Church of Lost Hats Sample Chapter

Chapter 20

                   The Queen of the Sciences

     Arnold Pethweather woke up in the train station in Albany, New York.  He didn't know what he was doing there as he stirred on the plastic seat where he had apparently spent the night.  Arnold looked around for evidence from the surroundings for his purpose there, and a nasty hangover didn't help the mental search with the late morning sun spraying through the windows. 

A few customers looked his way curiously; he must have been out for quite a spell. 

Arnold first remembered his interview with a private school in Manhattan for a position teaching religion.  How many days ago had that been?  He rubbed his chin to measure the days by the stubble.  Two, maybe three days, Arnold wagered.  What had he been up to?  Arnold surmised from his present condition that there was not a second interview in New York; there was no job offer either.  At the time of the interview, Arnold did not have travel plans that included Albany, New York, or even travel by train.  He usually didn't travel by locomotive, though he had nothing against Amtrak.  In theory, it was probably the best way to see the countryside.   

     From the high quality of his headache, Arnold guessed whiskey, as his previous evening's medicine, and also the muse for his newfound plans and apparent mode of transportation.  He looked down at the white splotches on his black oxfords.  Vomit, he deduced, but his recent diet was hard to fathom by the evidence.  Or maybe it was the old problem with acid rain.  Maybe he was on his way to Canada to escape the toxic rain in America.  A scientist of self had to look at all possibilities. 

Arnold cautiously looked about his person for a train ticket, maybe to Quebec and sanctuary from the American environmental crisis.  Montreal was a nice place to figure things out, but there was no ticket to be found to French-speaking Canada.  He had no apparent travel commitments.  Maybe he worked for the train company now.  Anything was possible.

     Arnold had learned years ago it was far more interesting to play the detective examining the clues to his behavior, rather than be filled with shame or self-loathing.  Arnold could always write in prison, so what was there to fear?  But deep in his gut, he knew there was hell to pay for every errant move in the game.  Arnold was not immune to feelings of damnation and spiritual paranoia.  The former seminarian was indeed afraid of Almighty God, especially on the tail end of one of his benders.  He wasn't in college, or even seminary anymore, and Arnold knew that a couple more blind turns in the city could leave him as a prophet among the homeless.  He had studied theology and the salvation history of Christianity, but it had been strictly an intellectual process.  Arnold believed theology was the most important field of inquiry into the nature of human existence: the investigation of the deepest sources of both hope and anxiety, but he had trouble putting what he learned into practice.

     Arnold noticed that a bumble bee was trapped in the air-conditioned train station.  It kept crashing against the glass, colliding with the paradise of what seemed to be just ahead.  But the surface reality was different than it appeared, Arnold knew.  The bee would die in an air-conditioned hell, and it might sting some poor bastard who tried to help it.  Most passengers were either reading or eating or staring into space, oblivious to the stray bee's struggle between life and death, paradise and hell.

     But Arnold suddenly had bigger things to worry about than the survival of a bee.  Two policemen stood outside the station conferring about something in his general direction with an Amtrak official.  What had he done?  Usually, he wasn't particularly violent in his missing pages of a blackout, but he wasn't so sure this time as he watched the cops case the train station.  He looked down at his fists to see if there had been some scuffling with local ruffians, but his hands only looked the part of the gentle scholar. 

Should he make a break for it and become legendary Boxcar Arnold?  Did hobos still travel on boxcars?  He did not seem to be in possession of luggage or at least a travel bag.  Perhaps he was the victim of a crime, and the cops were going to rectify his situation, or at least explain it.  Arnold didn’t feel like a victim, except of himself.       

     It was then that Arnold saw the old woman; and all of the crap she had carried into the train station.  She was sitting in the row of chairs opposite Arnold, and she was talking up a storm to herself.  She ground her gums together in her conversation of one, and it looked like an argument from what Arnold could see.  There were approximately twenty to twenty-five grocery bags of possessions around her.  How could she manage the load?  Her hair was streaked with grey, but it was hard for Arnold to determine her age.  There was an institutional air about the woman; maybe she was making her break for freedom on Amtrak. 

One of the cops approached the woman cautiously.  He was a young guy with a military cut to his blonde hair.  The cop held a pair of plastic gloves in his left hand.

     "Excuse me.  But you can't take all this stuff on the train.  You can only carry on two bags."

     She looked up at the young man while chewing the imaginary cud of her state of mind.

     "That's what they already told me," she said.

     "So what are you planning to do with all this stuff?" he asked as he shifted his feet, looking for the right position of authority with the strange woman, the right stance for the bureaucratic tough guy who would rather be in the military.

     "I don't have any plans."

     "This is not a storage facility.  This is a train station."

     The woman decided she had had enough of the conversation with the law enforcement official, and she looked at her lap while the policeman waited impatiently for the woman to figure a way out of the mess around her.  He finally walked away to converse with his partner.  The blonde cop knew exactly what to do if she needed be restrained.  That would be easy.  He could arrest her and take her downtown.  But he didn't have a clue about how to help her.  You couldn't just arrest someone for having too much stuff in a train station. 

     The woman had too much baggage to travel, and Arnold's possessions had been reduced to the clothes he wore.  They were crazy opposites in the morning light, but no one was questioning him. 

As Arnold considered the woman’s situation, he continued his own mental inventory.  The real test would be when he looked in his wallet; then he would know just what was possible for his new character in Albany.  Arnold watched the woman’s mouth and the slippery action of her rubbing gums, and he felt a little sick to his stomach.  He got up casually and walked to the bathroom; to possibly make further reduction to himself.  It is important to look casual when you have to vomit in public.  Nobody has to know what you're thinking or about to do.  There were lots of people in the passenger waiting area, but only the woman with all the stuff was being interrogated.  She stood out from the crowd and daily routine of Albany on the way to somewhere else.

Arnold found a stall open in the train station bathroom and heaved up his unknown, and apparently meager, diet.  He looked at the label which said "American Standard," and that seemed kind of funny to Arnold.  He had found himself a pretty low standard out east.  Arnold couldn't figure anything out about his food intake by looking at the rejected contents floating in the bowl.  Arnold knew the body didn't lie.  That was the brain's job.  His body was not happy, and his brain was struggling with the headlines: "Theologian Hits Bottom."  "Original Sin Stalks Albany."  "Amtrak and Hell:  The Untold Story."  He heaved again with little or no result.  His stomach was empty as he purged at bottom surfaces of yellow acid emptiness.  He flushed his recent past away and left the stall for further self-examination at the sink.  Arnold drank greedily from the tap before taking a good look at himself in the mirror. 

     His bloodshot eyes stared back at him from the mirror, and Arnold smiled wearily as if to make friends with the unshaved specter.  He was wearing a white button-down shirt and khaki slacks, the bare outline of his interview uniform.  He wondered where his blazer was, but he located the paisley tie in the pocket of his slacks.  It was wet, and Arnold sniffed it, looking for answers.  The moisture wasn't urine, so Arnold put the wrinkled tie back on to be more respectable as he looked for his next move.  A tie could be helpful, even loosely tied the way he liked it, but he would have to ditch it if he really became a hobo.  A guy with a tie would get rolled in his sleep on a boxcar.  But you could always chart a new course anywhere with a good hat. 

     Arnold rolled up his sleeves and washed his arms and hands carefully with the pink liquid soap.  Liquid soap was for individualists and germ freaks.  He sniffed his armpits, and the scent was strong--too strong for train travel in the developed world, except for France.  Arnold noticed a red stain on his shirt and frowned at himself for mixing wine with the whiskey, and possibly gin, at some point in the interview process.  He had heard about the job opening from an educational headhunter service he used, but he had had to pay his own way out for the interview.  The interview had been a total long shot.  It hadn't paid off apparently.   

     Arnold had once consulted a therapist in seminary who emphasized the importance of self-presentation and the habits of personal routine: that we were all engaged in the creation of our own characters.  As soon as we get up in the morning, the play is on.  Therapy was really about questioning stage direction and character study.  Every therapist had something that gave him, or her, the jollies, and Arnold liked to figure out what it was, then really pile it on.  With the self-presentation psychologist, details about showering, hair-combing, trimming nose hairs, and going to the can really got him leaning into the therapeutic situation and the self-directed rays of truth. 

     Arnold ran his fingers through his hair with some warm water.  There was not much more to be done as he readied himself to return to the first scene of the day; he was no longer the passed out guy.  He was a young man on his way to New York City to meet his future.  It was time to face the music.  He inhaled as he readied himself for the big test.  He pulled out his wallet as he looked at himself in the mirror again--before one of the most important inspections that society has in the drama of life and the possibilities of self-presentation.  He sniffed the wallet, which was also a little damp, and peered into it. 

     "Yes!  We're in business," Arnold said and winked at his accomplice in the mirror. 

Arnold thumbed through the billfold and then checked the ownership of the wallet.  There was $85 in cash, but, more importantly, a credit card in his name.  Arnold B. Pethweather.  A man with a tie and a credit card could go far in this country.  Even without a hat.

     When Arnold returned to the train station lobby with his new and improved self image, he saw that the cavalry had arrived.  Social workers.  They were going to help this woman, even if it killed her in the process.  There are few things more dangerous in this world than a newly minted M.S.W.  They were even worse than the clergy.  This one looked to be in her early thirties, and she wore a green shirt and khaki shorts with white sneakers.  She had an assistant who was a stocky guy with short hair who looked good at restraining things, or people.  Arnold guessed he would be called a psychiatric nurse.  The social worker was questioning the woman.  Arnold settled down for the show in the row behind the interrogation.

     "Where were you before you came to the train station?" the social worker asked.

     "I was in a cab."

     Arnold smiled at the cab driver transporting the mess from one place to another with a trunk full of grocery bags.  What did the cabbie care?  He was such a temporary person in one's life.  It was just a joke to him. 

     "Before you were in a cab...," the social worker paused, "Were you at Westview?"

     Her stocky assistant handed her plastic gloves for the kind of social work clearly demanded by the unfolding scene. 

     "What do you need gloves for?" the woman asked, getting alarmed. 

     "You need to calm down." 

Her assistant moved in, calculating the right hold for the situation.  Perhaps a half-nelson, Arnold guessed.  At that point, an ambulance arrived for the old woman with too many things in the train station.  The flashing lights of the red and white chariot didn't seem to calm her down any. 

The rescue was now in full swing. 

Help was on the way.

     "She's my mother," Arnold heard himself say. 

     The growing crowd of happy helpers turned towards Arnold, and the new character with the moist tie, got up from his seat as a bystander.  The old woman looked at Arnold for the first time, as she continued her cud chewing discipline.  She was in her own world, and a lost son was not going to change a thing for her.  The social worker looked at Arnold skeptically, one hand on her hip.

     "She's not my biological mother.  It was a common law thing.  She lived with my father for too many years to be just his girlfriend."  Arnold smiled as he continued.  "She was crazy about my father."   

     "Where's he?" the social worker asked as she studied the condition of Arnold's darkened tie.

     "Dead.  She's never been the same since daddy died.  She carries around mementos of his life wherever she goes," Arnold waved vaguely at her things.  "He was a hero.  In the war."

     The social worker nodded.  The destructive ripples of war could go a long way.  Maybe this was a case for the Veteran's Administration.

     "You'll need to sign some forms.  She needs to be in a place where people can help her.  What's her name?"

     Arnold hesitated, reeling through the possibilities that would fly in mental illness bureaucracy.

     "We always just called her Granny.  But it was more of a nickname."

     The social worker didn't buy the story, but the shift in responsibility for the case appealed to her for some reason. 

     "I'll call around and find out where she was.  There's a facility for women at Westview Hospital."

     "Could she have been released?" Arnold asked.

     "Not in this condition."

     Arnold thought of his own condition and the circumstances of the passengers gawking at the fate of the old woman with no teeth.  They were all out on their own recognizance.  They had just enough luggage for normal purposes, but her extra baggage had drawn the city's attention.  Something needed to be done.  That was clear to everyone in the station.

     Two paramedics approached with a stretcher and conferred with the cops and stocky assistant.  The paramedics had already donned their plastic gloves.  Arnold tried to gauge the expense of the equipment and attendants and wondered how it might impact his common law filial responsibilities.  Did the state of New York take Visa?  He wondered what the credit limit was on his card.  Another police car pulled up in front of the station.  It was a slow day in Albany, and Granny was getting the royal treatment. 

One of the paramedics knelt next to the woman, while the other positioned the stretcher.

     "Ma'am, we're here to help you," the paramedic said.

     She looked up in confusion, trying to place the new one in the uniform.

     "I'm not hurt," the woman said.

     "We just want you to be comfortable."

     "I'd be more comfortable on the train."

     The paramedic offered his white gloved hand to the woman who looked warily at the offering and where she knew it would lead.  The social worker's assistant looked ready for a takedown on the ward, and the cops were likewise prepared for the worst in the human condition.  This old woman might still be a terrorist ninja in disguise.  Arnold stepped into the fray with his naked hand outstretched to the woman. 

     "Come on, Granny.  You can't take the train today."  Arnold paused.  "The government is closing Amtrak down.  It's a Republican thing.  You know what heartless bastards they are."

     "What's going to happen to my things?" she asked.

     Arnold looked at the huddle of helpers around the woman.

     "They'll be safe," he assured her.

     She looked at Arnold’s bare skin and smiled at the big government that couldn't do anything right with the train system.  It was probably that Newt Gingrich.  The paramedic helped Arnold move her onto the stretcher.  She was as thin as a rail.  The psychiatric nurse didn't look very pleased with Arnold's intervention; maybe Arnold needed to be restrained.  The paramedics strapped the woman into a sitting position after putting a blanket over her.  They wheeled her out into the searing heat of the New York summer like an Egyptian queen.  The train to Montreal was leaving, and the passengers heading north were leaving their places in the audience. 

     "See ya, Granny.  I'll write if I get work," Arnold said as he waved goodbye.

     The social worker approached Arnold with paperwork from the state of New York and its capital of Albany.

     "Sign here," she pointed to an x at the bottom of the page.  She had removed her plastic gloves.  Arnold casually signed Nick Geary's name to the agreement effectively institutionalizing the woman with too much stuff.     

     "Try and visit your Granny when you have the time...Mr. Geary."

     "I'll try."

     "You've never seen that woman before, have you?" 

     "Never in my life."

     She smiled at him, and Arnold thought about trying to get her number.  But he had had bad luck with women who had psychological helping skills.  They always turned him into one of their cases, and Arnold hated that kind of help.  He knew he needed something more serious, an ancient remedy of salvation.

     "Well, thanks for what you did.  That scene could have gotten ugly," she told the former divinity student.  They shook hands, and her hands were soft without the plastic protection.

     "I was just trying to help."

     She left Arnold and rejoined her assistant.  The day was starting to look up, and Arnold went over to the snack bar and ordered a Heineken.  Beer was barely alcoholic, after all.  The other patrons were talking about the old woman and all the stuff she carried.  Two Amtrak employees carried a palette into the station, and they set it down and began stacking the grocery bags on it.  They looked through the junk as they worked. 

Arnold watched as he sipped his cold beer.  Hair of the dog. 

When they had finished their pyramid of grocery bags, they began wrapping their edifice with a plastic wrap full of the little bubbles used in shipping things.  Arnold liked popping the little bubbles, but who didn't?  The two guys seemed happy with the diversion from their usual routine at the train station.  The old woman had been a godsend for them.  They used packing tape to finish the job.  They heaved it up together, and their supervisor directed them outside.  There was an announcement for the train to New York, and Arnold chugged the remainder of his beer. 

Arnold walked to the ticket counter and used his Visa card to conserve his cash.  He held his breath for the electronic verdict.  Arnold sighed with relief as the card was approved.  He took his printed ticket and walked out to the track with the rest of the passengers.  He found a seat next to the window.  The two train station lackeys were fooling around with a forklift behind the station.  This was a real treat for them, Arnold could tell.  One of them played the role of signalman with comic drama as he directed his buddy tooling around on the forklift towards the palette with the plastic pyramid of junk.  The forks slipped into the opening, and the old woman's baggage was raised skyward.  The forklift reversed direction and then found a new course towards an open garage.  Arnold watched their clear enjoyment of the irregular occurrence.  It wasn't exactly materialism that had been the woman's downfall.  If that were the case, everyone would be in trouble.  It was the different kind of baggage she carried.

     Arnold woke on the New York line with a start.  The train emerged from the cover of trees, and Arnold looked out at the Hudson River, this time with less surprise at his traveling situation near Garrison, New York.  The gothic campus of the United States Military Academy came into view from across the water.  The austere grey buildings rose proudly out of the green hills of the Hudson Valley, and Arnold blinked his eyes at the sight.  West Point was a place that harkened to a lost virtue that the nation still needed.  Whatever its problems, it was a place of courage.  Arnold thought of his friend Nick, a lost member of the long grey line past, as he looked at the Military Academy of the present.  

     Something stirred in Arnold as he looked out the window.  He was wide awake.  A knotted well of emotion from nowhere heaved in his chest, and Arnold's vision opened to the beauty of the old vein of the Hudson River as it wound around the grey campus, heading for the Atlantic Ocean.  This was the exact center of the American colonies of the past; at one time the heart of America where the British could split the rebels in half.  Arnold tried to take in everything that filled his senses; it felt like his body was trying to give him more information than usual, like he was remembering the future through his senses.  The body doesn't lie, and Arnold tried to silence his mind. 

What was happening to him?  Arnold considered the possibilities before him in the moment: alcohol poisoning, nervous breakdown, religious calling, all of the above.  Arnold felt somehow older and wiser, all of a sudden on the train.  As the campus passed before his eyes, he noticed they were filling with surprising tears.  He thought of his friend Nick and how his priesthood had come from that very spot across the Hudson.  Arnold touched his hand to the glass and brushed his fingers absently against the window of the moving train. 

     Arnold had always held back from talking about his calling in seminary.  That wasn't his style.  Why did he always hold back from what he held in his heart?  Because he felt unworthy for what he was supposed to do.  Because he was crazy.  He knew he couldn't do it all on his own.  Despite the blackout behind him, Arnold knew he was supposed to be on this particular train winding through the Hudson Valley at this very moment.  He knew he was supposed to be contemplating the purpose of his life across the river from West Point, brushing up against his fate, and his true character before God. 

The branches of trees seemed to be reaching back to him as the campus went out of view for a moment, then it came back.  He looked at the reflection of himself in the window with West Point in the background.  The campus disappeared again as the train turned with the river's ultimate purpose.  He wondered if his eyes looked crazy with what he was thinking.  Arnold looked at his reflection in the window.  He was surprised at the kindness in the eyes staring back: doe eyes, liquid and soft in their measure of new soul.  It was so easy for him to give compassion to other people.  Could he finally give it to himself?  Was the underground man ready to go above ground to receive the love and forgiveness of the Living God?  

     "Jesus," Arnold heard himself say. 

     Arnold got off the train at the next stop.  He got into a cab outside the train station and told the cabbie where he was headed.  The cabbie gave him a funny look.

     "Do you have any bags?" the cabbie asked.

     "Not a thing."  Arnold laughed, thinking of the scene at the train station.

     "What's a normal guy like you want to go to a monastery for?" the cabbie asked him as they headed to Arnold's stop on the river.  Arnold was headed to the Order of the Resurrection, an Episcopal monastery on the Hudson River.

     "I'm not a normal guy."

    

     As Arnold stood at the entrance of the Resurrection Monastery at High Point, New York, his confidence and energy slackened.  He stood in the gap between the scene of his imagination on the train and the reality of the strange step he was about to take.  His sweet moment on the river was already up for grabs, and he was the only person around to defend it. 

Arnold read the sign at the gate and looked over the monastic service schedule.  He would at least thoroughly explore the scene before running like hell.  Arnold still had his Visa card and some cash to turn the corner on his next caper.  But he had tipped his cabbie grandly to punctuate his departure from the material world, and his pecuniary resources were running out. 

As Arnold entered the grounds, he noticed signs pointing in different directions: one way for guests and the opposite way for members of the Resurrection community.  A branch with thorns snagged Arnold's pants.  Arnold felt so many contradictions as he untangled himself.  He stood somewhere in-between on the map, the small legend of the scene.  He was looking for peace and contemplation, but insects buzzed at him in the muggy heat of the Hudson Valley.  Holy hermits had to battle with nature, after all, the rugged and ragged story of the desert fathers and Christendom.  A bee kept buzzing at his face, and Arnold swatted at the nuisance.  He shook his head at the small tear in his pants from the thorns.  This was no Eden here.  There was no ideal garden anymore.    

Even at a monastery, the food chain ruled the creatures of nature, and Arnold highly doubted that the monks were vegetarians.  White-robed holy men were the kings of the jungle, the top of the food chain.  Anglican monks probably got pretty good chow.  If they slaughtered animals on the grounds, Arnold could help with that.  The earth was indeed fallen, but the instincts in his blood were asking to him to redeem the whole mess with a vision of heaven. 

     It had always been hard for Arnold as a theologian to get a good handle on the character of evil in the garden of creation.  He had once written an apologetic examination of Satan in a seminary class using the text of Job, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Carl Jung’s Shadow and collective unconscious.  The professor had called Arnold in his dorm to see if he was ok.  I'm out of my mind, Arnold had wanted to say.  There had been genuine concern in the professor's voice.  Arnold had always sensed that evil was part of the grand design, but he would be lying if he said it was a comfortable understanding, or a peaceful vision.  He and John Milton shared a compelling and complicated Satan over the centuries between them.  But Arnold was now on the run from Lucifer.  Like a lost and vulnerable Adam, Arnold had returned to a garden haven, looking for answers to the toughest questions of human existence.  He couldn't separate the questions about himself from his opinions about the cosmos, and the universe was an unbelievably huge place.  Arnold turned and followed the sign that pointed to the guest house.  A dark flutter of wings ascended from the trees, and Arnold watched the flight trying to determine the winged form of the omen: vulture or hawk.  Both were impressive, but the vulture's press was all bad.  Arnold saw that the bird was a red-tailed hawk, and he stopped to watch the now gliding flight as a sign for him alone in the garden.  Arnold smiled and entered the guest house.   

     There was a woman at a desk in a room that served, effectively, both as registration desk and bookstore.  He hadn't expected the first person that he met on the grounds to be a woman.

     "I'd like to see the guest master," Arnold said.

     The woman looked up at Arnold.  She appeared to be in her fifties, but her hair was either colored, or holding out most heroically.  It was dark brown, and Arnold guessed it was the latter.  She gazed at Arnold from behind her glasses. 

     "Are you scheduled for a retreat?"

     "Not exactly."

     "Are you on the schedule?  What's your name?" 

She scanned her paperwork.

     "I wouldn't be on your schedule," Arnold paused.  "I'm on my own timetable, but providence has guided me here, as of yore." 

     She didn't crack a smile at the young man and his mystical sense of direction.  "The retreat rooms are booked for the whole summer," she explained.  "Summer is a very busy time for the house."

     "Look, I want to talk with the guest master.  Is that so difficult here?"

     Arnold stared the woman down.

     "Just a moment." 

She gave Arnold a frown and got up from her desk and walked down a hallway.  Maybe this lady was going to call the police, and Arnold would follow in the family tradition of Granny to the nut house.  They might not let him write there because pens are sharp and dangerous. 

     The receptionist returned with a man in a white robe.  He wasn't wearing plastic gloves, so Arnold assumed he wasn't on the state's payroll.

     "This is Brother John," the woman said.

     "Arnold Pethweather."

     They shook hands, and his hands were soft.

     "What can I help you with, Arnold?"

     "Can we talk privately?"

     Brother John glanced at his civilian assistant.

     "Come with me."

     "I'll be in my office, Susan."

     Brother John turned and retraced his steps down the hallway.  The monk was shorter than Arnold.  He stopped and let Arnold enter his office first.  Arnold chose the closest chair, and Brother John sat down opposite him.  The chairs were arranged at a conversational distance.  There was a window, and Arnold could see the river in the distance.  There was a desk against a wall and a table with some books and pamphlets.  Other than that, the room was bare.

     "How can I help you?"

     Arnold looked into the eyes of Brother John.  He wore glasses with thick, black frames.  He crossed his legs as he looked at Arnold, and Arnold did likewise.

     "I'm not sure how this works," Arnold said.

     "How what works?"

     "You guys.  Resurrection Monastery.  Are you guys like the marines?  The few and the proud."

     John looked confused, and then he understood.

     "You're interested in joining the order?" he asked as he adjusted his glasses as if it were difficult to get Arnold into focus.  Arnold knew the feeling. 

     "Yes.  Do I need to talk to a recruiter or get an appointment from my congressman?"

     "We work a little differently.  We have an Admissions Committee."

     "Do you have a crop here?  Do you make cheese or beer or something?"

     "No, we're strictly a retreat house and a community of prayer, but the monks do physical labor on the buildings and grounds."

     "Do you slaughter animals?  I could do that if some of the old boys are getting tuckered out." 

Arnold imagined vultures circling his work by the river.  The bloody duty of a mad monk. 

     "That won't be necessary," Brother John said.  "We have our meat delivered."

     "Boy, that's a relief.  I was afraid you boys might be vegetarians.  I once lived with vegetarians, but it didn't work out.  A sordid business in Berkeley."

     The two men stared at each other for a moment, and Brother John tried to find some familiar ground in the distance between the chairs. 

     "How long have you been interested in becoming a monk?"

     "Seriously interested?  About two hours.  But I did go to seminary."

     "You were in seminary?" 

Brother John looked confused again. 

It was as if Arnold had played a winning hand on the first draw.

"Are you ordained?"

     "No," said Arnold.  "But I do believe I have a calling."  Arnold paused.  "As much as I believe in that kind of thing."

     "Let me go get Brother Thomas.  He's the novice master.  He will determine if you have a vocation and what kind of testing period is necessary.  We usually have a two week period for you to see what it's like to be a monk." 

Brother John got up from his chair.

     "Oh, Brother..."  Arnold hesitated.

     "John."  Brother John hovered in the doorway.

     "Yeah, Brother John, would it be possible to have some aspirin?  I've had quite a pilgrimage.  You know, like Augustine…"

     "I'll have Susan bring you some."

     Brother John left to find the novice master.  They must be desperate for bodies, Arnold wagered, if they were interested in him.  He assumed he would get a quick heave-ho for his interest.  We'll call you, don't call us.  We're booked through the second coming, pal.  It was funny how mentioning seminary changed everything.  Because of his high-priced theological study, he was now eligible for a job that required poverty and celibacy.  His theological education was really paying off big time.

     Arnold got up to inspect the books on Brother John's table, and he picked up one called Jesus Through the Centuries.  It was a history of the images of Jesus in the visual arts.  Arnold sat down with the faces of the great one through the years; so many different perspectives and interpretations of the word becoming flesh.  Arnold paused over some clean-shaven images of Jesus Christ.  He looked younger than Arnold was now. 

Susan the assistant appeared in the doorway with a glass of water and two aspirin.  Arnold got up from his chair and tucked the book under his arm to receive his medicine.

     "Thanks a bunch."

     She gave Arnold a curious look and watched him.  Arnold put the aspirin in his mouth and took a few gulps of water.  She stood in the doorway as Arnold sat down again to continue his artistic survey of the messiah.

     "I'll just keep the water," he said.  "I need the refreshment."

     "I'll bet."

     "It's a rough world out there.  You should check it out.  I've suffered.  ‘Come unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.’  That's from the Bible.  You can look it up."

     Susan shook her head at Arnold as if he were some kind of intruder on the Resurrection Monastery of her imagination.  He straightened his wrinkled tie and stared her down.  She returned to her station, and Arnold stuck his tongue out at her former place of judgment in the doorway. 

     Arnold turned the pages of the book and stopped when he came to Marc Chagall's White Crucifixion.  It was a Jewish Jesus on the cross with his naked body wrapped around the waist with a prayer shawl.  There were crazy scenes around the figure in a cubist style: scenes from the awful experiences of the European Jews.  Fires, pogroms, perilous boat rides.  They had been through the ringer.  This crucifixion had an historical chaos with which Arnold could identify.  Redemption was messy and complicated.  It had always been that way.  Arnold breathed easier, and some of the sweet release of the river swelled in him again. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Arnold saw a white robe in the doorway like a ghost.  He looked up to see a new monk.

     "Hello, I'm Brother Thomas."

     Arnold rose to receive the novice master.  They shook hands, and the new brother's hands were calloused from hard labor.  He took the seat Brother John had occupied, but there was a different feeling in the room.  More challenging.  Like Brother John, he was clean-shaven, but Brother Thomas didn't wear glasses.  His eyes were a pale blue, with a hint of mockery in them.  There was grey at his temples, but not much.  He looked to be in good shape, used to measuring himself against younger men.

     "So you're interested in joining the order?"

     "It's a kind of a cliché, don't you think?"

     "What?"

     "The lost young man at the gates of salvation."

     "Resurrection is the gates of salvation?  That's news to me.  Plus, you don't seem very lost.  You know where you are."

     "I always knew I was a throwback, but this is positively medieval.  That's a long throw.  Back."

     "I prefer to think of it as timeless.  Brother John told me you went to seminary." 

Brother Thomas looked at Arnold expectantly.

     "That's right.  In Berkeley.  But for me it was mostly academic.  I thought I could do it all intellectually, and I didn't want some touchy feely secular religion either.  When I got to seminary, it was like a retirement home.  God was elsewhere."

     "There are many paths to God.  You realize you would be one of the younger monks here."

     Arnold nodded. 

     "Why didn't you apply for the priesthood?  You were already in seminary."

     Arnold considered the question.  He wasn't looking for the right answers.  Maybe that was half the battle.  He wasn't going to measure each word to test its political weight.  What was this guy going to tell him?  That he couldn't take a vow of poverty?  That he wouldn't have to be celibate? 

     "I'm unfit for the calling." 

Arnold looked Brother Thomas in the eye.

     "Why, Arnold?" 

     Arnold glanced down at the natural question.  There was plenty of time to answer questions in a monastery with no beer to make, or cheese to watch curdle, or lambs to slaughter.

     "I'm ashamed of myself.  I do everything I can to avoid the courtroom of the mind, but the sins are mounting."

     "Is that why you're here?"

     "Something's not working.  The intellectual religion isn't working for me.  I used to be so funny around the broken places inside me, but now I need..." Arnold couldn't believe what he was about to say.  "Discipline.  A rule of life." 

     He had never been a big fan of the concept of discipline with his spiritual trust in the winds of chaos. 

     "I knew I could always write in prison.  I know there's sunshine in hell.  There must be some kind of screwup at central casting to send the zany miscreant to the monastery.  I'm not looking for just self-improvement, to make my best better.  I'm looking for some serious changes.  Look, I don't even remember what I was doing yesterday."

     "And we will talk about that."  Brother Thomas looked at Arnold as if he held the private files on Pethweather.  "But some of the current brothers came here under stressful circumstances."

     "I thought it was because you were all fruits."

Arnold returned the knowing eye.  Everyone has secret files, Arnold's eyes twinkled.

     "Humor is a defense, Arnold."

     "You got that right."

     "I'm sure some of the brothers are gay.  But you seem pretty worldly.  Live up to it.  We're talking about you.  You came here freely.  Nobody put a gun to your head, and you're free to leave, even if you become a novice.  But whether you stay or go, I'm worried about you.  And I care."

     There was a kindness in the monk's eyes when he said it.  There was no hint of mockery or sarcasm in the moment between them.  Arnold recognized in Brother Thomas a complicated soul like his own.  Arnold thought of his own reflection in the train window as he looked at the new measure of compassion before him.  All the images of Christ from the book came back to him, but this was a more formidable icon.  Christianity was all about reflecting the past, and nothing could do it better than a real human face in the present.

     "I thought I just wanted to teach," Arnold said. 

He suddenly felt very tired.  Heavy laden.

     "Many of the monks have a teaching vocation."

     "In a city."

     "The city comes here one person at a time."

     "So you guys will be here for a while."

     "Yes.  Like you, people come here with spiritual questions."

     "I think I'd like to do that.  To teach here.  I have a lot of experience being lost."

     "Are you ready to become a novice?  To test your vocation?"

     "I'm ready for new life." 

Arnold hated the language of being born again.  That was a crock.  He liked the idea of a palimpsest, a place in an old document or scripture that had been erased by time where one could write with fresh ink.  A scribe had power when he or she came to the worn place in time. 

"I’m ready to begin again.  In an old place."

     "Are you ready for a discipline?  This is not a country club, this is a community of prayer.  But you need to remember that two elements of the calling are poverty and chastity.”

     "I've got the first one covered."

     "But what about chastity?  Do you think you have the gift of celibacy?" 

Brother Thomas's face betrayed no emotions, no hint of its difficulty for him.

     "I would not call it a gift." 

     Thomas laughed.

     "What about the vow of obedience?"

     "That will be the hardest one of all."

     "I suspect so.  Do you have any debts?"

     "Just spiritual ones."

     Brother Thomas nodded and took the admission at face value in the code of Arnold's humor. 

     "It's time for Vespers.  You and I will pray about your calling in chapel."

     Scenes didn't shift fast just in the movies; nothing gave more whiplash than the newly discovered religious vocation.  Arnold's world had changed completely as the sun headed towards the west.  At best a monk was separate from the world while being united with Christians everywhere.  There was an area for the general public in the chapel, and Arnold sat there with the people on retreat.  Susan the assistant joined the civilian congregation for the service of Vespers, and she sat directly behind Arnold.  He could feel her breath on his neck in the closed quarters, which felt kind of sexy, as she said her prayers kneeling behind him as he sat back relaxed.  He tried to focus on the chapel itself and not to listen to the whispered prayers of the Resurrection receptionist. 

     Arnold could always tell if a building had been prayed in, though sometimes he wondered if it was just a problem with his eyesight.  But there was that special air in the chapel, a holiness that was separate from the ceaseless currents of the world.  It was hard to explain to people on the outside, but animals could probably tell the difference too, especially the sharp-eyed birds of prey.  The monks came in one by one, and Arnold watched them carefully in their slow parade.  One old guy rolled himself in a wheelchair.  Sandals were popular as a Jesus fetish, as were beards, but some of the monks wore white sneakers under their robes.  There were a couple of young guys who averted their eyes from the public gallery.  If they had an athletic program at the monastery, Arnold would be the next sporting king of Resurrection, the big monk on campus. 

The service began as one of the brothers seated himself at the organ.  The officiant sang the words that began the service familiar to lay people as Evening Prayer.

     "O God, make speed to save us," the officiant sang.

     "O Lord, make haste to help us," Arnold sang back, one voice among many, as he joined the community in its evening chant of timeless need.  He had never prayed the words so fervently.  Arnold needed help fast.

    

     After the service, Brother John led Arnold to his new room.  He had certainly lived in smaller places.  There was a white robe on his bed, a Bible, and a Book of Common Prayer.  They were the only essential luggage items for a theologian on the run.

     "What about sandals?"  Arnold asked.  "I'm gonna need some sandals."

     "That's up to you, but I'm sure you can find a pair around here to borrow.  You can keep your clothes at the guest house," Brother John paused to look at Arnold.  "You might need them.  But I hope you find what you're looking for here.  It takes courage to do what you're doing."

     "Thanks, man."

     Brother John nodded and left Arnold to change.  Arnold picked up the robe and held it before him.  There wasn't a mirror in the room for Arnold to inspect his new uniform.  Maybe some babes would come to Resurrection on retreat, looking for the narrow gate of salvation.  Narrow gate.  Narrow bed.  Arnold's old instinct for humor leaned into his new reality like old company. 

     There was a knock at the open door, and Arnold turned to find the Prior of Holy Cross, Brother David, standing in his doorway.  Brother David was in his sixties and somewhat stooped.  He wore eyeglasses, and his head was shaved and looked baby smooth, ready for the return to the womb of death.  He was fingering his large silver crucifix in his hands as he watched Arnold.  Freudians would have a field day at a monastery.

     "I hear it's Brother Arnold now."

     "Yes, Father.  Something like that."

     He entered the small room and shook Arnold's hand.  He gripped Arnold's wrist with his free hand as they shook.

     "Welcome to Resurrection."

     There was both a kindness and a formality in his manner, a kind of men's milk of understated warmth and comfort.  Arnold suspected his antics would not go very far with this guy.

     "Brother Thomas told me that you and he had an interesting talk today.  He wasn't sure what to make of you.  I'm not either."

     Arnold nodded.

     The old man continued.  "You may have high expectations of us, but we're not a perfect community."

     "I know about imperfection," Arnold said as he watched the superior finger his cross.  He let the hanging Jesus go when he saw Arnold watching his unconscious fiddling.

     "I think you will be a special challenge," the superior said as he turned to go.

     "That's been my experience."

     "Mine too.  I'll see you at dinner."

     "Yes, Father."

     Arnold walked over to his bed and sat down with the robe still in his hands.  Arnold lay back in his narrow bed and spread the robe down his body like a blanket.  Or a shroud.  He made sure it covered his body perfectly, completely, every inch.  Arnold tried to imagine himself as the monk at rest after a day of labor and prayer behind him.  Was he ready for peace? 

There was crucifix on the wall above him.  Jesus was everywhere here.  He looked at the tiny limbs bound by two thousand years of evening prayers, and he felt himself in the moment unbound, and strangely free.  His stomach rumbled impatiently to stir him from his musings, and the novice realized he hadn't eaten anything all day, and possibly for several days.  Arnold rose to meet his new brothers for dinner.  Love had made a feast this day.  He wondered what kind of meat was being served and how it was prepared during the evening sacrifice of their prayers.  Brother Arnold walked, slowly, to supper.  After breaking bread, the Great Silence would be observed until the new morning. 

         

    

    

"‘Twas a Strange Night in Advent”

9 December 2012

The Second Sunday of Advent

Kent School

St. Joseph’s Chapel

If you listen closely to the readings of this Advent season, the results can be strange and jarring.  The comfortable expectations of this sentimental season—especially during these last few days before our long awaited vacation--come up against the hard edges of the Advent discipline on this second Sunday.  The figure of John the Baptist in today’s gospel is provocative, and unsettling.  The tight tension, or seeming contradiction, of Advent warnings or doom and expectations of Christmas cheer, is at its most dramatic in John the Baptist, who comes to us with prophecies of judgment if we don’t wake up to how we are living our lives.

God is coming, John the Baptist warns us, but what will that mean?  Will God’s wrath or God’s Love come among us as our guest this year?  Unlike the Christmas story itself, the lessons for Advent are edgy and dark.  John the Baptist lived in the wilderness, and people came to him, including Jesus, to hear his prophetic voice.  The tame moments when we approach the Christ child radically contrast with the Advent voices of our tradition that call us to account, and repentance; we are not ready for, nor are we worthy of, the love of God, so we are told by John. 

So, John the Baptist, the voice crying in the wilderness, won’t let us be free, awash in the warm glow of Christmas.  It says in today’s gospel from Luke that the word of God came to John, but it’s not a very nice word if we read Luke past the lesson assigned this morning.  Here’s John the Baptist just a few verses later in Luke:

“You brood of vipers!  (Vipers are snakes by the way).  Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Bear fruits worthy of repentance…Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees.”

             

So today, on this last Sunday before the break, I will tell you a story from my past, from long ago; a story that is both funny and sad, tragic and comic.  My own prophetic ministry, as a satirical John the Baptist, was a personal failure.  But I survived, just barely, to tell you the tale.  To make a long story just a little shorter, I once stole a Christmas tree.  I will have to take you back to my first year of divinity school at the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan, to a time before you were born.  At General Seminary, there is always an historic reading of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” with all of the children from the seminary and the neighborhood gathered around the massive fireplace in the common area.  A favorite reader of the story was the then Governor of New York Mario Cuomo.  His son Andrew is the current governor of New York.  However, my own controversial ministry to General Seminary was more along the lines of the morality play “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.”  I was the Grinch.

It all began so simply on a December day of cold and wintry Advent gloom.  It was then that I first noticed the early appearance, the premature arrival that is, of a Christmas tree on the afternoon of December 6^th, 1989.  Ah, the Christmas tree; this is a tradition which has no scriptural support, or theological justification, or religious meaning whatsoever.  The Christmas tree is actually Pagan in its origins.  The tree in question was set up in the exact middle of the Oxford style Close of General Seminary in Manhattan. The children had decorated the tree to celebrate St. Nicholas Day on December 6th.  I hadn’t known that last fact when I first began plotting the Pagan tree’s downfall, but it wouldn’t have stopped me.  I was young and impetuous, and full of brio.  “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees,” says John the Baptist, after all. 

But here’s the problem; technically, religiously speaking, the tree, which has—let me repeat—no religious meaning, should not make an appearance until December 24^th, the beginning of the Christmas season, after Advent is over.  The tree should stand for the twelve days of Christmas, and then go down at Epiphany.  If you’re going to be technical, which I certainly was.  My theft was during finals week, judgment season as the Baptist once warned us; and a plan was instantly hatched in my stressed out, homework-addled brain.  I tried, unsuccessfully, to focus on my upcoming Koine Greek exam, but a Grinch, not a scholar, was lurking in the shadows of General Seminary.

I wasn’t planning to steal the tree, not exactly, just to move it, under the veneer of satire and the cover of darkness.  Due to the great size of the tree, I needed some help; a few disciples if you will.  So I shared my Advent plan for a commando strike with two of my classmates, who are now both priests, here in the Northeast.  We went into holy Advent motion in the first hour of 7 December, a day that still lives in infamy at General Seminary.  They still tell the story to their children.  We Advent guardians were clad in black cassock (robes like the vergers); our visages were darkened with face paint—just three ghosts of the seminary tidying things up to insure a pure Advent.  As I said, the season of Christmas begins on December 24^th, and not a minute before. 

The tree was coming down. 

Strange church mischief was in the midnight air.   

We three, we merry Advent Police, left a lovely sign in purple calligraphy where the tree had been raised the day before.  Our calling card sign boldly read: “Beware you secular n’er do wells!  The Advent Police.”  Naturally, naturally, I chose the Dean of General Seminary as the honorary commander of the Advent Police.  We moved the tree into his office (the next day breaking and entering was among the charges against me).  The dean’s office was far too small for the enormous Christmas tree.  Even placed at an angle, it was still bent at the top by the ceiling, forming an upside down L shape.  The angel was set sideways by our mad midnight work; but the tree still looked very pretty, quite special, when we turned on the Christmas lights in the dark office.  Surely we had laid the groundwork for a lovely day at the helm for the veteran dean.  Good morning, sir.  It is more blessed to give than to receive.  A letter of introduction from the mysterious and apocalyptic Advent Police was waiting for the good priest on his desk.  What a glorious night it was.  We even rang the bell in the seminary tower to celebrate the holy Advent that was upon all the sleeping Whos in Whoville. 

Or something like that.

  

But my Advent adventure, or misadventure, became my very own painful Christmas lesson by the next morning. 

I learned, so much, by the very next day.

Here are the lessons I learned:

1)  I discovered, very quickly, that one person’s satire is, sometimes, another person’s disciplinary investigation.  And it’s not very fun to be the subject of a disciplinary investigation when you’re supposed to be in graduate school.  It is also better to confess when everything points to you.  The assistant dean came to my dorm room before breakfast to ask me a few questions about my whereabouts on the previous night. 

How did they know it was me?  How?  I ask you.    

2)  A dean, however stern and foreboding, can be a very kind and compassionate figure of authority at the same time, especially when you’re in trouble.  It often doesn’t feel like it at the time—only when you look back years later.  The dean put me on probation, even though some members of the faculty wanted the perpetrators expelled.  Yes, I was now a perp.  Breaking and entering takes you from the school handbook to the police station apparently, even during Advent.  

3)  I’m not as funny as I think I am.  And neither are you.  I learned that a good idea in the middle of the night can be a very bad idea by 9 AM the next morning.  Let me say this again: a good idea in the middle of the night can be a very bad one by morning.   

4)  The most important.  One person’s familiar holiday can be a small child’s very first Christmas, or the first time decorating a tree.  Think of the magic of your first real snowfall, or the first time hearing the story of the birth of Jesus, or hearing the rich beauty of the Lessons and Carols service on Wednesday.  It’s always somebody’s first time.  Or this year could be the first time a person you know really feels the true spirit of this season, a time of giving not just receiving.  And it can also be a loved one’s last Christmas.  Near the end of your life, I have no doubt that sharing a Christmas with your family is a foretaste of heaven itself.

It was through my failure as a Christmas Grinch that I learned the important lesson of this season.  Though John the Baptist was right about many things, he was also deeply, terribly wrong, in a sense—but an important one--about the most significant thing of all: Ours is not a God of doom, but rather a God of grace, love, forgiveness, and unspeakable beauty.  A God who makes each of us a beginner when it comes to experiencing, and sharing, the mystery of Love.  To be a child of God is to live in wonder; to find the mystical in the ordinary, and the ordinary in the mystical.  In God’s mercy, in those terrifying depths of divine love too bright for our mortal eyes to gaze upon, we were and are not condemned by God. 

Something different and unexpected happened. 

God instead gave us Jesus Christ; and God gave us each other. 

The Christian writer and Oxford professor C.S. Lewis once described the infinite grace of God with these words: “The hardness of God is better than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”  

The hardness of God is better than the softness of men. 

God gave, and still gives, everything to win our hearts, and to save our souls, that we too may give freely to each other and to our world as we have received God’s love and mercy.  Love is not simply what we expected, or what we needed; it is more than we can possibly imagine.  The only gift we can give back to God is the very best of who we are: to live again the good life of compassion, forgiveness, and charity to one another, in word and deed; that God may no longer be a stranger in the world, and in our hearts.  Have a blessed Advent and a merry Christmas and a happy Hanukkah.  May God bless all of you, and your families, in the weeks to come. 

“Advent Marks in Time: God in the Here and Now”

2 December 2012

The First Sunday of Advent

The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees

St. Joseph’s Chapel, Kent School

I’d like to begin this sermon exactly where Rachel Choe ended the meditation chapel on Thursday evening.  She was pondering the way we live our lives.  What exactly are we rushing off to?  Why are we in such a hurry to be out of high school?  Or college?  When exactly is this golden time that we seem to be expecting, just around the next corner?  At our formal dinners, we often hear how many days there are left for seniors.  If we lived our lives correctly, I think the seniors would be sad, and the third form would be overjoyed to hear about the plentiful days until graduation.  This is a special time of year, but we do it all wrong.  We even have a name for the madness: the Christmas rush.  At the meditation chapel, an alternative was presented: to be, simply and deeply, present in the moment. 

There is a wonderful book about the power and potential that is in the moment called The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle.  This short passage is about the mystery of our being that can be found when we stop rushing past our lives, at Christmas or any time. 

            “Being is the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death.  However, Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence.  This means that it is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature.  But don’t seek to grasp it with your mind.  Don’t try to understand it.  You can only know it when your mind is still.  When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.  To regain awareness of Being and to abide in the state of ‘feeling-realization’ is enlightenment.”

            Three years ago, I was giving the opening prayer, the benediction, at a dinner for my high school class in Turlock, California.  The Turlock Bulldogs, it was a lifetime ago.  The occasion for the dinner was our twenty-fifth year since our graduation.  Looking around the room, I reflected on how we were all in a hurry to grow up.  Why were we like that?  Most of us would give quite a lot, maybe everything, to go backward in time; to simply be in the moment as the Christmas break was approaching in the magical time of our youth, now gone.   Maybe, just maybe, I said, we could slow down tonight—and be completely present in the moment.  If we did that, if we could find a way, we would be more than young again.  Somehow I think that’s what God is all about, though I don’t think that’s the word we would use: to describe the wonder of just being.   

In 2010, a documentary about education came out called The Race to Nowhere, directed by Vicki Abeles.  She came up with the idea for the documentary as she watched her high achieving daughter actually become physically sick from academic pressure.  This movie is about highly motivated kids who are deeply unhappy, even when they get the results, like the right college admission, that they’re looking for.  These are not the slackers.  The documentary explores the lives and values of teenagers who want to be the very best, but the psychological cost of their striving is presented in this thoughtful and compassionate movie.  Whether you are a high honors student or not, you are all responding to pressure, be it academic, athletic, social, or extracurricular.  And the toxic cocktail of all of these things is the idea that your college admissions, or rejections, are your measurement of worth as a human being.  Why are we racing off to nowhere?  Human beings are crazy.  Animals actually don’t have neuroses.  Unless they live with people.  Then they start to get a little crazy.        

I have compassion for all of you racing off to nowhere: because I was once an insane little hamster on the crazy wheel myself.  I wasn’t always the Zen master of meditative basketball and sacred hoops.  Twenty-eight years ago, I was the valedictorian in my class, out of some five hundred students.  Now I’m in recovery, I go to meetings.  Being the valedictorian was something I decided to be; it didn’t just happen.  I didn’t have the same problem with athletics because I never played, or rarely played when the game was already decided.  Those coaches are all going to hell, by the way.  I’d be sent in with eighteen seconds left to play, so I tried to shoot as many times as possible before the horn sounded.  But, every night, I studied like a demon, with an agenda.  I had two objectives: one was to be the very best, to be #1.  The second was my holy grail, my golden dream: to go to West Point. 

Then a terrible thing happened: I got everything I ever wanted.  I won the race to nowhere.  Now West Point is a wonderful place if you like military perfection, people screaming at you, marching all the time, firing automatic weapons, and the possibility of live combat (whether or not you agree with American foreign policy).  Aside from being unable to take orders, smirking when people yelled at me, and hating regimentation, I loved it at West Point.  The uniforms were fantastic, and great with the ladies.  But I also had a very important and terrible realization.  I wasn’t there for me; I was there for my father.  I was living his dream, not mine, and I wasn’t going to get any closer to him by doing it.  I wasn’t going to get the love I wanted by following his dream.  So I did something that was very painful—is painful to this very day, though it’s a deep and good pain because it came with self discovery.  My great decision: I dropped out of West Point, and the race to nowhere.  I went in search of my authentic self.  Oh, and by the way, nobody at the twenty-five year reunion seemed to remember, or care, that I was the valedictorian, or that I dropped out of West Point.  I felt exactly the same way.

When my dream of being a West Point graduate and an army officer died, a new dream was born—almost instantaneously.  It is often when you fail that you find the true terms of your success.  That new dream, a new story, would lead me to divinity school and the priesthood; and eventually to you, my home at Kent on the other side of the country from California, and not very far from West Point, the citadel of my lost childhood.  In my first year of divinity school, the dean of my seminary told us something strange and mysterious.  He said we should make all of our study into a form of prayer.  To make all of our study into a prayer.  This idea was the exact opposite of my pre-West Point self.  Everything then was an insane competition where a bad grade (like an A-) was an indication of my worth as a human being. 

Make your study into a form of prayer. 

How can you do this?  Well, here’s a place to start in your thinking.  During my first year at Kent, a young man named Jon Geller was diagnosed with bone cancer.  He played center for Coach Marble on a team that eventually won the New England Championship.  But football was over for Jon in preseason; when his cancer was discovered after he broke his shoulder during practice.  Jon had to leave Kent to take a medical leave for chemotherapy treatments at home in Montreal.  Jon wasn’t facing college admissions stress anymore, or the nose guard across the line.  He was facing the ultimate test that we will all face.  And the gritty, determined young man fought his cancer, with every fiber of his being.  This is a happy story because Jon went into remission.  He returned to Kent; not to be a football player, but to be a student.  To be a human being.  To just be.  In the spring of his senior year, before graduation, Jon spoke in chapel about his journey, back to life as we know it.  I can remember every word.  You could have heard a pin drop in this chapel.  At the end of his chapel talk, he gave two Thanksgivings to God.  The first will surprise you.  Jon said he was grateful for being able to do homework again.  To read, to write, to think, to do math problems, to draw, to understand the world around him.  Jon had learned how to make studying into a form of prayer.  His second Thanksgiving was for friendship.  You never know how important your friends are until your life is on the line.  Being a friend is one of the most important human vocations.  Be kind to each other. 

Make your life into a prayer of gratitude, completely in the moment.  People will notice something different about you, almost instantly, a change in the air, a wonderful disturbance in the force.  This is called peace of mind, the change that comes over you when your authentic self is born.  It is God incarnate, but you probably won’t even need to use that word.  Being will be enough.   

There is a Christmas movie that many of you have seen called Love Actually.  How many of you have seen it?  My wife loves it.  We watched it again last night.  I pretend to hate it, because it’s pretty cheesy at times, but I secretly don’t.  “I feel it in my fingers.  I feel it in my toes.”  The opening voice over is by Hugh Grant, while watching people at Heathrow Airport, as family and friends unite after flights from all over the world.  In his words, Grant speaks of the phone calls on September 11^th , by people on the airplanes.  People who knew that they were going to die made the last phone call of their lives.  They didn’t talk about colleges, or work, or wealth.  They were calls of love to family members, words that live forever.  The conversations were the last words of love, from the deepest place of our being.  It was Love actualized. 

Beyond even approaching your studies with a new heart, make your entire life into a form of prayer.  A prayer of gratitude.                     

            I don’t often wait until the last paragraph to address the gospel.  But here we are at the end.  I think it takes a while to really see this gospel, to wake up to it.  Jesus speaks about the powerful signs coming in the future that will reveal the presence of God in our world.  These lessons are often associated with the second coming of Jesus Christ.  They are read during the season of Advent which is considered a time of watching and waiting.  But if Advent is simply about watching and waiting, we’ll probably miss the miracle, even if it’s right in front of our eyes.  When Advent waiting shifts to simply being, the second coming is in the here and now.  It is.  Don’t miss the magic of the next week and a half by merely counting down the days until you race off to nowhere.  Stop, sit, rest, be, and love actually.  It will make your life rich beyond words.  It’s all around us; as the God of Love, the child of our Being, is born again, and again, in poor hearts like ours. 

“The Gospel of the Bullpen”

16 October 2012

Chapel Talk

The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees

St. Joseph’s Chapel, Kent School

            This is the first of two baseball chapel talks this week.  Dr. Green from the Science Department is taking the mound on Thursday, and I’m taking the hill for the opener this morning.  

One of the most frequent messages in chapel talks at Kent School is the advice to take advantage of your opportunities.  Take advantage of all your opportunities.  I have heard this encouragement offered in St. Joseph’s Chapel countless times, by both students and faculty members.  The lesson has never gotten old; it is something like the gospel of Kent School.  When you arrive at Kent, a window of possibility opens.  It seems like the window will be open for a long time, but the days and weeks and months and years of a high school career come very fast.  A first indicator has come and gone.  You have a limited amount of time to make choices about how to respond to this open window in your life, and what you will become is predicated on the choices you make.  There are so many forms of regret—academic, athletic, social—that can come with these choices.  I have learned at this stage in my own life that I don’t get to follow all of my dreams; I have to choose.  I don’t have forever on this planet. 

            As I reflected on what it means to follow your dreams—and what it means to choose your dreams, I thought about my experience as a minor league baseball chaplain.  I was the chaplain of a team called the Ogden Raptors (named during your dinosaur phase) which played in Ogden, Utah, as a member of the Pioneer League.  I did this for two seasons, in 1994 and 1995, and it was a unique experience--one that allowed me to collect so many stories—to pluck stories like grapes, few of which I can share in chapel this morning.  It is sometimes said that someone who often uses profanity “swears like a sailor.”  Or a longshoreman, if you know any.  But I am here to correct these comparisons and similes: Sailors and longshoremen instead swear like ballplayers.  I have never heard more profanity in my life, not to mention the disturbing, demented, immature, profane, and sometimes hilarious discussions about everything under the sun—ranging philosophical discussions that took place on the bus, in the locker room, during batting practice, and even during the game as well.  In baseball, the chatter never stops; from the inane to the sublime to the philosophical to the anatomical, and around the bases we go again.  I went on two road trips with the Raptors, and I’ll never be the same, like a sailor after he first crosses the equator.  I was like an anthropologist, like Margaret Mead, or rather like Indiana Jones, studying primitive culture.  And I was grateful for the stories I got to collect, like souvenir baseballs in batting practice—they were scuffed and beautiful prizes. 

            So what can I share in chapel about my experience as a minor league baseball chaplain?  I can share the lesson about the courage it takes to follow your lifelong dreams, all the way to the end; how to persevere in the face of adversity, and how to keep going when no one else believes in you.  Every minor league baseball player has the dream of being a major league baseball player.  Minor league players are working hard to get by financially, playing for love more than anything, and a last chance at a dream. 

The Ogden Raptors played in single A baseball, but the Raptors were, then, an independent team.  They had no affiliation with a major league club; they are now with the Arizona Diamondbacks.  Most of the Raptor players had never been drafted, and the majority of them were former college players short on talent, but big on dreams; it was the proud domain of the underdog.  The players followed their dreams out in the open; they were willing to fail out in the open.  Baseball is a game that makes you tougher with failure, because failure is normal.  If you fail 70% of the time as a hitter, you’re doing very well; you’re hitting .300.  Getting rid of your fear of failure for many of you is the greatest obstacle.  And if you haven’t failed at anything, you haven’t tried anything very hard.  Most of the players on the Ogden club were playing the last year of baseball in their lives.  

One of my jobs as the chaplain for the Ogden Raptors was preaching a sermon for the home and visiting teams before Sunday evening games.  These baseball chapels took place in the bullpen.  Preaching in the bullpen.  Was this the high point of my career or the descent into hell, the inferno of Dante?  Actually I found it very poetic, heavenly, warming up with words in the bullpen, back and forth like a game of catch.  One of these sermons was documented in the poorly selling non-fiction book Minor Players, Major Dreams, by Brett Mandel.  In the book, Mr. Mandel, who clearly needed a fact checker (or a pair of eyes), said I was wearing Birkenstock sandals while preaching.  Just because I’m from California doesn’t mean that I own a pair of Birkenstocks.  And even if I did, which I don’t, I wouldn’t wear them to a ballgame.  It was pure libel.  I did the Christian thing.  I forgave him, but it was difficult.   

But I loved preaching in the bullpen, which is why I was delighted recently to find a book called The Bullpen Gospels, by Dirk Hayhurst, a long time minor league player who was just about ready to quit baseball.  He had made it as high as AAA for a few weeks, but he begins the season of the book in A ball, a huge disappointment.  He is ready to hang ‘em up.  The state of his dreams is seemingly watched by the Grim Reaper; his dreams are about to die.  From The Bullpen Gospels. 

“It’s hard to pitch with fear.  It was as if baseball’s Grim Reaper was watching every time I took the mound.  Most of the time he’d show up in little incarnations, like a black cat or a double that landed exactly on the foul line just when I thought I was going to have a clean outing.  Lately though, it seemed as if the Baseball Reaper had season tickets for the front row to every park I played in.’

‘Other guys began to see the Grim Reaper as well.  Haunted and paranoid, we strugglers took refuge in the rear of the bullpen discussing what we’d do after being released.  I told everyone I was going to join the circus because it’d remind me of life in the minors.  Another guy said he was going to become an executioner because at least he’d feel like he was getting even.”

 But Dirk doesn’t quit.  He doesn’t quit because of his family.  His family is far from perfect; they are terribly unhappy.  Dirk’s father can barely walk after falling off the roof in an accident, and Dirk was the one who found him.  It’s a miracle that his father can even walk, but he has no feeling in his hands and feet.  His father suffers from serious depression, and he has been fired from his most recent job.  Dirk’s mother works the graveyard shift to pay the bills.  His brother is an alcoholic who lives at home with the two unhappy parents.  When drunk, he regularly beats up his mother and father.  When Dirk intervenes, his brother beats up Dirk instead.  Dirk fears that his brother will kill one of them someday.  When Dirk calls the police during one horrific night, his parents are angry at him.  So Dirk tries to funnel his own anger and frustration into baseball.  He tries to change his family with his athletic success, but it’s an impossible makeover, an elusive alchemy.  Why is he even trying?              

There are many wonderful stories in The Bullpen Gospels.  You get to collect them when you chase a great dream.  Two of the most moving stories involve a homeless man and a severely disabled boy in a wheelchair that Dirk seeks out after a ballgame.  Dirk volunteers at a homeless shelter, and he ends up trading his shoes with a homeless man who lost all his money because of his wife’s medical bills.  His wife ended up dying anyway.  It’s a powerful encounter, one that gives Dirk healing and hope.  In the other story, the boy at the ballpark is so incapacitated; he can’t even accept the simple baseball that Dirk is offering him.  The two stories remind Hayhurst of how hard it is to give and receive love in his own family.  But the gospel of the bullpen begins to be born in just these moments; as Dirk’s dreams start to include other people.  They become about more than just about himself, and making the major leagues (he does make it by the way…for the Toronto Blue Jays, briefly).  But the absolute hardest thing he has to do all season is forgive his brother who begins to put his life back together in rehabilitation and AA meetings.  It is not easy to forgive him.  Dirk also lets go of failure; failure is no longer the measurement of his worth as a person. We’re so much more than that as human beings, and what we overcome is more important than what we achieve.  Dirk begins to pitch without fear, and he accepts the final results because he is giving his very best, without any fear at all.  When he lets go of his fear of failure, anything is possible.  He is finally at peace, no matter the results.  That’s a powerful feeling.     

The window of opportunity is open now for this year in your life; and a new indicator is here with the baseball playoffs underway, and my beloved San Francisco Giants still in the autumn hunt.  I love Buster Posey, but who doesn’t?  How we respond to our opportunities is more than how we honor our gifts, talents, and abilities.  It is how we honor God, and how we honor each other as children of God, as the human family.  When this year began, many of you felt like strangers to each other.  Now you know you’re not alone.  You are making friends for life.  No one will replace them, just like your own brothers and sisters (and dog).  Find and follow your own dreams.  But don’t be surprised if you start to dream dreams for other people, and to help those around you in your life find their true path.  With love, with faith, and without fear.               

“The Mountaintop and The Level Place of Wisdom”

Opening Service for Faculty

The Reverend Jonathan A. Voorhees

St. Joseph’s Chapel, Kent School

4 September 2012

I, like many of you, experience a profound and unsettling awakening to every new school year.  It’s not very pretty, this personal preparation, and every end of summer is slightly different.  I certainly won’t bore you tonight with some of the more neurotic elements, especially the truly bizarre school dreams that come to me as the days of August peel off the calendar.  It is a strange time of reentry where feelings of inadequacy are normal, even though I’ve been doing this for a while.  It’s just that I really know what I’m getting myself into.  I think it was easier when I didn’t.  This doesn’t mean that there isn’t hope and beauty and idealism in my reentry to my vocation as an educator.  There is.  It’s just all wrapped up together.    

This summer I watched the inner battle as a dialogue, or argument, specifically between idealism and realism.  My inner dialogue is usually not so well-defined, philosophically.  For instance, the founder of Kent School, Father Frederick Herbert Sill, wanted the boys of Kent to experience the monastic ideal of spiritual discipline and contemplation.  For much of its history, Kent had chapel eight times a week, sometimes as early as 6 AM, including on the girls’ campus beginning in 1960.  As chaplain, I am responsible for exposing students to the Transcendent, the Otherness of the holy, ancient mysticism, the Bible and Jesus, ethical teaching and how to choose the good, and, well, let’s call it the existence of God.  Wow, that’s amazing.  The reality is that we are teaching teenage students who are, actually, addicted to their i-phones, who expect instant gratification, and are totally saturated with technology and social media in a culture that is much less religiously defined.  Despite the beauty of St. Joseph’s Chapel, this is not a home field advantage.      

Idealism and realism.  Father Sill wanted the boys of Kent to retreat from the world, in a way that mixed Sparta with the rule of St. Benedict, the result being something called muscular Christianity, if you can imagine that (of course, this condition had nothing to do with girls).  I learned from Jesse Klingebiel’s chapel talk last year that Father Sill purchased the land for his ideal experiment very cheaply here because the iron industry had devastated the environment of Northwest Connecticut.  The ideal and the real do strange dances together.  When I first arrived at Kent eight years ago, the monastic ideal was dramatically more present because there were no cell phones.  The students had them, but they were useless, wonderfully useless.  Kent, Connecticut, did not have a cell tower then.  If I were an anarchist priest, I know the first thing I would do.  If I were Don Quixote, I know where I would find my first windmill.         

            During a Theology class last spring, my students were responding to the themes of realism and idealism in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors.  Terrible people did wonderfully in life, and the idealists were the sore losers in the end, with incomplete philosophies and broken dreams.  Also, the realist got the girl.  Yet the realists of the film were not worthy of emulation; they weren’t remotely heroic.  During our discussion, a student brought up the question of who are the realists, and who are the idealists, among the Kent faculty.  I took a step back and waited for the fascinating discussion that was about to flow.  This was going to be interesting.  Who are the realists among us?  It’s going to be the Math Department, right?  But they’re always in chapel, very idealistic.  Not the Science Department, they’re too ecological.  Maybe someone from the History Department, possibly Mr. Ober, a faculty member with realpolitik foreign policy.  Instead the students were completely stumped.  We had a long but thoughtful silence.  Don’t be afraid of those in class.  They were interested--they understood the terms of the question, but they could not proceed.  Until John Dong explained the problem this way: “Think about it.  You’re all teachers.  That means that you’re all the idealists.  We’re the realists, the students.”  

With John Dong’s explanation in mind, I did something new as I prepared for the new year; as I prepared for tonight.  I did something very idealistic.  I started making trips to the Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, New York.  The founder of this school was a priest and a monk in the Order of the Holy Cross, where they still pray five times a day.  So I went looking for Father Sill.  I really didn’t need to, realistically, since he’s buried right outside my window—he and I have some interesting talks.  The Holy Cross Monastery is only 42 minutes away by GPS, and I have made cell phone calls from the monastery grounds, so I might be more of a realist than you thought when I began this sermon. 

As the idealist and the realist in me bickered over the last weeks of August, I came across a book whose title shut up both of them: The Pope Who Quit.  Subtitled, A True Tale of Mystery Death, and Salvation, by Jon M. Sweeney.  In the two thousand year history of the Church, there has been only one pope who quit—just quit, who simply walked away from the job after only fifteen weeks.  The man was Pope Celestine V, formerly Peter Morrone, or Peter the Hermit, and he didn’t want the job in the first place.  The people who knew him found him to be holy, courageous, simple-minded, naïve, physically powerful, spiritual, out of touch, and saintly.  The truth is that Peter was a lot like Jesus, and he found God more in nature rather than in conventional church buildings.  Today we would certainly call him an introvert.  His time as pope is a little like the movie Being There with Peter Sellers.  Or there is the recent Italian movie from 2011 called We Have a Pope, about the election of an unlikely spiritual cardinal as the new pope.  The newly elected pontiff begins to suffer panic attacks, and a full-time therapist is brought in to bring the reluctant pope to his throne despite his fears, anxiety, and overwhelming sense of inadequacy. 

But the story of The Pope Who Quit is an unbelievable true story.  When Peter Morrone was elected pope in 1294, he lived in a cave on the top of a mountain in Italy.  Though he lived as a hermit, Peter was not without administrative experience and ecclesiastical accomplishments.  He had founded dozens of monasteries in his lifetime, but he always retreated to his mountaintop to worship God; to actually be with God in the moment, not just in the afterlife.  His entire existence was about a sacred play with his God, and a pitched spiritual battle with the demonic forces of the world.  Though in perfect physical condition, he was also eighty-five years old when he was elected pope.  It took the Vatican party ten days of hiking and climbing to reach Peter the Hermit.  I like to imagine what was going through the minds of these cardinals, bishops, priests and acolytes, as Peter made them all into Appalachian Trail section hikers, going straight up.  Peter had been notified of the climbing delegation by one of his monks, and he was absolutely horrified with the news they were bringing to his high perch on the top of the planet.  Because of the arduous journey to reach him, Peter had time to think about his options.  So Peter did the only reasonable thing as the ecclesiastical and political leaders of the world were climbing towards his cave.  He hid.  Peter played hide and seek with the world.  Peter not here.  Go home.  For me that was the perfect image of the idealist-realist war in August.  Part of me wants to hide; part of me is still hiding tonight.  When Peter was finally located, he did the next most reasonable thing he could think of.  He turned down the job.  But the Church, the world, was not going to take no for an answer.  They were taking the wild Jesus figure back to St. Peter’s, whether he wanted to go or not.  The man who would not be pope was brought back down to earth by the realists.    

Now Peter had a really big problem.  He was now called Pope Celestine V.  Despite all of his protests that went unheeded, he really was an administrative nightmare.  Peter/Celestine (there’s irony there) absolutely hated the job, and he returned often to his work strategy of hiding.  Though he mystified everyone, especially those who were trying to help him with his duties, we would now say that Peter was depressed.  He was also having what we would call panic attacks.  Someone might diagnose him with Asperger’s Disorder.  After fifteen weeks, as Peter headed towards a full-blown nervous breakdown, a realist came to the idealist’s rescue.  Now the question of whether a pope can actually resign is an extremely complex question of canon law, and most ecclesiastical experts would say no.  It’s impossible.  But the realist on the scene, Cardinal Benedict Gaetani, showed as much finesse as Chief Justice Roberts on national health care.  He found a way for Peter to resign, and the idealist Christ figure was relieved beyond words.  Cardinal Gaetani would also finesse his way to become the next pope, Pope Boniface VIII.  The time of idealism had passed; it always has a short window.                    

            Though I like the static image of realist Cardinal Gaetani helping to find a way out for idealist Peter, I have to share how the story turns out.  The realists in the crowd demand it.  Peter wanted to return to his mountain--to live out his live praying to God on his mountaintop.  Instead Pope Boniface VIII put him in prison, where he eventually died in questionable circumstances. 

While listening to the beautiful Plainsong chanting of the monks at Holy Cross Monastery in 2012, I knew that I needed something more than idealism to begin this year.  That I needed something more than realism has always been patently obvious to me.  I’m a teacher, remember?  What I needed was wisdom.  Wisdom about myself and the world.  The truth was the papacy was a step down for Peter Morrone, the Don Quixote of the papacy, and he knew it at the time.  Wisdom is the dialectic between idealism and realism, the spiritual guide inside you.  It is how you live out your ideals in your daily life.  It is the most important thing that you possess.  When you write a chapel talk, which can be a challenging task for faculty members who talk all day, you impart something more than knowledge.  You convert knowledge into something golden, something meaningful and worthwhile, with a heartbeat.  When you counsel a student in crisis, as every one of you will do this year, maybe even this week, you are the wise woman and wise man for that student, that child of God, in the teachable moment.  When you help a student sort through the madness of the college process, you share your treasure of wisdom.  You give them courage to find their own wisdom despite everything their culture is screaming at them from all sides.  This can be a very difficult time for our students.  High school is still an awkward time for me.  And for Joe McDonough. 

So I don’t want to leave you hiding with Peter Morrone on the mountaintop.  It’s time to come down to a level place, a wise landing, to work for the common good.  Welcome back to Kent.  My God bless you in your teaching and wisdom ministry this year.