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Chapter IV

Flinging Myself Against the Sky

The Tale As Father Told It

My great aspiration was to be a priest, but it was not just to be priest; it was to live out my priesthood within a religious community—to be a friar. As I look back at my boyhood after such a great number of years, this fact gives me a kind of quiet satisfaction. It also gives me one of the many things for which I am thankful to God. So often the dreams of one’s childhood must fade, evaporating into vague and sometimes even melancholy memories. Far too frequently the harsh realities of the world eat away at the goals of one’s youth like a corrosive acid until there is nothing left of them.

Of course, as people grow up, practicality must play an ever-greater role in their lives. Please understand that I am not saying there is anything wrong with that. What is wrong is that many people assume that being practical means they must lower their expectations. They believe that they must accept less than they did when they were young enough to “dwell in possibility.” The boy who yearned to become a pilot spends his life as an accountant who stares longingly at the sky. The girl whose dream was to be a ballerina grows up to become a lawyer. Yet only when she sits in a darkened theater watching others do what she no longer has any hope of doing does she feel fully alive. Such experiences are common; they may even be the norm. Yet they produce lives that are always tinged with regret, haunted with thoughts of what might have been, of what should have been, if only things had worked out differently … properly.

I have been very greatly blessed because God has spared me all that. He gave me what I most desired, and, in so doing, He made possible a life of contentment for me. Now, this is not to say that I have lived up to the potential God gave me. Nor is it to say that I have fulfilled all or even most of the tasks that He has sent my way, either. It is certainly not to say that I have been ecstatically happy at every moment over the last eight decades. Of course not! I’ve experienced the highs and lows, the successes and failures, the wonderful surprises and crushing disappointments that everyone does. Let me tell you, I have often failed miserably, and I am painfully aware that I have let God and other people down terribly many, many times in my life. But no matter what happened, I always knew that God had permitted my dreams to become my destiny, and that is a wonderful gift. It is something for which I humbly thank our heavenly Father every day.

There is a quotation I heard or read many years ago, and I haven’t the slightest idea from where it comes. Perhaps it’s from some poem, but I’m not even sure of that. It goes like this: “I take this puppet, which is myself, and I fling him against the sky.” I like this image very much, and think it is something that every Catholic and certainly every priest and religious might consider. Those few words could be a profitable source of meditation for most of us. Let’s face it; we rarely fling ourselves against the sky in the faith-filled confidence that God will find some way to catch us. We are often too timid with our lives. Put in the most basic of terms, we usually do not have enough faith to dare anything at all, and because of this lack we permit our dreams to die or to be taken from us. We allow ourselves to become less than what God would permit us to be—perhaps less than He wants us to be. This is part of our fallen nature; it is something we must struggle against.

When I was seventeen, a day came when I had so many butterflies in my stomach they felt like a herd of hyperactive elephants. It was just ten days after my graduation from Immaculate Conception High School in Montclair, New Jersey, and it was the moment when I was to leave the only life I had ever known for a life about which I knew little. All I really understood about the Capuchins, whom I was about to join, was that they practiced the most austere form of Franciscanism that existed in the United States at that time. I realized that attempting this way of life would involve many adjustments and sacrifices for me, but I didn’t have a clue as to whether or not I’d be able to measure up as a follower of Holy Father St. Francis in the Capuchin tradition.

All these years later I can freely admit something that I wouldn’t dare have even hinted at back than: I was a nervous wreck when I was going to the novitiate and terribly homesick for a long time once I got there. I’m going to let you in on a little secret: the religious life in the early fifties was anything but warm and fuzzy; it was, in fact, often cold and impersonal. At times it seemed like something from which any sensible person should flee, and it was certainly a very stark contrast to the loving family from which I came. Yet somehow God gave me the grace I needed to fling myself against the sky and to stay, awaiting treasures to come. I like to think that He gave me the grace to live the life for which He had created me.

I find the memories of that day amazingly easy to conjure up. As I dictate these words I have in my mind a perfect picture of my pre-novitiate self, waiting at Penn Station in Newark, New Jersey. Yet it is as if that person is someone else, someone whom I observe from a very great distance, rather than myself. The young man I am now envisioning—the one I was an eternity ago—is not alone. His parents stand on either side of him, and although he doesn’t really notice it, they are closer to him than they would normally be in such a situation. They almost hover around him protectively as if trying to shield him from something. He is wearing a very well-pressed but slightly uncomfortable black suit, a crisp white shirt, and a black tie. That way of dressing was not accidental. Such was the unvarying uniform of the seminarian in those days. As I think about it today, however, I suspect that I must have looked rather funereal.

Despite the fact that I was still a month short of my eighteenth birthday I felt very grown up—a man dressed in a man’s suit and embarking on a man’s life. How wrong I was! I see clearly now what I could not acknowledge even to myself then, that I was simply a boy who felt he should be more mature than his few years allowed him to be. Although I was simply a boy, I was a boy filled with expectation, one brimming with hope. The desire to be a priest had been a constant in my life for years by that time. No—I must correct that. It had not been a constant, at all. It had been growing steadily and powerfully until I had come to see it as a wonderful inevitability. I realize that on that June day in 1951, I could no longer even imagine a life that did not involve the priesthood.

Because of that feeling—that joyful obsession—I don’t really know if I truly appreciated the finality of things as I awaited the train that would carry me far from New Jersey, far from my family and the only life I had ever known. I suspect it had not completely sunk in that I would never again live in my parents’ home, that they and my brothers and my sisters would no longer be intimate parts of my daily life. I also suspect that I didn’t completely appreciate the effect my leaving must have had on my father, and especially on my mother. From the day I departed to the day they died, my parents never failed to support my vocation; never once did they try to dissuade me from what I was convinced that God was calling me to do. I know they were proud of me, and the memory of their pride is something I treasure today every bit as much as I did sixty years ago. I know that they prayed every day for my success and perseverance. But what I didn’t really know—or at least didn’t understand—back in 1951 was that it must have hurt them to see their eldest son leave at such a young age.

After I boarded that train, the family they loved so much was forever changed, and this must have been a source of sadness for them. They never spoke to me about this; they never even hinted at it. But from the distance of many years, I can see it in a way I could not back then. Youth is oblivious of so much. That lack of awareness protects young people in ways they never suspect until they are much older.

The train finally arrived with all its irrevocability. I kissed my mother goodbye. Then I shook hands with my father. I’m sure an onlooker would have seen our leave-taking as formal, maybe almost emotionless. But it wasn’t. The depth of feeling was there, and it was powerful; yet it was contained, even hidden, because that is simply the way people acted back then. It was a far more reserved era, a time when emotions were considered private, not suited to public display. Time conceals many things, but other things it actually reveals or at least makes clearer. And I believe I can see that day as it really was far better now than I did then. As I look back at that moment, I find I am actually a little overwhelmed at my parents’ love for me, at their pride in me, at their strength in being able to surrender me to God. Perhaps I didn’t feel all that as I waved goodbye to them and boarded the train, but God has allowed me to feel it now in all its wonderful intensity.

I can remember walking down the aisle of the train in search of my seat, my ticket clutched a little too tightly in my hand. I can remember the lurch of the train as it pulled out of the station and headed west, and I can remember feeling that the first part of my life was ending and the second beginning. I have to say that I was filled with excitement and nervous anticipation.

The trip to Huntington, Indiana, where the Capuchin novitiate was then located, proved to be long and somewhat boring. It was also hot, as there was no air conditioning in the summer of 1951. I could see that the land was becoming flatter and flatter the farther from home we got. That must mean we are getting close to Indiana, I assumed, dutifully remembering what the sisters had taught us: that Indiana was part of the Great Plains and that plains are, well … plains and lacked the hills and valleys that are so common on the East Coast. The train sped on, with me doing my best to imagine what the strange land of Indiana would be like, what the Capuchins would be like. I knew Indiana sometimes had tornados (another bit of information I had gleaned from the sisters), and I was still young enough to hope that I might actually experience one. I read for a while but couldn’t concentrate on what I was reading.

I tried to pray, but even that was difficult until I reached into my pocket and found my rosary beads. It was so familiar and the feel of the beads slipping through my fingers so comforting that I was able to let the contemplation of its mysteries enfold me as the train traveled on. I even discovered that the gentle rocking of the train seemed to help in praying the Rosary, or perhaps that was just a little gift God was giving to a nervous boy on his first trip away from home. Whatever the case, my rosary made me feel less alone. It made me feel that Our Lady was supporting me in choosing the life I was determined to follow.

The train stopped from time to time for people to get off and for new people to get on. I found myself staring at each of the new passengers, trying to figure out what their lives might be like and where they were going. After a certain point I began to realize that the new people actually sounded different. They formed their words in a way that seemed odd to me, and they spoke with a peculiar rhythm I wasn’t used to. Actually, their words seemed every bit as flat as the landscape through which we were traveling and utterly devoid of the ethnic elements that I loved to hear and were so much a part of the speech of the people with whom I had grown up.

I listened closely, silently repeating their words in my mind, wondering if I could make myself sound like them. Would the Capuchins speak like this, I wondered. I knew that many of my fellow novices would be from the Midwest. Would my speech mark me as being different from them? Would it make me an outsider? If I stayed in Indiana long enough, would I begin to sound like these people, like a Midwesterner? As these thoughts flowed through my mind I came to the conclusion that it was probably best to abandon my occasional use of Yiddish words for emphasis … at least for the time being.

From time to time I talked to some of the other passengers, although I usually let them initiate the conversations. Whenever I was asked about my destination—which is always the most common question on a train—my response invariably elicited a look of surprise or at least a raised eyebrow. “Are you old enough for that?” a motherly woman demanded with obvious concern. “I’m almost eighteen,” I asserted, a bit stung that she hadn’t discerned my obvious maturity. Hadn’t she noticed the seriousness of my black suit? Looking down at it, I was embarrassed to realize that somehow it had become a mass of wrinkles during the long trip, so I immediately glanced back up.

Suit or no suit, she didn’t seem very impressed with the revelation of my advanced age, and she looked at me skeptically. I remember suspecting that she was working hard to avoid saying something like: “You’ll have plenty of time to make a decision like that in the future. You should be going to parties and having a good time. You should find a nice girlfriend and go to a regular college.” I actually don’t remember that she ever said anything at all. Perhaps she just nodded. Maybe she wished me luck. I think I would have remembered if she had offered to pray for me.

But even if I had not been going to a monastery, I would have rejected the idea that I should be leading a carefree life. The Korean War had begun almost exactly one year before I left New Jersey. I was very aware that boys only a little older than I were going into the armed services and that some of them would never come home. The confrontation between Western democracy and communism was a constantly intensifying, and very alarming, reality back then, making it seem as if the world was determined to rush headlong into terrible disaster.

Much of my childhood had been spent during World War II, a time of great anxiety and enormous loss of life—an apocalyptic time, the memories of which were still very fresh in people’s minds the day I boarded that train. Those memories were irrefutable proof of the demonic depths to which mankind could sink, of the terrible evil and consuming destruction that could spring from the human soul.

Such things meant that my generation was very different from young people of the present time. We were not inclined to be frivolous. We were too intimately acquainted with the possibility of tragedy. We had learned too early and perhaps too well of the uncertainty of life and the transience of worldly pleasures—of the ephemeral nature of earthly life. The era in which we were born and grew up formed us. It drove us to look beneath the surface of things, to be dissatisfied with meaningless entertainments, to search for something deeper. It was this depth that I believed I would find with the Capuchins, this mysterious depth that transcended life and death and overcame the tragedy of our earthly existence. That, and only that, was the reason I was on a hot train in a wrinkled suit bound for a novitiate in Huntington, Indiana. I had no time for parties. I was in search of treasures that would last. I reached for my rosary again, and the train rumbled on.

Indiana, as it turned out, was different from what I expected. I remember standing in front of the novitiate, my bag in my hand and my heart in my mouth, looking to the left and to the right. My first impression of Huntington was that it was comprised of nothing but Capuchins and cows. Because of the flat landscape you could see a great distance in all directions, but that didn’t matter very much because once the novelty of seeing cows wore off (which it did rather quickly) there really wasn’t much else to look at. I realized right away that I had arrived in what we in Jersey City used to call the boondocks. It had never occurred to me before that day that the boondocks could be quite so empty. However, if God wanted me to be in such a place, then that is where I would be—and I would learn to love it … or, failing that, to like it. At least that was my plan on the first day.

My heart was pounding a little as I walked up the steps, but my nervousness evaporated as soon as the door swung open, for I was greeted by the most perfect monastic doorkeeper in the entire world. This was Br. Ferdinando Piconi, about whom I have written before. He had the power to make a scared, young novice-to-be forget his fear and misgivings in an instant. Br. Ferdinando also had the gift of being able to make people smile, and he didn’t have to work very hard to do it. He was very short and very round. He also had what I have always thought of as a God-given natural tonsure. He was an elf of a friar and seemed incapable of being in anything but a good mood.

Br. Ferdinando welcomed me enthusiastically, but in the midst of his exuberant greetings, he kept asking me to pray that he would have a happy death. I readily agreed to do so, of course, but the request startled me. In fact, it took me aback. I looked at him closely but on the sly, figuring that there must be more going on with Br. Ferdinando than what appeared on the surface. Maybe he’s very ill, I thought. Maybe he’s near death and is only putting on a brave front. Maybe it takes all his strength just to open the door and show me to my room.

As it turned out, none of that was the case. Br. Ferdinando did die during my year in the novitiate. Yet it was not any slowly advancing and valiantly fought disease that took him, but a massive heart attack. He went quite suddenly and perhaps even painlessly. So I believe I witnessed him receive what he had so ardently desired. He had been asking people to pray for his happy death for years. Hardly a day passed when he did not mention it. I realize that for most people this might seem as bizarre a request as it did to me on that first day in Huntington. Br. Ferdinando, however, thought it the most natural thing in the world. And I find I understand that far better now than I did in 1951. I have come to see that he was completely focused not on the present and not even on the future, but on eternity. His was a simple and slightly unusual way of expressing such things, but his was also a simple if profound faith. I believe that it was this focus, this awareness of eternity that enabled him to be so cheerful and optimistic, yet so very aware of death. I also believe that in the final analysis his requests for prayers paid off rather handsomely.