The Good Shepherd (2 page)

Four or five hands shot up. He picked one in the back row on the boys’ side. “Eight thousand,” said a deep voice, whose owner did not bother to stand up.

“Eight thousand people. Can you imagine that? And the Apostles laid hands on them, and the Holy Spirit entered into these converts. Then what did they do?” He chose a hand in the back row on the girls’ side.

“They went out and converted more people.”

“Well, some of them did that. But they
all
did something even more important. What was it? What are Christians supposed to do?”

This time there were no hands. He selected a girl in the pew nearest him. She was tall, bony, and a little stupid-looking. She furrowed her brow and said: “Obey the commandments?”

“That’s important. But what’s even more important for Christians to do? Come on. Somebody tell me. This is the most important question I’ve asked yet.”

“Love one another,” said a clear, sweet voice from the center of the girls’ side of the aisle.

“Right. From the very start of the Church, this was what made the Christians stand out. The Romans, the Jews, everyone, used to say: ‘See those Christians. How they love one another.’ That’s how I hope you’ll show everyone - your father and mother, your brothers and sisters, your friends, classmates - show them all what it means to receive the Holy Spirit. We don’t have time here to discuss what it means to love each other. It’s not easy. It’s easy to say but not easy to do. I hope you’ll discuss it in class this week and write a letter about it. Give me at least one example of how you decided to prove you were a Christian by loving someone and doing something about it.”

In the sacristy, Dennis McLaughlin almost groaned aloud. He would have to answer all those letters. You are an incurable romantic idiot, he fumed at himself. This man did not talk you into becoming his secretary. You talked yourself into it with your absurd illusions about penetrating to the heart of the power structure. All he wanted and needed was an energetic, reasonably intelligent drudge.

“Now I think we’re ready to begin the mass and administer the sacrament of confirmation,” Matthew Mahan said. He entered the sanctuary and took the bishop’s chair behind the altar. Monsignor O’Reilly said the mass. After the Gospel, Matthew Mahan gave a brief sermon. He talked about his own confirmation, how he had come home convinced that he possessed the Holy Spirit and attempted to convert his younger brother, Charlie. “I didn’t think he was a very good Christian,” he said. “I told him he had to stop calling me names, that he had to loan me his baseball glove whenever I wanted it, share his candy with me, and give me the last helping of dessert, if there was no more left. That shows what kind of a Christian I was, in those days. I had it all backward. I thought it was my job to start converting everyone else, on the assumption that I was more or less perfect. It took me thirty or forty years to know better.

“Now I know that the most important gift of the Holy Spirit is the
power
to love. That may sound strange to you young people. Of course, you love your fathers and mothers, your brothers and sisters. Love seems easy at your age. But when you grow older, it’s much more challenging. Especially the kind of love that Jesus urges us to practice. The love for the lost sheep, for sinners, for people who are in trouble. Read what he says about it. He tells us that it is better to go looking for one lost sheep and let the ninety-nine obedient, faithful sheep stay on the hills. That’s risky, hard. Not many Catholics - in fact, not many people of any religion - practice that kind of love. It’s the kind I hope you’ll practice when you grow up.”

He returned to the bishop’s chair, and the children streamed up onto the altar in two lines. Matthew Mahan anointed each with the holy chrism and laid his hand against their cheeks. Watching, Dennis McLaughlin remembered the wild rumors that had circulated through the school before his own confirmation. Most were about the blow on the cheek that had no biblical basis whatsoever and was added to the rite to remind the Christians that they must be ready to suffer martyrdom for their faith. There were tales of bishops knocking smaller boys unconscious, especially if they failed to answer correctly a question from the catechism. The whole scene had been projected as melodrama, a personal confrontation between quivering eleven- and twelve-year-olds and the toad-faced old man whose picture glared down from the wall of the principal’s office. High Noon in the sanctuary. Instead, they had all been marched to the communion rail and told to stand, not kneel, on the highest step, so His Excellency would not have to bend over so far.

Then the old man, surrounded by altar boys carrying the oil and priests obsequiously holding his robes, had gone down the long line mumbling Latin and daubing on oil and touching an occasional cheek with his hand whenever it occurred to him. Dennis had been one of those touched. He could still remember the scaly coldness of those ancient fingers, the involuntary shudder they had sent through him.

Everyone had gone home bewildered, wondering why they had spent the previous four weeks memorizing dozens of catechism questions which they had never been asked. That night Dennis had lain awake in his bed trying to detect some sign of the Holy Spirit in his body. But he did not feel braver, stronger, or happier. The next day, in school, the bullies were back tormenting “Brains” McLaughlin, as they called him, Sister was screaming imprecations and whaling away with her ruler, the girls simpered and tattled on the boys and on each other, and the standard topic of male discussion was still Mary McNamara, who would, it was rumored strongly, drop her drawers and hold up her skirts for a nickel. So passed away the light of that world.

After mass, Dennis helped Matthew Mahan take off his vestments. He noticed that the long white undergarment, the alb, was soaked with perspiration. “That’s hot work,” Matthew Mahan remarked. “I don’t know why it is, but whenever I speak in public, I sweat like a steer. It’s enough to make me wonder about my vocation sometimes.”

“I thought you were having a good time out there,” Dennis said.

“I was, I was, and I hope the kids were, too. How do you think it went?”

“I thought you were great,” Dennis said.

For a moment, Matthew Mahan looked at him with something close to anger on his face. “You’re not joking, are you?” he asked.

“No - why - no,” Dennis said, totally confused. “I - I mean it.”

The pain flowered in Matthew Mahan’s stomach. Another misunderstanding. Would he ever be able to talk naturally with this enigmatic young man? “Take these out to the car, will you?” he said, giving the vestments a pat and trying to sound friendly. “And keep Eddie company. I have to pay that little courtesy call on Monsignor O’Reilly.”

Dennis was tempted to say good luck. But having collected one rebuke for candor, he decided silence was safer. Miter and crosier in one hand and vestments folded over his other arm, he went out the sacristy door leaving Archbishop Mahan to his fate.

Out in the car, rotund Eddie Johnson, the Archbishop’s black chauffeur, had a grapefruit-league baseball game on the radio. The home team was getting walloped as usual. Eddie had played semipro baseball in his long-gone youth and considered himself an expert on the national sport. He started monologuing the home team’s deficiencies. All Dennis McLaughlin had to do was nod and murmur yes every other sentence or so. Meanwhile, he revised on a pad on his knee a draft of a speech that Matthew Mahan would be making next week to the Knights of Columbus. The subject was the renewal of the Church since Vatican II.

It was, he thought sourly as he neared the end of it, a model of intellectual elegance. Full of “on the one hands” and “on the other hands,” like so many statements that emanated from chancery offices and bishops’ conferences and the Vatican itself, it had everything in it but passion. It praised the idea of renewal, it committed the archdiocese to it, but there was scarcely a single specific issue discussed - and the last paragraphs were full of cautionary maxims against going too far too fast.

On the radio, another voice was somberly announcing that General Dwight D. Eisenhower had just died in Washington, D.C. “My, my, did you hear that?” Eddie Johnson said. “Poor old Ike.” It meant no more to Dennis than the latest score of the baseball game. He finished his revision and took from his coat pocket two letters he had received yesterday morning. One, from his mother, was still unopened. The second, from his friend Andrew Goggin, S.J., in Rome, he had already read twice. He had brought it along to read after Mother’s epistle, much as in boyhood he had always kept a glass of cherry soda handy when he was forced to take milk of magnesia.

Good old Mom, Dennis thought, stuffing the letter into his pocket, first a knee in the solar plexus, then a foot in the crotch. The memory of the two weeks he spent with her last year made him shudder for a moment. He had been trying to decide whether to leave the Jesuits or the priesthood or both, ignoring the advice of St. Ignatius that, in time of desolation, one should never make a change. But then it had never occurred to Ignatius that there could be a fourth reason why a priest was in desolation besides the three he had listed in the Spiritual Exercises. Perhaps because he never tried to cure his desolation by talking it over with his mother.

How strange it was to discover at twenty-nine that this woman who had always seemed to embody everything that was spritely and courageous was also stupid and dull, that her little maxims about praying together and keeping the heart pure, culled from
Grit
and similar magazines, were the fifth-rate philosophy of the world, tag lines for Salada tea bags. Why, why, why hadn’t you seen it before, why, Dennis?

Because you had spent ten years of your life in an intellectual balloon, smiling grandly on Mother and the other Lilliputians, seeing their shortcomings as no more than mildly amusing. But when the desolation came, when the balloon ran out of hot air and you found yourself in the streets surrounded by leering faces, asking why, why, the intellectual had to go to the roots of his life. He was appalled to discover that his intelligence, which he had always assumed he inherited from Mother, must come from nonexistent Father, the man with the smiling face and the pilot’s cocky hat, that bodiless being who grinned with such idiotic confidence from Mother’s dresser. To see that Mother, once regarded without the ground fog of love in the eyes, was stupid, trite, querulous, there was desolation, St. Ignatius, the desolation of the void. How could a man find sustenance of the sort the intellectual was seeking from a ghost? Perhaps this hunger explained your capitulation to Matthew Mahan. If you were looking for a father there, Dennis, you’ve found one in the classic mold. A combination slave driver and SOB.

No, he was not
that
bad. Balance, Dennis, what has happened to that beautiful balance, that lovely analytic discrimination that was the intellectual’s pride? Has it withered in the glare of burning cities, crunching bombs, bullet-crumpled leaders, the ghastly symbols of the sixties? Was it also, in the classic tradition of Christianity, his curse, the cause of his collapse? Wasn’t lack of passion, the very thing for which he taunted the Church, his tragic-comic flaw? Fervor, even the negative brand that poured from so many lips these days, seemed somehow beyond him. He had waited patiently for it to come, had sat through endless discussions of spiritual dryness with his Jesuit superiors, had wondered for a while if the Ph.D. in history he was acquiring from Yale had something to do with his growing sense of inner emptiness, but finally decided the answer was some central flaw in his personality which forced him to see with relentless repetition the fly in every ointment, no matter how secret. By temperament, he was a spectator who preferred one of the higher priced seats so he could smile wryly down at both the groundlings and the actors in the modern theater of the absurd.

Ultimately, it was his mounting dread of this fate that had driven him out of the Jesuit order, where he was highly esteemed as one of the province’s most promising young intellectuals. His doctoral thesis, published as a book,
Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Humanism,
had been widely praised and sold the expected 4,000 copies. His novel,
Infinitedium
, a satire of a group of fuzzy Catholic antiwar activists, had been more chillingly reviewed by a few intellectual magazines, where his hits were tensely recorded as accurate and his motives grimly questioned. It had sold the expected 1,500 copies and convinced Dennis that he had no interest in preaching to the elect.

Everywhere he looked, whether at Yale or St. Francis Xavier University, he saw hollow minds, he heard hollow words, he read hollow books, and he felt the same deadly vacuum drying out his insides. He was becoming a papier-mâché priest, withered scraps of questionable wisdom fluttering in his windy emptiness. Only one thing, both idea and feeling, relieved this emptiness while deepening his despair: his lust. Relentlessly, like one of the creatures from the apocalypse, it stalked his body and mind. Neither prayer nor mortification helped in the least. He toyed for a few months with extremes of penitence, wondering if it was time to fashion a whip of razor blades, favored by some Irish Jesuits in the early years of the century. But the idiocy of the idea made him laugh.

So he resigned from the Jesuits and sought a career in the city’s slums, hoping that pity would replace conviction. But there, too, he saw all the wrong things. He was incapable of romanticizing the poor. On the contrary, he was appalled by their stupidity, staggered by their self-hate, their degradation, and anguished by the pitiful formulae he offered them for solace.

When the Archbishop had summoned him to the chancery, Dennis was close to walking out on the whole show. End your sham of a priesthood, he had told himself, give up a role you were never meant to play. Take your Ph.D., pay the Jesuits or the Catholic Church or whomever your conscience selects for your expensive education, and retire to some university faculty where you can devote your life to turning out more students like yourself, dry sophists devoid of moral conviction, wryly amused at the imbecility of contemporary history, and not much more impressed by the banalities of other eras.

“Jee-sus,” gasped Eddie Johnson. “You hear that, you hear it? Two out in the ninth inning, two men on, and they pitched to Willie. Right-handed powa hitter like him. Don’t even put in a lefty. Leave that poor fella Jones in there to throw against Willie. The first pitch he clears them bases with a triple. Now they hangin’ by their finganails. Don’t them fools ever hear of the intentional walk?”

“Terrible,” Dennis murmured. “Terrible.”

Hurriedly he opened Goggin’s letter. A few laughs is what you need, Dennis. Old Gog never fails in that department.