Page 159 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 147

to priestly chastity, but what if...what if the Pope, during Vatican II,
commands priests to marry...”
Ha ha ha. He he he. Ho ho ho.
“Ahhh, then!” Dryden was triumphant, “what would we all do?
What would you do? Or you do?” He looked around the very anx-
ious room. “Or you? If the Church suddenly commanded priests to
marry!”
“What?”
“Shocking, isn’t it? Look at your faces. What a thought. How our
lives would change.” He stared the whole room down. “Would you
do it? Would you ‘marry’ on command the way you ‘don’t marry’
on command?”
Dryden circled through his crowded smoky room, taking ran-
dom ecstatic kicks at furniture and pillows and doctrine and dogma.
“I am,” he said, “a follower of T. S. Eliot. I subscribe to his theorem
that the greatest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason.
I also very much think that all institutions would be better organized
along the lines of the religious communities of the Middle Ages. A
modernized reorganization, of course. Perhaps into communes of
peace and justice and love.”
I stepped back to the shadow of the corner. “Mike,” I said,
“something’s got to happen to me this winter or I’ll die.”
“Cool it,” he whispered.
“You each do what you must for yourself,” Dryden said. “People
always do. Priests are people. As persons, you must withstand the
impersonal institution for the right reason, the reason proper to your
own existential soul. The impersonal must be resisted. Resist it for
whatever reason is right for you, not solely for the fashionable sake
of rebelling. This suite I have changed into a personal statement
that nevertheless remains true to the worker-artists who built Misery
with their own hands.”
“Hmmph,” I said.
Dryden stopped beneath a large black-and white photo graph of
himself sailing with Senator Jack Kennedy on vacation at Martha’s
Vine yard three months before in June. “Priests, you say, need safe
harbor. So true. Priests ought to be more than prayer machines,
vending masses to distract their libidos.”

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