Page 202 - What They Did to the Kid

190 Jack Fritscher

tall, carved in blond oak. The sculptor, actually the sculptors, several
monks, chose an Olympic diver as the model for the idealized Body
of Christ. Hung originally in the Cathedral in Berlin, the crucifix, so
decreed by Pope Pius XII, was shipped to Misericordia for safekeep-
ing in the spring of 1939.The Pope formally pronounced the crucifix
a permanent gift to Misericordia, to honor the seminary’s unspotted
German heritage, during the Holy Year, 1950.”
The world waited, not for me as a person, but for all boys called
to the priesthood. It is a terrible vocation, frightening, majestic, more
self-defying than self-defining.
I knew that most people cannot be reached by most priests. I
knew that certain people can be reached by certain priests. I knew
that if I struck a tuning fork in the key of G and put it near to
another tuning fork in the key of G, it would start the second tuning
fork humming.
But if I put the humming tuning fork in the key of G next to
a tuning fork in the key of C, nothing would happen. No energy
would be transferred.
So, all people can only be saved by some priest who is in their
key. That’s why the world needs so many different kinds of priests,
because there are so many different kinds of people. That’s why there
are so many different kinds of vocations.
I shuddered to think where the people Hank the Tank might be
in tune with would hang out, because I wanted to stay away from
that place. A priest needs to go out in the world and find the kind
of special people he is called to save, whoever they are. Only that
priest, and only those special people, in some kind of divine destiny,
would fill certain spots of place and time in the world, in history, in
the tumble- down mad affairs of humans.
Only the right priest could bump into them on special street-
corners, hello, and special Confessionals, Bless me, Father, for I have
sinned, at three o’clock on Saturday afternoons and hear the hot
muttered admis sions of guilt and sorrow, alone and with others, and
repentance. Only a special priest could raise them from the stifling
despair, my husband, and sweaty loss of, my wife, eternal hell. One
thing I know: hell is not fire and flames. Hell is isolation, loss,
despair, and depression when nobody loves you.

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