But he knew he must never take his faith for granted. The Catholic religion was full of mysteries that could only be accepted by a person with faith. And faith itself was a free gift from God. A person who had not been given this gift could not believe in the mysteries, even if he wanted to. Adrian had heard a story to illustrate this.

  A famous and very clever non-Catholic was being shown around a religious house. When he came out of the chapel he asked why a little lamp was kept burning beside the altar. The priest who was with him explained that in every Catholic church where the Blessed Sacrament was reserved, a light burned night and day to remind people that Our Lord was really present.

  Then the visitor said, ‘But I didn’t notice any of your priests in the chapel just now.’

  The priest asked the visitor what he meant. A strange, sad look came into the non-Catholic’s eyes and he said, ‘You know, your doctrine of the Real Presence is the most wonderful thing I’ve ever heard of. If I could really believe it, I would spend my whole life kneeling in a Catholic church talking to God. You Catholics believe the doctrine and yet you leave your God alone in the church for most of the day.’

  That was a man who would have made a wonderful Catholic, and yet for some mysterious reason God had not given him the gift of faith.

  A priest was expected to protect the Blessed Sacrament against disrespect or sacrilege. The devil hated the Sacrament because of all the souls it brought closer to God. In times of war he inspired non-Catholic soldiers to break into Catholic churches and commit outrages against the Sacred Host. Adrian knew a shocking story from the Spanish Civil War. Some Communist soldiers rode their horses into a church during mass and shot the priest and anyone in the congregation who tried to escape. Then they snatched the chalice and ciborium and scattered the Sacred Hosts on the floor and rode around the sanctuary stabbing their bayonets into them.

  Whenever a priest had warning of an outrage like that, he was supposed to consume the Sacred Species as quickly and reverently as possible. When the Communists were taking over China, a community of monks saw the Red Army coming in the distance. There was still time for the monks to escape. But they went solemnly into their chapel and consumed all trace of the Blessed Sacrament. The Communists arrived just as they were finishing. The monks were captured and put to death, but the Blessed Sacrament was saved.

  As a priest, Adrian would hear confessions. He couldn’t imagine himself being tempted to break the seal of confession—unless the Communists came to Australia and tortured him to reveal the sins of some leading Catholic layman. If this happened he could only pray for strength and remember the story of St John of Hungary.

  John was confessor to the Queen of Hungary. The King wanted to know what sins his wife had been confessing. He tortured John for days to make him tell. In the end John died with the secrets of the confessional still safe in his heart. The King had his body thrown into the river. It floated there all night, beneath the walls of the royal castle, with a strange light shining from its tongue, and the King’s subjects saw it and knew what their ruler had done.

  The seal of the confessional required more of a priest than just refusing to talk about peoples’ sins. A certain priest in a poor parish in Ireland found that money was disappearing from his room, even though he kept it in a secret place. One day his housekeeper told him in confession she had found where he hid his money and had been stealing from it ever since.

  The obvious thing for the priest to do was to find a new hiding place for his money. But under the seal of confession he was not allowed to act on any information he had obtained in the confessional. He had to leave the money where it was and never mention the matter to his housekeeper.

  Adrian read again a paragraph from the Charleroi Fathers’ vocations pamphlet.

  Under the Ensign of the King, the Charleroi Fathers are striving to hurl back the satanic legions that menace the souls of men. Today the evil forces of Antichrist must be broken on an ever-widening battlefront. Boys and young men are wanted to take up their station beneath the Royal Standard of the Cross. Can there be any greater or more urgent duty? Can there be anything nobler?

  Of course there was no career more wonderful than a priest’s. His main task was to win souls for God. At the end of each day he could look back and judge his success by the number of immortal souls he had saved. But Adrian knew there would be days when the going was tough—when the devil’s score of souls seemed to be more than his own. At such times the only thing to do was to pray harder and set a holier example to people. Otherwise he would be in danger of despairing and ending up like the few unfortunate priests he had heard about.

  Yes, there were priests who neglected their duties or found the struggle too much for them. Only very few, perhaps one in ten thousand, but Adrian was realistic enough to face the facts about them.

  Somewhere in Melbourne was a priest who owned racehorses. Adrian’s father had heard about him. He had inherited a lot of money and (because he was a secular priest) he had been able to keep it for his own use. He wore sports clothes to the races and kept his real name out of the racebooks, but his horses all had names from the New Testament. He owned a hurdler called Boanerges, a mare called Dorcas, and Philemon, a smart two-year-old. It was a great pity that he wasted his money when he could have used it to save souls. It would have built a new school in an outer suburb or paid off a parish debt.

  Adrian’s cousins at Orford had told him about a priest in a little parish out on the Western Plains who spent most of his time fishing and shooting. He kept curly coated retriever dogs in the spare rooms of his presbytery. He had started with only a pair of them but the dogs had gone on breeding until they were all over the house. His poor old housekeeper had left because of the mess, and the priest hadn’t bothered to employ a new one. He just batched in a couple of rooms and let the dogs take over the rest of the presbytery.

  Priests were only human, and now and then one went out of his mind under the strain of his grave responsibilities. A brother at St Carthage’s recalled that when he was a boy in Melbourne, marching along Bourke Street in the St Patrick’s Day Procession, someone in the crowd used to shout out a few lines from a Latin prayer as each Catholic school went past with its banner high. It was a poor old fellow who had gone mad years before and run away from the priesthood.

  The brother had used this little story to illustrate something about the sacrament of Holy Orders that was remarkable, even miraculous. When a priest was ordain
ed, his priestly powers were given to him for life. No matter what sins or heresies he was guilty of afterwards, he was still a priest with the power to consecrate bread and wine and to forgive sins and administer the other sacraments. But it was a fact that no priest (not even the blackest renegade who had ended up preaching and writing against the church) had ever used his priestly powers for evil.

  What sort of evil could a renegade priest do? The brother had explained that an evil priest could walk into a bakery and whisper the words, ‘This is My Body.’ The brother had paused to let his Christian Doctrine class appreciate the full horror of it—a bakery stacked to the roof with the Body of Our Lord.

  Or the lapsed priest could work the same mischief with all the vats of wine at a vineyard. But the brother had reminded his class of the point he was making. These things just did not happen, which surely proved there was something miraculous about the priesthood.

  In all his life Adrian had heard of only two priests who had broken their vows. One morning he had read in the Argus that a young priest was missing from a Melbourne parish and fears were held for his safety. For the next few days all the Melbourne papers had reports near their front pages telling how the priest had still not been located. Adrian’s teacher had asked his class to say a little prayer that the priest would be found alive and well and that there would be no scandal for the enemies of the church to seize on.

  About a week later a few lines in an obscure corner of the Argus announced that the priest had come forward in New Zealand and that a spokesman for the Melbourne Archdiocese had said the matter was closed. Adrian’s teacher told the class it was none of their business now. The priest should be left to sort things out between himself and God and his Archbishop. The brother said it was remarkable how anti-Catholic journalists and historians always concentrated on one priest who couldn’t live up to his vows and conveniently ignored all the other faithful priests and the good work they did.

  Adrian never discovered why the priest had run away to New Zealand. But there was one case, the saddest of all, where he knew the whole story.

  He heard it from Damian Laity, who had heard it from his father. Laity said that one of the teachers at the Oglethorpe High School, a man named Quinlivan, was really a priest from Queensland who had run away from his parish and eloped with a young woman and married her in a registry office. The Quinlivans lived in a weatherboard house just like any ordinary couple and had two children at the state school. Every morning Quinlivan caught a bus to the Oglethorpe High School to teach Latin and History.

  Mr Laity had known about the apostate priest for years. When the fellow had first run away with the woman, little groups of responsible Catholic laymen in all the big cities started to look out for him. They had reason to believe he might do something that would bring the church into disrepute. At first they thought he would change his name and disguise himself and try to get a job as a lay teacher in a Catholic college. But he may have known they were watching for him, because he joined the Education Department under his own name. The Catholic laymen had watched him for some time, but so far he had kept fairly quiet.

  From all reports, Quinlivan was a most unhappy man, tortured by his conscience. Laity had heard that sometimes at the High School when Quinlivan had to utter a Latin word that was in the prayers of the mass, his face twitched or he dropped his head in his hands for a moment. He often paced up and down like a priest saying his office and stared into the distance, remembering the glory he had run away from.

  The suburb of Oglethorpe was on the far side of the great valley that fell away to the east of Swindon. From the upper-storey windows of St Carthage’s, Adrian had sometimes looked at the hazy hillside suburb and thought of Quinlivan, the renegade and black sheep, looking westwards to the faint lump of St Carthage’s College on the horizon and remembering the days when he had been a Catholic secondary student who dreamed of a life in the priesthood.

  After Adrian himself had decided to become a priest, he had looked more often towards Oglethorpe and told himself he was much more fortunate than Quinlivan had ever been, because he, Adrian, knew a story to prove what a grave step he was taking and what a fate was in store for him if he proved unworthy of the priesthood.

  In his last year at St Carthage’s, Adrian won the prize for Latin in Form Five. On a Saturday morning in December, he and the other prize winners in his class met their teacher in Cheshire’s Bookshop to choose their prizes. Adrian felt obliged to choose a book for his spiritual reading in the junior seminary. While he was standing in front of the shelves marked RELIGION, the brother came up and handed him a book called Elected Silence, by Thomas Merton, and said, ‘One of the great books of the twentieth century.’

  Adrian chose the book as his prize because he didn’t like to offend the brother and because it seemed from the dust jacket to be about a man like himself who had sampled all that the world had to offer and then turned his back on it to become a priest.

  He didn’t begin reading Elected Silence until he was packing his suitcase in the last week of the holidays. But then he couldn’t put the book down. He sat all day in the shed in the backyard to finish it. Afterwards he put it carefully in his case beside his daily missal and the notebook entitled Resolutions for the Future, and walked up and down the back path meditating on the story of Thomas Merton.

  The brother had been right about the book. By every test that Adrian knew, Elected Silence was the greatest book he had ever read. There were passages in it that had brought goosepimples to his arms and legs and made the hair stiffen on the back of his neck. Many a time he had closed his eyes and turned a paragraph from the book into a scene in a film, with a mighty orchestra playing the climax of a gem from the classics, such as Overture 1812 or Capriccio Italien.

  Often he had wanted to rush to the drawer in the kitchen and grab the writing pad and dash off a letter to congratulate the author because his book described exactly what a young man in far-off Australia had felt at important moments in his own life. This was the most remarkable thing about Elected Silence—that the story of Thomas Merton, the young man who had never known true happiness until he entered a Cistercian monastery in America, was so like the story of Adrian Sherd.

  Of course there were some details in Merton’s life that didn’t match Adrian’s—Merton began life as a Protestant and attended several famous universities and travelled in many countries and had once joined the Communist Party—but Adrian was struck by the remarkable similarities.

  Merton had grown thoroughly sick of the pagan materialism of the modern world. Once, when he was coming back from a visit to a remote monastery, he looked up at the bright lights of a city and saw a sign, CLOWN CIGARETTES, and felt disgusted. This was exactly how Adrian felt when he remembered the view from St Carthage’s of miles of garden suburbs full of people who practised artificial birth control so they could afford cars and radiograms.

  Merton had had trouble with impurity in his younger days, just as Adrian had. The passage that revealed this was very brief—only a few lines buried in the great bulk of the book—but Adrian had not missed it. The passage was not very explicit either. But Adrian had once acquired the skill of skimming though pages of adult books for their few risqué lines and thinking over them for hours afterwards to get their full meaning.

  So when Merton mentioned briefly that he had no wish to wake the dirty ghosts of his past, it told Adrian all he needed to know. The man had fallen in his youth, just as Adrian had, and perhaps as often. Merton was man enough to admit it. And some day when Adrian wrote his own autobiography he would mention his American year in a frank paragraph or two.

  Merton described a summer holiday somewhere in the Appalachians when he sat outside his cabin every evening and read the Book of Job while his mates went down into the village chasing girls. Merton called them ‘mousey little girls’.

  Adrian saw the lean ascetic figure looking up calmly from the pages of the Old Testament, staring for a few moments into the pe
aceful leafy woods high above the pleasure-crazed cities of north-eastern America and pitying his weak sensual friends in the hot noisy cinemas in the valley below.

  Adrian had had to fall in love with Denise McNamara to learn that the joys of human love could never satisfy him. Merton had learned this lesson without the help of any girlfriend. Not that he scorned women. He had chatted freely with them at the university and at parties, but always about intellectual matters.

  There was another amazing parallel in the way that Merton and Sherd had discovered their true vocations. When Merton first decided to be a priest, he applied to join the Franciscans. Before he actually joined them, he went to make a retreat at the Cistercian monastery in Kentucky.

  He travelled by train from New York to Kentucky, through some of the splendid American landscapes that Adrian had once dreamed about. It was late at night when he reached the monastery. A lay brother opened the great door and led him into the silent building. The brother asked him if he had come to join the Cistercian order. Merton said he hadn’t, and began to explain that he was committed to joining the Franciscans. The brother said simply, ‘I was a Franciscan once.’

  Although Merton hadn’t dwelt on it, that was for Adrian the most stirring moment in the book. As the brother’s words echoed among the austere walls of the monastery, a mighty chord resounded. As Merton followed the brother down the shadowy corridor another chord rang out, and another. Then all the orchestras that Adrian had ever heard on the soundtracks of American films combined together in a heroic tune while the monastery faded and scenes from Merton’s early life surged up from the past.

  Only a few days before he was to leave for the junior seminary, Adrian was lying on his bed thinking of Elected Silence, and enjoying a profound spiritual peace. Suddenly, without any warning, he experienced a powerful attraction to the Cistercian order. He leaped up and paced the backyard and tried to think of harmless thoughts. But his mind was filled with vivid pictures, rich in details that excited his imagination—long rows of white-robed monks chanting in choir or walking in silence to their day’s work through fields of golden wheat or hacking and hewing at logs of wood while their cowls flapped about their faces and muttering, ‘All for Jesus! All for Jesus!’ as Merton had described them doing.