Page 176 - Demo

%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK164 Jack FritscherI talked to Him on a level of personal relation that soothed me with sweet rushes of grace. I cut dialogue short with the unfeeling, unthinking seminarians about me. To only a few could I express these thoughts. Someday I%u2019d tell everyone about divine love in wonderful sermons. I was so full of raw thought and soaring feeling that I was frightening myself with a divine panic.As if talking directly to me, Gunn preached a sermon in chapel, and eyes turned my way. I looked down at my hands. Gunn thundered that seminarians had no business writing or reading extraneous materials, especially the works of rogue theologians.%u201cYou will only hurt your grades and your spiritual life.%u201dBut my grades were excellent. I wanted to stand up in chapel, to cry out, to protest. I was stopped only by a tremendous interior discipline that made me quietly strong against him and his kind. A splendid sense of mystic isolation thrilled through me. I liked not being him.I kept to myself at free periods after supper and before rosary. I was effortlessly able to sit tight at my desk, writing in my room, resisting outside in the early October twilight a guitar and a couple of ukuleles pounding out %u201cSweet Georgia Brown%u201d and %u201cWho%u2019s Sorry Now?%u201d while those who didn%u2019t know, who hadn%u2019t found the secret, sang and yelled around the drinking-water fountain outside the back stairs, screaming occasionally as a water balloon tossed from an upper window exploded among them, wetting the ankle-length flaps of their black cassocks.The Great Either-Or reared its head. The clock was ticking toward Ordination Day. Time was short. Choices had to be forced. Would I serve God or the world? I could take vows of chastity, but what of obedience? I could dedicate my body, but my mind kept on thinking. Either total dedication or nothing.Why couldn%u2019t I be like the other boys who had become men certain of their path toward the priesthood? Why should I sweat making real analysis of the priestly vocation they were moving toward in obedient ritual? Hank%u2019s only dilemma, perfect for an adolescent gorilla, was asking either-or questions at table in the refectory like, %u201cHey, Ry, would you rather slide naked down a fifty-foot razor blade into a pool of iodine, or suck snot from a dead Protestant%u2019s nose until his head caved in?%u201dDecember 5, 1962The night St. Nicholas appeared annually with Ruprecht, Hank the Tank, in the merriment of the Free Period before Night Prayer, walked up to