Page 207 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 195

He exhaled clouds of blue smoke. “And March 17, the day for driving
snakes out of Ireland.”
“I have made progress. I’ve meditated and thought and prayed
a thousand hours to get where I’ve gotten. I care about people and
about God and I’m hurt because so many other people here don’t
care at all. About anything. I’ve written editorials about apathy in
seminary life. That went over big. Rector Karg screamed at me that
I might be the editor, but he was the rector.”
“Priests and seminarians don’t like criticism.”
“I wasn’t being critical. I care. That’s all. I see this tremendous
sense of social responsibility. Don’t I have a responsibility now to
awaken seminarians the way later I must awaken my parish? We
all need to care. I don’t think most people realize their potential for
caring. They never stretch their lives.”
“You know your potential?”
“Not yet. I’m discovering it. Pushing the sides out farther and
farther. It’s...” I stopped because the Reverend Sean O’Malley, S. J.,
didn’t act as if he understood.
“What?”
“Oh, convoluted, involuted, upside down. Nothing’s either black
or white to me any more. I see an awful lot of gray. I see meanings
to life, and double meanings to everything, and the meanings have
been so hard to come by that I want to explain them to everyone
else.”
“Through Christ.”
“Of course. He was a worker. I want to create and run before the
wind. I want children. Not my own. Not just the selfish satisfaction
of one child. But hoards of everybody’s children. And everybody.”
He chain-lit another cigarette. He said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “that I talk to you like this. Without any
preface. But I talk this way to my closest friends. We had to learn to
counsel each other.”
He looked hard at me. “I’ll not be saying anything bad about
my predecessor.”
“You must know, it’s been so long, it’s been never, actually, since
we’ve had adequate spiritual counseling.”
“You boys are vain and demanding boys.”

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