“The priest’s life,” Joe said at the class’s next little get-together, to which he’d received what had seemed to him a last-minute invitation, “any priest’s life, anybody’s life, in order to be fruitful in this world, to say nothing of the next, has to be rooted in contemplation. This is especially true of our life, which otherwise becomes one of sheer activity — the occupational disease of the diocesan clergy.”
“Look,” Rooney said. “I don’t want to listen to that stuff tonight. I’m here to relax. You guys don’t know what it’s like to run a four-hundred-family parish all by yourself.”
“That so?” replied Joe. “Happens to be what I’m doing at Holy Faith.”
“Another parish heard from,” said Cooney.
“Bob,” Mooney said to Rooney, “we all have our crosses to bear.”
“I still don’t want to listen to that stuff tonight,” Rooney said. “I had a tough day.” So Joe shut up, and the clerical shoptalk, which he’d only cut into because it had gone on too long, continued.
At the very end, when Joe was leaving the restaurant for the parking lot, he was approached by Rooney. “Sorry, Joe,” Rooney said. “But I had a tough one today.”
“Bob, I know what you mean.”
They went out to their cars together.
In the weeks that followed, Joe and Bob saw more of each other than they ever had before, except for that short time at the seminary when Bob had embraced the contemplative life. Joe hoped that Bob was having second thoughts about the active life, that it wasn’t only their plight as overworked assistants that had drawn them together again, but in any case he had a friend in Bob. They knew each other’s phone number by heart, and frequently met in the course of their duties — Bob pausing at Holy Faith on his way home from downtown, Joe at St John Bosco’s, Bob’s parish, after visiting the hospital nearby.
St John Bosco’s, unlike Holy Faith, was a new plant, with paid secretaries, the latest in equipment, and programs and organizations galore, many overlapping. The parish was too much for one man — even for him, Bob said, unless he was there every minute, which he couldn’t be. The pastor, Monsignor McConkie, or Mac, as Bob called him, a handsome silver-haired glad-hander, who had long ago joined everything joinable and now acknowledged when he got up in the morning, if he did, that he was in too deep and had a serious drinking problem, expected Bob to “represent” him and the parish at functions that Mac was under both doctor’s and confessor’s orders to stay away from. The worst ones — worst because there was no end to them — were service-club luncheons at downtown hotels. Bob attended three or four of these a week, and it was usually after one of them, in the middle of the afternoon, in high spirits or low, that he paused at Holy Faith.
Joe, usually in the office at that time of day — he’d moved the old prie-dieu down there — would make a drink for the visitor, as was the practice at St John Bosco’s, and they’d discuss what was uppermost in their minds: Boots, if she’d gone for Bob on the way in; Mrs Cox, if the TV in the living room was coming through well; or problems of universal concern. One of these was church finance, a subject that Bob had ideas about and that Joe, though he’d scorned it and clerical bookkeeping at the seminary, now felt he should interest himself in. To judge by some correspondence from the Chancery in the files, nobody else at Holy Faith had done so in recent times. What could be said of the take at Holy Faith — not enough — could also be said of organizations: only two, the Holy Name Society (men) and the Christian Mothers (their wives). Reluctantly, Joe would agree that something should be done about Youth or, anyway, about Young People and Young Marrieds — Bob had ideas about all these — but then Joe would renege and say he didn’t want to bite off more than he could chew: a veiled reference to the situation at St John Bosco’s.
“Heaven forbid!” Bob said. “Still, we’re in the same boat, Joe.”
That they were in the same boat (a commonplace in their discussions) and that Bob was having a rougher ride Joe would accept, but he couldn’t agree that there was so little to choose between those responsible for their plights — between, if you didn’t count the Archbishop, a mystic and a drunk — as to make no difference. One afternoon, Joe told Bob that it was the Father Van Slaags, oddly enough, and not the Monsignor McConkies, who kept the world going, who, by their feats of prayer and abnegation, stayed the hand of God. This, though he didn’t like to hear it — noncontemplatives never did — Bob knew to be the accepted and time-honored belief of the Church.
Joe would have made his point even better had he spoken of what he’d seen the night before, when he’d gone to Father Van Slaag’s room to complain about Boots and Mrs Cox’s TV, only to change his mind and ask permission to order Sunday-collection envelopes from another supplier, and then to retire to think, as he’d been doing ever since, on what he’d seen through the gaps in the old, almost buttonless cassock that Father Van Slaag wore for a nightshirt — the horny gray growths on the knees, the dogtooth wounds on the ankles. Dear God! What Joe had wondered about ever since coming to Holy Faith was clear to him then: why Father Van Slaag did nothing about Mrs Cox’s dog and TV. He was using them, these crosses, as a means to sanctification and salvation — making life make sense, which it otherwise wouldn’t. Out of prudence, and out of reverence for Father Van Slaag, Joe didn’t tell Bob or anyone else what he’d seen that night, but thereafter, whenever Bob said that their pastors ought to be put away — Mac in a sanitarium, Van in a cloister or cave — Joe was silent, brooding on those ankles and knees in awe and humility. He had decided that Father Van Slaag was — and not just in the sense that the word applied to anybody in the state of grace but in the sense that it applied to the big-time mystics and martyrs — a saint.
Before that night in Father Van Slaag’s room, Joe had tried to do the job he’d been ordained to do for God and humanity while also trying, for the sake of the former, to preserve himself to a degree from the latter, but afterward there was a change in him. Without exactly going ape, Joe let down the barrier and no longer distinguished as he had before, sharply, between the religious and the social demands of parishioners. Mrs Cox noticed it. “What?” she’d say. “Stepping out again?”
In this change in him there was a certain despair, a giving up on himself and the contemplative life. Why not? When he tried to look down as God must and saw one man fending off Boots with a cane, the other allowing himself to be savaged by her, amortizing the world’s great debt of sin a little, deferring foreclosure — really, there was no comparison. In that kind of company, Joe just didn’t figure. Still, you never knew where you were in the spiritual life; that was the hell of it — only God knew. Joe’s hope had to be that he was, without knowing it, a sleeper. He thought of Cardinal Merry del Val, who, as Pius X’s secretary of state, was another overworked assistant to a saint, and perhaps one himself; among his personal effects, after his death, had been discovered (a shock to his friends in high places and low, these instruments of penance) two barbed-wire undershirts and a scourge with dried blood on it. But that sort of thing, though still nice to know — edifying — was discouraging if dwelt on, intimidating, like Father Van Slaag’s ankles and knees. Joe took more comfort in Scripture — in “Whosoever shall seek to save his life, shall lose it,” in “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” though this too was pushing it in his case. The truth was he hadn’t sacrificed his spiritual life — it had been done for him, by his appointment to Holy Faith. All he’d done since then, and might deserve credit for, was to stop grudging the time spent in doing the routine work of the parish, the time he might have spent in prayer. The old prie-dieu, which he’d been carrying back up to his bedroom one morning when the office phone rang, was still where he’d left it then, on the stair landing where he’d first found it, and since Mrs Cox had come along before he could get back to it, it was serving as a plant stand again. He didn’t mind. Though praying a lot less these days, he prayed harder when he did (as recommended by Merry del Val), and though working harder and seeing more people, he had more appetite for them. The truth was, he’d always had a weakness for people, a weakness suppressed at the seminary but now indulged and transformed into a strength, a virtue.