Page 268 - What They Did to the Kid

256 Jack Fritscher

attraction to the people in the priesthood? These actual seminarians
and actual priests. I could fubbing murder them where they fub-duk
kneel inside their fubbing little cliques. What’s one more Murder in
the Cathedral?
What don’t I get?
When will I get it?
Perhaps I should spend all the rest of all the Sundays of all my
life saying two Masses in the morning and in the afternoon sitting
in the rectory basement slitting open the envelopes of dollar bills
and checks from the parish collection basket. If I take that road, if I
accept the cross of loneliness, of a long-distance runner, with all my
priestly heart, I shall still, with all my human heart, my frail human
heart, my unseeing, my fanatic heart, miss what could have been
on the road not taken. No other vocation is forever, and no other
vocation makes you be alone forever.
Can God–and I shook my head not wanting the question–ever
mean as much to me as does my possible life or my possible wife and
my possible children and my possible creative work? But if it turns
out I decide to follow Christ in the priesthood, then it will prove
only that although Christ might not mean so much to me as my life,
I love Him more, the Word made Flesh, the Man-God, divine and
human, noble, naked, nailed, huge up on a fifty-foot cross, seventy
feet high over the chapel sanctuary, agonizing, dying to save me. He
hangs, transcendent, glorious in this salvific, romantic moment, this
epic moment chosen by theologians and artists, this crowning single
frame of western culture, crucified, high over the small red flame of
the sanctuary lamp.
My ambivalence seesawed across the November days. Misery’s
code of silence meant I could not discuss any of these doubts with
my friends. Just me, Jesus, and the Jesuit. It sounded like a song in
a Misery skit: “Me and My Shadow.” The roundelay repeated again
and again till on a cold November morning I meditated. The Lord is
my Shadow. In the cold chapel in the long dark before dawn, with the
radiators knocking with the first stingy heat of the day, I said, there
is nothing I shall want. He leads me to lie down in green pastures. My
prayer book fell open, full of trust, to the pages worn thin through
eleven years of prayer. But the pastures, the pastures. During the

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