Called

PART ONE

THE DREAM OF THE PRIEST

1

THE DREAM OF THE PRIEST

I STILL DREAM SOMETIMES THAT I can fly. Flying is really easy—you surmount the tops of houses and sail over them, looking down at the roof tiles and chimneys as they pass beneath you. Maybe you approach a grove of trees, a bit cowed by their great height. Then you remember that you can fly, and your troubles are over: you float above them all. Funny, I never dream of landing—only of the ascent. I always awaken from these dreams a little surprised to be earthbound.

Let’s see: a ballerina. An archeologist. A lawyer. A college professor. A singer. An actor. I thought I might be a lot of things. Priest was not on the radar screen for girls when I was young, so when I raised it as a possibility I was told that girls couldn’t be priests, and I accepted that as the fact it was. I know many women priests who yearned to be ordained long before it was possible, but I was not one of them. There were plenty of other things to be.

I crowded some of these ambitions together at the same time—a career combining ballet and archeology made perfect sense to me for at least a year. I remember a friend in my dance class who wanted to be both a dancer and a nun. Why not, we told each other? The world was so full of interesting things to be, and our energy was boundless—we could not recall ever having been tired. Time seemed endless to us. In short, nothing stood in the way of our doing anything we wanted to do. This we knew. We were eleven or twelve, I think. Not enough of our lives had passed yet to sober us. Young girls think they can do anything.

Even after that golden I’ll-have-one-of-everything phase is over, another invincible season follows, one in which it seems that a person can do anything she sets her mind to. That limits aren’t real; they are merely a failure of nerve. I wish everybody could feel that way forever, but nobody does. Life is just not like that.

Eventually, you settle on something, in a more informed choice. Maybe you meet someone who already does that to which you aspire. Probably you seek out such people, make it your business to meet as many of them as you can, gravitating toward everything about this profession on which you are in the process of setting your heart.

Perhaps there are special clothes and equipment—a uniform, a lab coat. A stethoscope, perhaps. For us, a clerical collar and liturgical vestments. There are special stores that sell only clerical furnishings, and a quiet but rather intense rivalry exists among these establishments in their competition for the largest share of what has always been a very small market.

A flat package arrives at the door. You know what it is—you’ve been expecting it, with an eagerness that would embarrass you if you thought anybody else knew about it. It is your new black clerical shirt, your first. With it, three round white collars and a set of collar studs—soon, you will have to order more studs, but you don’t know that yet. You don’t know how easy they are to lose.

You wait until you are alone to try it on—you don’t really want anyone else to know that your appearance matters to you. You are a bit surprised yourself, actually; surely it was the work itself to which you were called, not the clothes. Occasionally, you have heaped inner scorn upon people you thought were too attracted to the haberdashery of your calling; now you appear to be one of them. And yet you study yourself in the mirror, once you’ve plumbed the intricacies of fastening the collar onto the shirt, an operation that was second nature to gentlemen of the Victorian era and will very soon be second nature to you. Something like a cleric looks back at you, somebody dressed in a way people don’t dress any more, and never did, really: although well-dressed men of the nineteenth century did wear detachable collars, the round dog collar is not ancient, nor is it a survival of street wear from an earlier age, as so many liturgical vestments are. It dates only from the 1840s, and only clerics have ever worn it. Before 1840, the clergy dressed like everyone else. So did doctors, until even later, and nurses as well.

You don’t know yet how often you will wear yours. You haven’t learned yet that if you forget to pack your collar on a trip, you can make one out of stiff paper folded lengthwise, or from plastic you have cut in a strip from a white jug of laundry detergent. You don’t know yet that you can fabricate a collar stud from a paper clip, if one of yours drops irretrievably down a grate, or that you can use a cufflink.

There is some other stuff you don’t know yet.

My friend Kevin grew up Irish Catholic. He loved everything about church—the Latin, the incense, the music, the statues, the bread and the wine. Of course he was an altar boy. He was scrupulous in all his observances—a daily Mass and the daily confession that went with it, the keeping of every fast day. He loved all the priests in his parish, and was always available to serve them at the altar. It was apparent to him from before he made his First Holy Communion that he was born to be a priest, too, and everything in his life for as long as he could remember had been in preparation for that. His mother was proud—her son, a priest!

At seventeen, he was sent to minor seminary with the blessing of his entire Brooklyn neighborhood. Of course he loved it. He strove to excel in holiness, really to be the devout Catholic he knew God wanted him to be. He fasted more than other students, stayed in chapel longer after the liturgies had ended. Every day was a test, a chance to be better than he had been the day before.

Such devotion. I am guessing that he might have been a bit holier-than-thou with the other seminarians. Kevin was very young then, and young people aren’t always as sensitive to the feelings of others as they might be.

The seminary years continued, and his devotion only increased, if that were possible. Certainly his professors’ job was to encourage their students’ piety, but even they grew concerned about Kevin’s extreme version of it. It was too much! They forbade his extra fasts, his long chapel vigils. He needed to eat and sleep. The tussle between their concern and his devotion was an ongoing war. In time, Kevin lost. He was asked not to return.

He would never be a priest.

Kevin’s dream was destroyed. The church to which he had dedicated his life had rejected his offering of himself. To say that he was devastated would be like saying that the Grand Canyon is big.

A long period of desolation followed. He found a secular career. He turned away from the church—it didn’t help that these were the years in which the innovations of Vatican II were implemented, and Kevin couldn’t stand any of them. The dignity and beauty he had loved all his life was swept away in a vernacular swirl of guitar music. It was clear that there was no church for him anymore.

Cutting this cord did open him to some things he had never considered. Love was one—he met the man who would become his life partner, and they began a relationship that would last more than fifty years. He lived a New York life, like millions of his fellow citizens—Sunday morning brunch with the New York Times. Years passed.

One day, Kevin was walking along West 46th Street on his way back to his office from lunch. He heard the music of an organ and looked in the direction from which it came, the open door of a church. He had passed that church a thousand times, but today the door was open. He climbed the steps and peered in: the priest was censing the altar, flanked by the deacon and subdeacon, who each lifted the hem of his beautiful brocade cope out of his way as he moved from one end of the altar to the other. Kevin could smell the incense from the door. He turned aside from his journey and walked in. The holy water stoup beside the entrance was full—he wet his fingers and crossed himself, for the first time in years. A statue of the Blessed Mother greeted him from behind her bank of votive candles in a station halfway down the nave.

The Mass was in English, yes, but it was Elizabethan English. It was not precisely the church of his childhood, but it was close enough. There was not a guitar in sight. Kevin was home.

The priest caught sight of him after the Mass and greeted him kindly. They talked for a few minutes that day, and Kevin hurried back to his office. But he began to attend Mass daily. He joined the parish. He did whatever he could to help out. No task was too big or too small. His partner was welcomed by the priest and everyone else when he visited. Kevin’s Irish Catholic mother was dead by now, so she was spared the knowledge that her son was becoming an Episcopalian. This was a good thing, for it probably would have killed her.

The priest suggested that Kevin attend a Cursillo retreat—the first one ever in Episcopal New York. He became a leader in that worldwide spiritual renewal community, founded and led by laypeople. This involved leadership at retreat weekends, where Kevin frequently was called upon to tell his story.

We heard this story often, over the years. Fifteen talks are given on a Cursillo weekend, and over the dozens of retreats in which he assisted, Kevin gave most of them, some more than once. This story of his vocation almost always made an appearance. Kevin revived his habit from seminary of staying in chapel (sometimes all night) to pray for people on the weekends, now an offering instead of scrupulosity. He was a mentor to many in the Cursillo movement in New York, as well as in his parish. From waiting on tables to presiding, he did it all gladly. He was a devoted and supportive friend to many priests and many laypeople, Episcopal and Roman Catholic alike. To tell this story, I reached out to friends from those days. We shared memories of Kevin, who has been dead for some time now. Writing about him here has made me miss him, and has filled me with gratitude for having known him.

Though they broke his heart, the faculty at the seminary were right about Kevin’s vocation: he would have been the wrong kind of priest, he used to say, if he had realized his dream early in life as he and everyone else had expected he would. He would have regarded ordination as the reward for his rigid adherence to doing things the one and only right way. It would have confirmed him in the belief that perfection was not only possible, it was obligatory. Imposing it upon himself, he would have imposed it on others. He would have become harsh and judgmental. He would have been too dutiful