CHAPTER SIX

SAINT JOSEPH’S SEMINARY

A man who considers life absurd does not dream of being surprised at his individual misfortunes; he regards them as being a confirmation of his theoretical views.⁴

There were no doors marked “EXIT” in the seminary. A closed universe inside God’s house. Self-doubt was viewed as a liability—to wit, yours. Is it pride standing in the way? Perchance you don’t belong at St. Joseph’s.

Being discharged was commensurate to being cast out of Eden—a black scourge on your nimbus the remainder of your days.

The priestly theologians brooked no ambiguity.

Yet therein lay my attraction. I willed myself to be unencumbered by other men’s beliefs, aspirations, fears, or dictates.

The true condition of man is that of an acrobat who performs above an illusory net, whereas the true believer permits no doubt that the net is God.

Then why perform?

NOVEL EXCERPT

Men with no self-doubt have a “spiritual” air about them: like cash registers, they always ring when you press them.

One encounters very little inquiry in a divinity school. The professors did not principally concern themselves with epistemology, metaphysics, or ontology. Instead, they taught history and biblical interpretation. Texts had to be deciphered in their original tongues. God had manifested Himself in Jesus Christ; now it was simply a matter of wicking it all up.

Why in Christ’s name had I ever ended up here?

Father Eustace Hope, ThD, a five-foot-tall professor of church history who wore elevator shoes and whose head, neck, and torso were carved from a tree trunk, or so it appeared, commenced his lectures with wooden prayers, a Bunraku puppet-like head dangling forward over the lectern for several seconds before it snapped back and the lecture rolled on.

Seconds after he had begun discussing the Canaanites one October morning, the lecture hall’s oak doors opened in their cathedral arches: a middle-aged man and young boy entered. As the pair self-consciously sidled along the back wall of the lecture hall, Hope bellowed:

“Nobody arrives late to my lectures!”

“John Gables, class of ’47. My nephew Jonathan . . .”

“Have you failed to recall, sir?”

“I apologize.” Gables turned the boy back toward the great doors.

“For God’s sake, man, enough time has already been lost. Sit down!”

Uncle and nephew slumped into the seats nearest them. Hope waited until he felt them properly humiliated. “Where were we, Jenkins, before the interlude?”

“You were discussing the Semitic language, sir,” the teaching assistant replied.

Gathering my church history, exegesis, and Christian philosophy texts, including the Old Testament in Hebrew—all thick and hard-bound—I brought them crashing down on the schoolboy desk and stood. The clap thundered in the vaulted lecture hall.

Hope quivered with rage. “You’re excused, Mr. Mueller!”

“Have you seen this man before?” I pointed to the visitor.

The students turned their heads.

“Tell him who you are, sir,” I said.

Expectant silence gripped the classroom. Hope’s grip on the podium suddenly relaxed. He stepped off the rostrum and moved to the platform’s apron, first catching his breath. “Who do you think he is, Mr. Mueller?”

“It’s not who he is, sir, but who he may be—”

Hope turned to the visitor. “I believe young Mueller intimates, Mr. Gables, that you could have been the Christ and I wouldn’t have been the wiser. Perhaps if you weren’t so clean-shaven . . .”

Several classmates stifled laughter.

“Why are you so sentient, Mr. Mueller?”

“I take no stranger for granted, sir.”

“What reason would the Son of God have to monitor my class on the Canaanites this morning?”

Jenkins applauded.

“You ridicule my naïveté, Professor?”

“No—it’s your righteous arrogance we find amusing. And why came you to St. Joseph’s?”

“I saw Christ in a gas station.”

Laughter erupted.

“Lost, I presume?”

“I was—in a manner of speaking.”

“And you asked for directions?” Hope smugly surveyed the classroom. “Colloquia aside, Mr. Mueller, may I suggest that we are theologians here, not aisle dancers. Theology is a science, not a felt show. The Trinity reveals itself in history, not fiction. We ask you and your fellow catechumen to penetrate the sacred texts as scholars, not as weeping fools at a Benedictine shrine. A Texaco Christ? Can you sing that doxology for us?”

“Not as mellifluously as you, sir.”

I swept the texts off the desk and tramped to the doors. I visualized Hope racing toward me, his miniature legs pistoning him to leap upon my back like a toad to inject his godly poison into my white and impudent neck.

The sound of the arched doors slamming against the adjoining walls ricocheted down three flights of stairs like a cherry bomb in a toilet. I’d addressed one tyrannical self. I was not about to be shaken down by some self-appointed minion of God.

One evening after the incident with Dr. Hope, I wandered about the quadrangle. I’d blundered in coming here.

And that evening I pulled open the great doors of the lecture hall so that I might enter its massive hallway and cry up its several floors, so empty and dark.

“You up there, Father Eustace Hope. Meet me at the head of these stairs, prick. Stand on your manuscripts if you want so that our eyes may meet, then tell me your secrets. In this sacred darkness, I will tell you mine.

“I want to test you. You and I will climb up the black metal ladder that hangs just outside your lecture hall, the one leading to the turrets. First you and then I will climb up to the slate now glinting in this October moonlight. And it is there—Hope, Faith, Charity—that we will walk to the pediment of this massive brownstone structure and pray.

“You in your sonorous, cathedral-ringing, mellifluous tones and rolled r’s about any subject you wish. But soon you must get to the simple question.

“We, old sir, we’ll request from your God, the one that brought each of us here, one set of wings. Not two, but one. A kind of humility and frugality of spirit, don’t you think? He would approve of that. Yes?

“After you have uttered your prayer, I will one-up you. I will forgo mine. For the God I long for is the one who hears people who don’t have to speak to him with tongues—no matter how trained in musicality. I won’t say a fucking word, sir.

“I will assume He understands my simple need, for it is far down, don’t you agree?

“Too bad. No audience. Some are asleep. Others studying church history? And perhaps a few are indulging in matters of the flesh.

“Even here. “Shame.

“And, sir, we will both leap. I care not whether I go first or second. The test. Which of us will be designated the pair of wings as we dive headfirst into the Boston-paver walkway that girds the great quadrangle?

“Or might we both?

“A Deather and a Lifer. Ecclesiastical wrens who erroneously presumed they could fly in holy places, this one seventy miles north of Pittsburgh and a couple hundred yards south of hell.”

Do I hear you coming up the stairs?

I totter on the pediment, waiting and debating the arc of this act. If I should strip naked and slip at its edge . . . ignominy I own for a brief moment. What does it matter at the lip of darkness how a man swallows his light? Yet, if those are your steps I hear below, for you, I would dive the willowy arc.

With no God strings to feather the fall.

But the loveliest of all gestures to transcend it.

The lecture hall’s granite steps sat mute that night. Unanswered by Eustace Hope. Fitting, for his morning invocations were also met with ghostly silence. The seminary’s quadrangle, leached cold under the lampposts. In the morning, its arteries would swell with acolytes trafficking in faith.

Mine had evanesced.

How does one drop out of God school?

Every couple of years, somebody killed himself at St. Joseph’s. You could bet on it. A biennial reenactment of the passion of Christ. Either in the dormitory or by a leap off the roof of the lecture hall.

I saw in the eyes of my classmates that something alarming was about to occur. High expectation and demonic glee. As if these lesser human traits had escaped the scrutiny of the righteous ones.

The thalamus of theology.

Feed me before the snow flies and we see a light in the east.

The professors of homiletics and Greek exegesis studied my face too intently of late. “Mueller, why so pale?”

Had I not caught them looking straight at me in chapel yesterday? And the president of this august institution—why had he gone out of his way to shake my hand for no particular reason on Wednesday past? “What do you hear from home, Westley?” And wasn’t it evident that several in my dorm had been posted at stations on the quadrangle? If I began to climb the hall’s granite steps, that tower of Babel, would they not signal the remainder of the community that the black mass was about to commence?

Oh, I could sense it all right. My anguish hadn’t abated, and now I carried theirs! I had to struggle out of my bed in the morning to attend classes. When called on to recite, I was so filled with foreboding that my tongue thrashed in a pool of mud. “Sawdust in your mandible, Mr. Mueller?” Hope took advantage. Others looked upon me with pained expressions. Relief.

Christ was the reward?

If I’d believed, as they did, that some divine being, periodically vengeful, looked after us, perhaps then I could have gone ahead with the wondrous dive to oblivion. For I would have been only flesh. The splash of my blood would evanesce to light and spirit, and I would be free of this earthly cage. Happily I’d have accommodated them, even doing a triple flip on my way down into their dervish midst.

But I didn’t believe any of it—not one lousy word.

A splat is a splat.

There are better acrobats
among you. Sorry for the
inconvenience.

Westley Mueller

I taped it to my bureau mirror. Then, in disguise as a drunken undergraduate, I lurched out of the dormitory and headed up Merchant’s Street, and not until I reached the Coughlin Library did I look to see if I was being followed. But the seminarians were resting in their crisp-sheeted beds—black cloaks hanging freshly laundered on hooks in anticipation of the great day that lay before them.

I would not be the Flying Mueller. The community would not celebrate the birth in snow, the garlanded trees, the winking lights—its holy Christmas in peace.

And at six minutes after midnight, I approached the Pennsylvania Turnpike in my Ford.

I had to find Jeremiah.