A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  At the end of the week the students were given copies of the timetable. Each day began at 5.40 a.m. (‘Morning Bell—Rise, dress and wash’) and ended at 10.00 p.m. (‘Retire to bed—All lights out’). Adrian pinned his timetable to the door of his room and read it over and over, savouring its harshness. (‘The Great Silence begins each evening immediately after Night Prayers and continues until after Mass on the following morning. During this period, students will observe silence in all parts of the building. At other times, students must also observe silence in corridors, study hall, washrooms and showers.’)

  Adrian counted the hours until the timetable came into force. He thought of it as a religious rule, and he knew that the rule of every religious order had been approved by the Pope as a valid means of attaining sanctity. This meant that anyone who faithfully followed such a rule would perfect himself as a human being and be sure of reaching heaven after death.

  When the morning bell sounded next day at 5.40, Adrian stumbled out of bed before he was properly awake. He was following the example of the saint who once said that a religious should leap up at the morning bell as though the bedclothes were on fire. He put on shorts and a shirt and pulled his long black soutane over his head. He hurried to the washroom. The timetable allowed him five minutes to splash his face and brush his teeth before he was due in chapel for morning prayers. (The students showered in the afternoon, after sport.)

  After mass Adrian flung his head into his hands to make a brief thanksgiving while the other students were walking upstairs to their rooms. A hand fastened on his shoulder and a voice said, ‘Haven’t you read your timetable? It’s time to make your bed and tidy your room.’ It was the Dean of Students, a boy no older than Adrian but one of those who had been at the seminary for several years.

  Adrian obeyed the Dean, but wondered what right he had to interrupt the prayers of his fellow students. All morning Adrian tried to find a few moments for the thanksgiving that he was used to saying after mass. But whenever he thought he had a free minute, the bell sounded and he had to begin a new class or hurry to some other part of the building.

  That night in his room he read his timetable again and counted more than twenty bells from morning to ‘Lights Out’. While he was counting, the bell for ‘Lights Out’ sounded, but he left his light on for a moment. He took a pencil and the notebook he was going to fill with the fruits of his meditations and spiritual reading. The door of his room opened. The Dean put his head in and said, ‘Turn off your light at once and go to bed!’

  Next morning during the study period before breakfast, Adrian knocked on Father Camillus’s door and told the priest he wanted to discuss a spiritual problem.

  Adrian said, ‘Father, I know the timetable here is a sort of preparation for the Charleroi rule that we’ll follow next year in the novitiate. And I know we must follow the timetable without murmuring, and obey the Dean of Students because he represents the authority of the Rector. But twice yesterday the Dean interfered with my private devotions.’ And he told the priest about the two incidents.

  The Master of Students heard Adrian out, but he looked as though he listened to similar stories from new boys every year. He said, ‘Our Founder, St Henry de Cisy, had a wonderful saying: “A holy religious has no time to be holy.”

  ‘St Henry meant of course that true holiness consists in doing the Will of God with all your strength all day long. God’s Will for you right now is to follow the timetable. A great saint once wrote that the bell in a religious house is the voice of God Himself telling each member of the community what he should be doing at any particular moment.’

  Whenever the priest dropped his eyes Adrian looked at the bed in the corner. Every Charleroi priest and lay brother slept on a thin mattress of straw with only planks beneath it. Adrian wished the students could have proper Charleroi beds to test themselves on.

  Father Camillus smiled at Adrian. ‘Believe me, we know what we’re doing when we keep you running with those bells all day long. Out in the world last year you were always looking for a quiet place to pray and talk to God about your vocation. Well, now you can really test that vocation. Follow the timetable here for a year with all your heart and soul. By the end of the year you’ll have found out some surprising things about yourself.

  ‘Some people would say it’s easy to obey a few bells and turn your light out when you’re told to. But you’re finding already it’s quite a challenge. Are you equal to that challenge? Let’s find out.’

  Adrian went back to the morning study class and put his head down over his books because it was God’s Will that he should do nothing but study at that time. At the first sound of the bell he slammed his book shut without finishing the sentence and was second into the refectory for breakfast—just behind the Dean of Students.

  For the next few weeks Adrian followed the timetable exactly. In recreation periods he learned all he could about the Charleroi life from the students who had been at the seminary in previous years.

  He heard about scruples—the worst of all ailments that could afflict a religious. Living in retirement in one of the back rooms of the seminary was an old priest, Father Fidelis, who suffered severely from scruples. He spent most of his time alone in his room with the door locked. He ate alone from a tray prepared by the lay brothers and said his morning mass in one of the private oratories in the priests’ wing.

  None of the students knew exactly what kind of scruples the old priest had. Whatever they were, they kept him from meeting any of the students. Sometimes when Adrian was walking along a corridor he saw the old priest come round a corner ahead of him, stop, and then scuttle back out of sight. Usually Father Fidelis made for the priests’ wing, where the students were not permitted. But if he was cornered in a distant part of the building he was likely to hide anywhere—behind a staircase, in the toilets or in a broom cupboard. Once Adrian saw a fold of a black habit showing from behind a pillar in the cloisters. He had forced the poor old priest into dodging round the pillar to avoid him as he walked past.

  A boy who had once served mass for Father Fidelis said the priest had taken nearly five minutes to say the prayers of consecration. He whispered ‘Hoc est enim corpus meum’ over and over, as though he couldn’t be sure they would work unless he concentrated on them with all his might.

  Some of the younger students tried to sneak up behind Father Fidelis when they saw him in the distance. But Adrian and the more serious students considered his case a warning to them not to overdo their piety.

  Adrian heard about Father Malouf. He was a secular priest from the Blenheim parish who spent a lot of time at the seminary. It was rumored that he was unhappy in his parish work and wondering if he ought to give it up and join an order like the Charlerois.

  Father Malouf had scruples of a different kind from Father Fidelis’s. He couldn’t sit still or kneel down. When he visited the seminary he walked for hours up and down the garden paths and round the cloisters. He would talk to a student, but you had to jog along beside him to keep up a conversation. When he stayed overnight at the seminary he came down to the chapel with the Charleroi priests for night prayers, but he paced up and down outside the chapel door and you heard his voice joining in the prayers from the hallway.

  Whenever Father Malouf stayed overnight he said mass in an oratory the following morning. At the parts of the mass where he had to stand still, he lifted one foot after the other like a runner before a race. And he said mass probably faster than any priest in Australia. The students who served his masses always timed him behind his back. His record was nineteen minutes.

  Adrian learned from the boys of the previous year that students were not allowed to form particular friendships. You were supposed to be equally friendly with every one of your fellow students. Otherwise, so the boys explained, you might be unhappy in later years if you were sent to South Australia, say, and your particular friend was in New South Wales.

  Adrian was told why the priests and brothers (and thos
e boys who knew) never passed a certain table in the front corridor without taking a plastic button from one of two bowls and dropping it in the other. Each button represented the soul of a dead Charleroi priest or brother from the Australian province. Each time you passed the bowls you picked up a button and offered a brief mental prayer for the repose of that soul. If the fellow was already in heaven, the merit earned by your prayer would of course be transferred to another button.

  He heard about the discipline. The Charleroi Fathers were one of the few orders who still practised this extreme form of self-mortification. Each priest and brother kept in his room a leather whip with knotted thongs. (One of your first tasks in the novitiate would be to make a leather discipline for yourself in recreation periods.) Two or three times a week the priests and brothers disciplined themselves while they recited their office together.

  The students who told Adrian about the discipline said if he didn’t believe them he could look up the Constitution of the Order where it was all written in Latin. A fellow in the senior Latin class had translated it for all the students the year before. Every religious had to lift up the back of his habit with one hand and strike himself firmly across the buttocks with the discipline all through the prayer called Miserere.

  A younger student asked what underclothes the Charlerois had to protect their buttocks. Two or three students answered at once—this was something they had learned long before. Every Charleroi wore a long flannel thing like a nightshirt and a pair of huge baggy underpants. The novices years ago had nicknamed the underpants ‘grey horrors’. Any boy interested in them could duck around behind the building on a Monday morning. In a clearing among the fruit trees was a line where the religious laundry hung. On an average Monday morning you could see half a dozen grey horrors dangling in the breeze.

  Every morning after breakfast the students were assigned to house duties for twenty minutes. Adrian’s duty for the first week was to clean the priests’ showers and toilets.

  The priests’ rooms and oratories were upstairs in one wing of the building. At each end of their corridor was a door with a sign, ENCLOSURE, on the outside. Adrian knew that anyone taking a female person past either of those doors was instantly excommunicated. He looked along the passage that no girl or woman had ever seen or, please God, would ever see. It was silent and peaceful. The doors of the priests’ rooms were all closed. Adrian knew their windows looked out beyond the town of Blenheim to the timbered hills of the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales.

  A man would climb the stairs from the chapel below, walk through the door marked ENCLOSURE and leave behind all the distractions, all the lust and avarice and ambition of the secular world. He could shut himself in his room and sit at his desk with a vast Australian landscape in front of him and prepare a sermon to persuade a whole parish to set up a door marked ENCLOSURE in their hearts, with a room beyond it where they could forget their senseless pursuit of pleasure and sit in silence with God.

  Adrian wiped the priests’ showers and poured disinfectant down their toilets and checked their supplies of toilet paper. Then he walked gingerly along the corridor to savour the religious atmosphere.

  Behind one of the last doors someone switched on a radio. Adrian stopped to listen. It was the breakfast session from 2GL Goulburn. He read the sign on the door. The room belonged to Father Pascal, an old retired Charleroi who had a bad leg and spent most of the day in his room. Adrian left the priests’ wing hoping that Father Pascal had only switched the radio on to hear the weather forecast. A man who had perfected himself by following the Charleroi rule for a lifetime would surely prefer the blessed silence of the priests’ enclosure to the noise of a breakfast session on the radio.

  Adrian’s second house duty was to lay out the vestments and set up the sacred vessels for the mass of the following day. He had thought it would be years before he could handle holy things. But Father Camillus had told the students when they began their roster of duties, ‘According to Canon Law you’re all classified as postulants of a religious order and you’re therefore permitted to handle things that ordinary lay people can’t touch—the burse, the corporal, the purificator, the spoon and the pall. You may also touch the exterior metal of the chalice, the paten, the ciborium and the monstrance, but not, I repeat, not the inner gold-plated areas that come into contact with the Sacred Species.’

  Each morning Adrian took a chalice from the safe in the sacristy and stood it on the priests’ bench. He arranged all the other sacred vessels and cloths to make the neat parcel that the priest would carry to the altar next morning. Over them all he draped the chalice veil, which had to be the same colour as the vestments of the day.

  Whenever he held the chalice or the paten in his hands he could not help thinking that those were the same hands that only sixteen months before had been polluted by an unnatural sin. Alone in the sacristy he endured the humiliation of remembering his past. But he hoped that before he was ordained he would learn to touch sacred vessels without thinking of the sins his hands had committed years ago. His mass each morning would be a burden to him if it only reminded him of self-abuse.

  On certain days in the sacristy he had to stack sixty small altar breads into a ciborium to be consecrated and given in communion to the students and lay brothers over the following few days. Adrian learned from the student who had done this duty before him how to rest a fountain pen inside the ciborium and stack the breads around it so the priest could lift them out easily for communion.

  Each time Adrian rested the pen against the gold lining of the ciborium, he wondered why the plastic of the pen (which only a moment before had been in contact with his skin) could touch the sacred vessel while his own fingers could not. Sometimes he almost convinced himself it would be no more disrespectful to the Blessed Sacrament to touch the gold lightly with his fingertips than to rest a plastic pen against it. He brought his finger as near as a sixteenth of an inch from the sacred metal and held it there. No priest or brother or student would ever know he had closed the gap and made the faintest contact. But something always held his finger back.

  In a cupboard in the sacristy Adrian found a tap and a tiny stainless-steel sink shaped like a spitoon with a drainpipe that disappeared through the floorboards. He learned that this was where the priest always rinsed the chalice and paten after mass. There was always a chance that a few minute fragments of the consecrated Species adhered to the sacred vessels after mass. It would have been a grave insult to the Body and Blood of Our Lord to wash these crumbs or drops down a common sink and force them to mix in the drains with all kinds of dirty substances. But the special drainpipe in the cupboard ran down into the natural soil under the building, where the Divine Body and Blood could decompose decently.

  About a month after his first talk with the Master of Students, Adrian went back to the priest and said, ‘Father, I think I can say I’ve followed the timetable exactly and never murmured against it. And I’ve learned all I could about the rules and customs of the seminary and the Charleroi order. But I still don’t feel I’m becoming any holier—I still commit plenty of venial sins and my character is just as full of faults as it was when I came here. Are there any extra penances I could do to develop myself spiritually?’

  Adrian had expected the priest to be at least a little surprised by his fervour. But Father Camillus only said, ‘So you’ve proved you can observe the letter of the law, but you’re looking for something more? Well, how about trying to observe the spirit of it? You know there are fourteen other students in this place. Do you behave towards all of them with perfect charity at all times? You say you follow the timetable perfectly. Are you proud of yourself because of it? The virtue of humility is one of the hardest of all to acquire.’

  Adrian went away dissatisfied. But then he suspected that the priest was only testing his patience and humility. A truly humble religious accepted meekly every reproof from his superiors. Adrian told himself he deserved Father Camillus’s censure. He even dec
ided to follow the priest’s advice for a trial period.

  He seized every chance to observe the spirit of the rule. At recreation periods he deliberately picked out the two or three students he felt the least liking for and talked and played ping-pong with them as though he found them delightful companions.

  On the weekly hike to the river he carried the haversack full of bread and sausages for longer than he had to, and then pretended he hadn’t noticed the time slipping away.

  One afternoon when sport was over, Father Camillus sent two boys to the kitchen for a crate of soft drinks. When the students crowded around to get their drinks, Adrian hung back and offered up his thirst. But when he thought the priest was looking at him he pushed in among the others so he wouldn’t appear to be making a show of his patience and self-denial.

  One day when he was rostered to wash the dishes in the kitchen, he stood staring at a scrap of newspaper wrapped round a parcel. The Dean of Students snatched the parcel away and said, ‘You know we don’t read newspapers in the seminary.’

  Adrian knew the rule about newspapers but he hadn’t thought he was breaking it by glancing at the advertisements on an old torn page. If he had given way to his normal human feelings he would have argued with the Dean, but he bowed his head and said nothing.

  One day at baseball when he stood under the ball ready to take the catch that would win the game for his team, he wondered whether he should deliberately spill the catch to forgo the pleasure of having his teammates crowding round and slapping his back. But then he realised that if he dropped the catch he would cause them to suffer considerable anguish. On the principle that charity towards others overrode all one’s own interests, he caught the ball and held it firmly.

  When he was with the others at mass or prayers in the chapel, he kept his hands loosely joined and his eyes wide open. He avoided any posture or gesture or facial expression that might have suggested he was unusually intense in his prayers.