The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition (46 page)

THE FRANCISCAN MONASTERY ON
31
ST STREET, NEW YORK, IS
a grey unprepossessing place, crowded in among big buildings, and inhabited by very busy priests. Not the least busy of them in those days was Father Edmund, Dan Walsh’s friend: and yet he was not too busy to talk to me practically any time I came around to see him. He was a big amiable man full of Franciscan cheerfulness, kind, disciplined by hard work yet not hardened by it, for his priesthood, which kept him close to Christ and to souls more than softened and humanized him.

From the first moment I met him, I knew I had a good friend in Father Edmund. He questioned me about my vocation, asking me how long it was since my Baptism, and what it was that attracted me to the Franciscans, and what I was doing at Columbia, and when I had talked to him for a while, he began to encourage me in the idea of becoming a Friar.

“I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t eventually make application to enter the novitiate next August,” he said.

Next August! That was a long way off Now that my mind was made up, I was impatient to get started. However, I had not expected to be admitted immediately by any Order. But I asked him:

“Father, isn’t there some chance of my entering sooner?”

“We admit all our novices together, in a group,” he said. “They start out at Paterson, in August, then they go on together all the way through until ordination. It’s the only way we can handle them. If you entered at any other time, you would miss out all along the line. Have you had much philosophy?”

I told him of Dan Walsh’s courses, and he thought for a moment.

“Perhaps there might be a chance of starting you out in the novitiate in February,” he said, but he did not seem to be very hopeful. No doubt what he was thinking of was that I might skip a half-year of philosophy and so catch up with the others at the house of studies up-state, where they would be sent after the year’s noviceship.

“Are you living with your parents?” he asked me.

I told him they had long been dead, and that none of my family was left, except an uncle and a brother.

“Is your brother a Catholic too.”

“No, Father.”

“Where is he? What does he do?”

“He goes to Cornell. He is supposed to get out of there next June.”

“Well,” said Father Edmund, “what about yourself? Have you got enough to live on? You aren’t starving or anything, are you?”

“Oh, no, Father, I can get along. I’ve got a chance of a job teaching English in Extension at Columbia this year, and besides that they gave me a grant-in-aid to pay for my courses for the doctorate.”

“You take that job,” said the Friar; “that will do you a lot of good. And get busy on that doctorate, too. Do all the work you can, and study a little philosophy. Study won’t hurt you at all. After all, you know, if you come into the Order you’ll probably end up teaching at St. Bona’s or Siena. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, sure,” I said, and that was the truth.

I walked down the steps of the monastery into the noisy street, with my heart full of happiness and peace.

What a transformation this made in my life! Now, at last, God had become the center of my existence. And it had taken no less than this decision to make Him so. Apparently, in my case, it had to be that way.

I was still without any formal spiritual direction, but I went frequently to confession, especially at St. Francis’ Church, where the Friars were more inclined to give me advice than secular priests had been. And it was in one of the confessionals at St. Francis’ that a good priest one day told me, very insistently:

“Go to Communion every day, every day.”

By that time, I had already become a daily communicant, but his words comforted and strengthened me, and his emphasis made me glad. And indeed I had reason to be, for it was those daily Communions that were transforming my life almost visibly, from day to day.

I did not realize any of this on those beautiful mornings: I scarcely was aware that I was so happy. It took someone else to draw my attention to it.

I was coming down Seventh Avenue one morning. It must have been in December or January. I had just come from the little church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and from Communion, and was going to get some breakfast at a lunch wagon near Loew’s Sheridan Theater. I don’t know what I was thinking of, but as I walked along I nearly bumped into Mark who was on his way to the subway, going to Columbia for his morning classes.

“Where are you going?” he said. The question surprised me, as there did not seem to be any reason to ask where I was going, and all I could answer was: “To breakfast.”

Later on, Mark referred again to the meeting and said:

“What made you look so happy, on the street, there?”

So that was what had impressed him, and that was why he had asked me where I was going. It was not where I was going that made me happy, but where I was coming from. Yet, as I say, this surprised me too, because I had not really paid any attention to the fact that I was happy—which indeed I was.

Now every day began with Mass and Communion, either at Our Lady of Guadalupe or St. Francis of Assisi Church.

After that I went back to Perry Street, and got to work rewriting the novel which had been handed back to me politely by one of those tall, thin, anxious young men with horn-rimmed glasses who are to be found in the offices of publishers. (He had asked me if I was trying to write in some new experimental style, and then ducked behind his desk as if I might pull a knife on him for his impertinence.)

About twelve I would go out to get a sandwich at some drug-store, and read in the paper about the Russians and the Finns or about the French sitting in the Maginot Line, and sending out a party of six men somewhere in Loraine to fire three rifle shots at an imaginary German.

In the afternoon I usually had to go to Columbia and sit in a room and hear some lecture on English Literature, after which I went to the library and read St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on Aristotle’s
Metaphysics
which I had reserved for me on my desk in the graduate reading-room. This was a matter of great consternation to some Sisters of St. Joseph who occupied nearby desks and who, after a while, became timidly friendly when they learned that I was going to become a Franciscan in the summer.

At about three in the afternoon I was in the habit of going to Corpus Christi, or to Our Lady of Lourdes which was even closer, and doing the Stations of the Cross. This meditative and easy prayer provided me with another way, more valuable than I realized, of entering into participation in the merits of Christ’s Passion, and of renewing within me the life that had been set alight by that morning’s Communion.

In those days it took a little effort to walk to a church and go around the fourteen stations saving vocal prayers, for I was still not used to praying. Therefore, doing the Stations of the Cross was still more laborious than consoling, and required a sacrifice. It was much the same with all my devotions. They did not come easily or spontaneously, and they very seldom brought with them any strong sensible satisfaction. Nevertheless the work of performing them ended in a profound and fortifying peace: a peace that was scarcely perceptible, but which deepened and which, as my passions subsided, became more and more real, more and more sure, and finally stayed with me permanently.

It was also at this time that I first attempted any kind of mental prayer. I had bought a copy of the
Spiritual Exercises
of St. Ignatius many months before, and it had remained idle on the shelf—except that when I came back from Olean and took over the apartment from Seymour’s wife, to whom I had sub-let it, I found a couple of little pencil marks in the margin opposite passages that might be interpreted as sinister and Jesuitical. One of them was about death, and the other had something to do with pulling all the blinds down when you wanted to meditate.

For my own part I had long been a little scared of the
Spiritual Exercises,
having somewhere acquired a false impression that if you did not look out they would plunge you head first into mysticism before you were aware of it. How could I be sure that I would not fly up into the air as soon as I applied my mind to the first meditation? I have since found out that there is very little danger of my ever flying around the premises at mental prayer. The
Spiritual Exercises
are very pedestrian and practical—their chief purpose being to enable all the busy Jesuits to get their minds off their work and back to God with a minimum of wasted time.

I wish I had been able to go through the
Exercises
under the roof of some Jesuit house, directed by one of their priests. However, I went about it under my own direction, studying the rules of procedure that were given in the book, and following them in so far as I managed to grasp what they were all about. I never even breathed a word about what I was doing to any priest.

As far as I remember I devoted a whole month to the
Exercises,
taking one hour each day. I took a quiet hour, in the afternoon, in my room on Perry Street: and since I now lived in the back of the house, there were no street noises to worry me. It was really quite silent. With the windows closed, since it was winter, I could not even hear any of the neighborhood’s five thousand radios.

The book said the room should be darkened, and I pulled down the blinds so that there was just enough light left for me to see the pages, and to look at the Crucifix on the wall over my bed. And the book also invited me to consider what kind of a position I should take for my meditation. It left me plenty of freedom of choice, so long as I remained more or less the way I was, once I had settled down, and did not go promenading around the room scratching my head and talking to myself.

So I thought and prayed awhile over this momentous problem, and finally decided to make my meditations sitting cross-legged on the floor. I think the Jesuits would have had a nasty shock if they had walked in and seen me doing their
Spiritual Exercises
sitting there like Mahatma Gandhi. But it worked very well. Most of the time I kept my eyes on the Crucifix or on the floor, when I did not have to look at the book.

And so, having prayed, sitting on the floor, I began to consider the reason why God had brought me into the world:

Man was created to this end: that he should praise God, Our Lord, and reverence and serve Him, and by doing these things, should save his soul. And all the other things on the face of the earth were created for man, to help him in attaining the end for which he was created. Whence it follows that man must use these things only in so far as they help him towards his end, and must withdraw himself from them in so far as they are obstacles to his attaining his end.... Wherefore it is necessary that we make ourselves indifferent to all created things, in so far as it is permitted to our free will ... in such a way that, as far as we are concerned, we should not desire health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honor rather than ignominy, a long life rather than a short life, and so on, desiring and choosing only those things which more efficaciously lead us to the end for which we were created.

The big and simple and radical truths of the “Foundation” were, I think, too big and too radical for me. By myself, I did not even scratch the surface of them. I vaguely remember fixing my mind on this notion of indifference to all created things in themselves, to sickness and health, and being mildly appalled. Who was I to understand such a thing? If I got a cold I nearly choked myself with aspirins and hot lemonade, and dived into bed with undisguised alarm. And here was a book that might perhaps be telling me that I ought to be able to remain as cool as an icebox in the presence of a violent death. How could I figure out just what and how much that word “indifferent” meant, if there was no one to tell me? I did not have any way of seeing the distinction between indifference of the will and indifference of the feelings—the latter being practically a thing unknown, even in the experience of the saints. So, worrying about this big difficulty of my own creation, I missed the real fruit of this fundamental meditation, which would have been an application of its notions to all the things to which I myself was attached, and which always tended to get me into trouble.

However, the real value of the
Exercises
for me came when I got to the various contemplations, especially the mysteries of the life of Christ. I docilely followed all St. Ignatius’s rules about the “composition of place” and sat myself down in the Holy House at Nazareth with Jesus and Mary and Joseph, and considered what they did, and listened to what they said and so on. And I elicited affections, and made resolutions, and ended with a colloquy and finally made a brief retrospective examination of how the meditation had worked out. All this was so new and interesting, and the labor of learning it engrossed me so much, that I was far too busy for distractions. The most vital part of each meditation was always the application of the senses (hearing the yelling of the damned in hell, smelling their burning rottenness, seeing the devils coming at you to drag you down with the rest, and so on).

As far as I remember, there was one theological point that made a very deep impression on me, greater than anything else. Somewhere in the first week, after having considered the malice of mortal sin, I had turned to the evil of venial sin. And there, suddenly, while the horror of mortal sin had remained somewhat abstract to me, simply because there were so many aspects and angles to the question, I clearly saw the malice of venial sin precisely as an offense against the goodness and loving kindness of God, without any respect to punishment. I left that meditation with a deep conviction of the deordination and malice there is in preferring one’s own will and satisfaction to the will of God for Whose love we were created.

In the big meditation on the “Two Standards,” where you are supposed to line up the army of Christ in one field and the army of the devil in the other, and ask yourself which one you choose, I got into too much of a Cecil B. De Mille atmosphere to make much out of it, but in the considerations on a choice of a state in life which followed, a strange thing happened, which scared me a little. It was the only incident that savored of externally supernatural intervention in the retreat.