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Chapter II

High School Days

The Tales Father Wasn’t Given the Time to Tell

And that’s it. The preceding short chapter was all Fr. Benedict ever wrote about his earliest years, all he was willing to confide. Over and over again he vowed to return to that period, to discuss his high school days, his growing sense of a vocation to the priesthood and religious life. Except for producing a few fragments, however, he never did that. In fact, he always seemed rather reluctant to talk about the early periods of his life in much detail, deferring such discussion again and again and choosing to speak about things that occurred at later points. I was never quite sure of his reasons for this and never felt completely comfortable asking him. I suspect, however, that at least part of it had to do with an unwillingness to put his family and close personal friends on public display in a book.

I believe another and perhaps stronger motive was that deep down he didn’t think that such things were very important. For example, he considered his life during his high school years to be quite unremarkable—of little interest to anyone who hadn’t known him well at that time. I believe he really conceived of his life not as the sum total of his days on earth, but as the work he did, as the living out of his priestly and religious vocation. It was the constant giving of himself to tasks that he deemed important and especially to people who needed his help that he considered noteworthy. Those things constituted his life; the rest did not. In a certain way, I think it can truthfully be said that his priesthood was his life and his life his priesthood. That is the real reason why, left to his own devices, Fr. Benedict might almost have been willing to write an autobiography that began with a sentence such as this: “I was born; seventeen years later I entered the Capuchins.”

Nevertheless, others vividly recall his early years and none of them remember him as unremarkable. Charles Kenworthy, a close friend of Fr. Benedict’s since the two met at Immaculate Conception High School in Montclair, New Jersey, as fourteen-year-old ninth graders, recalls a young man—known always as Pete—who was possessed of an unusual intensity for a young teenager, not to mention an unusual determination. He notes that many of the characteristics that became Fr. Benedict trademarks were already formed and in place by the time Pete Groeschel entered high school. “People always ask me what he was like back then,” Charles said. “There’s only one way for me to answer that question. I say he was the same. He was always consistent throughout his life. He never changed. He just became more and more like himself.”

That attitude was echoed by Fr. Benedict’s sister, Marjule Drury, who is thirteen years younger than her brother: “I was the second to the youngest in the family,” she said. “When my sister, Robin, was born, I was two years old and my mother was ill for a long time afterward. She was unable even to come home from the hospital for about eight months. There was no one to take care of me except Peter. He would pick me up at the babysitter’s promptly after school and spend the rest of the day with me until our father came home that night. It must have bothered him some to have such a young child tagging along after him all the time, but I don’t think he ever expressed that. He took good care of me. He was attentive, loving—he made me feel safe. He’s been making people feel safe his whole life, I guess.”

Along with a grammar school, Immaculate Conception High School was part of a large and bustling parish, the sort that were once called powerhouses and could be counted on to have innumerable Masses and very clogged parking lots on a Sunday or holy day morning. The faculty consisted of members of the Sisters of Charity in Convent Station, New Jersey, augmented by several laymen and women. There were three curates in the parish during the time that Pete Groeschel was there—an almost unimaginable number from our present point of view—and they, too, taught in the high school, forming the nucleus of the religion department, as well as sometimes coaching the school’s sports teams. Fr. Joseph Sheehan, who often taught apologetics to the senior class, doubled as the school’s football coach, a fact that Fr. Benedict thought mildly amusing: “If you think about it long enough, you’ll realize the two enterprises actually have a good deal in common,” he once said.

Immaculate Conception High School was like a magnet, drawing students from miles around; it was simply the school to which a Catholic family from that part of northern New Jersey would send its children if at all possible during the forties and fifties. The parish is still there today, smaller and less unwieldy perhaps, but looking much the same as it did when Pete Groeschel arrived there as a ninth-grade student in September 1947. The high school building, plain and square, with a front made of tan stucco and brick, looks little different from hundreds of other Catholic school buildings of that era: obviously constructed with an eye to serviceability rather than aesthetics, but still solid and appealing in its own way.

Located a couple of towns away from Caldwell, Immaculate Conception was a trek for Pete: too far to get to on foot, and so every day he boarded the number twenty-nine trolley on Bloomfield Avenue for a half-hour ride to school. By the time he arrived he had usually been up for hours, having attended early Mass in his home parish (often acting as unofficial sacristan by opening the church with a key entrusted to him by the pastor). His daily assistance at Mass was not always common knowledge among Pete’s wider circle of friends, but the ones who knew him best were very aware of it. “You knew he wouldn’t miss Mass except under the most unusual of circumstances,” said Edward Widstock, another good friend from that period. “He had to leave home early to get to Mass and then to school on time, and during the winter that meant leaving in the dark of night. Pete always was very considerate, and that consideration together with the darkness occasionally produced amusing results. One day he showed up in school wearing one brown shoe and one black one. No, he wasn’t trying to inaugurate a new fashion fad; he hadn’t turned on a light as he got dressed so as not to wake his brother with whom he shared a room. I guess he was just feeling around in the closet until he came up with one right shoe and one left one, and he just put them on. I don’t think he noticed until after sunrise that his shoes didn’t match at all.

“And Pete could very easily laugh at himself. In fact, I think that he liked to laugh at himself. He didn’t feel the least bit embarrassed to be wearing mismatched shoes; he just thought it was funny. I probably would never have noticed his shoes if he hadn’t pointed them out to me—and not just to me: he pointed them out to everybody, and every time he did he had a good laugh.”

The ability to laugh at himself, at his own foibles, to be absolutely unselfconscious about his physical appearance, was a characteristic of Pete Groeschel, and it never changed throughout his entire life. “Your hair has turned gray!” a slightly startled woman once exclaimed, after not having seen Fr. Benedict for several decades. “It’s an optical illusion,” Father immediately responded, rubbing his very bald head and laughing. “I’ve always looked like something out of the Canterbury Tales,” he would announce nonchalantly while walking down a busy New York City street, his flowing habit, Franciscan cord, and beard attracting stares from all directions. He never seemed to care, never made even the slightest effort to blend in. Nor did he choose to wear his habit rather than the black suit and Roman collar favored by most priests in order to attract attention. He did it because he loved being a priest and a religious and saw no reason to hide that love.

“He was always very religious, always devout,” Charles Kenworthy said, “and you could see that devotion when he served Mass, which he often did at Immaculate Conception Church. He was usually one of the boys who were chosen to do that when a Mass was being celebrated for the school. I served Mass there, too, but Pete did regularly, and you could see that he was really in his element, that he was really drawn into it. He also served Mass early in the morning at the sisters’ chapel in the convent. There were five or six boys who did that, in a kind of rotation, and he was always one of them. We knew he was going to be a priest. Everybody did. It was so obvious that it was almost difficult to imagine him being anything else. His faith was so strong you could almost touch it. You could kind of feel it when you were with him. I don’t think it ever wavered. That was just the way he was.”

Such remarks—and there are many of them—seem almost extravagant, and you can’t help but wonder if that is really the way people saw Pete Groeschel during his high school years or if people’s memories were influenced and subtly altered by knowledge of the rest of Fr. Benedict’s remarkable life. Perhaps there is a bit of both in these nearly seventy-year-old recollections. Or perhaps these memories are spot on. Whatever they are, they are simply the way that Fr. Benedict’s friends from that period speak of him, the way they recall him at this point. And it is interesting to think that despite the seeming extravagance of such statements, they probably carry even more weight than they seem to.

Back in the forties and very early fifties the Catholic Church seemed able to produce as many vocations to the priesthood and religious life as it wanted. There were, in fact, three other boys from Pete Groeschel’s high school class who entered minor seminaries after graduation—and that’s three out of only 136 students! Assuming the graduating class was divided roughly equally by gender that meant that out of slightly fewer than seventy boys, four believed they had priestly vocations. That’s a pretty high number, and when you stop to realize that several of the girls entered religious communities at the same time, the number of vocations produced from that small group seems almost amazing by contemporary standards. Yet it is always Peter Groeschel who seems singled out when the members of the class of 1951 speak of priestly vocations; it is always he who was known as “the priest to be” among them.

At Immaculate Conception High School in the forties there were three courses of study open to the students: the classical course, the scientific one, and the commercial one. Pete Groeschel was in the classical program, studying such subjects as Latin, English, History, and French; and although his report cards look very faded these days, they still reveal that he excelled in practically all his courses, and they also make it clear that writing and languages came easily to him. Yet in some ways it seemed his bent was almost in the opposite direction. He exhibited a love of and even a hunger for scientific knowledge. He was endlessly intrigued by the “workings of creation,” as Charles Kenworthy put it. “He always carried a briefcase crammed full of books. Most of them were textbooks, of course, but not all. He liked to read about science, especially astronomy, and, to a slightly lesser extent, physics. I guess biology didn’t interest him quite so much, but he found the physical sciences captivating. He read about them whenever he had the time and tried to learn as much as he could on his own.”

This love of science, and especially of astronomy, persisted throughout Fr. Benedict’s entire life. In his later years I recall him being fascinated by an article he found in The New York Times that described some new astronomical discovery. As soon as he was done reading it he asked his secretary, Natalie di Targiani, to get him as much material regarding it from the Internet as she could find. He devoured every word and discussed it for days with a genuine excitement. Yet his was a very specific approach to science and the physical world. He never looked at anything mechanistically or materialistically. Such an approach seemed not just incomplete or even faulty to him, but absurd. His perception of the universe could be summed up perfectly with the psalmist’s words: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork” (Ps 19). The attitude of Pete Groeschel as a high school boy and Fr. Benedict as an elderly man are, I think, the same, and are revealed in the following paragraphs he wrote in 2012. They were originally intended to form part of another section of A Friar’s Tale, a section he didn’t live to complete. But I think they fit perfectly right here:

I have always loved gazing at the sky. In fact, I have been utterly fascinated by astronomy since I was a small boy with a fifty-cent telescope. For nearly four decades I was blessed to live by Long Island Sound, and watching the night sky while I stood at the shore was one of my great pleasures. On a good night it seemed that endless stars shone above me, each one reflected in the dark, shimmering water at my feet. I could spend quite a while like that, noting stars and constellations, the planets in their orbits, the moon in all her many phases. In fact, I’d often lose track of time and stay outside much longer than I had planned.

I treasure the memory of those evenings, both because of their beauty and because of their depth. You see, such times at the water’s edge were rarely simply star gazing; they often became occasions of prayer and meditation for me. They were moments when I would feel especially aware of the magnificence of God’s creation, of the infinite power that caused our universe to spring into being and continually sustains it—the power that sustains each one of us with love. I like to think that watching the night sky allowed me to sense in some slight way the enormity and awesome complexity of God’s plan. It permitted me to feel concretely the truth of our Divine Savior’s words in the Gospel of St. Matthew: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will” (Mt 10:29).

These words show a great deal about the person who was Pete Groeschel and the priest he became. They demonstrate a breadth of vision, a way of seeing things that did not compartmentalize, that saw no reason to put science and faith into different categories or to imagine them as opposing forces. As Charles Kenworthy notes: “It never occurred to him for a second that there was any sort of conflict between science and faith. He would have thought an idea like that was crazy.

“Einstein was at Princeton back when we were in high school, you know. And Princeton’s not all that far from Caldwell. Pete was very aware of that. He never said it that I remember, but I knew he would have given almost anything to meet Einstein. He never did, of course, but he wanted to in the worst way. He carried a quotation of Einstein’s in his pocket on and off for most of his life. It’s a quotation about mystery, and Pete was very impressed by it. He saw a real religious dimension in it, and he used it in some of his writings. He had a great regard for Einstein, for science in general.”

The quotation from Einstein that meant so much to Fr. Benedict was this: “The deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God. My religion is a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.”¹ These words of Albert Einstein capture the way Fr. Benedict understood the universe—the way he understood it even as a boy.

I think they illustrate something else, as well: some of the changes that have occurred in our culture in the lifetimes of people of Fr. Benedict’s generation—changes he worried and prayed about often. When Pete Groeschel was a boy it was not considered odd for the greatest scientist of the age to write in words that seemed more religious than scientific. More than sixty years later we seem to inhabit a world in which science—or at least some scientists—has all but declared war on religion in any and every form. The time in which Fr. Benedict grew up did not do that. The culture still had respect and even admiration for Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It was a time in which religious thought was not barred from the public square and theologians were not sequestered in ivory towers but participated prominently in the important debates of the time. Their pictures regularly appeared on the covers of magazines such as Time, and they were listened to when they commented on science, or social policy, or the arts, or any of the many other aspects of human life.

It was this world that Pete Groeschel inhabited in his teens, a world where faith did not have to be on the defensive, and perhaps it was that world that helped to make Fr. Benedict Groeschel as open to the ideas of others, as confident in his faith as he was, and so able to see the workings of God in the night sky, the world around him, the joys and sorrows of daily life—in everything.

Friendship meant a great deal to the young Peter Groeschel. His outgoing personality, his easy humor, and his apparent inability to hold a grudge attracted many. Those who knew him best remember him being frequently surrounded by people as he made his way down the halls of Immaculate Conception High School, often becoming the center of attention without really having to do much to achieve that status. Yet I suspect he did not think of all those people as his friends. That position was reserved for a far smaller group of people who remained part of his life until his final days.

“We met during registration for ninth grade,” said Charles Kolb. “I remember him standing there with a book bag so full that he could barely lift if off the ground. We started talking, and we were suddenly friends. We’ve been friends ever since. We ate lunch together every day at school. He was very dependable. We would spend a good deal of time at each other’s houses after school. I remember he loved to come to my house, which was a good distance from his, especially when my mother was cooking sauerbraten and potato dumplings. He couldn’t get enough of that.”

Most of us lose the friends of our high school years as the decades pass by. Those people often seem to fall away, becoming part of a distant and discarded past. But Fr. Benedict was never one to discard people and so retained not just friendships but close relationships with those he had cared for most in high school. “I was having some trouble with my eyes and needed some help, and he knew it. So he told me he wanted me to come to St. Joseph Manor, the nursing home he was living in. He thought we could spend our last years together, just as we spent our high school years together. He tried to arrange it,” said Charles Kolb. “I wish it could have happened.”

He felt the same way toward others, maintaining close contact with Charles Kenworthy, Edward Widstock, N. John Hall and all the others who had formed his “inner circle” in high school, rarely failing to visit them when he was able to do so, never failing to pray for them and their families.

Pete was called a bookworm by many of his fellow students. He never took offense at that assessment and never thought that any was intended. For the most part, in fact, he agreed with the characterization. He was drawn to books as a boy and read avidly on many subjects throughout his life. His living quarters at Trinity Retreat were lined with bookshelves, all the contents carefully arranged according to topic or author (and as far as authors went, St. Augustine was always given pride of place, with Cardinal John Henry Newman a somewhat distant second). Entering his room, which was rather dark, was like entering a small library, and if you pulled one of the books from the shelves and opened it, you would probably find that the text had been underlined in various places and that notes had been scribbled in the margins in Father’s unique and occasionally decipherable handwriting.

But he was far more than just a bookworm. As anyone who has ever met him can readily attest, his personality was just too strong and too extroverted for such a description to be able to sum him up. As his friends state over and over again, he was liked by almost everybody and could get along with almost anybody. He was elected class treasurer (Who knows? Perhaps this was early training for his years as almoner for the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and as fundraiser for innumerable charitable projects), and he was prefect of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin. He also joined the debate society, quickly and decisively becoming its star. “Pete had the words,” Charles Kenworthy recalled. “He could come up with just the right word without a second’s hesitation. It was because of him that our school always came out number one in regional debates—always. It was a foregone conclusion when Pete was on the team. We couldn’t lose.”

And none of the countless people who have heard Fr. Benedict preach over the decades would be surprised by that statement. His preaching was legendary for both its power and its content, not to mention its sincerity. For he did indeed have the words, words that won debates in his youth and brought people closer to God in his later years. Peter Groeschel had been given the gift of words in a very special way and for a very special purpose, and he never failed to make use of that gift in his priestly life. He was also given another gift, I think, one that he claimed his mother had as well, the gift of feeling at ease in almost any situation, and that cannot be ignored.

One of the most common phobias in our rather neurotic world involves public speaking. The thought of having to talk to a large group of people—especially for an extended period of time—affects many, and even paralyzes some. This, however, is a fear from which Pete Groeschel was remarkably free at a surprisingly young age. He discovered early on that he was at ease in front of a group, that he actually liked giving talks and speeches, as well as answering questions and engaging in freewheeling discussion. I think it can fairly be said that public speaking invigorated him as a teenager, and it certainly did so during his adulthood. So, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Pete was pleased, but not entirely content with, being the “debate champion” of Immaculate Conception High School. For most of his high school years he was also a regular and quite formidable participant in statewide competitions for high school speech-makers, advancing round after round until he arrived at the final competition in the state capital of Trenton, where he captured either first or second place every year he competed.

Accomplished in ways that many high school students are not, and always at the top of his class, Pete Groeschel could have been considered by some to be a “teacher’s pet.” Yet that is not how his classmates remember him. He was clearly favored by some of the teachers. “Sr. Mercedida, our math teacher, loved him, and they remained good friends long after graduation,” Charles Kenworthy remembers. “The others, Sr. Benigna, our principal, and Sr. Catherine Grace thought he was pretty terrific, too. He never played on that, never thought to use it to his advantage. It was just the way things were.”

But nobody’s perfect, nor is any one person successful at all things. Pete Groeschel may have had wide-ranging interests, but those interests did not involve participating in sports beyond an occasional trip to the Caldwell Community Pool. Charles Kolb recalls that Pete and he were often the odd men out during physical education classes in high school. “Pete was kind of tall and lanky, and I was short and skinny. We didn’t fit in with the football players who made up most of the students in our phys-ed class.

“The professor—we called even the gym teachers ‘professor’ back then—really didn’t know what to do with us. I think he decided we needed to build up our bodies more, to get some muscles. So he asked us what sort of thing we thought would help us in that department. We ended up with a rowing machine and doing tumbling. This went on for the better part of four years, with us being excused from most of the activities of the physical education class as we ‘worked on our bodies,’ a process that never seemed to produce discernible results, no matter how much we rowed and tumbled. Occasionally, however, we’d be conscripted into one of the games the whole class was engaged in, like basketball. Once, when the teams were being chosen, the captain of one said (referring to Pete and me), ‘Who wants one of these two?’ Someone on the other team immediately replied: ‘You can have both of them!’”

Although he may not have been a great participant in sports, Pete rarely missed a school football, basketball, or baseball game. At least in part, I suspect, because he wanted to support his friends, such as Charles Kenworthy, who were on the teams. Charles Kolb recalled him always being there, usually serving refreshments or involved in some other useful activity.

He did the same at school dances, always showing up, always well-dressed and personable, often surrounded by a group of friends. Yet no one can remember him actually dancing. Perhaps he didn’t know how. Perhaps Pete Groeschel thought it inappropriate to do so considering his intense desire to become a priest. This latter theory certainly seems to make sense in light of what was written by N. John Hall, another good friend and classmate, and someone who also began preparation for priestly ordination after high school: “Pete and I … during our senior prom week, went to the Jesuit monastery at Poughkeepsie for a private retreat. Our act of difference and defiance was plain. While everyone else was living what for many were the culminating moments of four years of high school, we were hearing once again the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, interpreted for aspirants to the priesthood.”² Whatever the reason, the future Fr. Benedict Groeschel refrained from dancing. All accounts indicate that although he may have missed the prom, he still had fun at dances, but was usually to be found behind the tables, serving drinks and snacks, or taking tickets at the door.

Pete seemed to gravitate quite naturally to jobs such as these. He liked to be of service in any way possible. He was never afraid of work, and was willing to take on almost any task offered. One of his early jobs seems to have taken him to the sort of place that is rather difficult to imagine Fr. Benedict ever visiting: a golf course. In fact, he actually spent quite a bit of time on one, never as a player, but as a caddy. During his high school years, Pete could often be found at the Essex Fells Golf Club on weekends and during the summer, golf bags slung over his shoulder, offering clubs to members. He also worked behind the counter at a store in Caldwell, where one of his duties was to prepare parcels for shipping. “He was good at that,” said Charles Kenworthy. “I learned how to tape a box from him so that it would never come apart.”

Youths are often drawn in many directions simultaneously, fascinated by a world that is still new, still filled with wonder. And the young Pete Groeschel was no exception. The visual arts began to hold a great attraction for him during his teenage years, and true to form he was not content to be a mere bystander or onlooker. “He loved art and wanted to learn to draw and paint, maybe even to sculpt,” said his sister Marjule. “That was something of a problem, as there were no studio art courses available at his high school. But Pete was Pete, and he wouldn’t let a mere fact like that stand in his way. He spent a lot of his time after school up at Caldwell College and Mount St. Dominic. These were girls’ schools and operated by the Dominicans. Pete worked out an arrangement up there with the mother superior to take private art lessons in exchange for cleaning up the classrooms and maybe doing a few other odd jobs. This was the sort of thing that was important to him. He was always curious, and he always needed to try things himself. To this day I think there are a few of the things he did hanging in Trinity Retreat. He rarely mentioned that they were his, but they were, and they were pretty good—and it’s not just because I’m his sister that I’m saying that. They were good.”

I’ve seen them many times, and I can attest that they actually are good. Yet I suspect that despite Pete Groeschel’s clear interest and talent in studio art, he had no overpowering desire to produce works of art himself—at least not in the long run. His real interest, I believe, lay in investigating the act of creativity itself, to figure out what it was that transformed a canvas and a few tubes of paint into a picture that was in some way satisfying and even deeply meaningful to its beholder, to learn how it was possible for a lump of clay to become a figure that appears so human it almost seems to breathe.

The creative act of the artist is in some ways a pale reflection of the overwhelming creative acts of God, and this is what I imagine really drew the future Fr. Benedict Groeschel into the artist’s studio. Like his fascination with science, Pete Groeschel’s interest in art really flowed from the same source from which most things in his life did: his profound awareness of the presence of God. For him neither art nor science was really a secular dimension of life: They were dimensions of life that could reveal God a little more clearly to us. For him, perhaps there was no such thing as a secular dimension at all; he saw all things as God’s domain in one way or other, and if you listened to him carefully you would learn that.

He loved poetry and enjoyed quoting it at odd and unexpected moments. I remember sitting with him one warm fall afternoon at Trinity Retreat. We were looking out on what was called the Millpond, a small, protected inlet of Long Island Sound that was a haven for seabirds on their migratory paths. Together we counted twenty-seven perfectly white swans gliding slowly through the water, each on its own path. It was a lovely and almost breathtaking visual image, a living canvas. “Earth’s crammed with heaven. And every common bush afire with God,” Father said completely out of the blue, quoting Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It was that attitude that drew Pete Groeschel into the artist’s studio, and it was that attitude that persisted throughout his life. And by the way, on that day earth really did seem to be “crammed with heaven.”

The knowledge of the visual arts that Pete Groeschel gained during his teen years informed the rest of his life. He became a regular museum-goer during that period and continued to be one as long as he was able. Even at the very end, when he was too frail to walk more than a short distance he could still occasionally be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in his wheelchair, being pushed by Fr. John Lynch or one of the friars as he took in the newest exhibit. He often seemed revitalized by such excursions rather than drained. It was as if the art he had contemplated had somehow given him a little extra strength or perhaps a little extra joy.

Of course, religious art was the type that drew Fr. Benedict’s attention most powerfully, although at times he could define “religious art” somewhat broadly, discovering spiritual aspects of secular paintings that others would miss. The Cloisters, a museum in upper Manhattan that is a great repository of medieval art, was one of his favorite destinations, and I can’t even imagine how many times he visited it. He was apt to spend hours there, utterly absorbed in the art produced by a culture that knew no separation between the sacred and the secular.

Trips to the Cloisters became a tradition for him with each successive group of postulants and novices for the Franciscans of the Renewal. He would guide them from room to room, from corridor to corridor speaking enthusiastically about the vibrant and beautiful religious art that can be encountered there at every turn, art that he comprehended deeply because it had been inspired by a faith as profound as his own. Occasionally he would stop before a statue or painting of Our Lady, where he would fall silent for a few minutes and then, as if he were in a church, begin to sing the Salve Regina (in Latin, of course). The postulants and novices may have been a bit embarrassed by this, but they always dutifully joined in, probably leaving the other museum-goers wondering if all these gray-clad men were performing a reenactment of some long dead medieval rite. Fr. Benedict of course never thought there was anything particularly odd about singing a Latin prayer in the midst of a public museum—at least it was no more cause for embarrassment than being caught with one brown shoe and one black one.

¹ Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, with Introduction by Albert Einstein (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1948) 106.

² N. John Hall, Belief: a Memoir (Savannah, Georgia: Frederic C. Beil, Publisher, Inc. 2007), 63