Page 169 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 157

Dogs. They under stood ceremo nial piety. They were all so pious. So
pietistic. So instantly able to hit a pose like a Holy Picture.
I wondered what was the nature of true spirituali ty. Certainly
spirituality was more than liturgical pageantry. Even the truly good
boys hurt me with their ordinary goodness, because they were
ritualized beyond personality. Hello in there! They were walking
clothespiles of black cassocks and Roman collars and white surplices.
Whitened sepulchres, Christ had said.
I hated them, because if I was like them, no wonder Thommy
had called me “Phoney, a fake,” and I had to punch him. What if
Thom, who lived like a man in the world, was right. What do real
men really think of real priests?
Immediately, I prayed to be forgiven for my vain pride, to be
given the grace to mature finally without going mad, so I could
become like them, because I so envied their uncomplicated voca-
tions, and was desperate to be exactly like them, simplex, simple, not
complex, complicated, because under the watchful eyes of Gunn and
Karg and all the other priests, they had grown so fub duck perfect.
The hypnotic counterpoint of the rosary recitation–Angel’s
words, Hail, Mary, followed by sinners’ words, Holy, Mary–seemed
form without function. I knelt unfeeling in the crowd of seminarians
hailing Mary’s like taxicabs. Before I could save parishioners, maybe
I had to save these lost boys themselves. I wanted to reach out in the
chapel to the five hundred dark figures kneeling around me and
give them all I had. Would they applaud? I feared the crazy Russell
Rainforth in myself, the modicum of self-inflicted insanity no one
admits to, till it boils over and Saint Nicholas’ helper socks you in
the face and blood runs out from ears and nose and mouth and the
priests tie you to a chair and cart you away to an insane asylum for
lost seminarians.
I stared hard trying to find the dark taberna cle. What was it
John Henry Cardinal Newman had writ ten back during the Oxford
Movement, sitting among the Pre-Raphaelites, when he had been
silenced by his bishop? “Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encir cling
gloom.”
When things were good, Oh Lord, we should have stopped
all the clocks. Tick. Tick. No Tick. Nothing destroys me but myself.

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