“But you did not?”
Stephen’s voice was very low. “I dared not.”
“An interesting locution. I gather that you developed a profound sense of guilt about these sexual temptations.”
“I did. This guilt increased when I entered the seminary. Dedicated to the priestly life, I found myself torn between an ideal of chastity and a yearning for women. The conflict was so great that at one time I was deeply concerned as to whether I should continue my studies for the priesthood.”
“By what means did you solve this conflict?”
“By the means I always used when the going was hardest. I increased my devotions, prayed for the gift of supernatural grace, held on somehow from day to day. … It was never easy.”
Dom Arcibal gently rubbed his tonsure. “Avoid smugness, my son. Returning now to your handling of this deep conflict. Were there any other factors present in your solution of it? Any incident, encounter, or event that influenced you? Do not hurry with your answer.”
Stephen thought a long time. “I can’t remember anything.”
“Did your mother bring pressure of any kind?”
“Not unduly. I knew she was praying for my vocation, of course.”
“Your father, then?” Dom Arcibal permitted a note of personal curiosity to enter his voice. “What kind of man was he?”
Stephen launched into a tribute to Din the Down-Shouter. “My father was an uneducated workingman, but I have never met his equal in strength of mind or goodness of character. From childhood he was my model and guide. I think he has always been the dominating influence of my life.”
“Did you ever cross swords with him?”
“Not openly. I tried to be an obedient and docile son. But underneath, there was a constant competition between us. In this competitive struggle I always felt that I was wrestling with someone stronger than myself. This led me to ever greater effort to surpass my father. It has never been clear to me why I should contend, except in loving-kindness, with one who was always so good to me.”
“We shall come to that later,” said Dom Arcibal. “Meanwhile I think we have struck something of great importance. In the period when you were torn between chastity and desire for sexual pleasure, was there any significant passage between you and your father?”
“I can’t remember anything.”
“It’s not a question of remembering. Let your mind range freely over the whole field of your relationship with your father, and tell me the first thing that comes to mind.”
“Car tracks,” said Stephen, surprised at his answer.
“Why car tracks?”
“My father was a motorman. He drove a trolley car between Boston and Medford. As a boy I liked to stand with him on the front platform and watch him handle the controls. He seemed godlike to me as he drove the car along the steel tracks that have turned up many times in my later life as symbols of discipline and duty.”
Associations came crowding now. “The car tracks ran past a Catholic church—the Immaculate Conception, it was called—and my father always lifted his motorman’s cap as we passed the center door.” Stephen began to talk rapidly. “One day—I was about nineteen and a seminarian at the time—I took a ride with my father for old time’s sake. As we passed the church, he lifted his cap as usual. No perfunctory touching of hand to visor, but a real off-the-head obeisance to the Presence on the altar, accompanied by the ejaculation, ‘Blessed be God, Maker of heaven and earth.’ I have never seen a more pious action. Afterwards he turned to me and said, ‘Stephen, when I think that one day my son will stand at the very door of the Tabernacle, I am overcome by the Lord’s goodness and mercy.’”
“What effect did your father’s statement have on you?”
“I was deeply touched by it. To justify the faith he had in me, I determined to be a priest.”
Dom Arcibal shook his head in mild amusment. “That’s like saying that Dante wrote The Divine Comedy to justify the faith the Italian language had in him. Surely, there were other elements in your decision.”
“I don’t quite understand,” said Stephen.
Tartness of quince puckered the Benedictine’s lips. “You don’t understand because your remarkable talent for self-delusion won’t let you. Come now, Monsignor—didn’t your father’s remark open a whole new world of possibilities? Didn’t you see your chance to overtop this godlike figure at the controls by celebrating mysteries forbidden to him? I put it to you flatly: didn’t you realize that as a priest you could hold in your hands the actual body and blood of Christ while your father must be content with a passing act of adoration from the street?”
The enormity of such motives shocked Stephen. “Are such things possible?”
“Your whole life has shown it to be so. One aspect of your priesthood—I do not say all of it, because a priestly vocation is a complex work of God—is based on a desire to outrival your father. This unconscious rivalry is the key to your present difficulties. Proceed with your account.”
Omitting nothing, Stephen poured out the history of his love for Ghislana Falerni, and his struggle to stand free of it. From the sponge of memory he pressed the mixed sweetness and gall of their meetings, the joy of gazing at her across the table, the magnetic tide of sympathy that flowed between them, and the fearful backwash of remorse that buffeted him after each encounter. At the end, more confused than when he began, Stephen lifted perplexed eyes to Dom Arcibal in a plea for guidance.
“The thing that frightens me most is the force and recurrence of my feelings for this woman. Three times I’ve tried to tear her from my heart, three times I’ve failed. Will the old misery start all over when I see her again? Must I spend the rest of my life running away from Ghislana Falerni or flogging myself with whips of conscience for having talked with her?” His voice rose in anger and perplexity. “Why should she afflict me? I was proof against all others. Why am I defenseless against her?”
Sympathy for perplexed mortals charged Dom Arcibal’s reply. “Millions of lovers have found depthless joy in asking that very question. Ordinary men and women never cease to marvel at the biologic attraction (unique, they think) that they exert upon each other. We admit that such love exists in the world”—Dom Arcibal’s voice snapped—“but by our priestly vow of celibacy we renounce it.
“I will not indulge in homiletics with you, Monsignor,” Dom Arcibal continued. “I merely remind you that as a grown man you took a vow of eternal chastity. In language unambiguous and solemn you entered upon a sacred contract with God. To break that contract, or even trifle with it, means moral death … this is all quite clear?”
“Quite clear.”
“Yet, realizing as you do that your sacerdotal purity is in danger, why do you persist in this deadly dalliance?”
“I don’t know … I wish I did.”
Like a Greek chorus cleansing a tragic stage with chants of far-off ancient things, Dom Arcibal changed his mood. “Do you remember the passage from the Confessions in which St. Augustine laments pillaging a pear tree?”
A pear tree? “Yes, I remember.”
“As you will recall, then, Augustine asks: ‘What did I love in that sin?’ And he tells us that his pleasure was not in the pears—which he barely tasted and afterwards threw to the hogs—but in the offense itself! Augustine stole those pears becase they offered a childish opportunity to pit himself against God. Not merely to displease Him by breaking the Seventh Commandment, but as Augustine says: ‘I wished to mimic a maimed liberty by doing things unpermitted me, in darkened likeness of God’s omnipotence.’ In pain and humiliation the saint afterwards acknowledged that his offense at bottom was the colossally malicious sin of pride.”
Laying back his cannon-ball head, Dom Arcibal filled the cell with Augustine’s lamentations. “‘So doth pride imitate exaltedness … thus doth the soul commit fornication when she turns from Thee. Thus we pervertedly imitate Thee who lift ourselves up against Thee. Behold Thy servant fleeing from his Lord and ob
taining a shadow. O rottenness, O monstrousness of life and depth of death, that I loved when I might not—only because I might not.’”
Revulsion at the linking of Augustine’s “O rottenness of death” with the living beauty of Ghislana Falerni; unwillingness to loosen his fingers in complete renunciation, and the belief that his love was not entirely rooted in disobedience crushed sore words from Stephen.
“It isn’t true that I loved her only because I might not.”
Contempt that the elect in wisdom sometimes employ on the ignorant for their salvation twisted Dom Arcibal’s smile. “You still hug that delusion, do you? Well, we must take that childish toy from your arms without delay.” Dom Arcibal became the cross-examiner moving in to trip the witness on his own testimony. “This contessa is a woman of virtue?”
“That is true.”
“And being such a woman, she would disdain to enter into any relation other than marriage?”
“That is also true.”
“I ask these questions,” said Dom Arcibal, “merely as a prelude to the main inquiry, which is this: would you abandon your priesthood to marry her?”
Stephen uttered a weak and desolate “No.”
The Benedictine inveigler of souls placed his finger on the secret flaw in Stephen’s character. “What we are dealing with here, Monsignor, is the case of the half offender who carefully selects a sin that can never materialize. A would-be Lucifer who dares not take the consequences of open revolt against either the earthly or the Heavenly Father. Can you deny the pitiful mechanics of this plot against yourself?”
“I have no wish to deny anything,” said Stephen abjectly. “Only tell me what I must do to salvage my priesthood.”
Dom Arcibal’s voice returned to its normal register of kindliness. “First of all, Monsignor, you must stop pillaging pear trees. Give over contending with God. You are no match for Him, anyway. I suggest also that you revise your idea of the priesthood as a courtly tournament—half joust, half miracle play—in which you have cast yourself as a knight at arms, alone and palely loitering. Perhaps the Church needs cavalier priests. Well, let others tread that stage. A man carrying your impost of conscience would be split wide open by such a role.”
Reassuring warmth rayed from the monk’s bulky person. “There is much love in your heart, my son. God wants all of it, else He would not so relentlessly pursue His fleeing servant. … We will discuss these matters frequently and at length in the days ahead. I suggest, for the present, that you make the Stations of the Cross daily while you are with us here. Meditate particularly upon the seventh station, Christ’s second fall. Let it be a symbol of the special temptation that may crush a man midway in this mortal life.”
“I shall do so, Father.” Humbled by the new understanding that Dom Arcibal had given him, Stephen slipped to his knees beside the Benedictine’s chair. “I should like very much at this time to make a general confession covering my entire life.”
Silently Dom Arcibal drew a purple stole from his pocket. By the act of placing it around his neck he was transformed; the human counselor became the divinely commissioned looser of sins. Clinician and seismologist vanished. A priest took their place.
“I shall be glad to hear your confession, my son.”
Kneeling on the stone floor, Stephen Fermoyle endeavored to fulfill the conditions required of anyone, layman or priest, who hopes to receive the sacrament of penance. He confessed his sins fully, neither mitigating nor extenuating them; he made a firm resolution nevermore to offend God, and he accepted the penance his confessor laid upon him.
At the end, Dom Arcibal lifted his right hand to exercise the priestly power of absolution. “Cleanse your heart now in the springs of pure contrition.” His “Ego te absolvo” blended with Stephen’s “O my God, I am most heartily sorry for having offended Thee.” Together their voices rose in affirmation of the boundless love that taketh away the sins of the world.
DAY BY DAY, Stephen entered more deeply into the life of the monastery.
There were no drones in this monastic hive; each member of the community, whether a full-habited monk, a lay brother, or a postulant, had his assigned task. Some toiled in the gardens and vineyards stretching far out onto the Campagna; others tended goats and made an excellent cheese from their milk. The repair and upkeep of the old monastery required the constant attention of masons and carpenters. There were stablemen, kitchen helpers, cooks, launderers, and wielders of mop and broom. And finally there was the scientific work of the laboratory, where, under Dom Arcibal’s direction, a group of monks kept the seismograph adjusted and watched its needle scrawl a tremulous record of upheavals and displacements in all parts of the earth’s crust.
The entire life of the monastery pivoted on St. Benedict’s Rule—a remarkable document written fourteen hundred years ago, and still a model of wisdom and reasonableness in directing man’s attention to his eternal destiny. The rule barred extraordinary asceticism; St. Benedict— and Dom Arcibal after him—held surprisingly moderate views on fasting, mortification, and prayer. Although the use of flesh meat was forbidden, two meals a day were permitted. Idle chatter was discouraged, but conversation on profitable subjects might be pursued. Public prayers were brief; there was no limit, however, to the length of one’s private devotions. Studying the rule, Stephen found it to be singularly perceptive in gauging the capabilities and limitations of human nature. Benedict had shrewdly appraised the distance that a well-disposed soul could travel in its day-to-day progress toward God.
The chief spiritual activity of the Benedictines was the recitation of the Divine Office or Opus Dei—“to which,” as St. Benedict urged, “nothing is to be preferred.” Seven times daily—at Matins, Prime, Terce, Nones, Sext, Vespers, and Compline—the entire congregation gathered in the choir to chant the canonical hours. As a retreatant Stephen was permitted to be present, but could take no part in these exercises. Longing to lift his voice in the noble strophes of psalms and antiphon, he stood humbly mute while others praised the Creator’s name and works. After the first pangs of rejection had passed, he learned to console himself with Paul’s counsel to the Corinthians: “Sing with the spirit … sing also with the understanding.”
As a retreatant (and, therefore, a guest), Stephen might have claimed exemption from physical labor. On Dom Arcibal’s advice, however, he entered into the work of the community by helping in the kitchen for two hours before each meal. If vegetables were to be peeled, bread pans greased, or a fire built in the baking oven, Stephen performed these menial duties under the preoccupied eye of Brother Alphonsus—who turned out to be the short-jerkined, not-quite-bright oaf that Stephen had nicknamed “Fairhands” on the day of his arrival.
Brother Alphonsus was kitchen boy, dishwasher, and, by his own election, slavey-general to the monastery at large. A clumsier piece of clay had never whirled off the potter’s wheel. At stumbling, falling, bumping into chairs and tables, Brother Alphonsus was a virtuoso. As he staggered across the kitchen with an armful of hot loaves or a pile of plates, his lack of co-ordination seemed pitiful. Halfway across the floor it became ludicrous. When he finally reached his goal with the bread still in his arms, Stephen knew that by some miracle the God of falling sparrows had marked Fairhands for special protection.
Brother Alphonsus displayed an inexhaustible cheerfulness at whatever work he was doing. After the day’s cookery was over he would wash and iron the linen for the entire monastery—with great inner serenity and much exterior banging. As a lay brother he made no aspirations to the priesthood; while other members of the community chanted, performed devotional Offices, or helped Dom Arcibal with his seismographic work, Fairhands was content to remain in the kitchen. Although he could read well enough, he found no satisfaction in books. Evidently he feared that too much learning would make him vain.
It soon became clear to Stephen that every act of Fairhands’ life was a devotional exercise—offered privately when others were present, openly when he was
alone. Coming into the kitchen one morning, Stephen found him prostrate before the stove. At the risk of prying, Stephen asked, “What are you doing on the floor?”
Fairhands got up sheepishly. “I am not able to offer great things to God,” he said, “so I make what offerings I can. While waiting for my little pancake to cook, I sometimes prostrate myself in adoration of Him who gives me the grace to make it—as well as the flour to make it with.”
Stephen had known dedicated souls—his sister Ellen and Ned Halley among them—but he had never seen, or even heard of, a humility equal to that of Brother Alphonsus.
One day as Stephen helped Fairhands dice the onions and potatoes for the soup that was the main meal of the day, he thought he heard the lay brother call him by name. “What did you say?” asked Stephen above the clatter of knives. Fairhands shook his head: “Nothing.” A minute later Stephen again heard his name. “Whom are you talking to?” he demanded. Brother Alphonsus continued to hack away at great risk to his thick fingers, and said:
“I am merely asking God to accept my work as an act of love. …”
“Fine. But how did my name get into it?”
“I was begging Him to protect your fingers.”
“My fingers? What about your own?”
Fairhands began whacking at another onion. “If God wills that I cut myself, I shall accept it as a mark of His favor. But since I have placed the whole matter in His hands, it is not likely that any accident will befall.”
Since I have placed the whole matter in His hands …
All Dom Arcibal’s wisdom, all Stephen’s meditations on humility, all the devotions of the Opus Dei, were summed up in the crystal simplicity of Fairhands’ faith. Instead of trying to outrival the earthly father or dazzle the Heavenly One, you merely surrendered yourself, trustingly, completely, to His will. Whatever happened thereafter was a mark of special favor. …
As simple as that. And as difficult. …
STEPHEN stayed a month at the monastery. In prayer and contemplation the hours wheeled past, each a reminder of God’s timeless plan. When the month ended, Stephen’s problems were by no means settled, yet he had become aware, temporarily at least, of his true position as a finite and very humble segment on the compass of infinity.
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