Ginny Morgan was in a state of shock. She sat in her apartment in the heart of Chicago’s North Side singles district at five in the morning, shaking. Were she a drinking woman, she would long since have drowned her tensions. This was ridiculous, she felt. A lifetime of getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, and she had gotten all of two hours restless sleep that night, the night before she was to appear at a mass said by her friend Patrick Devlin.
She was ready to bet that she was the only woman about to marry a priest who was putting herself through this ordeal. Goofy as it was to be so upset about other people’s business – and she was convinced that saying mass and hearing it was someone else’s business not hers – she couldn’t walk away from it, because she had made it her own agenda.
She and the one-time nun Margo had discussed it in a way that made it sound perfectly normal, in fact necessary, if she was to throw her lot in with Patrick. Her life, with all its going to bed and getting up on time, had not been a paragon of organization. She’d gone in spurts from cause to cause, motivation to motivation, generally pursuing the writing trade and being pursued by it.
But it had generally been preparation, she finally decided under Margo’s questioning, for the something more substantial that involved connecting permanently with someone else. It had always been vaguely part of her personal baggage, that a Mister O.K., if not Right, was out there somewhere. (No Mister Goodbar, thank you.)
As for the writing part, she’d gotten to the point where she took it for granted. It was part of her life, after fifteen years or so of pecking at typewriter keys from scribbled notes and newspaper clippings. There were no decisions to be made about that. She was committed, one way or another, to observing and relating what she observed. In the manner of dichotomizing life that she’d heard expressed many times, professionally she was doing fine, personally only so-so.
She was on the brink of doing fine personally as well and didn’t want to screw it up. So she sat in her apartment at five a.m. and thought about the future. There were she and Patrick, with no plans to speak of. (They still hadn’t settled on anything, but were in effect drifting together.) She had her parents back in Ohio, still wondering now and then when Ginny-baby would get married and settled down. (Ginny-baby had wondered it herself.) How would they like it when she brought home a priest to dinner? And Patrick had his people.
There seemed to be a lot of them. Not family. He was vague about his brothers and sisters. She wasn’t even sure if there were any. His parents were dead. But his other family, which was the church — that was another story. She got the feeling sometimes that he was in a state of perpetual distraction, like a fireman or doctor waiting for the alarm to go or phone to ring. He seemed worlds away from belonging to anyone in particular (like her). He seemed to belong to some amorphous mass which held him in thrall with a harsh love and call to duty.
She was going to this mass because she felt she had to face up to this, attack it at its base, lest she be overwhelmed by it in her naivete and Protestant ignorance.
Margo the former nun had explained it to her. What was twenty years before a highly concentrated communal act full of long silences and sitting, standing and kneeling, had become since the Second Vatican Council (Ginny had heard about that) in many places a sort of free-wheeling vehicle of people’s own fears and hopes. Once there was the phenomenon of all eyes being focused on the robed back of the priest, who stood with arms outstretched, reading in Latin from the Missal, a red-covered all-purpose mass book, altar boys (never girls — there would be girls at the eleven, Patrick had told her — also faced the priest’s back, dressed in long black cassocks and white, blousy surplices which extended to below feet waist and elbows.
Mass was bell, book and candle time, with incense thrown in for good measure on more solemn occasions. Altar boys handled wine in small pitchers called cruets. They carried the big book around, often on its gold-embossed metal stand. They poured wine over priests’ hands into the chalice, lit and extinguished candles, carried the small “boat” filled with incense and swung the “thurible” on its long chain. Within the thurible burned the incense. If the altar boy did it right, the small piece of charcoal inside was hot and glowing when incense was spooned in by the priest from the boat, and then from the thurible came plumed clouds of sweet smoke which stood, Margo had once been told, for prayers of the faithful rising to heaven.
Rising to heaven. God was up there, the people were down here. The concentration on him above was complete. Everything that happened down here was to aid that concentration. Catholics went to church to pray to God, there was no doubt about that.
They used to. In many places that was no longer the case, Margo explained. In parishes like St. Denis (she knew of the place), God was a presence frequently alluded to. He (She?) was a dominant motif, a background to a self-centered discussion — not necessarily in any selfish sense, because neighborly concerns generally were the focus, but centered on the people involved, not on their God. God was in his heaven, but that had less to do with what happened at mass than his being in the midst of the worshipers. It was almost, Margo had explained to Ginny, as if God was legitimated by his being among the people, rather than the other way around.
No wonder I’m scared, Ginny thought, shivering briefly in her apartment. I’m going up against a tight-knit mass of people who lay claim to this man as their spokesman. A shaman he may or may not be: the important thing was that he represented them in their fear and bewilderment and their confidence and energy.
None of this she knew clearly and concisely. Thus the more frightening it was. She had this feeling, based on what she knew of Patrick and what she’d heard from Margo and picked up from being a Chicago resident for a half dozen years: you did not mess lightly with Mother Church. It was more than autocratic bishops and monsignors. It was a mass of fused concern. Life and death infused the mass: elemental forces gathered on a Sunday morning at eleven, her Patrick at the center of them. She shivered again, screwing her courage another turn.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Devlin lifted the chasuble over his head and let it down over him, for the briefest moment his vision obscured as the pullover vestment descended past his eyes. No matter. There was nothing to see or read at this least solemn moment of the proceedings, though once there were prayers posted as the vesting descended past his eyes. No matter. There was nothing to see or read at this least solemn moment of the proceedings, though once there prayers posted at vesting table, eyes-high, in latin, which the priest could read while vesting.
He recalled briefly the priests of his youth, approaching this very table — actually a deep shelf, a built-in table — after rising from kneeler next to it (the pre-dieu so called), as if already in the sacred mode, if not mood. There was silence in the sacristy, or at most some whispered conversation, and the altar boys stood at attention, having already filled the cruets and lit the candles. There were two for low mass, four for solemn-high — acolytes, thurifer (thurible-bearer) and master of ceremonies, the latter an eighth-grade boy (from the parish school, never a public school student) who had learned the many stops and turns and bows and scrapes that marked solemn high mass, one of which was held every Sunday at noon, come hell or high water.
But the solemn high at noon was poorly attended by the standards of those high-attendance years, because it was longer than the others and made greater demands on on its late-risen adherents. The two popular masses, the eleven in the church, the eleven-ten in the school hall down the block, were jammed, however. Ushers shoehorned people in between others who were sitting comfortably apart. This was togetherness in the pre-Vatican church of the ‘40s and ‘50s, to be shoehorned into the pews on Sunday, not to shake hands with your neighbor (or with your sister Kate, for that matter) just before communion, in the post-Vatican II American version of the kiss of peace.
You could hear mass in the school hall even as part of the rear-of-hall crowd that spilled out on to the school’s broad front walk. If you came late enough, you could listen to the bells announcing the consecration from outside the place of worship. There were those who considered this a good deal and would consider it likewise today, Devlin thought as he vested.
But there were others, a considerable minority, who flocked to the eleven of the 1980s as to their favorite club meeting. It was for them a combination of solemn moments interspersed with relaxation and even laughter and applause. No one shoehorned them into the pews; at St. Denis there weren’t enough to be shoehorned.
“Everything all right, Father?” Tim Flaherty, the red-faced usher, was asking him. He stood near the sacristy door, long-handled collection basket in hand, solicitous. Catholic collection baskets were long-handled. The usher held on to it all the way. Some Protestant baskets had no handles at all, but were passed around by the people in the pews. Flaherty was a conscientious basket-passer who never let go of the handle. Even now he clung to it as a badge of his authority.
“Just fine, Tim,” said Devlin. “Good to be back.”
“Do you like it at Saint Emma’s?” Flaherty asked.
“Very much, Tim. But it’s between jobs, you know. I’m there waiting an assignment.”
“I know you are, Father, and it will be a good one too, I’m sure. You’re too good a man to be let long on the shelf.” He smiled, nodded and left the sacristy for the church itself, apparently unaware that his outpouring of flattery had led to something of a gaffe.
On the shelf, eh? Devlin thought. But he didn’t mind it. How Tim Flaherty saw his position was the least of his worries. He had a mass to say, a swan song to sing at St. Denis, where if nothing else, he had come to terms with his ailment, the ennui that had gripped him for years.
He looked forward to the mass. Others now scurried around the sacristy, including two altar girls, both Skeltons. That was nice, he thought. He’ been through a few episodes with them and sat and chewed the rag and even been there when young Tom had run away (for a half hour) after he came on his mother, full of innocent zest having just gotten encouragement about her proposed column, hugging him, Devlin.
He laughed at the absurdity of that comedy of errors. Wonderful woman, Mimi Skelton, he thought. I hope she’s here today.
The reader, a young woman with a high-pitched voice, and the leader of song, a deep-voiced man about Devlin’s age, were lining up at the sacristy door. One of the Skelton girls took the crucifix and led the way into the church proper. The rest followed, with Devlin the mass’s celebrant, brining up the rear. Tim Flaherty smiled at him as he passed the ushers’ room, turned and headed down the long side aisle. The congregation was singing “Praise to the Lord,” and Ginny Morgan was standing next to a pillar on the side aisle, not daring to turn and look at the priest as he strode by in his regalia.
The procession reached the rear of the church and turned up the main aisle, heading toward the altar. Half way up, glancing to one side, he spotted the rest of the Skeltons, including their kindergartener and their first- and second-graders. The same glance showed him the Williamses a few pews ahead — Arthur, Melissa and their three kids. Good, thought Devlin. This is working out fine. Good turnout for my last shot. All that’s needed is for the Goodmans to show up, which is not likely but would be nice. No Dolan either. He’s occupied. So everybody’s here, he thought. Oh yes, he thought again. No Trib reporter. Thank God for small favors.
He strode up into the sanctuary where the marble altar rail had been torn out and sold for scrap. Devlin didn’t know if it had been sold. He had no idea. It happened before he came to the place as a priest. But he did figure the gold-plated gates into the sanctuary must have been worth a few bucks. Small price to pay for liturgical renewal, he thought, circling the table that stood in front of the high marble altar whose backdrop ascended dozens of feet into the air against the sanctuary wall.
He circled the presently used “free-standing” altar — so called by liturgists to distinguish it from the built-in affair where the priest stood with back to people — and approached it facing the congregation.
“The Lord be with you,” he said, eschewing the less formal and not uncommon “Good morning,” and the last mass was off and running.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Ginny was stunned. She never pictured it like this. The stateliness of it all, the attention of the people, the gestures of Patrick as he said his opening phrase. She’d never seen anything like it. Her Protestant experience, now several decades removed, was a static thing, stately too in its way, but not so grand. Some Episcopal friends had talked about their “mass,” but she’d never joined them for it. And her plain old Methodist church had done for singing what this place St. Denis was doing for a sort of liturgical choreography.
Patrick called for a moment of repentance, and people around her bowed their heads. Then he sat down on the big chair — she was ready to call it a throne — behind him, up a few steps. And a tall black woman strode from her position to Patrick’s right to the reading stand and in a high-pitched voice began to read from a big book.
It was the mass’s “first reading.” Something from St. Paul. Ginny sat with the rest and listened as the young woman announced:
“Now here, brother, is the news of the grace of God which was given in the churches of Macedonia.”
Ginny stole a look around her. Eyes were turned to the young woman. Macedonia?
“And of how, throughout great trials, by suffering, their constant cheerfulness and their intense poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity.”
The reader continued in a measured pace, her voice singing out over and past the church’s p.a. system. Ginny looked around her some more, now more boldly. Nobody was paying any attention to her.
The racial variety struck her — Filipino, black, people of apparent Mexican ancestry, judging from the Indian-like features, East Indian people, including a woman in a sari, the usual blend of white American faces.
A fat man with his stomach hanging over his belt caught her eye. She noted his heaviness, looked away, then looked again, amazed. She had to turn slightly to do so, but neither he nor anyone else paid attention to her. The man’s skin was showing where his shirt didn’t button all the way down, at belt level. Just about at the navel —from the angle she couldn’t see if the navel showed — his stomach had proven too much for the shirt button, and his white flesh showed.
Ginny’s eyes widened as she noticed it. She caught herself staring, then turned back, flustered, to the reader.
“I can swear that they gave not only as much as they could afford, but far more, and quite spontaneously, begging and begging us for the favor of us sharing in this service to the saints and, what was quite unexpected, they offered their own selves first to God and, under god, to us.’
She got about half of what the reader was saying. Back in the Methodist days of her youth, she hadn’t got much of Scripture readings either. She had had Bible drummed into her. This St. Paul talk about “service to the saints” and so forth, she found familiar enough. The longer the black woman spoke, the more familiar she found the situation. She began to sit back and relax.
The tall woman finished and sat down. The man on the other side, at another lectern, led them all in some prayers, and then Patrick went to the pulpit. Was he going to preach? Ginny sat up in her pew. He looked handsome up there. Would he talk about atheism? She found herself praying he wouldn’t.
Everyone stood. He read from the book, from St. Mark’s gospel, or as he said introducing the reading, “the gospel of Jesus Christ according to Mark.” It was about divorce.
“Leaving others, Jesus came to the district of Judea and the far side of the Jordan . . .” The east bank, thought Ginny, looking for points of reference.
“And again crowds gathered round him, and again he taught them, as his custom was. Some Pharisees approached him and asked, ‘Is it against the law for a man to divorce his wife?’ They were testing him. . . .”
Those Pharisees, testing him again. No worse group in the whole New Testament, as Ginny recalled from her Sunday school days. What the Pharaoh was to Moses, the damn Pharisees were to Jesus, bugging him at every turn.
“He answered them, ‘What did Moses command you?’” He let them do it, they answered. “’It was because you were so unteachable . . . ‘” Jesus told them. “’But from the beginning of creation God made them male and female. This is why a man must leave father and mother, and the two must become one body. So then, there are no longer two, but one body. So then, what God has united, man must not divide.’”
And on Jesus went, Patrick reading it, to tell his disciples afterwards that divorce and remarriage were the same as adultery, for man as well as woman.
Why was Patrick reading this? Ginny noticed people checking little leaflets, booklets really, they had pulled out of the pew rack, flipping through pages, looking at the index and so on, one or two lifting eyebrows.
She took up the booklet, which as well as she could figure carried the prescribed readings for a few-month period. She looked up the June Sunday that was the day at hand and saw a passage from St. John’s gospel, not the anti-divorce passage from St. Luke. What was going here, another Patrick Devlin surprise?
He finished his reading of the gospel passage. “The man who divorces his wife and marries another is guilty of adultery against her,” he read, quoting Jesus. “And if a woman divorces her husband and marriages another, she is guilty of adultery too.” Bang. He closed the book, straightened a bit and smiled.
“Good morning,” he said, oozing charm. “Thanks for having me back.”
Ginny saw people smile, returning Patrick’s greeting.
“I’m here because your parish priests are busy with more important things this morning.” He paused. “Just kidding,” he added. “One had a long-standing previous engagement, the other has a sick father. The gospel says you leave father and mother behind you when you follow Jesus, but the sick father won out this time. As it would for ninety-nine priests out of a hundred, if not a hundred out of a hundred.”
“That’s because we’re weak,” he said. “We’re all weak, including me.” He paused. “Weakness is our middle name. We barely know right from wrong, because of our.
“That’s because we’re weak,” he said. “We’re all weak, including me. Weakness is our middle name. We barely know right from wrong, because of our clouded consciences. And then when we do know, when we make a wild, accurate guess, we can barely summon up energy to move on the insight — or to reject it, for that matter. Call us weak-knees. That’s us.”
Ginny sat stunned. This was like nothing she ever heard from any pulpit as kid or grownup. Patrick talked with barely any inflection. He was relaxed, and a little smile played around his mouth. He spoke with no dramatic rise and fall in pitch, almost off-handedly. He didn’t hesitate, never inserted an “ah” or “uh” or (dreadful to hear) a “you know” or “sort of.” The church was very quiet.
“This is my sermon on my last day in your pulpit,” he said. “About weak-need people with special attention to divorce. I’m specially interested in divorce because I’m getting one. From you.”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Arthur Williams nudged Melissa. She didn’t turn towards him but kept looking straight ahead at the man in the pulpit.
Arthur nudged her again, and she was filled with immense irritation at the man with whom she had cast her life, who sat in the pew next to her. “What do you want?” she whispered, barely moving her head toward him.
“Did you hear that?” he whispered back.
“Yes I heard it. Be quiet,” she said.
Arthur wiped his upper lip with his finger and looked back at the pulpit to hear the rest of Father Devlin’s swan song.
“Jesus socked it to the Pharisees in this passage,” said Devlin. “He explained away an early permissiveness — by Moses, no less, hardly your classic example of permissiveness — by dumping on the Jews. Or so the gospel writer tells us, whoever he was, or whatever committee.
“‘You people,’ Jesus said, or something close to it. The phrase that in the 1960s more than any other betrayed the white speaker to a black audience as one who pictured himself apart from ‘those people.’ Or so I was told by friends who worked in black neighborhoods in those days.
“You people, Jesus said, were so unteachable, your own leader Moses, who led you from nowhere to or near the promised land, had to let you off the hook. ‘You were so unteachable,’ he told the Pharisees, a fairly conscientious group who did get carried away sometimes, to be sure. Can you imagine someone coming into this community and telling us we’re unteachable? We’d crucify him.”
He paused. Mimi Skelton sat riveted, plunged into gloom. The better the sermon got — and she thought it was getting very good — the deeper the gloom. The priest she had come to know and love was calling it quits before her eyes. And doing it with style, in church. It was dreadful.
Her husband Ted, sitting two children removed from her, gave a look that said, “It’s a tough one, dear, isn’t it?” She acknowledged it with a nod, then turned to listen some more.
“Divorce is the question of the moment,” said Devlin, standing straight up, not leaning forward in the old style but making his own up for the occasion, staying with the near-monotone recitative. He was later to concede to Ginny that this was one of his best sermons, if not his best. She said she was in no position to argue the point.
“Should two people tear asunder what God has put together? The position of Jesus is clear, but let us examine the matter.”
Examine the matter? wondered Ginny. Since when do Christian preachers examine the matter when Jesus’ position is clear? This Patrick had better get out of his present position, while the getting was good, she thought.
“God works, after all, in strange ways,” said Devlin. “‘What he puts together, maybe sometimes he himself tears asunder. He lets people die, for one thing, to cite the most obvious case. ‘When a husband dies, the widow may marry, because God obviously tore asunder what he once put together.
“God lets people die. Does he let relationships die, so that marriages are dead while their two partners still live? Very tricky business here to most of us. Once you talk about relationships dying while the relators still are alive, you have opened up a Pandora’s box. You can weasel out of anything that way. Declare moral bankruptcy, file under theological Chapter Thirteen or Eleven, and you’re home free. All debts cancelled or at least shelved for a while, and it’s away we go!”
What’s he up to? wondered Ginny.
What’s all this about? thought Melissa Williams.
Oh Lord, let it end, thought Mimi Skelton.
“Do you get my drift?” asked Devlin, now leaning forward for the first time, as if awaiting an answer. He did pause for a few seconds — an eternity for the beginning speaker, but nothing for Devlin, who knew what he was doing in the pulpit if nowhere else. The pause captured the few who were daydreaming. Nobody answered Devlin’s question.
“I’m saying we all have our contracts, our debts, whatever. We all owe something, and we can’t just break things off. Jesus didn’t think so, anyhow, and I agree with him.”
Jesus must be glad to hear it, thought Ginny.
I’m glad to hear it, thought Melissa.
You better, thought Mimi.
“Marriage is the most obvious case,” Devlin said. “You can’t just break up a marriage, which is very serious business, often involving kids, but even when it doesn’t, involving two bruisable people who once trusted each other. Jesus hits the God part. God joined the two together, and so forth. But even without that, or beyond it, there are the two people who trusted each other. You can’t just walk away from that sort of thing,”
Two bruisable people, reflected Ginny.
He doesn’t deny the God part, he just ignores it, thought Melissa.
And you, Father, speaking of walking away? wondered Mimi.
“I say you can’t do that. When Catholic priests preach about marriage, they have to say you not we, for obvious reasons. Anything else priests can preach about, they can join in the universal recommending, commanding, condemning, whatever. Lying, cheating, stealing, backbiting, murder, treason, genocide, fornication, adultery, incest, envy, lust, jealousy, hatred, sodomy, greed, gluttony — you name it. Priests can do it, priests have done it, priests will do it again. At a lesser rate than the general population, we believe, we hope. But still they can do all these things — and more — and can, nay must, be included in any praise for avoiding or condemnation for indulging in these all too human behaviors.”
Ginny thought she would suffocate as the list of horrors went on, Patrick dragging this whole churchful of people through his gallery of abominations. Melissa was stunned at his dragging priests into all that. Mimi found herself, against her will, fascinated.
“The one thing priests can’t do is get a divorce, because they don’t marry. A simple, inner-city woman, being informed for the first time that priests didn’t marry, and assuming they enjoyed sex outside of marriage, castigated the priest who informed her, accusing him of all manner of illicit activity. Informed further that he neither married nor engaged in such activity, she announced her opinion, calling it impossible.” Told by the flustered priest that she would have to take his word for it, she said she did but still considered it impossible.
I sincerely hope he’s not going to talk about us, thought Ginny.
He means a black woman, thought Melissa, picturing several from her girlhood who might have reacted that way.
That story again, thought Mimi, who had heard it from her inner-city priest brother-in-law.
“The woman gave priests more credit than many of you. A theologian would say she gave more credit to the grace of God.”
Wouldn’t you? thought Mimi.
“As a matter of fact, the woman was right. The priestly life is impossible, or virtually so. As a priest for 25 years, I ought to know. I have watched, or at least heard in confession about people who have fallen and skinned their sexual knees enough times to use up a factory of band-aids. I’d be very surprised if this church didn’t have a good number of such people. I hope it does, in fact. Churches need people with first-hand knowledge of human weakness. We’re not so cocky that way. We are less likely to be vain about our wonderful track records,”
He’s wandering, thought Ginny, but he’s getting too close to me for comfort.
“I’m getting too close to some people for comfort,” Devlin said. “I’m getting close to myself, for that matter. I’m getting a divorce from you, as I said earlier. Not from St. Denis, by moving to another parish either. But from the whole darn people of God, all of whom everywhere must today say goodbye to Father Devlin, because he’s going. Leaving. Checking out. Anyone behind me, don’t forget to turn off the lights. Father Devlin is dead, long live Patrick Devlin the simple layman and ordinary citizen. Goodbye.”
(end of chapter 23)
Blithe Spirit 