Page 87 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 75

and with a swimming breast stroke pulled open the heavy green
curtain and walked out through the twenty lines of three hun-
dred repentant boys waiting, shuffling, murmuring outside the ten
Confessionals.
I knelt in a back pew near a pillar. The medieval dark was musk
and damp as March. I shivered watching the far-ahead flicker of the
red sanctuary lamp casting shadows through the darkened church
across the marble altar. Once again a priest had failed to say any key
word. Perhaps no one would ever tell me. Perhaps boys who never
heard any word of revelation lacked a true vocation. Jesus could not
pass by like that, words unspoken between us. I’d find the words to
Jesus directly: with nobody between Him and me.
The Lord would take me.
Oh Lord, do take me. My life. My vocation. Wreck me. Break
me anew in You. Bring me close to You and Your Virgin Mother
and pronounce me a priest forever. To hold You in my hands, hav-
ing said the consecrating words, while the world crashes in its own
violent sins around us. To move out through the streets, to the sick
and to the sinners, carrying You in my heart. Oh God. Jesus God.
Let the priests themselves deny me the way to You. I’ll only crawl
onward on hands and knees to Your altar rail. Crucify me with fewer
words than You spoke crucified. Let me will nothing but what You
will. Let my will be Your will or Your will be my will—or however
it goes. See, Lord, I can make jokes with You and talk to You as my
friend and brother. You are all I have. My whole family is You. Your
souls must be my children because I am not like other men. Let me
suffer the fearful violence of Your life in my life. And, Lord, the one
thing, oh no, the only thing I ask is You deliver me safe from the
awful temporal possibilities of temptations. I’m afraid to be too free.
I might change or be changed and lose You. So if anything should
ever go wrong, I don’t, if I should commit a serious sin and be about
to die, I beg You to remember, don’t want, that this once, this actual
moment, I loved You intensely, this pleasure, with all my heart and
soul and never really meant to take my heart and soul away. Save
me, Lord, from the fires of hell. Oh, omigod, take me, Lord. Take
me now into Your changelessness.
In the phosphorescent dark, the sanctuary lamp flickering light

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