“Joe, he says I should think it over for two weeks. He’ll give me a letter of recommendation then, if I haven’t changed my mind. Says in the meantime I can wear this.”
Joe felt the hair shirt, as he hadn’t that evening in the Rector’s study, first with his fingers, then with the back of his hand, and said, “Whew!”
“Joe, I think the Rector figures I wear it I’ll change my mind.”
“You won’t,” said Joe, and he was right.
A few days before Christmas, on a Wednesday afternoon (Wednesday afternoons were “free” at the seminary), Hrdlicka departed for the Trappists with a letter of recommendation from the Rector and also with the hair shirt — a going-away present from the Rector. Joe accompanied him to the railroad station.
Since they were there early, Joe having hailed a cab while they were waiting for a bus, they sat down and talked. Presently, Joe was asking Hrdlicka for the hair shirt! He said there would be God’s plenty of such where Hrdlicka was going. Hrdlicka was willing in principle to oblige Joe but not in fact, because he was wearing the shirt. (Joe had thought it was in Hrdlicka’s suitcase.) Joe agreed that it might be awkward for Hrdlicka as a novice, even before he took the vow of silence, to ask the Trappists to mail the hair shirt to a friend, but neither Joe nor Hrdlicka liked the idea of just giving up. Then “Hey!” cried Joe, and told Hrdlicka his plan. They went to the men’s room, into adjoining stalls, where they undressed from the waist up, and Hrdlicka passed the hair shirt over the top of the partition to Joe.
That was how Joe got the hair shirt. The only bad thing — something that made Joe ashamed of himself when he thought of Thomas à Becket — was that he’d succumbed to fastidiousness in the stall, and had emerged from it with the hair shirt in a pocket of his overcoat, and had then deceived the simple Hrdlicka by squirming and saying, “Whew!”
For his penance, Joe had walked back to the seminary, three miles against a north wind, ears freezing all the way, save for a minute or two in a little grocery where he stopped to purchase a box of Rinso.
Wearing the hair shirt was like coming from a really careless barber and being pricked by clippings on a hot summer day, only much worse, and so Joe, being human and not a masochist, was glad when he could take the thing off. This he did at night, hand-washing it in the utility room — too much traffic in the lavatorium — and leaving it to dry on his radiator, over a towel, as he would a woollen sweater.
As a discomforter of the flesh and a strengthener of the spirit, the hair shirt probably did the job, but Joe was still where he’d been before with respect to growth in holiness — still stuck in the first stage of his hoped-for spiritual evolution, in the purgative “way”—and was afraid he’d never enter the contemplative way, not to mention the unitive. The little appetizers of spiritual delight that Joe had read were not infrequently vouchsafed to the beginner — though they were not to be mistaken for the banquet itself, for they would soon be withdrawn — were not vouchsafed to him. He wasn’t giving up, though. He was still in there — in the chapel for hours every day, trying, praying.
Mooney and Rooney were also doing hard time in the chapel, but they, unlike Joe and Cooney (who said, however, that wearing a hair shirt was taking an unfair advantage, like wearing brass knuckles), were openly complaining, wanting results — especially Mooney.
“Joe, I’m not getting anywhere.”
“Let’s go for a walk, Chuck.”
During this period of crisis with both Mooney and Rooney wavering, Joe often took one or both of them for a walk around the seminary grounds. When it was really too cold to go for a walk, as it often was those days in January, Joe would say they’d be better for it, for the discomfort, and then Mooney, if not Rooney, would go gladly. Mooney could see that mortification was not an end in itself but a means to an end, a smelting process that got rid of what was worst and left what was best in a man, which was something that guys much brighter than Mooney, guys who called the little band “spiritual athletes,” just couldn’t see, or wouldn’t. Unfortunately, in his reading, and he was not a great reader, Mooney had a taste for the flashy — Blessed Angela of Foligno punishing herself by drinking the water in which she had washed the sores of a leper, St Ben Joe Labre retrieving the lice that left him and piously putting them up his sleeve, that sort of thing — a taste that Joe did not share (and hoped he never would, however much he grew in holiness). “Chuck, your eyes are bigger than your stomach,” Joe told Mooney, and quoted Pope Pius XI: “‘Sanctity is the chief and most important endowment of the Catholic priest,’ Chuck. ‘Without it other gifts will not go far; with it, even supposing other gifts to be meager [Joe’s italics], the priest can work marvels.’” Joe prescribed more prayer and renunciation for Mooney. “I saw a Baby Ruth wrapper in your wastebasket, Chuck.”
In this manner, his words vaporizing in the icy air, Joe spoke to Mooney, and sometimes to Rooney, on their walks around the seminary grounds, stopping here and there to make a point. His favorite place to stop was a spot from which they could view, across the road, a billboard advertisement showing an amiable old clergyman (obviously Protestant, but no matter) sniffing the air as he passed under a windowsill on which a freshly baked pie was cooling. “There you are,” Joe would say. “That’s how most people see the clergy. And they’re right.”
It seemed to Joe that the billboard, taken with his commentary — he was scathing on the subject of the beery little evenings in the Rector’s study — had a steadying effect on the wavering Mooney, but as time went on it was hard to get Mooney to stop at that spot, and impossible when Rooney was along. In any case, the billboard was changed. And Rooney — saying, “I’m sorry”—resigned from the little band.
The next evening, as Joe was about to leave his room for a siege in the chapel, Mooney dropped in.
“Joe, I’m not cut out for this,” he said. “I just want to be a good priest and maybe work with the poor.”
“Chuck, you can’t give what you haven’t got — even to the poor.”
“Yeah, I know, Joe.”
“So there you are, Chuck. And Thomas Aquinas tells us, Chuck, that ‘to fulfill the duties of Holy Orders, common goodness does not suffice; but excelling goodness is required; that they who receive Orders and are thereby higher in rank than the people may also be higher in holiness.’”
“May?”
“He means ‘must’—you know how cagey he is.”
“Yeah. But I’m not getting anywhere, Joe.”
“Chuck, I’m not getting anywhere. And Cooney — I happen to know he’s not getting anywhere. So there you are.”
“What d’ya mean, ‘So there you are’? Joe, I wish you wouldn’t always say that.”
“We’re all in the same boat, Chuck. That’s what I mean.”
“Joe, maybe we don’t all want to be in the same boat with you. Ever think of that?”
“Rooney, you mean?”
“I mean me. I’ve had it,” said Mooney, and turned away. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” said Joe, sounding smug, but really hurt.
And so the little band was down to two — if that. The next evening, at a lecture in the auditorium, Joe asked during the question period, “Father, how can we make sanctity as attractive as sex to the common man?” (after all, the speaker had quoted Léon Bloy: “There is but one sorrow — not to be a saint”), and Cooney, who was sitting beside Joe, laughed right along with the rest.
Early the next morning Joe was summoned to the Rector’s office, where the tobacco clouds were already building up, churning in the winter sunlight, and the Rector, like a nice old gray devil in his element, head smoking, hand smoking, waved Joe to a chair.