BIG NOT-EASY
Return now to the first weeks of novitiate, inching by as we approached the Big Muddy, Big Ditch—name your obstacle course—the Long Retreat.
We had arrived August 8, another group arrived on September 2. We and a few novice brothers, who had arrived one by one in the previous year on their own schedule, not in a class, were en route to a 30-day meditation fest that would end on the last Sunday of October, the feast of Christ the King, when we would emerge in all our glory, having survived a long initiation.
If it sounds grueling, consider the fraternity initiation I and one other of us had undergone at Loyola—six weeks of programmed humiliation and physical punishment that led us to brotherhood and in some cases lifelong friendship. Those were the days.
Youth was wasted on the young, Shaw said, calling it a pity. Not so this coming novitiate event. Rather, it was to be life-changing.
The retreat would be the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, the 16th-century hidalgo with an itchy sword arm turned dedicated religionist. Disabled by a cannon
shot in a siege of the Basque city of Pamplona in northern Spain, at 30, he underwent painful surgery for vanity’s sake, so he could wear snappy boots. While recuperating, he ran out of inspiring stories of military derring-do and turned to lives of Jesus and the saints. These inspired him in quite another direction. He began to reassess himself. From dreams of earthly glory he turned to heavenly. Accustomed to kingship as going concern, he pictured Jesus as his king, his beau ideal, his general. Two years after his wounding, he found himself in a cave at Manresa in northeastern Spain, fasting and doing penance and taking on noonday devils and all others that showed up. He had a close call getting to Manresa. He ran into a Moor and discussed religion as they rode along. It was almost fatal for his newfound spiritual intentions and for the Moor, who spoke disrespectfully of the Blessed Mother. Ignatius had to think twice about that and came within a hair’s breadth of chasing the fellow and sticking him with his dagger. The story, a good one, is that he left it to the mule, who took a different road, away from the Moor. In the cave, wrestling with himself more than with devils for 10 months, not all of it in the cave, he was born again. He came from the experience a changed man. Not all of it in the cave, because he had to get out and do odd jobs for food, in which respect he was a sort of Thoreau at Walden Pond, but he did not eat as well. Out of the 10 months also came a scheme of spiritual rebirth and renewal, the Spiritual Exercises, which in a few years took shape as a little book that shook the world, a sort of blueprint for self-examination and conversion. It was these exercises, all 30 days of them, to which we 50 young Americans gave ourselves in the month of October, 1950. Let us consider that experience.
DOWN TO BASICS
On the first day of the first week, we went at the meaning of life, rehearsing what we already had heard and absorbed, most of us, from our youngest days. It was simple stuff, reminiscent of the Baltimore Catechism: God made us, we are meant for his purposes. More precisely, “Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.” Basic stuff, bread and butter Christianity, worth repeating. We heard it in conferences with “Father Master” in our little third-floor chapel, with its dark walls, dark kneelers, dark chairs. In the conferences he provided “points” for meditation. The schedule was “points and meditation” four times a day, with points for the morning given the night before, the better to fall asleep thinking about them, the better to wake up still thinking about them. It was an exercise in thought control. We were concentrating mightily. Father Master was also “the master,” as we commonly referred to him, without embarrassment at using a phrase from Eastern religious discipline, not even thinking about it. For one thing, he was in no way Eastern. He was Bernard “Bernie” Wernert from Toledo, Ohio. Gaunt, dark-complexioned, big-eyed, intense even when his face broke into lines with the broadest of smiles, he sat facing us at a little table on which he laid notes on typed half-sheets. He never looked unprepared and always seemed to say just what he intended. We looked at that face four times a day for 30 days, minus three break days separating the “weeks” of the Exercises—divisions of meditation material rather than seven-day periods. We meditated also on break days but far less, being given the morning and afternoon for hiking and playing. The news of a break day came on the second-floor bulletin board after breakfast. The first of these was the tenth day, after nine days thinking about life and death. One of us, a high-strung track man who had special permission to go off running on his own to let off steam, burst out almost hysterically at the news.
DEATH’S STING
No wonder. After creation and our purpose in life on the first day, we heard about sin, death, hell, with a little bit of heaven tossed in at the end. We pictured ourselves on our death beds, kneeling with shades drawn and lights dimmed. The sun still shone outside or didn’t, I can’t remember. But I remember the meditation and recalled it years later, when I told a psychiatrist about it. He wasn’t treating me. My wife and I were at dinner with others of his profession prior to a talk by the famous death-and-dying expert Elizabeth Kubler Ross. When talk with the professionals came to imagining oneself dying, it came to me: I had done that, in the First Week. Into such a week, put your more than usually pious, relatively sensitive 18-year-old. Put him in a dark room and have him meditate on his death as if it were then and there, and you have the potential of a soul-searing experience—Billy Graham, who had his own life-changing episode, and John Wesley, founder of Methodism, would recognize it. I shrink from too dramatic a designation, but I do know that tossing hell into the mix in another of the first nine days—before or after, I do not recall—gives a young man pause. It was certainly geared to help a back-sliding novice think twice about leaving the novitiate, “checking out,” as we put it, or just “checking.” Neither fear of ostracism on leaving—for most of us, there would have been none—nor precipitate ending of a chosen career (we were young enough to start over, so what?) nor a dipping of one’s personal flag with accompanying sense of failure (again, so what at this stage?) did the job on the dark days of the 22 novitiate months yet to come. It was the fear of hell that hung in the minds and hearts of some of the weary and disconsolate. So much for hell. The first week had heaven too. We pictured torment and loss in meditating the one and joy without end in the other. Even death had its light moments. Demonstrating how we know neither the day nor the hour, Father Master listed Jesuits he knew who had cashed in without a moment’s notice. As he did so, Charley O., Marine vet and highly motivated spirituality practitioner, got a giggly fit, he said later. He kept it bottled in at the time, and many men together could not have spied it, I’m sure. It was the image of those Jesuits dropping like flies, he said later. Which goes to show, you can find a laugh in just about anything if you just let the spirit move you.
Blithe Spirit 