A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  On one of the weekly hikes along the riverbank, Adrian was sitting as usual with the least popular of the younger boys. He lay back with his head against a warm rock and prepared to enjoy the sight of the languid brown pool with its beach of pale pebbles, and the view beyond the river of grazing country with scattered trees. Since coming to the seminary he had learned to look at a peaceful landscape without any urge to make it the setting for a sin of impurity. The pleasure he got from staring at quiet pastures or deserted riverbanks was now quite innocent.

  Or perhaps it wasn’t. Adrian sat up suddenly and brought his reason to bear on a new problem.

  If he were still a layman there would be nothing wrong with taking pleasure from the sight of a landscape. But he was now a religious who had given up the world. He was bound by a strict timetable and would soon follow the exacting rule of the Congregation of Christ the King.

  By the standards of the religious life, the pleasures of the emotions were as reprehensible as unlawful sexual pleasures were in the world outside. It was no use mincing words—to lie on his back in the sunshine and feast his eyes on the countryside was a form of spiritual masturbation. In future he would resist any inclination to indulge in such pleasures. He would keep his eyes away from landscapes and works of art. Even his fondness for chalices and richly coloured vestments was no more than spiritual sensuality.

  For the rest of that afternoon Adrian deliberately avoided looking at the long stretch of river or the miles of farmland around it. And all the way back to the seminary he walked with his eyes on the ground ahead of him. At the top of each hill he called on Our Lady of Dalriada to stand between him and the broad sunlit paddocks all around.

  After two months at Blenheim Adrian was fairly satisfied with his progress towards perfection. By following the timetable exactly he was doing God’s will at every moment of the day. Poverty, chastity and obedience didn’t bother him. He wanted no material goods; he was relieved to be away from all sight of girls and women; and he delighted in obeying the Dean and the Master of Students for the practice it gave him in meekness and humility. He had proved he could cope with the religious life. His next step was to speed up his spiritual development.

  The inner life, the life of prayer, attracted him. The great saints of the inner life had described years of painful struggle to reach even the lowest levels of the via contemplativa. They warned beginners that only one soul in a thousand ever travelled the long upward path to its end, which was nothing less than mystical union with God Himself.

  Adrian calculated that if he had taken eight weeks to master the life of a religious, he could expect to be contemplating the Divine Essence within three or four years.

  His first task was to stop thinking of prayer as the repetition of prescribed words and phrases—Our Fathers, Hail Marys and the like—and to begin composing his own spontaneous prayers to suit his different moods or the particular glory of God that he was contemplating. He considered the prayers of the mass. He had believed until then that the most meritorious way to pray at mass was to follow from his missal the exact words of the ceremony. Since deciding to be a priest he had read those words in Latin and been pleased to find he could keep up the speed of the average priest and still understand a good half of them.

  Now he wanted to understand the true meaning of the mass so he could look up from his missal and, with one piercing glance at the altar, pray a wordless contemplative prayer more appropriate than the long Latin formulae.

  He struck trouble at once. All his life he had heard priests and brothers and nuns talking of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: of how it was the centre of Catholic devotion, a re-enactment of the sacrifice of Calvary and a means of earning incalculable graces and merit for those taking part in it. Now Adrian was surprised to find he did not know exactly how the sacrifice worked.

  His first attempt to understand the mass he called the Theory of the Perfected Victim. Adrian worked out this theory during a morning study period. Whenever the Dean looked at him Adrian pretended to be translating his Livy. In some circumstances it could have been sinful to deceive the Dean and neglect one’s studies, but Adrian had asked God for a dispensation from his studies until he had properly understood the true meaning of the mass.

  THEORY OF THE PERFECTED VICTIM: The priest and the congregation offer to God the Father bread and wine representing a proportion of their worldly goods. They then persuade Him by means of their prayers to accept their sacrifice, humble though it is. Just when He is deciding how much spiritual merit to award them, the priest changes the offering into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The priest says, in effect, to God the Father: ‘You were gracious enough to accept our bread and wine. Now see what it really is that we offer You.’ God then increases his generosity towards them in keeping with the increased value of what they have offered.

  Objections: 1) How could the congregation claim that the bread and wine represented a sacrifice on their part? (Adrian understood that in the early days of the church the people brought their own loaves and wine to the altar. But no modern congregation would have been allowed to mill around the sanctuary, dropping breadcrumbs and spilling wine on the carpet.)

  2) Why must God the Father be in any way pleased to be offered the body and blood of His Son under the appearance of bread and wine? Why must He reward those who offered Him such a sacrifice, if sacrifice it was?

  Adrian had to wait until the evening recreation period to work out a better theory. At recreation the students were expected to mix widely with one another. No one was allowed to read or to sit apart from the others. Most played ping-pong or darts or gathered around the piano for a sing-song. Adrian usually played darts but he knew he couldn’t concentrate on his theories while he aimed at the dartboard. Instead, he stood with the group at the piano. During the last verse of ‘Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes’ his second theory occurred to him.

  THEORY OF THE DISGUISED PRIEST: The death of Jesus Christ on Calvary was the most perfect sacrifice ever offered because Christ Himself was both priest and victim. He Himself offered his own body and blood to God the Father, who derived infinite satisfaction from it. Whenever a priest celebrates mass he says, in effect, to God the Father: ‘Here is the very same Victim who pleased you so much when He was offered to you on Calvary. Moreover, I, the humble priest who offers Him to you’—and here the priest, metaphorically speaking, throws off his disguise—‘I am really the same Priest who offered the sacrifice of Calvary, because His power is working through me.’

  A few minutes later, during the ‘Drinking Song’ from The Student Prince, Adrian saw a fault in his latest theory.

  Objection: When Christ first offered His body and blood to the Father, He earned for mankind an inexhaustible treasury of merit that could be drawn on in any age. How could it be necessary for us to re-enact the death of Christ whenever we wanted some of this merit? Surely God the Father did not have to be reminded every morning of His Son’s death before he would deliver the spiritual goods that it purchased.

  Despite their busy timetable and their long periods of enforced silence, the students found plenty of time to talk among themselves—at recreation, on their weekly hike to the river, during their hour of sport every weekday afternoon, and in the cloister between classes. Adrian was disappointed that they hardly ever talked about doctrine or theology. They sometimes commented on the different mannerisms they observed among their priest-teachers during mass or other ceremonies. Sometimes they compared the Charleroi way of life with those of other religious orders—usually to the advantage of the Charlerois—but Adrian missed the sort of discussion that might have helped him work out his deepest concerns.

  Once, during the weeks when Adrian was working out his theories about the mass (as a preparation for a more intense life of prayer), he overheard two students commenting on the ugliness of the Roman chasuble and telling each other how pleased they were that the Charlerois wore only the more voluminous Gothic style. Adrian was ready to bre
ak in and say, ‘It’s all very well to compare styles of vestments, but have you ever tried to understand why the mass is a sacrifice?’ But he checked himself. The two he had overheard were so-called late vocations—young men who had left school and tried other careers before deciding they were called to the priesthood. One of the two had played senior rugby in New Zealand. Adrian feared he might seem childish or a cissy if he tried to turn these men, as they seemed to him, from discussing vestments and to talk theology with them.

  One Saturday afternoon, when the students were sitting in the cloister and polishing the brass candle holders from the chapel, Adrian singled out the most serious-seeming young man and asked him abruptly why the mass was a perfect sacrifice. Adrian hoped no priest would stroll past and overhear the conversation. He had learned that the priests seemed to discourage such discussions among the students and to prefer them to talk about their tasks at hand or to joke with one another. Adrian was reminded of the many days at St Carthage’s when he had looked over his shoulder while he huddled with Seskis and O’Mullane and told dirty jokes or talked about sex.

  As a result of his conversation in the cloister, Adrian postulated a third theory: THE SEPARATED SPECIES THEORY. The mass is basically the same kind of sacrifice as was offered by the Jews of the Old Testament. The congregation offer to God their most prized possession—not a calf or a lamb but the most outstanding member of their own kind, Jesus Christ Himself. The Jews of old had killed and burned their victims. In the sacrifice of the mass, the death of the victim is merely symbolised by the fact that the Body and Blood are consecrated separately and remain separated on the altar.

  Objection: When the Jews sacrificed beasts or crops they actually deprived themselves of valuable property. How could a Catholic at mass claim that the Divine Victim was his to offer?

  Adrian could devise no better theories than these three. He set about deciding which of the three would best assist him in contemplative prayer. On each of three consecutive mornings he left his missal closed during mass and stared at the altar while he concentrated on one or another of his theories. None of them gave him the exalted feeling he had hoped for.

  Next morning, something told him to look for guidance in the prayers of the mass for that day. In the Postcommunion Prayer he found the words ‘O Lord, by the working of this Mystery may our vices be purged away and our just desires fulfilled.’

  Adrian had found his answer. He, a mere student in a junior seminary, had wasted days trying to understand the meaning of the mass while the learned theologians who composed the official prayers of the church were content to call the whole business a mystery and to humbly ask God to make it work.

  He felt suddenly free to enjoy life again. He was still in the chapel and mass was still in progress. He looked up at the chalice. It was a pure silver-white in the morning sunlight. He savoured the deep, rich violet of the Lenten vestments. He derived an innocent pleasure from the winking of the sanctuary lamp behind its ruby-coloured glass. This was how the mass ought to be experienced! God the Father and His Son between them understood how the sacrifice worked and how it earned boundless merit for mankind. The people, and even the priest, had only to follow the ceremony with reverence and to wait for their souls to be showered with spiritual treasures.

  To put an end the intellectual puzzle that had tormented him for days, Adrian arranged his newest insight in the form of a theory: THEORY OF THE CELEBRATION OF THE MYSTERY. This was so simple and satisfying that he felt a rare form of excitement. He would have called it an intellectual excitement except that it gave him his first erection since he had arrived at the seminary.

  He tried not to panic, but he recalled at once an anecdote in a book of modern psychology that he had once found by chance in the State Library of Victoria. A young student of theology (he would surely have been a Protestant) became so tense whenever he was working on a difficult theological proposition that he was obliged to masturbate as soon as he had solved all his theoretical problems.

  Adrian was determined not to allow theology to do that to him. To save himself, he turned away from theological theorising to the purely sensuous satisfactions of the mass. The door of the tabernacle was ajar. He stared at the frilled white satin exposed for a moment inside, and his erection quietly subsided.

  Marco Zovic was in his early twenties. All that Adrian knew about him was that he came from Western Australia, where he had managed one of his father’s shops selling jewellery and souvenirs and smokers’ requisites.

  On the second Thursday after classes began, Father Camillus told the students that Marco wouldn’t be going with them on their hike to the river. Some of the previous year’s students looked at each other, but no one else made any comment. Adrian supposed Marco was sick or staying back to receive an important visitor.

  Later that afternoon Father Camillus met the boys at the chapel door before meditation. He said, ‘I have a piece of sad news for you all. Marco has gone home to Western Australia.’

  Adrian saw the same fellows look at each other again and nod. Others gasped or looked shocked. Someone asked the Master why Marco had gone, but the priest said, ‘I’m sorry, but that’s all I can tell you. Marco is no longer one of us.’

  Adrian learned afterwards from the fellows who had nodded over Marco that this was always how a fellow left the seminary. Sometimes, they said, you could tell beforehand when a student was thinking of leaving. He would mope in a corner during recreation or daydream in study periods. He might have long talks in private with Father Master. Of course he might whisper to the others that he was thinking of going home, but this was strictly against the rules.

  Once the fellow and Father Master had agreed that he ought to go home, he left the seminary by the first train to Sydney or Melbourne. This was because a student who knew he was going back to the world could have a damaging influence on the others. He couldn’t see the sense of obeying the rules any more and he might even make fun of the hard life the students led. He always disappeared without saying goodbye to the others in case he made them homesick or tempted them to give up their vocations.

  Adrian asked the fellows from the previous year what proportion of students went home each year. They reckoned that of the fourteen still left after Zovic, two or three would be sure to disappear during the year. They told Adrian that if ever a fellow was missing from his desk in the study room or absent from morning mass, you could bet Father Master would announce a little later that the fellow had gone home. And if you ever heard voices from the driveway in the early hours of the morning and car doors slamming, it would probably be a student taking a taxi to Blenheim station for the night train.

  Adrian began to take a fresh interest in the other students. He wondered which were the two or three who were doomed to go back to the world, and when they would disappear in the night. At recreation periods and on hikes to the river he investigated them all in turn. He would tell a fellow a little about his own past and then wait for the fellow to open up about himself.

  Bernard Cleary, the oldest student, was a qualified optometrist with his own business in Sydney. He had lived with his mother in one of the best suburbs on the North Shore. One night he had heard a lot of cars coming and going in his neighbour’s yard. He found out next morning that his neighbour (a wealthy dentist and a good friend to Cleary and his mother) had shot himself and left a note saying he couldn’t see any point in living.

  Cleary had suddenly realised there was more to life than making money. He had always been an average sort of Catholic but now he started going to daily mass and wondering what else he ought to live for apart from money and possessions. A few months later he had contacted the Charleroi Fathers and now, here he was in the seminary to test his vocation.

  Adrian said, ‘It was lucky you weren’t engaged or married.’

  This started Cleary talking about his experiences with women. His mother had always been at him to take out this or that daughter of families she knew. He had taken out a few
to please her, but no matter where they went there was always a floor show with a comedian telling double-meaning jokes. Cleary had got fed up with the embarrassment of it.

  Adrian doubted whether Cleary had a true vocation. He was probably suited to a life of chastity, but the poverty of the religious life might be too much for a man with his wealthy background. When he was over the shock of the dentist blowing his brains out, he would probably be tempted to go back to his optometry business.

  Daryl Drummond, the second-oldest student, was twenty-four. He had been a schoolteacher at Grafton in northern New South Wales. He told Adrian his story in strict confidence one day at the river, but Adrian often saw him talking quietly to other fellows and wondered how many had heard Drummond’s history.

  Drummond had been brought up a High Anglican. Every Sunday as a boy he had travelled ten miles by train to a church in Sydney where Anglican priests in proper vestments celebrated a kind of mass and believed they were actually consecrating the bread and wine like Catholic priests. It was always his ambition to become an Anglican priest and join the Community of the Resurrection—an order of Anglicans who lived a monastic life.

  When he was eighteen Drummond had a spiritual crisis. It started with worries about the Apostolic Succession. He couldn’t be certain that the Anglican priesthood could trace back their orders in an unbroken line beyond the English Reformation. (If they couldn’t, they had no power to consecrate bread and wine, and their lives were dedicated to an illusion.)

  He read articles and books by Anglo-Catholics who said they had preserved the succession, and Roman Catholics who refuted the Anglicans’ claims. At first he used to spend a few weeks believing the Anglicans and then go over to Rome for a few weeks. Soon he was spending no more than a day in each camp, and the time came when he changed sides every few minutes.