CHAPTER NINE

WE LIVE TO AUDITION

These coveted Calvary roles were the apogee of any monk’s life. How one’s soul must have thrummed when the announcement came from the abbot and the grudging congratulations, wordless of course, from the other monks.

And it came to me that just hours earlier I, too, had stepped out of the identity I had borne with me for decades.

Except this day I am no longer him.

Last evening, as I watched the living curiosities witnessing the Calvary spectacle, I imagined that Albert/Alberta was somebody other to himself than the person who wore a lady’s size four shoe on one foot and a man’s size nine on another. Or Serpentina, her head held up by the lovely Cleo, listening to the monks’ lamenting; surely she wasn’t the lusus naturae “mermaid,” the role that others had assigned her.

And Whadizit??

Weren’t we all, that night, questioning the identities into which we are ostensibly locked? Perhaps that’s what the living curiosities in the ersatz West End were letting me in on when Whadizit? christened me Schlitz.

And now I’m beginning to suspect we live to audition.

The priest persona had legitimacy for several years. I felt totally at home in that identity, comforted by the authority of the scriptures, the generations of ecclesiastical decrees and teachings, the personal gratification that I was experiencing, having been created in the image of God. And there were those rare occasions when I believed I personally communed with the spirit of Christ within me.

Some might inquire: “How can you be addressed as Father Westley Mueller one day then Schlitz the next?”

Yet Schlitz, in the eyes of some, has as much legitimacy as Father Westley Mueller in the eyes of others. The question we must ask ourselves is this: What is the final worth of living? How many of us are living in roles that have outlived themselves, ones that are little more than ethers of someone who was once alive?

When I watched my living curiosity acquaintances scarcely illuminated by the lights in Brother Stanislaus’s stall, I felt that each, albeit for a short duration, had, through the intermediary of the monks’ cries, risen out of themselves to become someone other than who they were.

Perhaps I was not going to perform the high-wire act of disseminating to others the love of God who gave his only begotten Son so that we might be saved. The consolation is that now there is neither a high wire nor the net . . . and I rejoice in that liberation.

My breath is my own.

I am no other but myself.

I pray only to myself for forgiveness. And perhaps one day for mercy.

So be it.