Prince of Peace

by James Carroll

  I stood and shook hands with him. I felt oafish in my monastic mufti. I needed a shave and a shower. "I'm Frank Durkin," I said. The priest stared at me so intently I had to look away. And then my discomfort exploded into humiliation when for the first time it occurred to me that, after all those years, I had a part in Michael's legend too. I was the FBI informant.

  Canon Putnam turned back to Carolyn. "I hate to bother you with this, but there are television people outside. I've told them no interviews, of course. But I wanted to know your feelings about letting them film the service."

  Carolyn looked at me.

  "No," I said without hesitating. "Absolutely not."

  Putnam ignored me and continued to stare at Carolyn. "The more dramatic their footage, the more likely they'll use it. What better way to memorialize Michael than to draw attention to the killing in Beirut? Wouldn't he seize the opportunity to denounce...?"

  "I beg your pardon, Canon Putnam." I touched his shoulder. "But we don't want camera crews in church." Did I have to explain myself? Did I have to say it's against our religion? The man had the instincts of a publicist. So would you if you had the largest cathedral in the world and no congregation to fill it. No wonder he offered it to aerialists and jazz musicians and renegade Catholics.

  Carolyn said, "Television? Why is television here?"

  The canon touched her. "Because Michael is still news, my dear. He was a great American when America needed one." How did he manage to make even that tribute seem condescending? I pictured him, years before, as a seminarian who'd gone into the ministry, instead of the family investment firm, to avoid the draft. Nicholas Wiley would have been about his age by now.

  He waited for Carolyn to contradict me. When she didn't he said, "All right. But we can't stop them from filming outside." He looked at me. "Just so you'll know."

  I nodded at him, but the image of stars arriving at some premiere seemed ludicrous to me. No one would be coming to Michael's funeral. Television was there because Canon Martin Putnam, the Impresario Priest, had called them.

  "Dean Evans has mentioned you," he said. "You were a friend of Michael's, weren't you?"

  "Yes, I was his friend."

  It was easy to read the canon's expression, and he wanted me to: What friends poor Michael had, you and Archbishop O'Shea.

  Somehow I found it possible to continue looking at him this time. A surge of anger rescued me from my embarrassment. You Anglicans don't believe in excommunication, do you? And you never betray your best friends either. You have manners. If he says something ingratiating, I told myself, I will hit him.

  When Carolyn took my hand I was surprised. It was a manifestation of her loyalty, and I was grateful for it.

  Canon Putnam said to her, "Dean Evans will keep his remarks brief of course. He asked me to tell you that he intends to draw the connection between Michael's ministry and what's happening in Lebanon. Is there any other particular point you want him to make?"

  "His remarks?"

  "The eulogy."

  "Oh."

  Why was it a surprise to her? Clearly she had been unable to anticipate in any way the details of the service. Distress distorted her face, but instead of making her seem helpless, it girded her. She was still the strongest woman I had ever known. "Dean Evans has been wonderful to me, but he can't speak for Michael. I'm sorry, but he can't."

  "Well, I ... whatever you..."

  She turned to me. "Frank, will you?"

  THIRTY-TWO

  WHEN we were children nuns told us that Pentecost was the birthday of the Church. The silliness of that notion, the banality of it, struck me even as a boy in the overheated classrooms of Good Shepherd School. I am not inclined, like so many, to mock the memory of those earnest women. Such easy targets; my instinct is always to defend them. Nuns made the Church possible, and many of their ludicrous images—the Baby Jesus pretending to a drooling helplessness—made great mysteries available in ways the obtuse categories of theologians—Homoiousian—never could. But the birthday of the Church? I remember squirming at the idea of the Apostles gathering around a cake with one candle. Was I supposed to think of its flame as the fiery manifestation of the Holy Ghost? Was the noise they made with their Gift of Tongues the group's off-key singing of the Happy Birthday song?

  Now of course I am an informed Christian and I know what Pentecost really was. I refer to it here not for the sake of some blatant, facile comparison between the lives of Jesus and Michael Maguire, as if finally my point is to make Michael a latter-day Christ, but because at Pentecost was revealed the structure of human hope, which begins, of course, in despair. The followers of Jesus had disgraced themselves. They had all abandoned him, or, as Mark put it, rather more mercilessly, "They all forsook him and fled." They left a stranger, a centurion, one of the crucifiers, to finally and formally acknowledge Jesus: "Truly this man was the Son of God."

  Those who claimed to love Jesus simply disappeared. They were terrified that what happened to him was going to happen to them. And so they hid. They dispersed. They went their separate ways. Only one thing could have brought them together again—a miracle. Only a miracle could have changed them from confused, inarticulate, and beleaguered peasants into a company of preachers who would in a generation ignite an empire. Pentecost is the day on which the miracle happened. Not a mountain being moved, not the sun being stopped in the sky, the miracle was a eulogy. A eulogy of Jesus.

  The eulogist was no orator, and he was no hero. Of all the disciples he had the least right to stand in the main street of Jerusalem and speak of the Lord because, like Judas, who'd had the decency to kill himself, this man had not merely abandoned Jesus, but had explicitly betrayed him. He was Peter. When he stood up—had Mary asked him to?—and told the simple story of Jesus of Nazareth, everything changed. He told how Jesus went around doing good and how his words and actions fulfilled the promises of Scripture; how he came, like a good Jew, to Jerusalem for Passover, though he knew the leaders of the people plotted against him there; how he was arrested and, though the Romans offered to release him, how the people themselves demanded that he be put to death; how he was crucified among thieves; but also how His Father was faithful to him even in death and so raised him up to glory. In the exposition, the telling of the story itself, those who'd been a part of it were able to grasp its meaning at last, and those who hadn't been a part of it were able nevertheless to see its relevance to their lives.

  People from all over the world—Parthians, Medes and Elamites—heard Peter's words as a new language, but one they understood. And in the recitation of facts with which they were familiar but had never seen whole, as forming like every story a coherent structure with a beginning, a middle and an end, the people recognized the narrative that bound them together, that made them a community, that made them what came to be called the Church.

  What came to be called the kerygma, the Good News, the Gospel, began—and this is the miracle—as the coward's eulogy of the only man he ever loved, the one whom he betrayed.

  I was in the huge Gothic cathedral alone, walking the aisles. Michael's funeral was to begin in half an hour. A few people had taken places in pews at great distance from each other. Once more I felt the pang of disappointment for him. In that vast space it would seem that no one came, no one cared. He would have passed from the earth unnoticed, unmourned by all but a meager remnant. If the death of this man was insignificant, whose wasn't?

  Yet also, at the same time, the space itself, however it dwarfed us or because it did, was exactly right for that particular liturgy. In the end that structure overpowered its own history, and its associations with class and denomination meant nothing. It was a Gothic cathedral, and to a Catholic its stones were sacred. Its aisles, its nave, its narthex, its crossing, its transept and choir formed the geography of memory. At first I'd felt entrapped by it, but memory is what saves us when we are faced with death. These were the darkened, mysterious aisles along which I'd run with Michael as a boy. Actu
ally I'd run after him, for he was the one who led the way in all our explorations, our adventures. He was the one who'd pushed first into tunnels or who leapt into quarries or who sallied forth on the winter's first ice. I, with others, had stood outside those tunnels, back from those cliffs, on those shores, waiting to see if he made it, to see if it was safe. And we'd cried after him, "Go, Michael, go!"

  The pointed patterns of color splashing the stone floor from the stained-glass windows signaled the coming of nightfall, for this was evening light, not morning. Yet my memories had not, as I'd feared, condemned me to an end-of-the-day nostalgia. The sun was gone behind the buildings of the city, but its last light and warmth filtered into that immense yet intimate enclosure. The feelings I had for him filled it, and like angels whose wings could be heard fluttering in the reaches, so also did the memories we'd inherited from our people, of their adventures. In this place we'd recognized that those adventures going back eons were ours. That communal memory suggested that we had hidden from barbarians behind these pillars; we had taken the spiraling stone stairways at a clip, yeomen rushing to the battlements; we had crept from cavern to cavern, from vigil light to lantern; we had attended coronations and installations and heard anathemas pronounced from the great Chair; we had been present when saints were named and kings wed and cardinals invested and nonconformists banished; and we had lowered our heads and struck our breasts countless times when the anointed one high above us held for all to behold the broken Body of Our Lord. The Gothic cathedral is the Catholic's Holy Land, and even those of us who were raised in pale parish churches carried in our minds, as Jews did Palestine, the image of that homeland. You see, as Catholics we knew that we, like that very place—and isn't this what's gone now?—were made for worship.

  I had been grieving for Michael, but for so much more than him. He was the flower of Catholic life, the best we had, the one who went before us and showed that it was safe. Against the numbing sameness of secular culture even as it had encroached upon the Church, he had stood as our champion in exactly the way, as a boy-soldier, he had stood against the enemy for the sake of his friends. He could risk his life because he believed innately that life is made for more than itself. That innate knowledge—what made him a hero—became the conscious religious affirmation—what made him a priest—of his maturity. The world is made for more than itself: that is what Michael meant. That is what the structure of the cathedral meant. No mere achievement or act of heroism could have justified or explained his life, as no organizational function, no bishop's throne, no social or aesthetic purpose could have justified or explained that church. Michael Maguire was the Gothic cathedral of men. He and it were made—I hesitate to introduce the word after all this time in the telling—for God.

  If God did not exist, then that building was a cruel, pompous joke on itself. If God did not exist, then Michael Maguire, war hero, resistance leader and priest-against-the-Church was a figure of the absurd. I did not think, in beginning this story, that it would end religiously. I had thought rather that religion was that cluster of false notes we had left behind. I had gone, perversely, to a desert monastery to escape it. And hadn't Michael abandoned his religion to love a woman and make a family? The Catholic Church, like a good Roman, had fallen on its sword. Hence the unarticulated grief of a generation of sophisticates. We were exactly like the sons and daughters of a suicide, with anger for the past and fear for the future, each so intense we never consciously entertained them. If the Church could not maintain the loyalty of men like Michael, then surely—and wasn't this to be our theme?—God's work on earth had failed.

  As it had when His Son was crucified, his disciples having fled. As it had until Peter stood among strangers and told the story.

  Is it the core Christian insight that just when we free ourselves from the spell religion casts, we come face to face with God? When we confront failure we succeed? When we die we live? Doesn't the inbuilt tension between forgiveness and sin provide the drama of every human narrative? Aren't the stresses between, in Simone Weil's phrase, gravity and grace what keep the Gothic masterpieces standing?

  Michael was dead, but God lived.

  Was that enough for me?

  Could one believe finally in the Resurrection of the Dead? That is the question this story puts. As it was the question Peter's put. It is the only question left, and has always been.

  I was ready now to be with him.

  His coffin waited, still, in the baptistry, the priest-hole, and as I crossed in front of the high altar toward that octagonal chamber in which the marble font sat like God's crown, I genuflected, right knee to left heel with an altar boy's precision. The physical gesture reassured me, restored me, reminded me.

  On the coldest mornings of winter in Inwood the place we loved to be was in the sanctuary—steaming radiators, undulating linoleum tile, threadbare orientals—of Good Shepherd Church. Each pair of altar boys thought of themselves as halves of one person. Since they, together, held the corners of the priest's chasuble while he genuflected and raised up the Sacred Host, it was natural for altar boys to come to think that together they were worthy of almost anything. But let a morning come when one of the pair did not appear; the other was struck with terror at what he had to do alone. What if the Host fell to the floor? What if the finger-towel got wet? What if he forgot the secret Latin phrases that the priest's hocus pocus— "Hoc est Corpus ..."—required?

  I always served Mass with Michael because he never failed to come and he always knew exactly what to say and when to move the Book. And if the unexpected happened, a tabernacle key missing or a shortage of sacred wafers or a blown-out paschal candle, I knew that Michael could deal with it. At those times, I anticipated terrified GIs and Vietnamese priests and American draft-dodgers, crying after him as he moved decisively to do whatever had to be done, "Go, Michael! Go!"

  A tower shaped like a lantern and supported by rounded arches overhung the baptistry. It was nearly dark in there, shadows dominated, and at first I did not see the coffin. Had attendants moved it already? But no, for I had just crossed the intersection of aisles where it would sit during the funeral. The coffin would be carried into the nave in the opening procession. As my eyes adjusted I saw the oblong shape against the arched doorway that led to the columbarium, the room where ashes were interred in stone, the final prison. Caroly was right to want the earth for him, not walls.

  Slowly I approached.

  I wanted to cast aside our personal history. I wanted to exchange the end of our friendship for the beginning. Couldn't we have been two boys lifting up the corners of a golden chasuble forever? That close to God? That close to one another? Instead we were two men on a weather-beaten desperate island, separated forever by the woman who united us. I saw him looking back at me, amazed, through that fog of pathos which was to blur, then stain, the entire chronicle of our time. Even the most cherished memories of our innocence had become polluted by the knowledge of what happened. It was like wanting to be rid of our national history. Oh, if we could only have been the heroes of the world, vanquishers of Hitler, defenders of freedom, forever. Oh, if we could only have had our Kennedy, our Pope John, our Tom Dooley, Tom Merton, our Cardinal Spellman in his prime, our Martin Luther King. If we could only have had the Holy Catholic Church we'd first believed in. If we could only have had "America."

  Instead we had Vietnam. That evil war forms the center of this narrative, not as the source of all the evil that befell us, but as the great reminder that no nation is holy—not even ours; no Church is sacred—not even this one; any more than a single one of us is free from sin—not even Michael Maguire. The shadow of the Fall has been upon this story from the start, and that, not references to cathedrals, cardinals or the infidelity of priests, is what has made it Catholic. The bronze cock stands on every paragraph, as if it were a barn, a basilica, and like the memory of My Lai, it rattles each time the wind blows. It crows each time we deny who we are. And for every denial there is later put the q
uestion, thrice, "Do you love me, friend, more than these others do?" In every paragraph I have tried to answer.

  I tell you, Michael, dead as you are, that you and I ourselves embodied the age without knowing it. We were the town that had to be destroyed to be saved. We were the immolations and the gunships and the body bags. We were the naked girl running down the road with napalm bubbling her skin. We were the dark-eyed campus beauty at Kent State, screeching above the corpse of her youth. We were the scar on LBJ's belly, and we were the coonskin on the wall. We were what made Cassius Clay change his name. We were the stonewall around Nixon and we were Washington aflame. Instead of in truth or God we believed in our innocence, then in our sorrows, and that is what made us dangerous. You were going to end the war. I was going to create a mansion of literature, love and loyalty.

  We had handfuls of each other that we carried like treasures until the day we turned and found that all we carried were stones. What else to do but set them rolling? How did it feel to be all alone? To be on your own? How did it feel? Oh, dear reader, by now dear friend, don't ask me. I could never tell you. Ask Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, Cesare Pavese, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin, Papa Hemingway, William Inge, and why shouldn't our souls be disquieted?

  "Go, Michael!" I cried. But also, "Wait for me!" You didn't. You forgot what my life was, and you became hard while I grew soft. You were too far ahead to see it happening when I became totally—overly—dependent on one thing. Not you, God or booze. Just her. She was all I needed and all I had. And no one in the world—not Nixon, Mao or J. Edgar Hoover—could have destroyed our love but you. You took Carolyn from me, you bastard. And I repaid you without a kiss.

  And now I was touching the gleaming wood of your coffin, at the end of my recitation.

  How could I believe in God, Church or the Resurrection of the Dead when I did not believe you were in that box? You, Michael, in the throes of decay? You, Michael, with a waxen face? A rosary through your fingers? All you ever had were bones and flesh, fleet feet and that fierce conscience of yours. Now they were separated? If flesh was falling from your bones, why did mine adhere? If you were dead, Michael, how could I believe that I was alive? The box alone did not convince me.