A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  Adrian was alarmed. The Charleroi vocation he had nurtured for weeks was threatened by a crazy temptation. If it had been an ordinary impure thought he could have called on Our Lady of Dalriada for help. But it was hardly fair to ask Our Lady to banish the Cistercians from his mind—they were one of her favourite orders. Merton had explained how the monks named all their monasteries after her. The Charlerois loved her too, but she couldn’t be expected to show a preference for one or the other order.

  His urge to join the Cistercians would not go away. He told himself that his parents would never allow him to join an order that lived all their lives enclosed in a monastery and talked only in sign language. And he asked himself how he could afford the fares from Melbourne to Kentucky.

  But he seemed to remember reading in the Advocate about some Irish Cistercians founding a small monastery in Australia. He walked to the phone box three streets away and spoke to his Aunt Kath.

  She said, ‘Yes, some Cistercians from the famous Irish monastery of Mount Melleray have established themselves up in the hills past Yarra Glen, about forty miles from Melbourne. Whatever made you ask?’

  She was suspicious. He said, ‘A friend from school asked me. He thinks he might have a vocation to the Cistercian life.’

  ‘Tell him to pray about it. And don’t you trouble yourself about them just when we’ve got you all packed up and ready to join the Charlerois. Read that pamphlet I gave you. Your own order leads a much fuller life than the Cistercians.’

  Adrian went home thinking his aunt was prejudiced against the Cistericans. But he read his pamphlet again and noted all the references to a monastic way of life among the Charlerois. As he peered at the photographs of Charleroi houses with their extensive grounds and distant views, his temptation slowly faded. It was hard to imagine an inspiring landscape only forty miles from Melbourne, where the Cistercians had their monastery. And if he decided to join them he would have to go back to St Carthage’s for his matriculation year. His friends would be puzzled. Cornthwaite and the others would think he had fallen into his old habit over the long holidays.

  In the end it was the thought of the journey to Blenheim that brought back his old feelings for the Charleroi Fathers and finished off the Cistercians. The trip to the Cistercian monastery would take him thirty miles by train and then ten in a bus. He would never be able to reflect on Merton’s great journey to Kentucky while he was looking out of an electric train at the eastern suburbs of Melbourne.

  He would still take Merton’s book with him to Blenheim. He could read the best parts of it whenever his life with the Charlerois seemed dull or tedious. He could even follow some of the Cistercians’ rules and customs in private if the Charleroi life didn’t challenge him sufficiently. And the mere sight of Elected Silence among his spiritual reading would remind him to prepare for that great day years later when he was a priest of the Congregation of Christ the King and he welcomed into his monastery some worried young fellow seeking advice about his vocation and asked him, ‘Have you come to join the Charlerois?’

  The young fellow would say, ‘No. I think I want to become a secular priest.’

  Then Father Sherd CCR would say, his voice charged with emotion, ‘I was nearly a secular priest once.’

  Adrian had to catch the late-afternoon train for Sydney. On his last day at home, three telegrams arrived for him.

  FATHER CAMILLUS TO MEET YOU AT BLENHEIM

  STATION BLESSINGS—CASIMIR CCR RECTOR

  ALL PRAYERS AND BEST WISHES AS YOU BEGIN

  GREAT CAREER—KATHLEEN

  ALL BEHIND YOU IN YOUR NEW STEP

  —MCALOON FAMILY

  In the afternoon his parents and young brothers went with him to Spencer Street station. A priest from the Charleroi house in Melbourne met them on the platform.

  Adrian’s mother had been crying quietly to herself for hours. The priest said to her, ‘It always seems a little hard when you’re saying goodbye, Mrs Sherd. But believe me, you never lose a child who goes into the religious life. Young Adrian might be hundreds of miles away, but he’ll be closer than ever to you in spirit.’

  Adrian was annoyed with her for not cheering up after the priest’s kind words.

  When the warning bell rang on the platform, Adrian shook hands with his father and brothers and let his mother kiss him and told them all he would pray for them. Last of all he shook hands with the priest and said he hoped the next time they met he would be wearing the Charleroi habit.

  It was a hot, bright summer afternoon. The train would be almost to New South Wales before night fell. Adrian leaned back in his window seat. All the scenery was new to him. He was impatient to be out of the suburbs of Melbourne and into the great swathe of country opening up ahead of him.

  Workers were going home from factories in the suburbs. They waited respectfully at railway crossings for the Sydney train to pass. Adrian saw their faces staring up at him. They were tired and worn. In a few years he would be able to forgive their sins and ease their burdens a little—although they were probably too attached to material goods to experience the true peace he could offer them.

  In the grazing country north-east of Melbourne, Adrian chose the kind of small town where he would preach one of his best missions. There was one place where the little Catholic church had a proper stained-glass window, and the presbytery (where he would be a guest for the fortnight of the mission) was a spacious two-storey bluestone house.

  The town itself was drab, but in the countryside around it Adrian noticed several huge homesteads sprawled among trees on low hilltops. During his mission he would call at the Catholic properties and sip cold drinks on their wide shady verandas. Each night of the mission, the little church would be crowded. The families from the grazing properties would be there, as well as the poorer people from the township. Father Sherd would remind them that Christ had said it was easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter heaven. The graziers would squirm in their seats and resolve to be more generous in future, while their well-dressed wives and daughters would wonder at the courage of the young mission priest, who was obviously not impressed by their wealth.

  After sundown it was harder to see the towns and farms and people in the land that was waiting to be conquered for Christ the King. Adrian sat back in his seat and thought of the long history of the priesthood.

  All primitive peoples had an instinctive urge to offer sacrifices. This urge had been implanted in man by God Himself. All over the ancient world, people slew beasts or poured wine onto the ground or set fire to altars in an effort to appease the gods. Unfortunately most of these sacrifices were wasted because they were offered to idols of brass or stone or nature spirits or even demons.

  The only ancient people who pleased God with their offerings were the Jews, because they acknowledged Him as the one true God. The Jewish prophets and holy men were inspired by God to make elaborate laws about their sacrifices. God was using the Jews to prepare the world for the arrival of His Son, who would establish the One True Church and the most perfect sacrifice of all.

  So, by the time of Christ, people were used to the idea of having a special priesthood who wore elaborate vestments and offered sacrifices in a building set apart for the purpose.

  The first Catholic priest was Christ Himself. At the Last Supper He celebrated the first mass in history. From then on, people had no further need to slaughter bullocks or burn corn. The mass was the most perfect sacrifice that man could offer to God.

  The Last Supper was also the world’s first ordination ceremony. Christ turned His disciples into priests and told them to offer the mass in future just as He had done. Ever since, Catholic priests had followed His instructions, so that you could walk into a Catholic church anywhere in the world on any day of the year and see a faithful re-enactment of the Last Supper.

  Priests had a hard life in the early days of the church. If Adrian had lived in those days he might not have had a vocation. There wer
e so many persecutions and so many pagan countries to be converted, and few of the compensations that a modern priest enjoyed—such as quiet presbyteries with shelves of theology books and flowerbeds outside to walk among. Worse still, some of the early priests had wives and families to look after.

  No doubt many of these married priests worked hard, but the church soon learned that the best priests were those like St Paul, who never married, or St Peter, who left his wife as soon as he was called by Christ.

  There were several good reasons why the church, quite early in its history, insisted on the celibacy of the clergy. (In the dusk near Violet Town Adrian checked them off. Some hostile non-Catholic would be sure to start an argument about celibacy with him one day.)

  First, a celibate priest is able to serve his flock twenty-four hours a day, whereas a married priest would have to give some time to his wife and family. Adrian imagined the embarrassment of refusing an invitation to an important meeting of priests because your wife was expecting a baby.

  A celibate priest was somehow more dignified and commanded more respect than a married one. It would be hard, for example, to preach an exalted sermon to people who had seen you the night before with an apron over your clerical suit washing the dishes for your wife.

  Most important of all, many people would be reluctant to confess their sins and talk over their troubles with a man who lived in close contact with a woman. Even the best of wives would ask you every night about your day’s work. One night you would let slip some item you had heard in confession, and next day it would be all over the district.

  Anyway, Christ had said somewhere in the Gospels that a man who wanted to be perfect should cut himself off from all family ties. Our Lord knew it was almost impossible to perfect yourself with a wife and children distracting you all the time.

  Even before the celibacy of the clergy had been made binding, there were many priests who sought to be perfect themselves by abstaining from marriage and practising extreme poverty and mortification. These were the early hermits and Desert Fathers, the forerunners of the monks.

  There were famous hermits who walled themselves up in caves or hid themselves in forests and never spoke to a living person for fifty years and more. The state of holiness that a man would reach after living alone with God in a cave for half a century was too much for Adrian to imagine. Yet he himself would probably not have been suited to the life of a hermit. After a few years of saying mass alone with a rock for an altar and only the birds and animals to watch him he would have longed for a gilt tabernacle and a silken chasuble to remind him of the dignity of his office.

  As the centuries passed, there was an increasing range of choices for a young man wanting to be a priest. The great monastic orders—Benedictines, Carthusians, Cistercians—were founded. Their rapid spread all over the civilised world was proof (if any were needed) that their founders had been divinely inspired. The orders of friars—Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustines—provided for those who liked to travel and to preach against heresies in the marketplace.

  It was significant that the Protestant leaders of the Reformation spoke out fiercely against the celibacy of the clergy. It may well have been the devil himself who inspired them. The devil knew that his worst enemies were the clergy, who won back thousands of souls from his clutches every year. It would have suited him very well to do away with celibacy and so distract priests and religious from their great work.

  Of course his schemes had almost no effect on Catholics. But he easily persuaded the Protestants to allow their clergy to marry. The results were plain for anyone to see. The Protestant clergy were pitifully outnumbered by Catholic priests and brothers and nuns, despite the fact that the Protestants were free to marry and satisfy all their fleshly urges. All over the world young Catholic men and women flocked in their thousands to seminaries and convents to embrace the challenging life of a celibate religious. Thomas Merton had written about the great monastic revival sweeping the United States. Young men all over the country were realising that a monastery was the only place where they could live a sane life.

  The priesthood and the religious life had a long and glorious history. Past Wangaratta, when it was quite dark outside the train, Adrian put his face against the window and saw that history as a succession of pictures. The pictures hovered over the dark countryside just as the spiritual world of God and His angels and saints hovered over the Modern Age, although many people were unaware of it.

  The pictures were line drawings from the pages of the History Readers—Catholic Syllabus, which had been Adrian’s textbooks each year at primary school. To represent the early centuries under the Roman Empire, there was St Peter in chains with the angel about to rescue him. For the Middle Ages, the Great Age of Faith, there was St Cuthbert and the otters. The Renaissance was typified by the portrait of a great Pope who patronised many of the leading artists of those days. England after the Reformation was illustrated by Blessed Edmund Campion being led to the scaffold. St Francis Xavier, baptising a crowd of several thousand pagans in India, stood for the Discovery of the New World.

  As yet, there was no picture for the Modern Age. No doubt in years to come the authors of Catholic history books would assess the true importance of the many great modern priests and religious. Adrian thought of several who could serve as illustrations in his series—St John Bosco, the modern Italian priest who converted boys by juggling or walking tightropes in the streets; St Bernadette, who was visited by the Apparition of Our Lady at Lourdes and ended her life as a nun; Monsignor Fulton Sheen of America, who had converted thousands with his radio and television programs.

  At Albury the railway gauge changed and the passengers walked along the platform to another train. By midnight Adrian was deep into New South Wales. It was the first time he had ever been outside Victoria. He peered out to see how different the landscape was, but he saw nothing in the darkness. He prayed silently that Father Camillus would be at Blenheim to meet him. Then he stared at the jumble of reflections in the dark glass beside him and tried to think again about history.

  He realised that non-Catholics had their own version of history. Once, at primary school, he had glanced at a history book belonging to a state-school boy in his street. The only illustrations he saw were shadowy portraits of Oliver Cromwell and William, Prince of Orange, and a picture of the Duke of Monmouth lying on the floor with his hands clasped around the knees of King Charles the Second. The state schools kept religion out of their history courses.

  The bigotry of non-Catholic historians was most evident when they wrote about priests or religious. The Spanish missionaries in South America were supposed to have baptised Indian babies and then dashed their heads against trees to send their souls to heaven. The Jesuits in England were always plotting to overthrow ‘Good’ Queen Bess. Monks and friars were fat and jolly and fond of a good time, like Friar Tuck. The Pope was no different from a temporal ruler, and his cardinals dabbled in politics.

  These opinions were not just the ravings of a few fanatical anti-Catholics. The daily press in Australia and the majority of people educated in state schools accepted them as true history.

  The train entered a fair-sized town and stopped at a station. A voice through loudspeakers said, ‘Cootamundra.’ Adrian realised he was hundreds of miles from home. Around him were dark shapes vaguely lit by weak electric lamps, and all he had to go by was the name—Cootamundra.

  He must never forget that Australia was a Protestant country with Catholics a barely tolerated minority. As he passed into the darkness on the other side of Cootamundra he remembered the day when he had first suffered for the Catholic faith.

  His mother was in hospital and he was having some of his meals with the family next door. One night the woman said to her husband, ‘Here, Dad, here’s the Pope’s nose, and I hope it does you good.’

  The man took the piece of meat and ate it from his fingers and spat out the bones into his cupped hand. Adrian was disgusted. He had always be
en taught to call the tail of a fowl the parson’s nose. But when he tried to correct the non-Catholics they only laughed at him.

  Adrian’s first week in the junior seminary at Blenheim was like a holiday. The Master of Students, Father Camillus, told the boys they would have a week to get to know the priests and their fellow students before the full seminary timetable began. In the meantime they were expected to attend mass each morning, join the priests and lay brothers at midday and evening prayers in the chapel, and spend their mornings working in the garden and their afternoons playing sport or hiking to the river.

  There were fifteen students. When they sat in the refectory in order of seniority Adrian was seventh. The four oldest were grown men in their twenties—late vocations. If these fellows had joined almost any other order they would have gone straight into the novitiate year. They would have worn the habit of the order and followed its rule and undergone spiritual trials and hardships to test their vocations. But the Charleroi Fathers sent all their new entrants—no matter how old—to the junior seminary for a year. The Charleroi novitiate was considered too hard for a fellow who had come straight from the world.

  During his first week Adrian tried to look like someone who had discovered at last the life he was destined for. When he was chipping weeds out of the gravel path and Father Camillus walked past, Adrian pretended to be so absorbed in his task that he hardly noticed the priest. When he was setting off for a hike he smiled at the trees and flowerbeds and parted his lips as though he saw all nature as a visible manifestation of God—and hoped one of the priests was watching him from a window.