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Chapter V

The Capuchin Way

The Tale As Father Told It

I quickly got the lay of the land at Huntington and realized the novitiate was comprised of two wings extending in opposite directions. They were joined to each other by the chapel, which was right in the center, just as it should have been. One wing was for the novices; the opposite one was for the professed friars, many of whom, at that time, were elderly. As I look back at those days I can’t help but think that those two wings may as well have been in two different universes, because the friars’ wing was absolutely off limits to the novices, and our contact with the professed friars was designed to be as minimal as possible. I have to admit that this is something that has always baffled me. How can novices be properly formed if they are prevented from associating with the very people who should be their role models? Despite the apparent illogicality of it, however, this was the way things were done in the religious life before the Second Vatican Council; in fact, this separation was an almost universal feature of both men’s and women’s religious communities at that time.

Of course, we did see the older Capuchins from time to time, in the refectory and especially in the chapel. And, let me tell you, they seemed most impressive—so impressive that even today the thought of them is not merely a thought. It is more like a flood of memory that sweeps over me, carrying me back more than half a century, providing me with a flawless and detailed picture of their dark brown habits and flowing white beards. I close my eyes and those old friars are as present to me as if it is still 1951, each standing in his choir stall chanting the Divine Office in Latin. I can still feel the fervency—the totality—of their devotion. I can see the expressions on their faces, expressions that hinted at a type of prayer that was unknown to me back then, a type of prayer that was something for which I yearned.

I must say that those memories are wonderful. Yet at the same time they are almost painful, for they remind me somewhat sadly that we rarely encounter such devotion today. So much has changed; so much has diminished since those long-ago days. I even wonder if it is possible for me to describe the prayer life of those friars in a way that contemporary readers will grasp. Perhaps all I can say is that their concentration and intensity were palpable, as was a certain quality that I do not hesitate to call their joy. When they were deep in prayer it almost seemed as if the very air around them vibrated or even shimmered. It didn’t, of course, but that is what it felt like to me then. I can find no other words to describe it.

This is what prayer really means, I realized. As I gazed at them, I thought of St. Teresa of Ávila, whose writings on prayer I had avidly read before I went to the novitiate. Back in New Jersey, I had thought I had understood her—at least to a certain extent—but as I watched those old Capuchins I realized that I had not even begun to grasp what she had meant. The men before me, however, certainly had. Prayer had suffused their lives so deeply that it had become a virtual constant for them; it was as natural as breathing, as dependable as the beating of their hearts. I was in awe of them, and I wondered if I could ever hope to be like them. I still wonder that today.

Many years after I left Huntington I wrote a book entitled Spiritual Passages. It was an attempt at an in-depth description of the spiritual life, which usually manifests itself in three distinct stages. Those stages are called the purgative way, the illuminative way, and the unitive way. The deeply spiritual among us slowly rise from one to the other, becoming closer and closer to God as they do. Part of this process, especially in the beginning, involves a step-by-step discarding of those things that are not essential and a turning away from all that separates us from our heavenly Father. It is absolutely necessary in the early stages of this journey that we shed those things that impede our progress toward what is true and good—toward God—and that we turn our gaze more and more to what matters, to what is eternal. This process is never easy and can, in fact, be very difficult. At times it even involves a great deal of suffering, but it is also very beautiful, and it culminates in an unshakable peace.

After many decades of observation I believe I have witnessed a number of people who have arrived at the great clarity of the illuminative way and even a few who have achieved the great intimacy with God that characterizes the unitive way. For example, I firmly believe that the Servant of God Terence Cardinal Cooke had entered the unitive way in his last days. I visited him as he lay dying and can attest that there was a peace about him, a simplicity, a joyful and total acceptance of God’s will in his life no matter what the cost. I felt that he was both with me in his little bedroom and with God at the same instant. I remember it as a profound and moving experience, something I can never forget.

I did not know the terms used to describe the spiritual life when I arrived in Huntington. In fact, I really didn’t know very much at all. But I could see or sense or feel that some of the older friars possessed some spiritual quality that made them very different from most of the people I knew. As I look back at them I realize now that they had probably arrived at the spiritual clarity of the illuminative way. They fascinated me, and it was frustrating not to be allowed to speak to them except on very rare occasions. I watched them as often as I could, however, trying to discern from their manner, from the way they moved, from the look in their eyes, why they were so different, so special. I could not, of course, but the fascination persisted, making me yearn for a glimpse into their souls, the way I had yearned for a glimpse into the tabernacle in Corpus Christi Church when I was five years old.

But I must say something more. There was one friar whose holiness was so visible, so very tangible, that he stood apart from all the others. That was the Venerable Solanus Casey, a remarkable man in every sense of the word. I have written and spoken about Fr. Solanus Casey more times than I can count, and yet every time I look back at him it is as if I see him anew. He was quite old and gray by the time I met him at Huntington, and he was a man of profound silence as well as great humility.

As a young seminarian he had not been thought intelligent enough to complete the studies necessary for priestly ordination. In fact, he actually failed theology. Yet for one reason or another it was decided that he should be ordained anyway. It was, however, understood that he would not ever hear confessions or preach. He accepted these limitations meekly and spent most of his life as a humble porter in his Capuchin monastery. Yet the depth of his spirituality became impossible to deny, and throughout much of his life miracles of one sort or another accompanied him. When I was a novice it was not uncommon to see people come from great distances to receive his blessing and to ask for his prayers.

It was clear to me that he was unique among the friars, that he had arrived at a place in his spiritual life that few people reach—that few people even approach. I chanced upon him in prayer once, alone in the chapel late one night. He was in what I can only call a type of ecstasy before the Blessed Sacrament. He was aware of nothing but his mysterious encounter with God at that moment. The world around him had lost all meaning for him. I don’t know that I have ever seen anything quite like it since. Seeing him like that was the sort of experience that transforms you. It dissolves all doubts. Through Fr. Solanus Casey I, as a young novice, was given an extraordinary gift: a glimpse into a type of holiness that was too real and too powerful ever to be ignored. It is a gift for which I will be forever grateful.

As I let my memory drift back to my days as a Capuchin novice I am amazed at the odd things that appear to my mind’s eye. Some are full of meaning, such as the great depth of prayer displayed by the older friars. Others are quite trivial, such as the immense beards worn by those same friars, which—amazingly—is what I’m thinking about right now. Why two such different things should be juxtaposed in my thoughts I have no idea, but they seem to be, perhaps because beards were such a constant feature of Capuchin life back then. They were by no means optional, you understand. If you were a Capuchin in 1951 you grew a beard, and that was all there was to it. This rule, to put it very mildly, was taken with the utmost seriousness. In fact, when it came to beards, the Old Testament patriarchs had nothing on the Capuchins I knew. Some of those old friars really did look like Moses or Abraham, and by the time I got to Huntington, their beards had been in progress for far longer than I had been alive. As a seventeen-year-old I guess I was impressed.

Yet it must be remembered that even those immense beards had come about for reasons that were ultimately spiritual. Beards were part of the ancient Capuchin constitutions because they were considered to be a direct imitation of Jesus and St. Francis, who both were bearded. Like our Divine Savior and St. Francis, the Capuchins did not trim their beards; they simply let nature take its course—which, in the Capuchins’ case, it sometimes did with a vengeance. I came to love this part of the Capuchin way of life, the fact that every aspect of daily living—even shaving or not shaving—seemed to be infused with a spiritual dimension. If one truly lived the Capuchin way of life the way it was meant to be lived, it would be hard not to advance in holiness.

And so, with great determination, I set about to grow a beard just like my Capuchin confreres. If I couldn’t pray like them I could at least look like them, I figured. Those who know me are aware that I have always worn a beard, not an immense old-style Capuchin one, but a modified one that is kept well under control. At seventeen, however, I must admit, the beard proved to be a challenge—one I began to fear might be insurmountable. The initial results were decidedly disappointing. Some people (those slightly lacking in charity) even said they were unnoticeable. If I had known about Miracle-Gro back then I might have been tempted to try it, but persistence (and getting a little older) finally paid off, and eventually I managed to produce a reasonably acceptable beard. I have kept it ever since. I consider it very much a part of my Capuchin identity. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I’d even be able to recognize myself without it.

Only a few other new novices arrived with me that June, as the prospective new Capuchins showed up in Huntington every year in two distinct waves. The first was for boys like me, who had not attended the Capuchin minor seminaries. We arrived over a month before our more seasoned confreres-to-be. That head start was used to give us a crash course on the Capuchin Franciscan charism and way of life—a postulancy in the fast lane, you might say. It was a sort of Capuchin boot camp, and I remember it as a whirlwind with much to learn, and even more to do.

The second and slightly larger group showed up in late August. I must admit that I was just a little nervous at the arrival of the Capuchin-trained novices, wondering how far ahead of the rest of us they would be. They were ahead; there was no question about that, and both they and we were very aware of it. For a while this fact seemed to create two distinct subgroups among the novices. It was not unusual to hear the Capuchin-trained novices speak about the rest of us as “the outsiders.” Now, that may sound insulting, but I don’t think it was ever meant as such. It was really a simple statement of fact, especially in the beginning. In a sense they were already Capuchins and we, as yet, were not. As the months went on, however, the difference between the two groups became less and less noticeable, until by the end of the novitiate, a period that lasted one year and one day, I would say that the two groups were all but indistinguishable.

At that time, Huntington was the novitiate for the Capuchin Province of St. Joseph, which extended from the East Coast to Montana, so I found myself among novices from a great many places and a great many backgrounds. Those from the Midwest were about double the number from the Eastern Seaboard, and this was the almost unvarying pattern back then, with the East supplying one Capuchin friar for every two who came from the West. As I think back on those young Midwesterners I am again reminded of how much things have changed since those long-ago days.

Back then, before the media and increased mobility had more or less homogenized our society, people from the Midwest seemed very different from us Easterners. It was almost as if they came from a different culture. Perhaps it was a gentler and less self-critical one; it was certainly a more taciturn one, for it was clear that we Easterners liked to talk a great deal more than then they did. I must say that most of the novices from the Midwest seemed very devout. They also seemed able to adapt to the rustic life at Huntington with much greater ease than we from the East did. Many of them had grown up on farms and were used to the sort of manual labor that was part of a novice’s life in those days.

And when I say “rustic life” and “manual labor,” I’m not fooling around. The novitiate was all but totally self-sufficient—a world unto itself—and the novices and friars were expected to do all the work that was required. Few repairmen were ever called in, and the idea of using an outside gardener or cleaning service would have been incomprehensible. We raised our own vegetables in gardens so large they looked like whole farms to me. We also raised and eventually slaughtered our own pigs, which is something I’ve been trying to forget for over sixty years. We had orchards with various types of fruit trees, and we had more bee hives than seemed either sensible or safe. We had a large carpentry shop and our sandals were made in our cobbler’s shop. We sewed our own habits and produced all the hosts that were used at our Masses, as well as pretty much all the other baked things that we used in daily life.

At one point someone thought it would be beneficial if the novitiate had its own in-ground swimming pool. The next thing you knew, a large group of novices set to work, shovels in hand, to build one. All this meant that a novice in those days had to adapt himself to a type of physical labor that was more intense than we former city dwellers from the East were used to. We eventually got into the swing of things, but I must admit it took me some time to do so.

As I think back on my days in the novitiate I realize that I have become more deeply aware of the reasons for the stress that was laid on manual labor. Part of the motive, of course, was to teach us that many of the people we were destined to serve had no choice but to work long and hard hours to support themselves. It was to show us that we must never take this for granted and that we must never forget what it is like to work hard, to be very tired, and to have aching muscles. But it was also, at least in part, an effort to cultivate the entire person rather than simply one aspect of the person.

In our fractured and fragmented world we are apt to draw a sharp dividing line between the physical and the intellectual and an even sharper line between both of them and the spiritual. This has never been the Catholic way, and it is most certainly not the Franciscan way. For this reason the novitiate was not a time given entirely over to prayer, meditation, and spiritual instruction, as some people assume that it must be. It was a time when physical labor reminded us in no uncertain terms that we were not ethereal beings, that God had created us as flesh-and-blood creatures.

As we worked in the fields, the orchards, or the workshops we came to see that the physical was not so entirely distinct from the spiritual. If we were very blessed, perhaps we even came to understand that the spiritual life was not an aspect or division of our lives at all, but the grace-filled element that unites all the many disparate aspects of our being—the physical, the intellectual, the emotional—into the integrated person, the whole person, God wants us to be.

After the Second Vatican Council some religious and priests began to retreat from prayer and give themselves more and more totally to various social ministries. Often, when asked about this, they would say (usually rather indignantly), “My work is my prayer.” I always thought they were half right, but half right also means half wrong. Work can be a type of prayer, and a very good type of prayer. That is something we all learned at Huntington. However, work that is not nourished by a vibrant inner prayer life will eventually dry up and become simply effort. Sometimes it becomes a way of hiding from the deeper things of human life and of hiding even from the self or from God. It was at Huntington that I really fully learned what the sisters had begun to teach me back in Caldwell: that work and prayer must become a balanced unity. It was there that I began to see that the spiritual life is difficult to maintain if they aren’t.

The religious life is always marked by a series of very clear milestones: first vows, solemn professions, etc. These are the moments during which a person’s ever-greater commitment to living his life for Christ within a specific religious community is recognized. They are also the means by which the community itself affirms in progressive steps its acceptance of new members. In effect such ceremonies are the community’s symbolic way of saying, “Yes, we believe it is God’s will for you to become one of us.” The first such milestone is almost always the clothing of a novice with the religious habit of his or her community, and for us in Huntington this invariably took place on the last day of August. It was a day all the new novices eagerly anticipated, a day which we hoped would be transformative and for which we all yearned.

I remember kneeling in the chapel as the brown Capuchin habit was slipped over my head. I then stood, as I had been instructed to do, and the hem of the habit fell to my ankles, concealing my secular clothes completely. I looked down as the Franciscan cord was wound around my waist for the first of what would be countless times. And there I was, a new Capuchin and a new person—at least on the outside. I found this to be a very dramatic moment, nearly an overpowering one. It was one in which I became very aware of the words of St. John the Baptist as recorded in the Gospel of St. John: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (3:30).

If I was ever to become worthy of the habit in which I had just been clothed, I knew I would have to decrease in such a way that the light of Christ could shine through me unimpeded, undimmed. That was a rather tall order for someone who had just passed his eighteenth birthday, but it was something that youthful enthusiasm made me believe was within my grasp. It wasn’t, of course. I now understand very well that such things are not within anyone’s grasp; they are pure gifts of grace. They are things to which we can respond and with which we can cooperate, but they are never within our human grasp. That means I’m still hard at work trying to put myself second and God first, trying to let myself, my wants and needs and endless opinions, be hidden quietly away like my clothes were that day underneath my new habit.

I think it is safe to say that anybody who has ever worn a religious habit knows they take a little getting used to, especially for men. The rather loose, floor-length design of the traditional Capuchin habit is very different from the clothes men are used to wearing in the contemporary world. It feels very odd at first to have your habit constantly flapping around your legs as you walk, so odd that when you are still very new to wearing one, you sometimes feel as if the habit is going to trip you up. It rarely does, however, and over the years I’ve witnessed friars doing all manner of things including playing basketball in their habits without mishap.

I’m so used to the habit after more than sixty years that I never even give it a second thought, but I must admit that in the first few days and weeks after being clothed I sometimes felt as if I were living my life in a very large, roomy bathrobe. And, speaking of bathrobes, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Once we were clothed in the habit we were expected to wear it at all times—even in bed at night! We actually had a special night habit, which looked almost identical to the daytime habit except that it was made of a lighter fabric. The Franciscan cord that we wore in bed was also lighter and thinner than the regular one. This tradition arose centuries ago when it was considered a great blessing (one possibly even meriting an indulgence) for a religious to die in his or her habit, and since people sometimes die in their sleep (which might be a great blessing in itself) religious took to wearing their habits to bed. To this day, cloistered Carmelite nuns wear their brown scapulars at night and many Trappists—as far as I know—still wear their entire habits.

I must say that the nighttime habit proved to be a challenge to most novices. It certainly was one to me. The problem was that, as is the case in many religious communities, the novice’s habit was somewhat different from that of the professed friar. The cowl was removable to symbolize the fact that the novice has not yet made the vows that would bind him completely to the community. It was attached to a scapular-like garment which we called a caparone. The caparone hung down the front and back of your body, extending only to your waist. This presented no great problem during the day, as the ends of the caparone were held more or less in place by the cord around your waist. At night, however, the caparone seemed absolutely expert at escaping the cord. Thus both ends of the scapular as well as the Capuchin cowl were likely to move every time you did. At times they almost seemed to take on a life of their own, and often one end or the other ended up in your face. Other times everything managed to get twisted up in a very uncomfortable way.

I can recall many nights when I felt like I was locked in mortal combat with an octopus, and there were at least one or two times when I was convinced I would end up strangled before dawn. I remember it being very difficult at times to resist the temptation to simply discard the cowl and the caparone during the night in order to get some decent sleep. I’m sure everyone felt that temptation, but I also think that few novices actually did that, at least during the early fifties. Habits in religious life have been downplayed and even denigrated in recent years, but back then we thought of our habits as being very important. They were holy symbols for us. We felt they were a necessary part of the transformation that must take place within us if we were ever to become true Capuchins. They were the outward sign that symbolized what we hoped would be a growing inward reality and, as such, we were very aware that they should be an ever-present reminder.

It has been several days, almost a week, since I have tried to dictate a new section of this manuscript. I have had quite a few visitors in the meantime and, although I enjoy seeing people very much, their presence drains me. I find that I have less and less energy as time goes on, and I remind myself regularly that it’s only natural to feel that way at my stage of life. Natural or not, it’s frustrating. I have, however, been eager to get back to work because I find I enjoy recalling and speaking about this particular part of my life very much.

Reflecting on my days in Huntington causes a clutter of images to cascade through my mind, and they all compete for my attention. These memories seem like old friends who have been ignored for too long, and each one of them seems to spark others, to resurrect recollections long buried, but never truly forgotten. Perhaps there is some logic in the way this is happening, but I cannot discern it, nor do I care to try. I am content simply to enjoy the progression of such memories, to travel where they seem intent on taking me. It is like watching a stream of water flow by or clouds traveling through the sky, propelled by strong wind.

Right now, although I am in my reclining chair, it is as if I am standing in a large room, and I must inform you that this is no ordinary room. It is the refectory in Huntington, the place in which countless Capuchins took their meals for many, many years. It is the place in which I ate every day for my entire time in the novitiate. I can see the tables. I remember the assigned seats for the novices so well that I could tell you who sat where without a second thought. I can envision my own place just a little more than halfway down one long table as if I were there only yesterday. I can even see the plain food that was our daily fare back then. Let me tell you, no five-star restaurant ever had to feel threatened by our monastery kitchen. Yet the food was good and nourishing, if not particularly inspiring. Most of it came from the things we had grown on our own land. Most of it was organic, I think, although nobody would have used that word in such a way back then. Maybe that means that we were ahead of our time—in the vanguard, so to speak.

I cannot imagine the meals in that room without also hearing a voice. As is common in most monastic houses, there was a lector at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, someone who read aloud as everyone else ate in silence. It was firmly believed that in the life of a religious, time should never be wasted, and the mind must be focused as much as possible on spiritual things. So the custom arose many centuries ago of having some spiritually edifying text read aloud during mealtime. Meal after meal we worked our way through one book after another, listening closely as we ate (most of the time, at least).

Some of those books were captivating. Others were less so. There is one book that I will never forget. It had such a deep impact on me that it literally changed my life. Saints for Sinners was the title, and it was by Archbishop Alban Goodier, SJ. In it he told in a rather lively way the stories of a good number of the saints, and not just the ones everyone is familiar with. He told of some saints whose names were not well-known at all and even of some whose names were virtually unknown.

It was during the reading of this book that I first heard of a little-known saint, a wanderer, a tramp like the tramps whom I remembered from my childhood. These were men whom life seemed to have treated with exceptional cruelty—those whom life seemed intent on crushing. As the book was being read I recalled being a small boy, hiding behind a bush and watching one such man make his way down our street. I had realized at the time that he was different from all the adults in my life, and I had understood that this difference was a disturbing one. I can remember crouching low so he wouldn’t see me, as something about him seemed frightening. Perhaps on some level I understood that he was also terribly sad; perhaps I did not.

I saw other such men as I grew older, for they were not really uncommon in the late thirties and early forties. Often their lives had been destroyed by the Great Depression; often they were the ones who could not recover, could not go back to a normal life. They carried all that they owned in a bag or two. They had no fixed abode; they were always moving on, as if condemned to travel endlessly in search of what? Acceptance? Love? Peace? My mother would never fail to give them food, as did many people in our town, and they would never fail to be greatly appreciative. Some of them—more than a few actually—turned out to be real gentlemen.

They had seemed to me to be the forgotten ones, the invisible ones, the ones whose lives no longer mattered to anyone. To the world they were no more than leaves being buffeted from place to place by cold autumn winds. As I grew older, seeing them ceased to be frightening, but it started to become troubling and eventually almost painful. Why didn’t anyone help them, I wondered. Why did no one take them in as they wandered from disappointment to disappointment? Their presence, their very existence, seemed to me to expose the truth of our world in a very stark and unpleasant way. It showed how far we really were from what Christ wants us to be.

These wanderers became for me the mirror of our failure, of our indifference to the suffering of others, of our ability to ignore the pain that is right in front of our eyes. I wanted to help—felt a compulsion to do something. Yet all I could do was to offer them the food that my mother had made or sometimes, perhaps, some money. It was something, but it was little—far too little when measured against all they really needed. Perhaps it was the sight of those lost ones that first awakened in me the desire to serve the poor.

I recall how startled I felt all those years ago in the refectory as I discovered that Archbishop Goodier had actually included such a wanderer—a little tramp—in his book on saints. Before that moment I don’t think I had ever imagined that such a person could achieve so much; I guess I had considered men like him to be too damaged to be capable of rising to real spiritual heights. That realization felt shameful, because it showed me that, like the people who ignored such men, I too perceived them as being somehow less than others—almost, but not quite fully human. I had allowed their sad and disturbing exteriors to obscure the fact that they were made in the image of God, that they were the ones for whom Christ died. I felt ashamed, but also excited. Listening intently, I began to see in a way that may have been new to me at the time that God’s grace really can enter wherever God wants it to enter, can transform even the unlikeliest of human lives. I must say that it was a rather thrilling realization.

The vagabond saint about whom I was hearing became utterly fascinating to me, so fascinating that I forgot to eat, which I can assure you was not a common occurrence for me at that time. As I pushed my carrots around my plate, I began to visualize him on his wanderings, and in my imagination his face began to take on the features of the men I had seen as a boy, the ones who had disturbed me so.

Yearning for a life of holiness, yet rejected by one religious order after another, this saintly hobo (for when I was a boy, that is what we called such men) traveled on foot throughout France, Italy, and Spain, making his way from one shrine to another. Denied a monastery, he made the world his monastery. Denied physical possessions, he still engaged in constant acts of charity, giving to others the very food he needed to survive. Denied friends, he devoted himself to the one Friend who would never desert him, and spent countless hours in Eucharistic devotion. Denied a home, he died on the streets of Rome. Denied in this life almost everything the world values, he received everything of real value in the next.

He was a perplexing kind of saint, and there is a very real possibility that if he had lived in our times he would have been considered mentally ill.