Free to be Jimmy

By Jim Gerwing

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PREFACE

Friends and family have often urged me to write my story.  I have lived an interesting life, not just in things others could observe, but also the interior journey that has featured times of turmoil interspaced with periods of internal peace.  I have long felt the need to describe in writing how I broke away from the religious constraints that so often threatened to drown me.

My life has taken me from a rural village in Saskatchewan to over a dozen moves in central and western North America.  It is in part a story of the tortuous path I have taken to overcome long-held beliefs and break into the freedom that allowed me to become myself.

There’s an old song I like very much.  It begins with “It’s a long road to freedom, a-winding, steep, and high.”  Whether I sought freedom of the spirit, the mind, the emotions, the body, I always found another corner to navigate, another valley to cross, another height to scale.

Just when I thought I had triumphed or had won some victory over imprisonment, I faced another hurdle.  It became abundantly clear that I could not set one part of my being free without freeing every other part.  I could not separate the various parts of who I am into neat or discrete departments and remain one being, one person.

Nor could I attain freedom in any realm without constant discipline, without taking responsibility for each step.  Each new victory thus brought both the exhilaration of winning a stage and the challenge to keep moving on.  Each backward step, and there were many,  was a bitter lesson that threatened to derail me.  Writer Joe McGinniss put it this way, “To always plunge into something new and somewhat frightening is to keep growing.”  I have loved.  I have lost.  I have come away from my experiences a better person.  At times I am still angry beyond words.  At other times I am at peace within myself.

Late in my life I am reaching toward the freedom of spirit that allows me to live without fearing the wrath of God or church, toward the freedom of mind that liberates me from the shackles of restrictive intellectual systems, toward freedom of emotions that washes me in pleasures, and  freedom of the body that allows me to enjoy love and food and comfort even while my aging body is beginning to protest.

I have long ago learned that without discipline there is no freedom.  For most of what I learned about discipline I am indebted to my Catholic upbringing.  The moral discipline of my religious heritage has guided me throughout my life decisions.  The pursuit of knowledge is part of that heritage.  Nuns and priests taught me rigorous study habits which I value most highly.

Learning the art of meditation in the monastic setting taught me how to control not merely my thoughts but my whole way of being.  I learned to screen out distractions to the point that I have been called a master of selective listening, at once an advantage and a liability.  The discipline required to become proficient in sports gave me a body I was proud of.

Not an end in themselves, these forms of discipline helped set me free in the different realms of my being, my personhood.  Out of discipline flows creative energy, the ability and freedom to roam the streets of spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical wellbeing.  Without discipline I would have floundered through the many twists and turns that have taken me from mere existence to being fully alive.

The road to freedom all started with God.  I needed to confront the nature of that God who struck such fear into my naïve self.  The God created by the institutional church became the basis of the God-image I created in my own fertile imagination.  I needed to face down this God and find the courage to kill and bury it.

I considered the mocking image of God both benevolent and malevolent, one who haunted my dreams for so long, and my daydreams even longer, all while I was squirming to escape.  In the process of wrestling this God/Demon to the ground, over and over, I became so soul-weary that there were times when I could no longer breathe.

I was finally able to shed my childish notions of God as some outside force manipulating events, whose will could be known only through men of the cloth.  That God is dead, of no account, no longer deserving my loyalty.  On my life journey I found another way of looking at life and its meaning.  I can see no compelling evidence for me to accept  the existence of the God of my upbringing.  In the final analysis I had to come to terms with what is meaningful deep within myself, a most sacred place where it is frightening to enter and where no one else can go.  I am my own judge of what is there.

I have not been as successful in dealing with the institutional Catholic Church, which I found to be part mother, part wife, part harlot.  The mother sustained me at times, nurtured me at times, but also became a demanding tyrant.  The wife part became more than friend and lover until it also became a force demanding more than I could give.  The harlot owned me.  I paid her in soul-dollars which I could ill afford.

Late in life I allowed myself to get sucked back into the vortex of institutional Catholicism. Once again, it all but destroyed my equanimity.  Once again, it was a struggle to free myself from its siren entanglements.

There is a lot of anger in my story.  I was surprised when a leader of a prayer group I belonged to in my early sixties told me privately that I harbored a great deal of rage which was eating away at my spiritual welfare.  I had always considered myself a mild man, a man who chose not to engage in angry dialogue or physical combat.  I thought long and hard about what she said and wondered how she came to her conclusion.

Always inclined to self-examination, I rummaged through my memories.  I took note of times when I surprised people with sudden outbursts of anger over things that really didn’t matter.  My anger was buried deeper than those events.  It was late in my life that I found help to discover ways to bypass my intellectual memories and to search my emotional and bodily memory banks.  Many, many things began to reveal themselves.

It was easy for me to feel justified in nursing a deep loathing for Catholic priests and bishops who physically or sexually abused innocent and vulnerable children and adults and then covered up those abuses;  and also for refusing to express sincere and full apologies for those crimes.  Equally and even more devastating are the emotional and spiritual abuses they have wrought upon unsuspecting and defenseless people, most of whom are women and children.

It was also easy for me to harbor anger at what I perceived to be wrongs done to me personally.  For many years I could not see why I should not receive apologies.  Ultimately, I learned to go deeper.  The anger I directed at churchmen for those wrongs, however much they deserve it, was and is, misdirected.  I know that they will never apologize.  The deepest rage I reserved was toward myself for making decisions which in my heart I did not want to make.  In the mode of a martyr-victim through much of my life, I made decisions as if I were some helpless and forlorn little fellow who allowed others to make my life decisions and then felt sorely tried and forced to bear wrongs in fruitless bitterness.

I have come to realize that I could never be free without dealing honestly and openly with all my buried anger.  Even if I could bring myself to forgive others, I would never find peace until I forgave myself.  I can do nothing about anyone else.  I believe my story, which is in part a story of spiritual and emotional abuse, needs to be told.  Too many of us go to our graves with our stories untold.  The result is that churchmen can continue to abuse their power.

I did not make this journey alone.  I am most deeply indebted to a number of remarkable women who loved me enough to stand beside me, listen to me, urge me to go deeper and deeper into my soul.  These women have loved me into life and freedom.  I could not have done this without them. As I review my life, I cannot think of any one man who has done as much.

My story, as I worked over it for so many years, shows that we do not need to be swallowed up in the quicksand of impotent rage.  We can rise above and beyond what we experienced and find the strength to stand on our own and accept full responsibility for our own lives and only for our own.

My story is as true as I could make it.  Each revision yielded more and more memories.  I am aware that some of these memories may have been enhanced by my imagination.  Memory is a very tricky thing.  There is an old saying, “the older I get, the faster I could run as a boy.”  It might seem self-serving in places, but I insist that I am not spinning a false tale.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

As far back as I can remember, from earliest childhood, I liked who I was.  I liked my name, Jimmy.  I liked how I felt.  I liked my Daddy and Mamma.  I liked the way they treated me.

I was born in 1932, the third son of  Peter Gerwing, married to Rose Britz.  My dad farmed east of the tiny village of Lake Lenore, Saskatchewan.  Neither Daddy nor Mamma had more than an elementary education.  Eventually our family would number seven children, Daniel, Alois, me, Marian, Lillian, Alma, and Raymond.  My great-grandfather, Heinrich Gerwing, came from western Germany to the United States in 1867.  A wooden-shoe carver by trade, he homesteaded in Pierz, Minnesota, where he raised a large family.  The shortage of land in Minnesota led him to become part of the first influx of settlers into St. Peter’s Colony in 1903.  Seven Gerwing men eventually established families there, among them my grandfather, Henry, with his wife and a small son.

My grandfather married Suzanna Wolsfeld in Minnesota.  They had ten children, Henry (Hank), Peter (my father), Alois, Anton (Tony), Susan, John (Hans or Jack), and Katherine (Katie).  Three children died in infancy.

When I look back at my life to find my earliest clear memory, I see myself crying in a dark room.  I might have been  four years old.  Daddy and Mamma and our small family had been invited to the evening meal at a neighboring farm, the Prodahls.

We walked along the road to their farm.  The sun had just set.  Brittle, dull yellow and brown poplar leaves chased each other across the dirt road.  Two nondescript horses, their backs to the wind, huddled heads down under a leafless bunch of willows.

The unpainted cedar siding and shingles of the farm house contributed to the colorless world around us.  Mrs. Prodahl opened the door at our knocking.  The table was already set for supper, simple but hearty fare from the garden.

I stared at the plate of food set in front of me.  I must have turned up my nose at the unfamiliar smells, and then refused to eat any of it.  Daddy spoke somewhat harshly, “Eat it, Jimmy, or get away from the table.”

I made no effort to pick up my spoon, my lips beginning to quiver.  Not wishing to eat the food, I was just as unwilling to be sent into the gloom of the bedroom.  I was afraid of the dark.  I was afraid of anything strange.  I burst into tears.

Daddy picked me up abruptly, carried me away from the table, and unceremoniously dumped me onto the bed, pulling the door shut partway as he returned to his place at the table.

In the unfamiliar setting,  my  whole body trembled at every new sound, every moving shadow cast by the flickering lamp in the kitchen.  Who knew what grim monsters were hidden in the corners of this unfamiliar room?

The house creaked ominously.  Wind rattled at the window.  I fancied I saw vicious red eyes in every corner.  Maybe something horrible was lurking under the bed.  Through my tears I tried to keep my eyes focused on the sliver of light coming through the doorway.  I could hear the others talking quietly around the small circle of warm light originating from the single coal-oil lamp at the centre of the table.  I tried hard to listen.  Were they talking about me?  I moved a little so I could see the lamp better.

A strange thing happened.  The light from the lamp was almost cheerful, friendly, and suddenly I saw colors, brilliant colors. Spikes of pure white burst and sparkled and played between stunning reds and yellows and blues.  I forgot my fears, fascinated with the beautiful patterns forming and changing rapidly, like a kaleidoscope (only I  wouldn’t have known what that was). I made an effort to squeeze out more tears, and squinted with varying pressure and varying amounts of tears to change the patterns and colors.   I had to make an enormous effort. The astonishing images contrasted so vividly with the general drabness of everything around me that it became impossible for me to cry, and then I was more than a little disappointed when one of the Prodahl girls came in to soothe me, and she carried me out into the kitchen and the colors vanished.

I do not remember our move to Pilger, but it was shortly after that.  Daddy had lost his quarter-section of land, under what circumstances I do not know.  One of the first places we moved to had two small homes in a farm yard.  Our Uncle Tony Gerwing, (Daddy’s brother) and Aunt Margaret (Mamma’s sister) and their children lived in one of the houses and we in the other.

One winter day Uncle Tony’s family went to town. While they were gone their house caught on fire.  With no fire engines or any effective means of extinguishing a fire of that size, the house lasted only a few hours.  Did they take all the children, or did they leave the baby, Bobby,  in the house?  Highly unlikely, but no one could be sure, and we had to wait until they came home to discover that all of them were indeed safe, though they had lost all their belongings.  What remained were the chimney and the charred remains of the bedstead and springs, the stove, and bits and pieces of indistinguishable household items.

When we finally got a home of our own, it was on the bank of a shallow creek.  Neighbors helped in the building of a one-room log house.  There weren’t a lot of big trees around, but the house was completed and we moved in.  Blankets separated the sleeping area from the kitchen.  They used a mixture of mud and straw as chinking between the logs.  The interior was white-washed.

That house had a most frightening addition.  A shallow hole dug into the ground under the house served as a cellar for root vegetables and home-canned goods.  It was a thoroughly scary place to go down into because it was pitch dark in there.  When it was my turn to crawl down the ladder to fetch potatoes or something else, I believed I would never come up alive.  It took a lot of coaxing to get me down long enough to pick up what was needed.  I would grab the first thing I touched and would have to go down again and again. Who knew what dangers lurked in that black hole? My imagination told me a huge monster and thousands of ghosts waited down there for a fresh young boy to eat.  Or maybe the devil lived in there.

Among the common diseases going around during those years was whooping cough.  Our family had a remarkable remedy.  Skunk fat.  A bachelor neighbor, Pete Ehrlinger, who lived in a tiny shack out in the bush east of our place, hunted rabbits, weasels, skunks, and any other small animals whose furs could be sold.  I remember seeing dozens of skins drying inside-out on a rack beside his house.  He would fry out the fat of skunks and give us a pail of it every now and then.  We took a spoonful of this disgusting stuff (there was no hiding its origin) and follow it with a spoonful of honey to take away the taste.  Later on we used to talk about this preventive and laugh that no self-respecting germ would want to be around anywhere near it.

We had a dog called Rover.  He was of mixed parentage, with the coloring of a collie.  He was Daddy’s dog but we all played with him.  He lived outside, and loved to hang out with Bessie and Bossy in the pasture.  One day he went missing.  He was gone probably a week when we caught sight of him, dragging himself home.  He was skinny and bedraggled, one of his back legs almost completely shot off.  Maybe he was chasing someone’s cows or was mistaken for a fox.  There was no hope for saving his life.  I can still see Daddy’s pain when he sent us into the house and headed for the wood pile, picking up the axe and a shovel on the way. I tried to watch through a window as he disappeared behind some bushes.  Mamma made me move away from it.  Daddy was unusually quiet when he came back an hour or so later.  He did not tell us where he buried Rover, but wherever it was, he likely buried him deep enough that coyotes would not be able to dig him up.

Daddy rented the quarter section of land on which our new log house stood.  While we were living there we had to walk three and a half miles west to get to Mass at St. Bernard’s Church if we couldn’t catch a ride on a neighbor’s wagon. Missing mass on a Sunday was considered seriously sinful.

I have vague memories of having to wait at the church for Father John to arrive.  He was usually late coming from a previous Mass in Marysburg.  Some people waited in church praying the rosary, but I mostly hung out with Daddy and other men and boys on the steps watching for the plume of dust that signaled Father John’s approach.  Father John always drove fast.  The gravel roads produced a huge amount of dust, since it hardly ever rained those years.

I recall being sick to my stomach often in church.  I remember retching violently beside a car with Daddy standing patiently by while I got the sickness out.  I am not sure whether we had anything to eat before coming to church.  I had not yet made my first Communion, so I assume I had something, but I know everybody was always hungry on Sunday mornings if they wanted to receive Communion.  Not too many did at that time.  The old idea of receiving Communion once or twice a year at Easter and at Christmas was still in vogue.  People also still did not feel they could receive communion unless they had just gone to confession.

One Sunday after church our family and a bunch of cousins were all packed into the back of an old truck with Uncle Hank at the wheel.  One of the wheels decided the truck was not going fast enough and took off ahead.  The truck lurched to a halt in the ditch.  One of the boys ran ahead to bring the offending wheel back.  Somehow, Uncle Hank fixed it and off we went again.

I remember the dust, the endless hot days of summer, when we would watch the sky in the west, praying for even the slightest sign of a cloud.  One day when Daddy was out in the field, a great mass of dark cloud began to form in the west.  Would it be rain?  Mamma knew better.  She hustled us all into the house.   The animals would have to fend for themselves and take shelter in the log barn just up from the creek bed.

The dust storm that day almost blew the house down.  The outhouse landed about a quarter of a mile away.  Mamma lit a blessed candle and we huddled around the kitchen table praying the rosary.  I’m sure she struggled not to let her own fear show.  It was so dark we could hardly see one another.

The storm blew over almost as quickly as it came.  Everything inside the house was covered with gray grit.  Outside, the sun glared down even hotter than before. Great swirling dunes of dust, like snow, covered the yard.  The soft, grey dirt squished warm between my toes when I ran up and down the banks piled up along the fence lines and the ruts in the roadway.  Daddy found his way home, shaking his head.  The wind had been so strong that it was moving the big tractor under which he and another man had taken cover.  The storm had cut off what little grain had come up in the field in front of the house.  Was I happy that Daddy was safe because we prayed for him?  But then why did our prayers not bring rain as well?  Does God listen to some prayers and not to others?  If so, why?  I doubt whether I articulated those thoughts at the time, but such thoughts planted seeds that haunted me most of my life, a fear of a mysterious God who could do anything and overlooked nothing.

We faced another summer with almost no crop at all.  I don’t know how we survived, but I know it had something to do with neighbors all working together to look out for each other.  Bachelor Paul Walter across the road produced a lot of potatoes, which he shared with us.

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, about how one of our neighbours dealt with the depression.  He ran a still and sold home brew.  He did not worry about getting caught.  He was jailed several times.  That way he was fed, and apparently the province had some sort of program to provide relief for his family while he was serving his time.

I attended the Lenore Valley School, about three miles east of home, for only a few months in the spring of 1939.  My older brothers had already attended for two years, except in winter.  I remember the prevailing atmosphere in the school as something akin to indifference, maybe more like a feeling that the kids from the poorer families were maltreated and frequently smacked across the head and hands.  The kids from wealthier families were given the best treatment.  I can’t recall learning anything, but I must have learned something about reading.

One day while returning home with our little cart and pony, one of the shafts broke.  As biggest boy, Daniel got to drive Bessie home, while Alois and I and an older cousin pulled the cart the rest of the way.

Some time before the end of the school year there was a community picnic at the school grounds.  The adults and teenagers were playing a game of softball.  Daddy came up to bat.  He took a mighty swing and the ball sailed over the heads of the fielders.  Despite a warning from Mamma not to run, he took off around the bases, but he never made it past third.  He went down on his knees, gasping for breath, in obvious pain.  That was the first time I became aware that Daddy had a serious heart condition for which there would be no cure.

That was our last summer on the farm.  Rain had returned and the crops were quite good again. We had one picture of Daddy standing in a field with only his shoulders and head visible above the ripening grain.  Perhaps the better crop enabled him to pay his debts, but not much more than that.

The Second World War broke out that fall.  I had visions of German soldiers with guns and bayonets coming at us over the rise to the south of the house, much like the neighbor’s bull did on occasions when he broke out of his fence. He would bellow as he threw up great clouds of dust and grind his head in the holes he made.  I would watch him with mixed awe and fear.  Maybe we would be safer in Lake Lenore?

We borrowed a team of horses, put all of our belongings into a wagon. Off we went.  I do not remember ever seeing our old house again.  In later years as adults we visited the spot long after the house was gone.

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

Daddy’s Aunt Kate Wolsfeld offered us her cottage-style house, with its weather-beaten unpainted cedar siding and shingles, in the village of Lake Lenore.  Raymy was born very soon after we moved.  I heard Daddy and Mamma talk about how much better it was for us kids to be taught by the Sisters and that it was good to be near a priest for Daddy when the time came.  Aunt Kate was rather badly crippled and said she would be more comfortable if she moved out to the farm to be with Grandpa and Grandma Gerwing, whom we called Vater and Mutter.  Her little house, set on a cement foundation, had but three rooms, a front room taking up half the house, one bedroom just big enough for a double bed and a small dresser,  and a kitchen with a lean-to pantry.  An open porch was supported by a four-by-four post into which we drove hundreds of nails left over from our various projects.

The front room sported a large square window on the street side.   All our meals, homework, card games, and family celebrations happened around a square wooden dining room table in front of the window.  A gas lamp hung from the ceiling over the table lit the room with its bright white light.  I was fascinated with its flimsy white mantles that blossomed out like magic and hissed with such a comforting whistle.

We boys slept in the attic, where we could stand only at the centre.  The roof rafters were not filled in.  A substance like straw matting about a half inch thick was the only insulation.  The roof was made of boards, a layer of tar paper and shingles.  A small gable window faced the street. The only heat came from the chimney which ran up through the attic near the narrow stairway.  In the winter as the fire in the stoves burned down, the attic froze.  In the summer it was just as desperately hot. The girls slept in the front room in a pull-down side-board, something like a Murphy bed.  We lived in that little house for over ten years.

The floors were covered with an orange and brown patterned linoleum, which we scrubbed and waxed about twice a month.  We often made a game of the waxing.  One of us smeared the paste wax on the floor.  We had an old rug to do the polishing.  One of the girls would sit on the rug while we boys pulled her around until the whole floor gleamed.  Our aunts, who had acquired a weaving loom, had woven a burlap-like material which they glued onto the bottom half of the walls in the front room and painted a sallow yellow.  Above that they painted the walls cream.  Later we papered over that.  The other rooms were also done with wall paper.

The house had no electricity, no running water, no central heating.  The cement basement with a dirt floor was big enough for a root cellar and a cistern that caught the rainwater from the roof and which we filled with snow in winter.  This water was used only for laundry and washing.  One corner of the basement was reserved for the coal that heated the house in winter.  Against another wall a set of shelves held Mamma’s canning of Saskatoon berries (we called them June berries), choke cherries, wild raspberries, and pin cherries which we picked in the bushes around Lake Lenore, and vegetables, most of which we grew in the back yard.

The main piece of furniture in the small kitchen was the big black cook stove with its warming oven and reservoir to hold warm water for washing dishes.  At the back of the stove four or five heavy irons were always waiting to be heated for ironing.  Mamma baked bread almost every second or third day.  We all loved to talk her into letting us eat a slice while it was still warm.  She never let us use more than one spread, either butter or jam, never both.  Later when margarine came out, we bought the uncolored blocks because they were cheaper.  They included a small amount of yellow food coloring which we could mix in to make it look like butter.  It did not improve the taste, and the same rule applied:  only one spread at a time.

When winter came, we moved a pot-bellied stove into the front room.  Fear of a possible chimney fire precluded building too big a fire in our stoves.  The brick chimney had no lining. We changed the screens for storm windows at the first frost.  We always hoped for a good early snow so that we could bank it up against the house for insulation.  Farthest back in the yard, close to the alley, stood the outhouse, a two-holer, the venue of many a pissing contest.  Mamma kept a small chamber pot under her bed for the girls to use in the winter.  We built a small enclosure for chickens along the side of the back yard facing our neighbor on the south.  Each spring we would get twenty-five tiny chicks.  We fed them all summer on grain spilled at the grain elevators along the railway tracks, and in the fall butchered them.

The back yard faced westward to the horizon about five or six miles away.  If you knew just where to look you could see the single steeple of St. Bernard’s Church in Pilger.   On clear mornings mirages would bring the church so close it appeared to be only one or two miles away.    I never tired of the wonders nature offered.

Most of the space in the back yard was devoted to the garden.  In the spring we prepared the soil.  Mom always rotated where she planted certain vegetables, knowing that legumes provide natural fertilizers which other plants needed.  The early products, lettuce and radishes, were the first to get to the table.  We harvested other vegetables gradually, thinning out carrots and beets and digging under potato plants for the bigger potatoes while letting the smaller ones continue to grow.  Tomatoes and cabbage and corn grew all summer long.  A patch of horseradish, impossible to eradicate even had we wanted to, grew way at the end of the yard along the alley.  It provided excellent spicing for many of our meals.  Several strong rhubarb plants also thrived back there.

We always set up our play farm in the cramped space in the front yard between the house and the shrubbery.  As rows of vegetables were consumed, we could expand the farm into the garden.

One of our neighbours owned a cow.  We took turns staking her out on a long chain in empty lots where grass grew, putting her in a different place each day.  As payment we would receive a pail of milk.

With only a few street lights, the nights could be very dark.  The stars shone at times so brightly that they seemed to provide enough light to see by.  I learned the main constellations, partly from stories, partly from school.  The North Star was the great direction finder for people lost in the dark.  I always watched for Orion, the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, the Pleiades, Sirius, the Milky Way.  I gloried in the way the moon grew and waned as it made its appearance in the night skies.  Wild dances of northern lights delighted my very soul.

 

 

CHAPTER THREE

 

The Lake Lenore School was a square box-like red brick building.  Four nuns lived in the basement.  Three of them taught and the other was the “Cook Sister” whose job it was to cook and clean for the others.  The “Big Room” took up the north half of the first floor.  Grades eight to twelve were taught in that room.  The other half was divided about equally between a parlor and a chapel, with double doors between them which could be opened to make a bigger chapel.  Above the chapel and parlor was the “Middle Room” with grades five to seven.  The “Little Room” held the beginners up to grade four.

This was a public school.  We were not allowed to have crucifixes or other religious symbols in our classrooms, but they were all over the rest of the building.  The nuns were not allowed to wear their religious garb, so they simply took off the great white wimples and their rosaries, put on a simpler black veil, and the law was fulfilled.  The village hardly ever had any Protestant families, and the ones who did come, usually the bank managers, respected the good education their children got from the nuns.  We had religion classes after three o’clock.

When we moved into Lake Lenore in the fall of 1939, I had not yet passed grade one.  I had to start over.  It did not take long before the Sister in the “Little Room” thought that I was ready for grade two.  She asked me one day to come to the front of the class to read from the grade two reader.  I had no difficulty.  She told me I could go into grade two after Christmas once I had caught up a little more in arithmetic.

I remember nothing much about the next few years in school, except that in grade four I failed a test in Citizenship, part of what came to be called Social Studies.  I never forgot the humiliation of that failure and vowed to myself that I would never again fail a school test.

Another memory of grade four which I cherish was one day on the playground I had a verbal tussle with one of the girls.  In anger I wanted to call her an asshole, but somehow I prefixed it with “horse’s” because she acted like a horse’s ass.  She took off to tell Sister, and everyone else along the way.  Sister called me in.  Did I, she wanted to know, call this girl a horrid asshole.  In all truth I answered that I did not.  I felt rather than saw the little gleam in her eye as she dismissed me to the playground without further ado.

The years in the “Middle Room” were not my best.  The nun who taught me in grades five and six played favorites.  I got tagged as a teacher’s pet because of my grades and because I was considered a sissy.  By the time I was in grade six I could no longer stand it.  I was not about to quit getting good grades.  I loved learning too much.  But I had to do something to set myself free of being teased as a pet.  I deliberately set about misbehaving.  I antagonized that nun as much as I could, and got a strapping almost every day for months.

The strap she used was a mighty fierce one.  It was not made of leather, as some others were.  Hers was stiffer, of inflexible woven material from a machine belt, about  2 inches wide, a quarter of an inch thick, and maybe a foot long.  She carried it at all times and would roll up her big black sleeves in preparation for a strapping.  The first whack stung, the second one burned, and the rest were pure agony as blood rushed into the hand, making it super-sensitive.  She was fully aware of its power, and she hit hard.

One day I was at the end of the line while we were waiting to be dismissed from school.  I gave the line a great shove, and all the kids in the line added a little.  They didn’t like her any more than I did. We pinned that nun to the door jamb so hard she lost her breath.  I got a good strapping for that one.  As usual, I cried.  I cried not so much because it hurt.  It did hurt.  I usually cried after the second hit, and she would usually stop whaling on me.  Not that day.  She was so mad she was out of control.  She never did figure out what the problem was.

Her strap did a lot to raise me in the esteem of the rest of the boys, but then I started to stammer.  I could not begin words with the letters C and W.  That nun made me read in front of the class, as she did with all the kids, and I simply could not get those sounds out.  She hammered me for it.

In the school every boy was expected at some time or another to establish his place in the hierarchy of fighting.  I had avoided all fighting ever since coming to school.  Now it was critical that I fight.  My two older brothers fought a few times and were left alone.  It didn’t really matter who won, just that you would fight.  I refused.  I learned to run.  Fast.

I always knew when they were preparing a fight for me.  I would linger alone after school, and sometimes they would get tired of waiting and would go home.  Fights always attracted crowds, including girls, who stood around in horrified glee, especially if someone got a bloody nose or a split lip.  Fights almost never took place in the schoolyard.  We feared the nuns too much.  Most fights occurred under one of the wooden bridges, away from the eyes of adults.  A small creek ran east and west through the north end of the village, separating the church grounds and the school and a few private homes from the rest of the village.  The foot bridges spanning these creeks were made of two-by-fours, and wide enough for two or three people to walk across side-by-side.  They were about a block apart.

When I misjudged and started for home too early, I would have to outrun the pack of expectant spectators and the proposed champion, and I developed great speed in escaping.  They tried to ambush me, hiding under the bridge or in the bushes around the creek.  Not everyone hid well enough most of the time, and I could almost always see which bridge I had to avoid, and would be across the other before they caught on.  And all I needed was a few yards start and they would never catch me.

I grew trickier too.  One day they were laying for me at the smaller bridge. I knew it.  I hid behind some trees for a while and surveyed the situation.  The crowd was easily visible.  I made a dash for the other bridge, making sure they would see me.  Sure enough, they took off in a great rush to head me off.  I stopped behind a spruce tree in the cemetery, waited a few seconds, and then dashed back across the small bridge before they knew what happened.

I knew they were very upset, because they thought they had me that day.  Not long after, they did get me.  They laid traps at both bridges, and waited.  I had no choice but to fight.  They had picked a tough little guy who would surely beat me.  It did not take long.  I swung wildly at his stomach a few times.  He connected with a few good punches, and I duly cried.  No blood.  No real hurt.  But I cried, and the fight was over, just like that.  A victory for my opponent, no doubt, but not a very noble one.  Who can brag about beating up a blubbering baby?  In my own mind, I had gained a victory of sorts because no one hassled me any more.  I was not worth it, I guess, as far as they were concerned.

Generally, my school years in Lake Lenore were happy.  We played a lot of games at recess times, mostly unorganized and unsupervised.  We played a number of different versions of tag, including “Pump, pump, pull-away,” were the IT person or persons would yell those words to any kids who tried to stay too long in the safety zone.  In the winter we made the outline of a small soccer field with pieces of firewood for goals.  Any number of kids could play on each side, the teams always changing with each recess.

After a fresh snow we would stamp out a large circle and a small patch at the center, with paths from there to the outside circle, like spokes of a wheel.  On these paths we played another version of tag called Fox and Goose.  You had to stay on the paths and the centre was the safe place.

Quite often, sometimes every week, our teachers would set aside a half hour of letting us entertain each other with songs or skits.  Daniel and I sang at many of these “concerts.”  We performed cowboy songs and old ballads.  Much later in life the two of us sang together in the monastery as chanters.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER FOUR

 

Most of my memories of Daddy center about his gentleness, his care for his family, his humour.  He loved to laugh and make others laugh.  Sometimes he would burst into song and then tap his Adam’s apple to produce an exaggerated tremolo, and roar at his cleverness.

Daddy could not keep a regular job in Lake Lenore.  With barely a grade six education and untrained in anything but manual labor, most jobs demanded more exertion than his heart would tolerate.  He would take a job draying, or piling lumber, and then have to give up.  I do not remember seeing any of his despair, his frustration at his disabled heart and the dirty trick nature had played by robbing the rich soil of its fertility in the thirties, and then robbing him of the strength to farm.  Was he able to hide his fears from his children?

He broke his leg fooling around practicing a skit for a family get-together.  I remember walking alongside him on his crutches on the snow-packed street to the skating rink where he was custodian. I was so afraid that he might fall and not be able to get up.

I remember Daddy bringing in a piece of solidly frozen beef from a box outside during the dead of winter.  He would slice off bright red shavings that curled up in the cast iron pan on the stove.  He would follow with thinly sliced raw potatoes and onions.  I looked forward to those meals.  Daddy was a top of the stove cook, while Mamma tended to boil and bake.  Sometimes Daddy would get a few pounds of peanuts.  We would all help shell them, and then he would grind them in the meat grinder to make peanut butter, adding a bit of real butter and some salt.  No matter to us that the results did not match the taste or texture of the store-bought variety.  We loved it.

My stomach aches, first experienced in the Pilger church,  persisted until one day when the doctor came to Lake Lenore Daddy took me by the hand to see him.  Daddy sat watching quietly while the doctor put me up on a table and probed my stomach for what seemed forever.  Finally the doctor explained that I seemed to have a problem with my appendix, and that it really should be removed.  We could not afford such an operation, but Daddy said that if it became necessary he would see that it was done.  My stomach aches disappeared.

I remember Daddy’s hands.  The nails on his index fingers bent slightly downwards over the tips.  I wanted so much to be like him that I would hold the ends of my fingernails down with my thumbs when my hands were not otherwise occupied to try to match his.

One of Daddy’s last jobs was slinging beer for our Uncle Albert’s beer parlor in the hotel.  I remember him coming home sometimes after having a few too many beers.  I can still see him sitting by the table and slapping his knee, laughing at some antic cut by a neighbor who had also imbibed too freely.

Every Saturday morning Daniel, Alois, and I would go with him to give the beer parlor a thorough cleaning.  We moved the tables and chairs around as he scrubbed the floors.  The worst place was the lean-to toilet attached to the side of the building where a long tin trough along the wall slanted downward to an unbelievably foul-smelling hole.  There was no running water to flush anything down.  Nor any attempt to deodorize it.

Although the hotel was only a block and a half from home, there were times when Daddy had trouble making it home.  We would see him coming around the corner of the pool hall and suddenly squat down in the middle of the road, panting in noticeable pain.  I recall a bunch of us kids running to him.  He would look up at us, unable to say anything.  After a while he would get up and slowly walk the rest of the way home, with us tagging somberly behind him.  Mamma could not hide her anxiety no matter how hard she tried.  Photographs taken during these years show him getting progressively more gaunt.

The year of grade six brought our family the tragedy of losing our Daddy.  He died suddenly of a heart attack on May 26, 1943.  The day began as every other school day began.  Nothing unusual happened at home.  We all had our normal breakfast of cereal and off we went in small groups to school, walking the few blocks to the north end of our village.  On the way we joined with other children already on the sidewalks which were nothing but well-worn paths beside the gravel streets.

The morning went along as usual.  I don’t remember whether Daddy was at home for lunch.  We always walked home and then back to school again.  Only the “farm kids” ate at school.

It was during the afternoon recess.  The intermediate classes had a softball game going on the field just west of the school and nearest the church.  Shortly after starting to play, the church bell tolled a single dull ring every three or four seconds.  Someone in the village had died.  Who?

The normal yelling and screaming of good plays and bad was interrupted temporarily by a fight which broke out between Paddy Ryan and my brother Alois.  I can’t remember why they fought, but probably in a dispute about the game.  Invariably Dougy Nieman was available to assist Paddy if he got into trouble, but there were too many Gerwings around, and Dougy let things go.  Before Alois could get the advantage he had taken a few scratches to the face from Paddy’s ragged fingernails.

The circle of kids watching the fight broke up in a hurry as one of the nuns, her black robes flying, came charging out of the school toward our field.  Surely the boys would catch heck again for their fighting.  They hurried to their feet just as Sister rounded the corner of the garden.

“Tell the Peter Gerwing kids to come to the parlor.”

She was gone again just as quickly as she had arrived.  The three of us on the field, Daniel, Alois, and I, exchanged brief glances as we took off behind Sister, who had already reached the school.  Would we all get into trouble for Alois’s fighting?

But a more serious thought took hold.  I remembered the church bell toll a death in the village just at the beginning of recess. In a matter of time all of us would know who died, and the ball game had begun anyway.  The only reason the Peter Gerwing kids would be called was . . .

To be called into the parlor was always most serious. Ordinary discipline was done in the classroom.  Only on the rarest occasion were pupils called to the parlor, usually to be interviewed along with their parents or outsiders visiting the school.

We stepped into the cool, inviting, immaculately clean room, furnished with simple, inexpensive, but sturdy furniture.  Mother Magdalen, the “big room” teacher, was waiting for us.

“You know that your father has been ill for some time,” she started.

I didn’t really admit within myself that he was so ill.  He was laughing so happily just last night at some joke he was telling Mamma.  He was in his usual good mood this morning.  He wasn’t sick at all.  He had a little trouble with his heart.  That was all.

“He died just a little while ago. You can join your sisters in the chapel to pray for him.  I’m so sorry.”

She opened the double doors between the parlor and the chapel.  So many times on Saturdays I had come here for Mass and knelt before the little white altar with its statues and flowers and candles.

Marian and Lillian were kneeling, crying, in the middle bench.  We joined them.  I began to cry too, more because that was expected than because I really felt the loss at the time. We said very little and each prayed in silence for a few moments.  Should we go home?  What would we find there?

I can’t remember the walk home.  We must have talked a little, but I can’t remember any of the conversation.  Maybe we wondered to each other what was to become of us.  I know I expected to find Daddy at home, lying dead on the bed or somewhere.

He wasn’t there, of course. A small group of neighbors and relatives had gathered around Mamma.  They were in the middle of the rosary, kneeling on the living room floor, all close to Mamma. She was holding Raymy in her lap, crying softly, rocking herself back and forth.  She glanced up quickly as we came in and just as quickly looked down again.  She said nothing.   I had the distinct impression that she was somewhere else in her mind.

We were told that Daddy had been in Uncle Albert’s big car with at least one or two other passengers looking at some crops.  Uncle Albert had turned off the road and gotten stuck in a muddy ditch.  Daddy jumped out, got behind the car, and heaved.  He collapsed on the spot.  He never regained consciousness.

We all moved out to Vater and Mutter’s farm late in the afternoon.  Some time during the next afternoon Daddy was brought out in a simple box which our Uncle Johnny Mamer, a carpenter, had hastily put together and covered with black cloth.  The box was set on two chairs in a small parlor.  I remember looking at him briefly. He was wearing his suit and tie.  My aunts talked about his face being very blue.  They had heard that if they covered his face with a cloth soaked in vinegar overnight the color would be lessened.  They could not persuade Mamma to go into the room.

Next morning all of us kids went in together to spend a few minutes with him.  Mutter, Aunt Katie, and Aunt Susie insisted that Mamma had to see him to say goodbye.  He looks very peaceful, they told her.  They took her by the arms and marched her in. I thought she would faint away, she was so overcome.  But she did stay a while.

The church was full that day.  After the funeral Mass, they brought his body out for burial in the cemetery next to the church.  He was placed beside his brother who had died accidentally some fifteen years earlier.  I remember watching them lower the box into the grave with long ropes, and Mamma’s extreme distress.  They waited until we were gone before filling in the grave.

We spent the rest of the school year on Vater’s farm.  The smell of egg sandwiches still evokes memories of sitting in the big room with the other farm kids gulping down food quickly so that we could head out to the playgrounds before the town kids took over.

One of the phrases we heard over and over and that keeps resonating in my head is that Daddy’s death was the will of God, and we needed to accept it.  That meant that God took our Daddy away from us.  None of our prayers had cured his heart.

It gradually began to register.  God loves to see his children suffer.  He made Jesus suffer horribly.  Suffering is good.  Don’t question it.  Just accept it.  God told Abraham to kill his precious little boy and praised him for his obedience.  God spared Abraham, but he did not spare Jesus.  God abandoned Jesus.  And why?   Because of my sins, that’s why.  I have to join Jesus on the cross to make up for it and appease God’s righteous anger.  Don’t feel angry at God.  I could not ask whether God was unfair.  Never, never question God.

Over the years I came to consider God a monstrous force, overwhelming in his demands, allowing no slack of any kind.  I must be perfectly resigned to God’s will.  I saw the suffering of my Mamma in being told to accept the will of God.  It broke her spirit and she had to be hospitalized several times in North Battleford for what was termed “nervous breakdowns.”  At those times she would withdraw from life to escape into a silent world none of us could enter.

Now Daddy is in a better place.  That’s another thing I heard a million times.  Better for him?  Yes, I suppose he went to heaven. Better for us kids, or Mamma?  Hardly.  Uncle Albert had said that Daddy’s last clear words were, “Take me to Father Francis.”  Daddy took his religion very seriously.  Later in life, I wondered whether it was more important for him than his family, and if so, why?  After Daddy died, I feared that they, whoever “they” were, would come and take us kids to the Prince Albert Orphanage, and we would never see each other again.

 

 

CHAPTER FIVE

 

How we survived, our Mamma and her seven kids, aged four to thirteen, on practically no income for so many years is one of the great mysteries of survival that a number of Lake Lenore families went through.  Only later did I come to realize the strength and determination of our little mother.  She was so tiny, less than five feet tall.  But she had a dignity and power that kept us all together, kept us fed and clean.  Two stores, the general store run by Mr. Riederer, and the Red and White meat store owned by the Ludwig family, allowed us to charge groceries, waiting to be paid until Mamma’s checks came in.  We lived on family allowance and a small widow allowance for many years. Together they amounted to somewhere around $60 a month.

Mamma taught all of us, including the boys, knitting, sewing, darning socks, and embroidery, skills which I have treasured.  All of us had responsibilities.  We boys had to earn enough money to buy new clothes if we wanted them.  It was easier for me, because I got hand-me-downs.  Daniel had to earn enough to buy the coal needed for the months of winter.  Alois and I were responsible for keeping the wood pile stocked.  I was in charge of the drinking water pail.  Relatives and neighbors gave Mamma dresses and material for the girls.

Our garden provided lots of vegetables, fresh at first, then canned for the winter months.  We went out to the bushes surrounding Lake Lenore to pick Saskatoon berries, choke cherries, pin cherries, selling what Mamma couldn’t can.  We helped Mamma make dozens of sealers of sauerkraut.  We piled up potatoes, carrots and beets in the cellar.

Mamma taught us to play cards.  She was such a mild person, but when she played cards, she never let us win unless we honestly beat her.  Others also taught me to play competitively, but I believe she provided the basic attitude:  you play your best to win every game you play.

A few months after Daddy died, I was hitting a tennis ball against the garage across the street from our house, and waiting for it to come rolling back to me.  On one of these hits I missed the garage and the ball soared off into a mass of machinery.  It was nearly time for our evening meal, and I knew that if I didn’t retrieve the ball right away, it would be lost.

I ran across the street. As I got in among the machinery I heard Daddy call my name, Jimmy!   Clearly and distinctly.  I looked back at the house to tell him I would come as soon as I found the ball, expecting to see him standing in the doorway, one foot in the house and one on the porch, holding the screen door open, as he did when he called the last few kids in for a meal.  He was not there.  I stared for a long time at where he was supposed to be before I realized that he would never be there again to call me.

All through my life I have pondered the loss of my father.  How much did I miss not having his guidance when I came to those difficult crossroads of life?  I would certainly have made different choices.  Would they have been any better than the ones I made?

We were certainly among the villager’s poorest in terms of money.  Yet, I remember feeling poor only on the rare occasions while visiting a cousin who had everything a boy could want.  Trains, cars, candy, toys of all kinds.  He was pudgy, soft, and thoroughly bored with all his stuff.

We made all of our own toys.  We sawed and carved horses, cows, pigs, chickens, made barns and houses out of any scrap of wood we found.  We called ourselves apple-box carpenters.  All we needed was a small coping saw, jack-knives, sandpaper and paint.  We made replicas of farm machinery, copying the John Deere machinery across the street from our home.  As we grew older we found jobs helping set machinery together under the supervision of the owners.

We made a scale model of a four-runner sleigh, complete with iron clad runners and all the hitches and double-trees and single-trees for horses.  Daniel was working for Louis Schober, the blacksmith at the time, and had access to all sorts of iron parts we needed.  Daniel and Donald, one of our many cousins, were usually the horses when we played with the sleigh.  Alois the driver, and I was the dog who ran behind.  We hauled all manner of real and imaginary freight in that sleigh.

We made a neat picket fence across the front of the yard, painting it white with red trim.  Daniel, who also worked piling lumber in the Beaver Lumber yard,  was chief engineer for that project.  A few caragana bushes also separated our yard from the sidewalk.  In spring I liked to suck tiny bits of sweet liquid from the yellow flowers of the hedge.  Late in summer the pods darkened and suddenly popped open, spitting the bean-like seeds all over, leaving the pods spread out and beautifully twisted. We also had two or three lilac bushes.  I still can’t walk past a lilac in bloom without pushing my nose into the flowers and remembering that incredible feeling of delight I experienced as a child.

I always played more with my sisters, female cousins, and their friends than with my older brothers or other boys.  The girls were infinitely gentler and more fun to be with.  They welcomed my company, and I entertained them with my own versions of cowboy movies and all manner of creative nonsense.  I loved helping with paper dolls and lending them a hand when they made little houses for them.  No doubt, my playing more with the girls was part of why my older brothers and others considered me a sissy.  I was not that good at sports either.

As I look back at my childhood memories, I would like to think of myself as a gentle person.  But that would not be the whole truth.  Upstairs in the attic where the four of us boys slept, Daniel bought his own small cot so that he could be by himself.  Alois and I slept in a sway-backed double bed with little Raymy between us.  I am sure he did not enjoy being squeezed there with insufficient strength to make us move.  It was a way of keeping warm in winter, but very uncomfortable in summer.

There were other elements of his discomfort.  We teased the dickens out of him.  “Hey, Jimmy, did you hear that bear in the corner?”  I would dutifully answer with a frightened agreement and make a growl.  “I can see his eyes now.”  And Raymy would scream in fear, until Mamma would yell, “Ach, you two boys, stop that teasing.”  This was usually not very effective because we knew she would not come upstairs to deal with us, and by morning all would be forgotten.

We also engaged in a favourite pastime of boys and men: farting.  We ate a lot of beans, which helped the process along very well.  “OOH, chicken guts.”  And we would try to keep Raymy’s head under the covers to get the full benefit of our accomplishments.  How he ever managed to come out of these regular torments with the wonderfully positive outlook on life is a tribute to his good nature. Maybe the fact that we three older boys had already left home (to St. Peter’s) by the time Raymy was 7 and he had only his older sisters around him played a role in that development. He was idolized by them and by their friends.

Not much over a year from our Daddy’s death, our maternal grandmother moved into our yard.  Her son, Uncle Tony Britz,  had built a one-room shack with a door and window and put it on skids so that he could pull it to the different yards of her children.  When they tired of having her around, he would come along with his tractor and pull it into another yard.  His plan was to convert it into a granary when it was no longer needed for Grandma.

Grandma wasn’t one of our favourite people for a lot of reasons.  She had entered an unfortunate marriage after her first husband died.  He abused his step-children until he was forced out by the older boys.  Mamma did not hide her fundamental dislike and distrust of the man, and never allowed any of us to be alone with him.

Maybe we resented Grandma’s presence in our yard because she never lifted a finger to help our Mamma.  She never helped with the dishes or the laundry.  She expected one of the girls to come in periodically to clean her place.  One of us had to call her in when meals were ready, and she would disappear afterwards, often enough complaining about the food and our table manners.  We were deliberately unmannerly at table.  She would scold.  In protest, Alois and I learned to burp on command, something which disgusted Grandma.  And of course we never held back a fart if one happened to present itself.  Mamma tried in vain to make us stop, but we insisted we couldn’t help it.

One day an RCMP officer visited the school.  Lake Lenore was part of the territory under the jurisdiction of the Humboldt contingent.  After he spoke to the kids in our room we were invited, if we wished, to talk to him individually in the parlour.  I took the opportunity.  When I entered he commented, “My goodness.  You are certainly a husky young lad.”  That remark gave my confidence an enormous boost.  Because of his comment, I harboured the idea of joining the RCMP when I got old enough.

Every so often the kids in our end of Lake Lenore got together to put on shows for each other.  I especially remember one cousin, Sevy Gerwing, who used to stand up on a box and give us spirited renditions of some of Shakespeare’s soliloquies.  Later on in high school, I recognized the rhythms and felt that I had already been drawn to the bard.  It made memorization so much easier.

We played games which required virtually no expense. “Hit the tin can” was a favorite that could be played in near darkness.  We would set a tin can on a block of wood.  Each player had a stick of some kind, usually a broken hockey stick.  One person was IT while the others hid.  Like hide and seek, the IT had to find those who were hidden and then beat them to touch the can and call their names.  If the hidden person beat the IT, he or she would wallop the tin can as far as possible and everyone could hide anew.  The IT then had to replace the can and count to fifty or more before again looking for those hiding.

When it was completely dark we played “Jack in the Dark Where Are You?” Again a form of hide and seek, but we could hide by simply staying very still.  When the IT called out, “Jack in the dark, where are you?” everyone hiding had to make some sound in response, and the race would be on to the “Safe” place.

Boys made guns out of wood and clothes pins that could fire rubber bands made from rubber inner tubes cut into long strips.  Games of Cops and Robbers could go on for hours.  When I was allowed to join my older brothers and cousins for these games, I took delight in their acceptance even though I was usually a weak link on the team.

One of the places that offered us endless entertainment was the hitching posts across the street from our home.  These posts provided parking space for teams of horses driven into town from the farms.  The posts were about five feet apart and were joined by steel pipes about four feet off the ground.  We all learned a great many gymnastic tricks on these bars.  We had names for some of the moves, like “skinning the cat” and “windmill.”  With mastery of each new trick we could challenge others to do what we did.

On the corner of Main Street was the barber shop/pool hall, with its oiled floor and smoke-filled atmosphere.  Even though I never went in for haircuts, I liked sitting on the tall wire stools and watching the pool players.  A lot of boys did this and nobody ever told us to get out.  This was a place where women and girls simply never set foot.

A large family in a three-room house provides precious few opportunities for solitude.  I found the best time to be alone during what we called “three day soakers.”  Once or twice a summer we would be blessed with soft, soaking rains that could last for days.  When the rest of the kids preferred to stay inside, I was out on the street in front of the house.  The rains kept washing the gravel street, turning it into a constantly clean sheet of sand just waiting for me to be the first to draw designs on.  With no older brothers to take it away from me, I used the wagon to make great and small circles and spirals.  These were all my own.  No one else saw or cared.  I could survey my accomplishments without interference from anyone, and then dream away the hours thinking about another way of doing it after the rain erased my patterns.  I could be cold and soaking wet, that did not matter.  This was heaven to me.  I learned early in life the sheer joy of creativity for its own sake and being alone with my own dreams.

On one of these occasions I had tied a bent nail behind the wagon and promptly forgot about it as I pushed it around in circles.  I stepped on the nail with my bare feet, and all but tore one of my toes in half.  Mamma was a wonderful nurse.  After drying my tears, she stopped the bleeding, put some salve on the toe and wrapped it firmly with strips she tore from a worn-out pillowcase.  She had a special nick-name for me, one only she used, “Bimps.”

When the snow started to melt in the spring, we all became engineers with hoes and broken hockey sticks, channeling the runoff waters toward ditches and eventually toward the little creek.  Chips of wood became boats, winding their ways through treacherous turns and over miniature waterfalls.

Not long after Daddy’s death I became an altar boy.  Father Francis taught us the Latin and the ritual movements and would not let us start until we had everything down perfectly.  He was often cross with me for daydreaming.  He was very strict, but he also provided us boys with a lot of fun experiences.  Every summer he would take us all to some lake or resort for a day of picnic and swimming.  One year he took us to St. Peter’s College in Muenster, where I would eventually enroll as a boarding student on a scholarship he helped arrange for me.  For the first time in my life I saw running water and flushing toilets.

In grade seven we got a relief in the classroom.  Mother Perpetua was a little older than most of the other teachers.  She had been a nursemaid, she told us, of a noble Spanish family before coming to Canada and becoming a nun.  She told us all about the bull fights to which she took the children every Sunday afternoon.  She loved boys.  If there was too much talking in the classroom, the girls got the blame.  She read stories to us about Silver Chief, Dog of the North, and other adventures that appealed to boys.  I remember seeing her one day running after one of the boys, swinging a baseball bat at him, both of them laughing so hard they fell to the ground.

My stammer disappeared like magic, and I never got another strapping.

The following year I made it to the “Big Room.”  I vaguely remember thirteen of us in grade eight, five boys and eight girls.  Three of the boys were Gerwings, Roman, Cliff, and I.  I can’t remember all the girls.  Mother Catherine was a terrific teacher.  She handled all the subjects of all the grades, and we learned our stuff;  well, at least I did.  At the beginning of each day she posted assignments for each grade, and we simply went to work on them, teaching ourselves and each other, getting help from older students sometimes, and then she would come around to help us as a grade before sitting down briefly with each one of us to check our work and to be sure we understood.

All the nuns had the same clean smell of strong ivory soap and black serge habits.  Their hands were always meticulously groomed, their shoes always shined.  Most of them really cared for us kids.  I felt that even when sometimes they seemed harsh in their discipline.  I accepted the general belief that the ones that got the strap deserved it, and they said very little at home, because most parents gave their kids another licking if they got one at school.

That last year in Lake Lenore was the year I learned my English grammar.  I look back at that year’s accomplishments with pride, because I never had trouble again with parts of speech or sentence structure or punctuation.  We learned to parse sentences and did a lot of writing.  I learned all about tenses, moods, and voices of verbs.  In high school at St. Peter’s College when I studied foreign languages I had no trouble with those aspects of language.

I worked one whole summer for Father Francis.  He had an old German fellow, Sebastian Langkammer, as caretaker, living in a small room in the basement of the church.  He could not speak English, but would talk on and on to me in German.  I understood almost nothing of what he was saying, but nodded wisely and said “Ya” whenever it seemed appropriate.  Sometimes his look would tell me I should have kept my mouth shut.  I often wondered about this man.  He was likely one of the many displaced persons from Germany who came to Canada to find a better life than post-war Germany could offer.  I have an idea that the man was spouting socialist philosophy, but that is a guess.

He did not like working with engines, so I got to mow the lawn and cemetery grass with a power lawnmower that kept breaking down.  I also got to use a big flame-thrower to control the weeds in the gravel parking lot and along the sidewalks.

Father Francis was supposed to pay me each week, but one week he forgot.  I waited till the end of the second week.  I handed him my hours.  He frowned, “Did you really work all these hours?”  I thought of the times I sat and talked with old Langkammer, and thought maybe he was watching.  I blurted out that he could knock off some hours if he thought I didn’t deserve my pay.  He glowered angrily at me.  “Were you here working during these hours?”  I told him I was.  “Then I pay you for these hours.  You have to learn to speak up for yourself.”

That same summer I mixed the mortar for the bricklayer who built an addition to the church and also helped mix some of the cement for the rock grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes east of the church.

My connection with Father Francis may have stemmed from the need to have a father-figure in my life, and he was always good to me.  Mamma sometimes threatened to tell Father Francis if we children misbehaved to the point that she could not handle us.  I never went to him for advice about my life decisions.  Late in  life I wondered what advice he would have given me.

 

 

CHAPTER SIX

 

When we moved into our Aunt Kate’s house in Lake Lenore, we became next-door neighbors to the Meyer family.  Christ Meyer was the village shoemaker.  I loved the sound of the tapping of his little hammer, and the whir of his sewing machine.  I loved also the smell of the shoe polish and the special wax he used, called schuster pech in German.  He collected all the store string he could, waxed it and then used it for his sewing.  He sewed up baseballs and softballs, and taught us to do it.

Mrs. Meyer was very short and very fat.  I don’t remember very many people more genial than that woman.  She kept chickens all year round.  One day Mrs. Meyer came over laughing so hard she could hardly breathe.  “We’re having chicken tonight,” she announced.  She always kept laying hens in her coop.  And a feisty rooster.  That day she happened to have a butcher knife in her hand as she went to pick up the eggs.  The rooster made the fatal decision to defend his territory.  She swung hard and the rooster lost his head.

Each spring she would get the runt of a litter of pigs from some farmer, and would nurse that pig along until the fall, when she would have a fine young hog to butcher.

One year she got an old Billy goat with a great set of horns.  He stunk something awful, but we enjoyed playing with him.  He had a mean streak, but we had no trouble staying out of his way.  We would roll car tires at him, and he would butt them down.  We even tried truck tires that almost knocked him off his feet, but he was game.  He didn’t last long.  He was meant for the table. We did some smirking and eye rolling when we heard that Mr. Meyer said the best part of that beast was the “prairie oysters.”

For me, the neighbor next door who meant most was Albin.  Albin was about thirty or so when we moved to Lake Lenore.  He was blind.  He taught me many lessons about life that I cherish to this day.  Albin and I spent an enormous amount of time together.  He was strong.  He loved to run.  He would grab my hand and we would run down the alley as fast as our legs could carry us.  He gloried in the freedom and trusted me completely to keep him from stumbling.

He bucked wood for their use, and also for others.  He would put a log on his saw horse, measure out the length with his buck saw, and cut.  He even split the larger pieces, and piled the wood up neatly, crawling around on hands and knees to make sure he did not miss anything.  He even cleaned up his sawdust.

Most of all, Albin and I played games.  Our favorite by far was checkers.  His board had recessed squares, and a set of round and a set of square pieces.  For a king we would turn the piece over and it had a hole in the middle.  He could feel across the board without disturbing their places and could tell which checkers were kings.  He was good at games.  Whenever we started he would announce, “All right, Jimmy, here’s where all friendship ceases.”  We played for keeps, to win, with no quarter given and none asked.  When the game was over, we were friends again.

I tried sometimes to cheat by taking off one of his checkers or putting one of mine back on the board.  But it didn’t work.  He saw as much with his hands as I did with my eyes.  His hearing was also a lot better than mine.  He never got angry with me.  He would just laugh and say, “You can’t fool me.”

Albin loved to carve simple wooden propellers and put them on poles around the yard.  He loved the sound of them rattling in the wind.  I watched him and learned some things about carving.  You can tell what kind of wood you have by its smell as surely as by looking at it.  You can feel when the wood is smooth and hear when you have sanded out the last irregularities.  Paying attention to all your senses as you carve will sharpen your focus and even improve your designs and final product. I used those lessons later in life for my own woodcarving.

Albin walked four blocks to church for daily Mass alone if none of us were around at the time he was ready to go.  He knew every uneven place on the path to church, and could greet practically everybody by first name as they called out to him along the way.

Albin played organ, mouth organ, guitar, and drums.  We sang the cowboy songs of Wilf Carter and Roy Rogers until we couldn’t sing anymore.  Albin attended dances and played in whatever band was playing.  He had been taught Braille at a school for the blind, and could tune pianos.  He would get materials of all kinds to make things, like leather belts and bags.  But he quickly ran out of clients in the village, and would have to set these hobbies aside.  I often thought that he was treated as if he were a little kid, not worth much, or not normal.

About once or twice a month movies would arrive in the village.  The shows were run in the community hall, where we also had dances and parties.  The owner would let Albin come free, and whoever brought him would also get a free pass.  I saw a lot of movies that way.  Albin enjoyed the movies, usually westerns, every bit as much as we did.  He had a terrific imagination.

He often read from the big Braille books he got from some kind of service for the blind.  Mostly he got detective stories.  We also played cards with Albin.  He had his own deck, marked in the upper left corners in Braille.  He would stack his cards between his fingers, and hold them close.  I tried to figure out what system he used in stacking his cards, so that I would know if he still had trumps or more of a suit.  But he would fool me every time, and would slap down a card that I just “knew” he couldn’t have.

While I was learning all this stuff from Albin, my two older brothers were learning the tricks of baseball from Albin’s brother, Eddie.  He was a good pitcher, and taught Daniel and Alois how to throw curves and also a good deal of the strategy of the game.  Alois became a regular player on the Lake Lenore ball team.  When he started playing he got a new name.  The name Alois is actually Aloysius.  He became Allawishes, then Allafishes, which evolved into Allfish, and finally Fish and Fishy.  For years he bore the name Fishy Gerwing.  Eventually Alois would be inducted into the Saskatchewan Baseball Hall of Fame.

When I left Lake Lenore to attend St. Peter’s College, I lost contact with Albin.  I worked at the college during the summers, and teenage pursuits gradually crowded out time I would have spent with him.  Yet, I cherish him as one of my great teachers.

The war took a lot of young men out of the village and farms of Lake Lenore.  Although pretty well all of us were of German heritage, there was no question in anyone’s mind about which side we supported in the war effort.  Amazingly, our little village and surrounding farms sent 115 men and women to the army, air force, and navy of Canada.  Two of Daddy’s brothers and seven other Gerwing men and women went into the armed forces.  Two of Mamma’s brothers and one sister also went into military service.  Daddy knew his health precluded being accepted for enlistment.  Still, he made the attempt.  He always wore the button they gave him to show that he had tried to do his bit for the war effort.  I have kept that little button.

Many of the cereal boxes were decorated with cardboard cutouts of military equipment.  We put them together to make spitfires and Lockheed bombers and tanks and pieces of mass destruction.  Then we copied them in wood and played war games.  We made German planes too, but very carelessly, and they always lost every battle.

All during the war I watched the sky, looking at every airplane that passed over Lake Lenore.  I knew the silhouette of virtually all the allied aircraft.  Somewhere in the back of my mind was a fear that some day a German plane would be over the village and we would be bombed.

I was only dimly aware that Leo Gerwing took his military training, had his first leave in Lake Lenore, and, along with his friend Bernard Schreiner, went AWOL for the rest of the war, thus continuing a centuries-old Gerwing tradition of non-violent conscientious objection.  Nothing was said about such things among us children.  As an adult, I felt a great admiration for this man for having the courage of his conviction that the law of God not to kill took precedence over the country’s call to arms.

One of our uncles, Alfred Britz, joined the RCAF, and changed his name to Britts so it wouldn’t sound so German.  His plane was shot down in June 1944 over Holland, where he is buried. On May 8, 1945, the war in Europe was over.  I remember that day vividly.  I was tending the tennis court, a packed clay court, whacking down dandelions around the perimeter and carefully slicing them off on the playing surface.  When I heard the news, I dropped my hoe and left it lie right there, and I never bothered to go back.  That was my victory celebration.  A bunch of us went up to the church and began to ring all the bells.  When we finally tired of that we climbed on top of the fire hall and had that bell ringing for hours.

I do not remember much jubilation over VJ day, when the war with Japan was ended.  I recall something of the horror of the devastation created by the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After the war was over, the men and women who went into the forces began to drift back  to Lake Lenore.  Most of them didn’t stay long.  On balance, I would say that none of them were much improved by their experience overseas and a good many of them had difficulty readjusting to civilian life.

 

 

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

 

Religion was the foundation of the cycle of our lives in our village.  What sticks in my mind is the dogged joylessness of most of the observances.  Sunday Masses, daily Masses, Benediction, Novenas, Rogation Days, rosaries, litanies, indulgences, no meat on Fridays, fasting during Lent.  If there was something going on at church, Mamma made us go.  Talking or even smiling in church was sacrilege.  Telling jokes about religion or priests or nuns was unthinkable.  Using profanity, even in jest, was seriously sinful.

I lived in abject terror of burning in hell for all eternity;  in terror also of ever offending anyone in authority, especially priests.  I was unable to make a distinction between things that were inherently evil, and disobeying ritual laws.

The only religious observances to look forward to were weddings, Christmas and Easter, the latter two for Santa Claus and Easter eggs and not for any divine messages.  Weddings were great if you were chosen as a mass server, because after the service we always got a tip of a few dollars.  Very few people missed Mass on Sundays because it was socially unacceptable.

Of course, there was Halloween.  In the Catholic calendar November 1 is All Saints Day.  The day before great feasts used to be observed as a day of fasting and abstinence from meat.  Only adults had to fast, but children were expected to do penance.  For our family, the rule was no candy until after Mass on All Saints.  That put only a small damper on Trick or Treating.   There were households where you got a potato or a piece of coal instead of candy but generally we hauled in a fair amount of candy, something we saw very little of for most of the rest of the year.  Older kids and adults did all sorts of pranks, the most usual being to upset backyard outhouses.  I wondered if the kids who ate their candy as soon as they got it would go to hell or purgatory for not observing the rules of penance.

We had a fine man in the village, Jack Gorzalitz, who refused to attend Mass.  He was the best mechanic for miles around.  He had a huge family, one of the poorest of the poor.  He did not collect all the money owed him for work done.  He openly supported the CCF party, and that was akin to heresy in Lake Lenore.

When Father Francis came to be pastor, Jack’s wife and others convinced him that this was a change from the curmudgeonly manner of old Father Rudolph, who was constantly harassing people to give more money.  The parish was in deep debt.  Father Francis was different, he was told.  But the one Sunday when he consented to go was the one Sunday Father Francis brought up the need to deal with the debts of the parish.  Jack never darkened the door of the church again.

Years later when he died, the parish priest refused him a Catholic burial.  I was already in the monastery at the time, and was horrified.  This was a man of honor and integrity and generosity.  What more could you ask of a Christian?  I wrote his widow that she should not worry about his eternal salvation, since God judged in quite a different manner than the narrow-minded clerics who make such stupid decisions.  I recalled to her that when Daddy died people took up a collection for our family.  Jack Gorzalitz, poor as he was, gave five times as much as the wealthy farmers and businessmen who threw in a few coins.  What really ticked me off at the time was that shortly after Jack died a full church burial with the Abbot officiating was celebrated in another parish for a wealthy Catholic businessman who never attended Sunday Masses.

One of our parish’s big devotions was the Forty Hours exposition of the Blessed Sacrament.  It would start on a Sunday after the last Mass and go on for the next forty hours.  Someone had to be in the church at all times.  To ensure this would happen, the altar boys were assigned one-hour shifts in pairs to cover the whole period.

Shortly after becoming an altar boy, we had one such devotion.  I felt honored to be chosen for the first hour after Mass.  The Blessed Sacrament was enthroned high up on the side altar in the big golden monstrance.  The altar was decorated with all the candles and flowers available.

Dressed in cassocks and surplices my cousin and I settled ourselves in the kneelers in front of the altar. We knew this would be a long hour. We were hungry from having fasted from the night before.

We soon tired of saying rosaries and paging through the devotional books Father Francis had left for us.  Father Francis had told us we could sit for short periods, but that it was better to kneel.  Suffering would join us to the suffering of Jesus on the cross.

When the clock in the sacristy struck half past eleven, my partner took off since the shifts were for half an hour.  I was now alone, the sole protector of the Blessed Sacrament.  I felt the sobering thrill of so great a responsibility.

Time dragged.  The clock in the sacristy chimed the quarter hours. At exactly noon old Mr. Langkammer climbed the stairs to the loft to ring out the Angelus.  But he left as suddenly as he had come without looking into the church.

Despite my hunger and thirst, I could not bring myself to leave the church unattended.  I really thought I would be committing an unforgivable sin.  I am not certain how long it took before another shift of boys arrived.  I went home, thinking I would be greeted with some concern about having been so late.    In reality, no one noticed or commented, not even a word about it from Mamma, as if what I had done counted for nothing.

Still another memory concerning the Eucharist comes to mind. The tremendous fear we had of ever touching the Host with anything but our tongues caused me hours of agony one Sunday.

When we received the Host in Holy Communion, it was always after a long period of fasting even from water.  If we took even a sip of water after midnight, that would prevent us from taking communion that day.  It was not unusual that our mouths would be dry.

That day, the Host refused to dissolve. Instead, it lodged on the roof of my mouth.  I spent the last part of Mass searching with my tongue.  The rough area was the Host, I was certain.  There it was.  I had Jesus God stuck on the roof of my mouth and I could not get him down.

My tongue became tired, and then the roof of my mouth began to get sore.  The more I tried to dislodge it from its perch, the sorer my whole mouth and cheeks and tongue got.  I could not go home and eat until it was gone and safely into my stomach.  I could not allow myself to put other food into my mouth while the Sacrament was there.  That would be sacrilege.  Even a drink of water was out of the question.

I thought it would be a mortal sin to reach in there with a finger and help it down my throat.

I thought of going to Father Francis with my dilemma.  He could look and take the Body of Jesus off and then I would be at peace.  But I was afraid of what he might say something like,  “How come Jesus will not go into you anyway?”

I went home finally, still scratching with my now raw tongue and rawer mouth.  All the muscles of my face felt cramped.  What was the meaning of this refusal of the Host to enter me?  Was I in some deep sin that I was unaware of?

I examined my conscience, which I kept so scrupulously clean that even a speck of sin could find no hiding place.  Or if it did enter, I was always quick to the confessional to get it off.

I feared that if I did reach in to dislodge it I would die and go to hell, for God would surely strike me dead on the spot if I dared do anything so terrible as touch the Host.

I had visions of being found all shriveled up and blackened by a stroke of lightning, with a piece of the Host stuck under the fingernail of the one finger not burned.  The Lord would leave that as a reminder to others of how sacred the Sacrament was, and that to do sacrilege would meet with immediate and frightful consequences.

Somehow I managed to convince myself that I had to be mistaken.  No Host could survive that long in my mouth.  It must be rough skin up there.  I ate in fear, pushing some bread against the roof of my mouth and held my breath for the thunderbolt to fall.  It didn’t.  I was still alive, so I must have been mistaken after all.  I still have a rough spot on the roof of my mouth and I know that it is not a piece of the Host.

 

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

 

I learned early that only by going to confession to the priest in the confessional could I have my sins forgiven.

Sins could be venial or mortal.  Venial sins were little sins, not serious enough to land a person in hell for all eternity.  Mortal sins not confessed, even one of them, would send a person straight to the realm of the devil to burn forever.   Venial sins pile up and create an attitude of sinfulness.  Therefore they also needed to be confessed.

One Sister taught me to think of eternity in the following way.  Imagine a small bird coming every thousand years to peck away at the top of a mountain of solid rock.  If it took just one peck every thousand years, how long would it take to wear down the whole mountain?  A long, long time, I agreed.  Then, she said, with eyes wide and finger wagging, when that happens you will have arrived at the first day of eternity and not even time for breakfast yet.  Well, I did not relish burning that long.  I made no real objections when every two weeks we were all herded into the church to form long lines of sweaty kids waiting to have our record of sins erased by the priest, and then we could be free to start over clean.

It was a relief to know that if I died right then and there I would go to heaven for certain.  Not directly, of course, because I would still not be perfect.  I would have to serve some time in purgatory, but that was OK because purgatory would not be forever.  I could look forward to heavenly bliss after a more or less short burn.  Just like the eraser still leaves marks on the paper so my soul needed to be burned clean of the smudges left behind after the priest’s erasing.

I was sure I was not the only kid in school who carried a vision of God keeping an accurate list of all our sins, and then listening carefully to see which ones we confessed.  Or maybe he had some angel taking care of such records.  Then the angel would take up our record and erase the ones we confessed.  No confession, no erasing.  That simple.

That’s why it was so important to confess the sins correctly as to exactly what I did and how many times.  No guessing allowed when it came to mortal sins.  The priest would say nothing when I gave guesses like two or three times when it came to little sins.  But not if it came to the big ones.  The number had to be exact.

All sins involving sex were automatically big, automatically mortal sins.  Any sexual thought, word or action or even desire deliberately harbored for any length of time, were always to be taken as mortal sins, punishable in hell forever if not fully confessed and forgiven.

I often imagined myself dying with sins not confessed.  I would be standing before the judgment seat of God, in front of the whole world, including all my family.  They would haul out my record and point out in detail which ones I left out.  Horrified by this prospect, frightened out of my wits at times, I overhauled and searched out the nooks and crannies of my soul to be certain that not the slightest stain would be left behind by oversight or by deliberate exclusion.  I continued doing that long into adulthood.
It was not hard to fool the priest, but you could never fool God or the angels.  I often pictured God as a huge eye that never closes, that sees all.  I had visions of my guardian angel shrugging his wings.  “I told him, but he wouldn’t listen.”  And he would watch in great sadness as I joined the chain gang bound for hell, all because I was too proud, or too ashamed or too careless to tell my sins.  Now the whole world would know.  For that one moment of weakness, or an attempt to make the sin seem less serious, for that one moment of deliberate falsehood, I would for all eternity be excluded from the happiness of God’s house and have to live in torment with the devils who would taunt and prod as I twisted in the hot coals of the fiery furnace forever stoked with the best coal there was. And it was so simple to take care of it.  The priest in the confessional could be seen as the person in charge of God’s eraser.

How long that image has stayed with me!  It comes back to taunt me at times.  My head tells me to ignore it, but sometimes my head is not in charge of what goes on in my heart and spirit.

Even with the thorough study of moral theology later on in the years at St. John’s, the image persisted.  Even while I sat for hours in the confessional as a priest, hearing children and adults spew out their long lists, complete with numbers, specific names of sins, and all circumstances that would alter the morality of an action, word or thought, or omission, even while I tried to help people understand that God and the angels have better things to do than keep minute by minute records of all we do, even then, the image carried over.

Huck Finn said that conscience can be a yellow dog with no sense at all.  He was right, but knowing that does not make conscience slink away with tail between its legs.  It keeps insinuating itself into every thought, every word, every action, every omission of all kinds but mostly in every sensual or sexual feeling.  God simply does not want us to have fun, not that kind of fun anyway.  It’s all evil.

Well, not exactly.  I did hear that when you get married you can do it.  In fact, you and your spouse could do just about anything you feel like doing.  But by that time, you’ve gotten so used to fearing and feeling guilty that you can’t switch gears so easily anymore.  Your head might tell you it’s all OK now, but your stupid yellow dog of a conscience can’t let go of the years of training.  I wonder and marvel that so many people seem to be so well adjusted.  Is that only on the outside?  Were they not taught or did they not believe the stuff I was taught and believed?

Much later when I was studying for the priesthood, and was taught how to give marriage instructions, one of the instructors, a priest, went into the most graphic details of sexual encounter of every conceivable kind, and I dutifully took notes.  What a laugh!  As if celibates were the ones to teach this stuff about “sexual fulfillment” to potential couples.  Later, in my own marriage, I began to see the essential stupidity of the whole matter and thought how naïve I was at that time, and how essentially ignorant.

Part of the difficulty in dealing with sexuality was not being able to name the private parts of our bodies.  I knew what peckers and pricks and tits were, but those were dirty words.  And so we developed other ways to name our penises.  One of those was to use the most hateful name we could find, Hitler.  One of my cousins used to greet me with, “How’s your little Hitler today?”  And I would be duly horrified.

Another cuss word that was used a lot by adults was “cocksucker.”  I had absolutely no idea what it meant or even that it was a dirty word.  So I started using it in such expressions as, “Boy, can that little cocksucker throw the ball hard!”  One day Daniel took me aside.  After some hemming and hawing he came out with it.  I should not be using that word.  I wanted to know why not.  He asked me whether I knew what a cock was, and I had to admit that I did not.  “Well,” he said, “It’s that little thing that hangs in front of you.”  Now I had to work out how many times I had used it so that I could confess it next time I hit the confessional.

Only much, much later did I come to realize what a cocksucker really was up to.

CHAPTER NINE

 

Living close to nature as we did in our farming community, death was part of the cycle of life.  We butchered our chickens and pigs and cattle for their meat.  The seasons brought on the pain of a dying of the world in bitterly cold winters that brought almost everything to a halt.   Death visited our community without attention to age.

One of the few non-German families in Lake Lenore was that of Rex Ryan.  The oldest child was Frankie, then there was Anita, and finally Paddy.

One summer Paddy and I herded cattle almost every day for Uncle Pete Wolsfeld.  He was my Grandma Gerwing’s brother, who lived on the south edge of Lake Lenore and had a small pasture and eight or nine cows that he milked.  The pasture was much too small for that many animals, so he hired us to herd them along the roadways.  All we had to do was keep them off the roads and out of the grain fields of the farmers.

We used two of his old horses.  Mine was Nellie.  She was gray and very easy-going.  Paddy rode Roy, a white horse with pink eyes.  We rode bare-back but that did not stop us from racing wildly on every stretch of road that offered itself out of sight of the farm or village.  I can’t count the number of times I fell off, almost always to the left.  My left hip was sore all summer.  Nellie would stop and wait for me to get to her.  Then she would put her head down.  I would sit on her head and she would throw me up on her back.  Much easier than trying to pull myself up with a sore hip.

We usually started around nine in the morning, brought the herd back in at noon, and took them out again for a few hours after lunch. We knew when it was noon by listening for the Angelus bells of the church, which the caretaker rang precisely at twelve.  If, as sometimes happened, we were napping spread out on the backs of the horses, they would stamp until we woke up.

One of the cows was a skinny red one we named Red Devil.  She hated white horses and would charge at Roy whenever he came too close.  Paddy watched and always managed to get his horse out of the way.  That same cow was one of the easiest to milk of all of them.  She knew just how to stand to make milking her a snap. We made up stories to explain why she would be mad at white horses.

I can’t remember getting paid for this work.  The reward was in the job, and Uncle Pete was not a generous man, nor a rich one by any standards.

I felt very close to Paddy after that summer.  We talked a lot about life and the future.  The war was still going on, my father was already dead, and a few of the Lake Lenore soldiers had lost their lives.

Frankie Ryan was out of school by the time I remember him.  He and his Dad worked on a crew of men who repaired grain elevators for the Pioneer Grain Company.  It was hard and dangerous work, as this story will tell.

Almost every summer evening a bunch of kids would gather around the ball diamond near the fire hall and play a game of pick-up.  Frankie was pitching one evening and making batters look foolish.  He relished the feeling of control.  Since he was not often in town, the rest of us felt some awe in his presence.  He was special because he had a responsible job and he was rarely around and he was a terrific pitcher.

He and his dad had been repairing one of the local Pioneer elevators.  They had some more work to do next day.  We heard about the accident at school.  Apparently Rex was working on the highest roof and needed a rope as a safety measure.  He called to Frankie to toss one up.  Frankie was leaning out of a window just below his father, and attempted to throw the rope up.  It kept missing, and he kept leaning out farther and farther.

The combination of the effort of throwing and the weight of the rope pulled Frankie out of the window and down he fell onto the roof below.  It was too steep for him to hold on and he began to slip down feet-first, faster and faster.  When he hit the eaves, his feet caught and he turned somersault and landed face-first onto the railroad tracks below.

He never recovered consciousness.  Even though we never really knew him well, all of us felt the loss deeply, especially when we considered that his father had to watch the whole thing unfold and could do nothing to help, and maybe even felt responsible because he could just as easily have climbed down for the rope instead of calling for it to be thrown up to him.

Another young man who lost his life in the village was “Butch” Ludwig.  The Ludwig family owned and operated the Red and White Meat Market.  Butch had a habit of giving the nuns in school a hard time.  He was not very interested in school work and loved to fool around.  He loved to gross the girls out with startling exhibitions of one kind or another, like nonchalantly sticking a finger out through the fly of his pants, and laughing uproariously at their horrified stares.

Anyway, Butch and a friend of his went out to a dance one night.  Maybe they had something to drink along the way.  On the way home, the driver failed to negotiate a sharp turn in the road, and Butch went flying out of the door of the truck when it opened suddenly.  He flew a good distance into the ditch and smashed up his head and his insides something awful.

He lay in the hospital for some days, drifting in and out of consciousness.  During one of those lucid times his mother was sitting beside him sobbing.  They all knew that his chances for survival were minimal.

He turned to her, and said, “Don’t worry about me, Mom.  It’s OK.  I am ready to die if that is what God wants.”  He had received all the “last sacraments” of the church. I have often looked back at this incident and marveled at how sometimes it seems that the ones who appeared to be “bad” kids turn out to have a deeper spiritual strength than the goody-goodies.

Everyone who has ever lived among farm animals knows that bulls are not to be trusted.  When I was young stories circulated among our family about bulls either having killed a relative or neighbor, or maimed them.   We respected stallions and boars in much the same way.

My grandfather Gerwing had a close call. A young bull knocked him down in the middle of the pasture.  Instead of finishing him off, the bull kept rolling him.  Grandpa kept his wits about him, and rolled himself under the fence.  Luckily he had no broken bones.  Despite severe bruises, he went straight to the house.  Without a word, he took out the shotgun, and did away with that bull in quick order.

In the spring the creek running through Lake Lenore always had a good stream of water running through it.  As it meandered westward it made its way through the pasture of one of our cousins.  Like most pastures, this one provided residential accommodation for a great many gophers.  They caused enough concern that the town council put a bounty on their tails, a penny a tail.

Spring also meant that most gopher holes had a family of young ones, not too smart yet in the ways of humans.  A bunch of our cousins made a great hunt at least once or twice in the spring to catch as many gophers as possible.  Trapping was one method, but it was a slow business.  Drowning them out was quicker.  With access to water, we could carry many pails of water to a hole into which we had seen a gopher disappear.

The idea was to flush the gophers out.  We took Nicky, a full-blooded bulldog along.  He would perch over the hole.  As the water gushed into the hole, the gopher would have to come out, and soon as one poked his head out Nicky would snap it up, shake it to death, and we had a tail.  When the hole contained young, we often got two or three at a time and then the chase was on.

The pasture also was home to a small herd of cattle, including a not-very-friendly bull.  The trip before I was allowed to go out, the bull cornered the guys, and they always contended that without their guardian angels they would not have gotten away.  No one told parents, otherwise we would not have been allowed to go again.

“Last time the bull chased us.  Let’s chase him this time.”  It was more of a dare than a threat at first.  Then we thought, why not?  We leashed Nicky and set out to find the herd.  We thought that maybe if we rushed the bull before he could work up a “mad-on,” we would scare him and the cows away from the area in which we were hunting.   It worked like a charm.  We caught that bull completely off-guard.  With Nicky on his heals he fled to the safety of the barn.  He wasn’t exactly a big bull but it was a triumph for us. We hunted gophers undisturbed for hours, feeling heroic, no doubt about that.

It might have been a few years later that a farmer brought a mad bull to the stockyards in Lake Lenore one Saturday morning to ship him on the next train.  Word got out and soon a bunch of men and boys crowded around the small corral to witness it.  With mixed horror and fascination I watched a young man jump into the ring with the bull, run with it around and around until he finally grasped the ring in the bull’s nose.  The bull reared up, dragging the young man backwards until more men were able to put enough ropes around the angry beast to subdue him.

Years later, I had another encounter with a bull in a pasture.  It was much more scary.  I attended St. Peter’s as a boarding student beginning in the fall of 1946 in grade nine. Then I spent the summers there as well, working on the grounds and in the fields.  Most of the time the college hired one other teenager as well.  We hoed weeds, picked fruit, mostly strawberries and raspberries, and mowed lawns.  My pay provided enough spending money for me to get through the next school year and to offset my scholarships.

The rows of corn and potatoes went on forever, a quarter of a mile or more, and what seemed like about a million rows.  By the time we finished with a field, the weeds were already high enough to warrant starting over.

Coming from a farming community, I was endlessly fascinated by the farm.  The big horse barn at the entrance of the farmyard invited a visit every time I went down.  I liked the smell of the hay, and even the rather sweet smell of horse manure was not offensive.  Not like the pig barns, even though they were kept as clean as any barn could be kept.

The last big barn was the dairy barn.  Usually Brother Bruno, who was in charge of the dairy herd, milked around two dozen Holsteins.  The first stall in the barn was for the bull.  His stall was made of heavy iron pipes, and his small corral outside was made of rough two-by-ten planking, with posts every six feet.  No bull could move that fence.

Holstein bulls are never safe to be around , especially when they get old enough to start breeding.  Brother Bruno was letting this bull go out with the cows into the pasture because he was still young and seemed safe enough to be around.

One morning my friend David and I were at the barns just after the milking was over.  As Brother Bruno let the cows out to pasture, the bull turned on him as he went out the gate.  He did not charge, but stood there snorting and pawing the ground.  Brother Bruno snapped his whip at him a few times.  For a while the bull held his ground, then slowly backed away.

That evening, when it was time to get the cows for milking, we were again at the barns.  Brother Bruno asked if we wanted to go out and get the cows in.  “There should be 24 cows and the bull,” he told us as we left.  I had misgivings, but did not say anything.

The pasture was a good half-mile long and about a quarter mile wide.  Most of the pasture was grass. A few groves of poplar trees provided a bit of shade along the north side, and in some low spots, a mixed growth of willows, berries, wild roses, and other low bushes grew.

When we got to the cows, they were all were lying down, chewing cud.  Cows welcome milking time, but they take their time getting up.  Some of these cows had huge udders, dripping milk as they swung along the well-worn path to the barn.  We counted only 23 cows.  David quickly volunteered to look around in the bushes for the other cow.  Meanwhile, the last one up was the bull.  He waited there until I practically had to kick him before he decided to rise.  And he was not in a good mood about it.

He took stock of me in the most belligerent manner.  I had no whip, not even a stick.  It was a good three or four hundred yards to the fence.  I would never make it if he chose to charge at me.  Even though the trees were a bit closer, there wasn’t a tree big enough to climb anyway.

Animals can smell fear, and I was afraid.  But I dared not show it.  I faced that bull straight on.  “Come on, Charlie, get going.”  We stared at each other for a few minutes.  The cows were already moving on, maybe twenty yards away.  The bull took a quick look at them, gave me a final stare, and turned to follow them.  But he walked all the way turned almost sideways to keep me in sight, roaring angrily all the way in.  I took my place right behind him, walking close enough that I could almost have touched him sometimes.  It seemed like the only safe place to be.

Meanwhile, David didn’t find the missing cow.  He kept far enough back that he could easily make it to the fence should the bull decide to turn on me. What a relief to arrive safely at the barn with the thought that I had just escaped certain death.

These experiences added to stories of bulls killing farmers caused me to have nightmares about bulls chasing me.  My dreams have always been rich in detail.  I would wake up in a sweat to search frantically through the dream sequences to find ways out.  I could never find them.

 

 

CHAPTER TEN

 

While Daddy was alive he would always hide candy and nuts for us to find on St. Nick’s day, December 6.  No matter how penniless we were, he always found ways of providing some sweets for that day.  We kept that tradition in the years after he died, and then I resurrected it in my own home later.  We would put up the Christmas tree on December 24 after a thorough cleaning of the whole house, and Daddy would carefully place about a dozen or so candles on the tree.  These were lit once or twice amid the excitement of sharing the few gifts we found under the tree from Santa Claus.  We continued these traditions after he was gone.

Mamma used to allow us one dollar for Santa Claus.  I remember one year my gift was a maroon and black striped writing instrument with a Schaeffer’s fountain pen at one end and an “Eversharp” pencil at the other.  I took great care of it for years, until the nib wore down and it was no longer useful.

Midnight Mass was always an essential part of Christmas.  St. Anthony’s church rang with the traditional Stille Nacht, Transeamus, and other carols we loved so much.  One of the last of these celebrations I experienced at home was a night of a particularly nasty blizzard.  The roads were blocked for vehicular traffic, but the church was full.  Farmers arrived in their cabooses, pulled by teams of horses that hadn’t been in harness for long months.

After mass, one of these farmers, I think it was a Prodahl family, offered my sister Marian and me a ride home.  We gladly agreed.  The horses were rambunctious. The driver found it difficult to control them.  It was a wild ride, galloping through swirling snow and bitterly cold wind, harness bells ringing, and everything so wonderful.  Happy greetings rose from every side, and the thrill of running into the warm house filled our hearts with such a warm glow that I could have cried.  But of course I didn’t.

Lake Lenore produced some pretty good baseball and hockey players.  Our curling rink boasted several teams that went on to provincial championships.
When we were kids we learned to play ball in the most informal ways.  All summer, as soon as there was a patch of dry grass along a street (Yes, some of the streets were grass with wheel tracks down the middle.) or on an empty lot, kids would gather for impromptu games.

We would put down blocks of wood, never in precisely the same place twice, not always in the most symmetrical shape, two of the bigger kids would choose sides and the game was on.  The fielders checked for fresh cow pies before venturing out to their stations.  The village had two or three cows that could be staked out almost any place where grass grew.  A ball covered with cow dung is hard to throw, among other considerations.

Equipment varied.  Not everyone had a mitt.  Balls might be soft, misshapen, and often repaired, depending on who brought one out.  Bats were as often as not some sawed-off castoff from the big teams.

After the sides were agreed on, the winner of the bat toss usually chose first bats, because you never knew when the ball game would end.  A yell from a family door could summon half a team and the game would be over just like that.

Winning was important.  We kept score.  We never had umpires.  Close calls were argued back and forth until the stronger team or a persistent mindset made its point.  Only the balls struck at were strikes, and some kids would wait and wait for a pitch to swing at until the pressure mounted and they would swing at anything that came along.

No one kept records, but everybody knew who the good players were.  All games were played to win, even though the following day no one could remember who won or whose team they were on.  As time went on some of the players from the big team would come out to watch.  Nowadays you would call it scouting.

Out in the field no one expected the ball to bounce anything but funny.  A bad bounce was part of the game.  Batting lineups went from the best to the worst.  The poorest fielders found themselves way out in the field and the good players switched around depending on who was up to bat.  Generally everybody got to play every position sooner or later.

Most games produced tears for one reason or another.  Maybe a lost argument.  Maybe a sprained ankle or a jammed finger.  Maybe a bloody nose for the catcher on a foul tip.

Pitchers varied the distance depending on who was batting.  Sometimes a kind player would allow a little one to reach first base instead of throwing him out.

Daniel and Alois were among the better players, and I was down near the bottom of the heap.  Stationed out in right field I could get more engrossed in blowing dandelion seeds than watching for the ball to come my way.

In the winter we played street hockey with any kind of sticks we could put together and usually used frozen horse turds as pucks.  The packed snow of the streets got hard and slippery.  One winter we had regular teams representing those on the north side of Main Street and those on the south.  Our team on the north side even had “uniforms” made up of a small pin on the front of the caps of the players.

Hockey Night in Canada, with Foster Hewitt, came on the radio every Saturday night.  We wouldn’t miss that for anything, and we modeled our play on what we heard on the radio.  Most of the villagers were Toronto Maple Leaf fans, since their games were broadcast every Saturday.  Daniel and Alois modeled themselves on Syl Apps and Gordie Drillon, while my hero was Wally Stanowski.  When we became adult players, they were forwards and I played defense, just like our idols.

The community hockey rink depended on someone volunteering to manage the place.  Making ice in those days was not an easy task.  The village had dug a large dugout to supply water for both the curling rink and the skating rink, but pumps would freeze up and hoses would break.

One winter, when I was about twelve or thirteen, no adult came forward to take care of the skating rink.  We kids wanted to skate and play hockey.  We badgered one of the men to be our coach, and he agreed on condition that we kids would take care of the flooding of the rink, its cleaning and the management of the operations.

And so one evening, a bitterly cold night, we started the flooding.  The first task was to stamp down the snow that had already accumulated.  We must have had twenty boys and girls out at the beginning.  We had a roaring fire going in the shack that served as a dressing room.  Before too long the hose froze and we resorted to pulling water up from an open well with a pail on a rope.  Kids ran home for pails and the bucket brigade went on for hours.  Ice built up around the well, and only the bravest dared stand over the hole to bring up the water.  But we did get the first layer of ice done.

I was proud to make the team that year.  I wasn’t that good.  It was more a question of numbers of players available.  And I was a good skater.  I recall only one game.  We went to Humboldt, some 16 miles away, to play their team.  Transportation was horse and cabooses.  It took hours to get there.  Humboldt had a covered arena by this time, the first time most of us had skated in such a place. We lost 18-2, but we were happy.  I  had a breakaway, but missed the goal.  Right after the game we got back on the road for home, a very long day for the horses.  And for us kids.

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

My first regular job was to carry wood in daily for the cook at our Uncle Albert’s hotel.  Sam Lee offered me 75 cents a week to keep his wood box filled with wood and lots of kindling to start the fire each morning.

There is a story about how Sam came to stay in Lake Lenore.  I have no idea whether or not it is true, but it is a good story.  When St. Peter’s Colony was settled, the villages attracted single Chinese men whose ambition was to establish restaurants and laundries.  The movers and shakers in Lake Lenore apparently wanted no Chinese men living in their village, and had scared off all comers.  But Sam was determined to stay.  He holed up in a small shack and equipped himself with a shotgun.  When the gang, among whom were Gerwings, had strengthened their wills with sufficient liquid courage they stormed the shack.  Sam fired off both barrels in their general direction, probably scaring himself more than the ruffians.  He stayed.

I grew to like Sam very much.  He was a very gentle soul.  Once, while cutting grass around the hotel, I cut my hand.  Gushing blood, I ran into the kitchen.  I thought Sam was going to have a heart attack.  Screaming words I could not understand, he rushed out to get the druggist next door.  He patched me up and I went back to work. I don’t know how long it took for Sam to settle down, but he came running out every few minutes to check up on me.  Every January Sam gave Mamma a gift worth a month of my salary.  At the time I did not understand this Chinese custom.  Years later, Sam opened his own restaurant, the Ohio Café, in Humboldt.  I visited him at every opportunity.

A cousin of mine, Roman, and I worked for his mother one summer.  She candled and sold eggs and raised chickens to sell.  Romy and I got paid for building egg crates for her.  And we took care of  hundreds of rooster chicks.  We had a lot of fun together.

As the little roosters grew up it became apparent that the sexing process made mistakes now and then.  A pullet or two would appear among the flock.  When the roosters reached sexual maturity it was important to get the pullets out of the enclosure.  Even an hour could mean disaster for the poor little thing.  We witnessed the human equivalent of gang rape.  Once the attack got started, the mad frenzy of it never failed to sober me.

Romy had a .22 rifle which provided enormous entertainment for the two of us.  A box of shells cost very little in those days.  We had target practice with beer bottles, attempting to shoot the bottoms out through the neck.  It never dawned on us to question leaving broken glass strewn around the neighboring fields.  We also hunted that prairie scourge, gophers.  Sometimes when time dragged we tried to shoot marbles out from between the legs of some unsuspecting rooster.  His mother was not amused when we missed.

The summer I was 14, Romy and I joined two sixteen year old girls one evening and played some tricks on neighbors, one of whom did not take it as a joke.  We had written on their door the message, “This liquor store for best friends only.”  On the message we created a big skull and crossbones.  The next day we were summoned into their presence.  They had been half way to Humboldt to inform the RCMP when they thought it just might have been the two of us up to some smart-alecky pranks.  It did not take very long to get a confession out of us.  “I think two little boys just got too smart  in the company of older girls,”  the woman remarked.  Either some things just aren’t funny or some people can’t take a joke.  Whatever the case, we cooled our heels in a long walk into the country.

The first big job to come my way happened that fall.  A local farmer, Martin Forster, came to the house to get either Daniel or Alois to drive tractor for him for harvesting.  Both were already out working on other farms.  “Do you have any other boys?” he asked Mamma.

“Well, there’s Jimmy, but he has never done anything like that.”  He shuffled around for a while.  He must have been desperate because he decided to give me a try.

The tractor was a big old green two-cylindered John Deere with a hand clutch on the left side and a huge fly wheel on the right to start it.  While I drove the tractor, Mr. Forster sat on the high seat of the binder, working the various levers.  It took a while before I learned how to push the clutch in slowly.  He had to hang on for dear life every time the machinery lurched forward.  He showed me how to make the corners.  There was no such thing as power steering in those days.  It took all of my strength to muscle that tractor through the turns.  After a few rounds, I got the hang of it without  having to throttle down.  I was ecstatic when he told me I was doing a good job.

I  worked for him until his fields were cut and stooked.  I did lapse into daydreaming sometimes, not hearing him yell to stop either because I had wandered off into the standing grain or because of equipment breakdown, but he was usually more amused than angry at me.  However, he did not appreciate it when I tried to use the tractor and binder to make creative patterns in the field.  “What the heck are you doing?” he would ask. I never go past his farm even now without a warm thought for a man who took a chance on me.

 

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

 

I am not certain when it was that the world around me became convinced that I would become a priest.  That also meant being a monk, for all the priests in our colony were Benedictine monks.  When I completed grade eight, I would go to St. Peter’s College in Muenster.

Our family could not pay the tuition, room and board (about $250 a year), but Father Francis assured us, as he had assured Daniel a year earlier,  that the college would grant me full scholarship for all the years I would study there as long as I was committed to entering the monastery.  If at any time I decided that I did not want to enter, I could continue my studies through grade twelve and pay back what I owed when I had the money.  I was not to worry about that.  Just to study hard was all that was expected.

At the time, St. Peter’s Abbey and College were all housed in the one big red brick building, the monks occupying the second and third floors, while the students used the basement and the first and fourth floors.  The cross atop the  building rose 100 feet above the prairie, with 14 foot ceilings and many, many 8 foot high windows, none of which were properly wind-proof.

The walls were uniformly drab institutional colors and bare, the only decoration being a crucifix in every room and a few scattered holy pictures of dubious artistic merit.

I was fourteen the fall I started boarding school.  For the first time in my life I had running water, began to brush my teeth regularly, and slept in a bed by myself.  The boys’ dormitories were on the fourth floor.  In the winter the monks turned off the heat and power at 9:30 when we went to bed.  It got miserably cold up there during winter blizzards.  We got extra blankets, but sometimes the only way to keep warm was to crawl in with someone else.  Around 4:30 in the morning the steam pipes began to bang as the heat went back on, but by that time the holy water vessels at each doorway would have a half-inch of ice on them.

There were no bath tubs on the student floors, so we were scheduled once a week to take baths on the third floor, which was part of the monastic enclosure.  We were each allowed about twenty minutes and no more than three inches of water.  Bath days were scheduled two days a week including class time since there would not have been enough time during recreation periods.

I was small for my age, one of the smallest boys in the college.  But there were about half a dozen Gerwings among the eighty boys in my first two years, Charlie, Sevy, Emil, Freddie, Daniel, Romy, Alois, and I, and a good number in addition from Lake Lenore, and no one hassled me.  I also had an older student, Wally Sarauer, as a guardian.  He protected me from the bullying that seemed to be part of every recess period.  It was due to his protection that my head did not make the intimate acquaintance of the bottom of the rain barrel beside the printing press.

I would have given anything to be able to defend myself, but that would have to wait a few years.  Countless fist-fights broke out during recess times.  Guys would get back into the classrooms with clothing torn, with bruised faces and hands, and no one said anything.  I suppose it was accepted as part of the life of young boys with too much energy to burn.

The recreation room was always a mess.  Lots of students smoked.  No one cleaned up much behind us.  The tables were made of solid planking, with checker boards painted on them.  It was always difficult to find enough checkers or chessmen to get a game going.

From the time I entered grade nine at St. Peter’s I never lived at home again for more than a few weeks at a time.  I went home for weekends about every six weeks or so, and two weeks at Christmas, and a week at Easter.  I spent the summers at the monastery, working in the orchards and mowing lawns, hoeing miles upon miles of rows of corn and potatoes, weeding around the endless rows of trees, picking strawberries and raspberries.  I worked off tuition costs for the first month, and collected a salary for the last six weeks.  That money had to last me until the next summer, and usually it did.  I did not have to ask Mamma for money.

Unable to do all the farm work, the monks hired a few single laymen, housed in a shabby bunkhouse near the horse barn.  One of those men was Harold Torborg.  Harold knew every animal, every piece of equipment, every inch of farmland.  I grew to love that man, a rough fellow, drunk most weekends, but who was always on the job on Monday morning.  I remember his hands particularly, huge hands, rough and calloused.  But they were also gentle.  If ever I were in a position where my life depended on anyone, this is the man I would have chosen.

One summer, my brother Alois joined me at St. Peter’s.  We picked over 600 gallons of strawberries and over 800 gallons of raspberries.  In the late part of the summer I drove tractor for the binders, and stooked and pitched bundles during harvest.

They were good years, my years as a student at St. Peter’s, all things considered.  Since I was on a scholarship program, I was expected to work off part of my tuition.  I cleaned tables the first year and was a table waiter for the last four.  I swept floors most of those years as well.  I helped Father Martin in the library, and read voraciously.

I read all the Zane Grey books I could get my hands on, as well as those of Jack London.  But I found equal pleasure in the Scarlet Pimpernel books and mystery stories by Conan Doyle and G K Chesterton.  Gulliver’s Travels and Treasure Island were other favorites, but most of all I relished the language of Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe and The Talisman.  Even the long descriptive passages which others skipped gave me great pleasure, painted beautiful images in my mind.

Daily Mass and weekly confession was simply part of the life of students at St. Peter’s, and on Sundays we went to two Masses.

As year followed year I made the honor rolls regularly.  Generally the teaching was good to excellent, with a different teacher for each subject.  In addition to classes six days a week, we had over two hours a day of scheduled supervised study time during which talking was actively discouraged.  After breakfast no matter what the weather, we were herded outside for fresh air.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays three hours of the afternoons were devoted to sports.  Each student was expected to be in at least one organized seasonal sport.  Intramural sports were highly competitive in three levels.  On Sundays we had four and a half hours of scheduled study time.  On Saturdays after classes we picked up our laundry and remade our beds with one clean sheet a week.  About once a month after laundry time we all made our way down the outside fire escape ladder.

St. Peter’s was known for its drama.  Each year we put on at least two plays to which the general public was invited.  I acted in most of the plays, often in a lead role.  I was one of the aunts in “Arsenic and Old Lace,” the lead actor in “Brother Petroc’s Return,” and major roles in some of the Moliere plays the director loved to produce.  I sang first tenor in the Glee Club during my last two years.  Our Glee Club always placed high in the Humboldt Music Festivals.

In grade eleven I suddenly grew almost six inches, and the following year made the hockey team. Being on the squad was one of the greatest achievements for SPC students.  I was partnered on defense with Tony Brophy.  In grade twelve, our class produced the first year book.  I did some of the art work, and designed an SPC logo that was used for many years.

I belonged to a small circle of close friends who were more brothers to me than my own family. Joe Cels, Tony Brophy, Raphael Poelzer and I were a foursome for years.  Where one was, the other three were not far away.  Joe Cels was my very best friend all through the five years of St. Peter’s.  We often talked of going into the monastery together, but when he applied, Abbot Severin would not even consider putting his name to the community.  I did not understand, but neither did I question.  Joe seemed at peace with it.  I guess neither of us questioned authority’s right to tell us what to do with our lives. Joe and I could go for long walks and never say a word.  It was just great to be together.  We had no problems with expressing our love for each other.

One of the annual events at St. Peter’s was a three-day retreat.  They would bring in a retreat preacher, usually a Redemptorist, to give us lectures and to be available for personal consultation.  The Redemptorist Fathers had a reputation for preaching fire and brimstone, with the most lurid descriptions of hell and sin.  Far from welcoming the days as holidays from classes, these retreats added to the great fear of God that had been ingrained in me since my childhood, a God forever poised to fling me into hell if I could not guess right where my sins were.

These men were usually charismatic types, noted for their ability to move the hearts of young boys, and that surely worked on me.  These retreats were occasions for me to review once more, rather dozens more times, the sins of my life, confess them all over again in what was called a general confession, to make certain that I had covered them all.  I feared that somewhere, sometime, somehow I must have forgotten something, and that would make all subsequent confessions and communions sacrileges.  Instead of blessings, they would be counted sinful in the eyes of God.  I took it all very seriously, combed and plowed through my memory of sins and confessions.  I suffered untold agonies during these examinations of conscience, searching hidden crannies for elusive sins.  I felt relieved, at least temporarily, that I had taken care of everything.  That is, until the next retreat.

Each year around the middle of June classes would be suspended for three days for students to cram for the finals.  Our marks depended solely on the grade we achieved on provincially administered examinations.  In 1950, as June exams approached, a group of us grade twelve guys used to hang out in the shade of the gymnasium speculating on the futility of writing our exams.  Stalin was bragging that he would bury the west.  NATO was in its infancy and the United States seemed in no position to get into another war.

The Russians would roll over Canada to get to the States, and Saskatchewan was the easiest route.  We would all be killed anyway in a few months, so why study?  But we did study and the cold war remained just that, a cold war.

And what about girls in my teenage years?  I had a lot of girl friends.  In all my holidays at home I sought their company rather than boys. That is all they ever could be — friends.  Throughout my adolescence, I never had a date alone with any girl.  We partied as a group in our circle of cousins and friends in Lake Lenore.

We had a lot of fun, danced, played sports, went to sports days and parish picnics.  But I knew, and they all knew that I was going to be a priest, and God would strike me dead if I so much as kissed a girl, and any girl who would chase me would also have to contend with an angry God.

On one of my holidays at home, likely for Thanksgiving when I was 15 or 16, a bunch of us went to a youth meeting at the church.  A girl my age was visiting her family two houses from ours.  She was extremely attractive, with freckles, curly red hair, and a gorgeous figure.  Despite her being non-Catholic, we made her welcome to attend the meeting with us.  After the meeting a whole pack of us stuffed ourselves into a car driven by one of my cousins.  I sat in the back seat behind the driver, and she piled in on top of me.

That girl knew where and how to sit!  Of course, with her wriggling around, the inevitable happened, and she made it clear to me that she knew what was going on.  We began to play with each other’s finger tips.  Although the plan was to cruise around town for a while, she announced that she had to get home.  No one in the car really believed her, but no one said anything.  I felt her disdain when I stayed in the car when she got out.  The experience unnerved me, particularly when my Mom took it upon herself later that evening to warn me about the dangers of getting too friendly with Protestant girls.  I doubt whether she was satisfied or convinced when I told her there was nothing to worry about.

Several of these girls touched my heart more than others.  Among them was Bernice Altrogge.  She and her family lived in St. Benedict, about twenty miles from Lake Lenore.  Her older brother Leo and his family lived in a house across the alley from our home in Lake Lenore. The well from which we got our drinking water was in his yard.  My first meeting with Bernice took place when she was visiting. Our water pail was empty.  Each one of us boys had a chore.  Mine was to keep the water pail supplied with water from the well in Leo Altrogge’s yard.  Word had it that his teenage sister was very pretty, blonde and blue-eyed.  Alois suddenly decided to see for himself by grabbing the water pail and heading for the door.  I intercepted him.

“It’s my job,” I yelled at him.  I surprised myself.  I was ready to fight for the privilege of getting water.  He yielded without much fuss.  I dallied at the pump long enough to make certain she would appear, and she did.  She was everything the rumors said.

We exchanged whatever harmless pleasantries young people did in those days.   I had won the first round of getting to know her.  We met off and on at sports days during the summer and spent time watching ball games and eating hot dogs.

On one of those occasions in Lake Lenore on a Sunday afternoon we found ourselves alone.  I was working at St. Peter’s and had just arranged for a ride back to Muenster and had to go home for my bundle of clothing.  She offered to walk with me.  No one was at home.  We sat around for a few minutes.  I started shooting rubber bands at her.  She seemed unconcerned about fending them off or where they hit her.  There was a distinct look of mischief in her eyes when one of them hit her on the breast.  And I became flustered.

“We need to get back to the ball diamond,” I said.   As soon as we got there Bernice took off.  A short time later I caught sight of her with another guy from Lake Lenore.  They were laughing and talking excitedly, holding hands.  It was obvious to me that I was just too slow.

The girl that meant most to me by far was Sally Stroeder.  I thought she was the most beautiful girl in Lake Lenore, and the most beautiful girl I ever saw anywhere.  The Stroeders lived fairly close to us during the final years while I was at St. Peter’s and when we college boys came home (her brother Joe was one of them) we often got together in their home or ours for parties.

Our parish church often provided the opportunity for our crowd to get together.  After the youth meetings we would either pile into a single car (our record was 14 at one time) or walk in a group to the home of one or the other.  We would at times linger in small groups.  On one of those occasions Sally and I ended up holding hands, the most daring thing I could manage.  We were looking up into the clear night sky, admiring the beauty of the glittering stars.  I suggested we find a star just for us, where some day in some far off future, some other world, we would find each other.  I felt sure that it would never happen in this life.  We agreed on the third star from the end of the big dipper.

At one of our house parties during my last year of college we were playing games.  One of the games was truth or consequences.  She answered a question wrong, and Joe Cels, who was visiting with us, called the penalty:  Sally would have to kiss me.

I could not believe it.  I had never in my life kissed a girl or been kissed.  This would be in front of all the other kids, but that suited me fine.  I stood to receive her kiss. That kiss has stayed with me all my life.  So sweetly and carefully did she plant her kiss that I can feel it still.  She lingered ever so slightly.  Her lips felt so cool and just a bit moist.  How many tears I shed later through my years in the monastery just remembering its effect on me.

I had a six-week holiday at home between my last exams and the date of entry into the monastery.  I had planned to do nothing at all, just hang out around home.  Mom told me that she would not put up with that.  I must get a job.  I cannot remember what I did, but I used my earnings to buy Mom a set of dishes which she kept until she died.

I went to Mass pretty well every day.  Sally was also there most of the time.  We never sat together, but we often walked home together.  On the last day at home I wanted to say goodbye in a special way.  But we walked along in silence, I not knowing what to say.  I said something stupid like now she would be rid of me.  She gave me a look that I could never figure out.  Was it surprise?  Hurt?  Anger?  Incomprehension?  She simply turned and walked into her home without turning back to look at me again.  I had wanted to at least kiss her goodbye.

I wanted so much for her to throw herself at me, to hug me, to hold onto me, to scream at me to stay and not go to Muenster.  I wanted her to cry because I was crying inside and could not say what was in my heart to say.  I wanted her to tell me she would wait for me, that if it didn’t work out she would be here for me.

I could not imagine even the possibility that it was OK with her that I leave, that she might not love me as I loved her.  I could not imagine that she might have resented my hanging around because I was not serious about her, that I was just being nice to her till the time came for me to leave to get into that Benedictine habit.  Wretched beyond words, I slunk home.

The time of leaving it all behind came too soon.  My cousin Roman drove me to Muenster, but not before I dramatically emptied my wallet on the kitchen table and told my sisters they could have it all.  I would have no further need for money.

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

 

One of the first lessons I learned in the monastery was about rank.  Monks attained their place at table, in the chapel, and in whatever situation rank counted, by the date of their entry into the monastery.  However, those who aspired to the priesthood were immediately ranked above the lay brothers, monks who were neither priests nor studying for the priesthood.  From that first day we two novices (Peter Ackerman and I) ranked above all the old brothers who had been monks for decades even before I was born.  At first I felt funny about this, but the brothers were so humble about it all that the feeling went away.

During the retreat in preparation for assuming the habit, Abbot Severin asked me what name I had in mind.  I could not keep my own name since there was a Father James in the monastery already.  I told him I would like the name of Anthony since that was the patron of our parish, and I had two uncles by that name, one on each side of the family.  Besides, our family had a great devotion for St. Anthony because he could help us find lost things.

No, he said, people would call me Father Tony, and that was simply out of the question.  He had two names in mind, and I could choose which of them I wished.  Anselm or Bede, both great Benedictine saints of whom I had never heard a word.  Well, I did not want to have the name of Bede, and so I became Frater Anselm, a name none of my family found easy to pronounce, a name I never identified with.  I now believe that it was all part of Severin’s deliberate plan to alienate me from my feelings, to kill every semblance of my self-reliance and initiative, to drive a wedge between me and my inner sense of self-worth and dignity.  He would break my will and my family ties.  He would make of me a model monk who obeys without question, who fears God with a terror beyond description.

Within the first month I realized that I did not want to be in this place, did not want to become a monk.  Much as I admired many parts of the rule of St. Benedict, this life would never be of my own choosing.  Daniel had entered the monastery a year ahead of me and made his first vows at the same time as I entered the novitiate.  That first summer we often worked side by side in the fields.  Talking was discouraged but I did tell him about my lack of enthusiasm for the monastic life, hoping to get some direction from him.  He said nothing either way.  Much later he told me he wanted to tell me to go home, that this was not what I should do.  Sometimes I wonder what I would have done had he told me what was in his mind.

Meanwhile the daily talks from Abbot Severin did their work.  He built mightily onto the image of the God of my childhood.  Through the years as a boarding student I had at times been able to set aside some of the fears and scruples I harbored as a boy.  In the monastery that old God reemerged larger, more demanding than ever, more angry and intolerant of any imperfection.  He showed his love, so I understood, by sending me tribulation, just as he did his son Jesus.  He did not spare Jesus.  What made me think that I should be spared the cross?  Gradually I developed an almost Don Quixote spirit.  Do the impossible.  Bear the unbearable sorrow.  But I was no Don Quixote.  Unlike him, I could find no satisfaction in my misery.  My escape route was to develop a deep and abiding hatred for my self, my feelings, my thoughts, my will.

The day we entered the monastery Abbot Severin provided each of us with a copy of the Rule of St. Benedict.  During the course of the year of novitiate he went through it line by line.  He stressed the chapter on obedience.  It begins, “The first degree of humility is obedience without delay.  This becometh those who, on account of the holy subjection which they have promised, or of the fear of hell, or the glory of life everlasting, hold nothing dearer than Christ.  As soon as anything hath been commanded by the superior they permit no delay in the execution, as if the matter had been commanded by God Himself.”  And later on in the same chapter, “obedience which is rendered to Superiors is rendered to God.”

Counting my years as a student,  St. Peter’s was my home for 22 years.  Years of tears.  Years of yearning to be free of it all.  Years of fears.  During the first year as a novice, we were allowed only one letter home a month, handed in to the abbot unsealed, and only one visit from the family.  I believe it was some time in November that Mamma and the girls visited me.

The visit was short, maybe an hour.  I wanted so much to talk with Mamma, to tell her of my unhappiness, to get her to tell me it was all right to quit and come home.  But how could I talk to her with the younger kids around?   Then, just as they were walking to the door, I held her back.

“I can’t stand it here, Mamma.  I want to come home.”  I feared that she would balk at the idea.  She looked at me in her quiet way, with love written all over her face.  Surely she saw my desolation.

“Whatever you think is right, Jimmy, you do.”

That was not what I wanted or needed to hear from her.  I wanted her to say, “Come home, Jimmy.  You have done enough here.  Now it is time to start something else.”  I wanted her to tell me what to do, to take the direction of my life away from Abbot Severin.  I was unable and unwilling to take responsibility for my own life decisions.

Without clear direction from her, I plodded back to my quarters.  I would not see her again until the day of my first vows the following June.  Much, much later, I wondered what Daddy would have said to me if I had been able to put my dilemma before him.  Would he have told me not to stay if I did not want to?  Would I have listened?

The most fearsome book used in our spiritual formation was the Tyrocinium Religiosum, a book designed as a school of religious perfection.  That book presented the ideal to which I had to aspire.  God demands a level of perfection that can only be attained after completely ridding oneself of all self-will, all self-indulgence, all emotional tendencies, all independent thinking.  The horrific fear of God that had shaken me as a child  now disguised itself as love of God, as commitment to perfect love of God.  Absolute obedience in complete submission to the Abbot was the only path to such perfection.  If that path to perfection brought me darkness and unutterable unhappiness it was due to my own imperfections.  The book taught that it was a mortal sin for a monk not to strive for perfection.  It was a sign of serious sin to make no progress in the spiritual life.  It was entirely my fault that I felt as I felt.  I must do more penance, more self-denial to appease the anger of God.  Only the most despicable person says to God, I will not serve.

I was equipped with absolutely no defense against the principles of this spirituality which reinforced my early upbringing.  Those in authority know best what is good for me, and they are always right.  They constantly used the example of Abraham’s unquestioning obedience to that stupid command to kill his son as a model for me to follow.  I must kill my self-will.  God always rewards obedience, always punishes disobedience, as in the case of Adam and Eve.  Jesus himself obeyed even unto death, and therefore was exalted.

The vow of poverty presented no great difficulty, partly because I never owned anything of any value.  St. Benedict put it this way: “The vice of personal ownership must by all means be cut out in the monastery by the very root, so that no one may presume to give or receive anything without the command of the Abbot; nor to have anything whatever as his own, neither a book, nor a writing tablet, nor a pen, nor anything else whatsoever, since monks are allowed to have neither their bodies nor their wills in their own power.”

Most of the things given over to our use was labeled ad usum, (for the use) followed by our names.  I was given a beautiful old pocket watch by the abbot.  I wound it up every evening at the same time.  It usually lost about a minute each year.  When I was ordained, my family presented me with a fine wrist watch, and the abbot made me turn in the other one.  Same thing happened with a new fountain pen someone gave me.  The abbot had me turn in the one I had if I wanted to hang on to the new one.  At the beginning of Lent, each monk was to hand in a list of everything in his personal use.  The abbot would go through it each time I did that, and ask whether I really needed this or that.  If I answered that I did, he signed the list.  I never found this unusual or even absurd and always complied.  But back to my first year…

By Christmas I was as good as dead to my old world.  All of the younger priests had left for extra parish assignments.  The bell rang a half-hour before midnight on Christmas Eve, rousing me out of sleep.  At 11:45 the few monks left in the monastery assembled in the chapel and croaked out a few Christmas carols, lugubriously and solemnly.  Abbot Severin was suffering from such a bad cold that he could not celebrate the Midnight Mass.  All during Mass he snuffled, blew his nose, hacked and coughed as if he was about to die.  His replacement at the altar had not been prepared for the service.  His sermon, what I do recall of it, was dry as the prairie dust that had suffocated me as a boy.  The whole experience was so different from the Christmas joys of Lake Lenore.  By one o’clock we were back in our beds.

I received no gifts, no cards, no phone calls.  As novices, the two of us were isolated from the rest of the monastery as part of our training.  By Christmas I had developed such an aversion for my novice partner that we were barely on speaking terms.  He made it clear that the feelings were mutual.  We went for a silent walk that afternoon as we had to do every day. The afternoon seemed to last forever.  Just as we ascended the stairs for Vespers at 5:30 one of the lay brothers asked us why we hadn’t come to their recreation room for goodies and games.  We had not been told that was permissible.

The message was clear.  This is not like Christmas at home!  Joys and carefree celebrations are no more.  I longed for Lake Lenore, for my Mamma and my sisters, for friends, for games and singing and dancing and laughter.  I longed especially for Sally with an ache so deep it would never go away.  All was lost, all killed, all murdered, all crucified.  And yet not dead.  Every now and then a spark would flare, and as quickly I would scramble to extinguish it.

In March or April I felt that I had shifted and wiggled long enough with my decision.  Father Martin was my adviser.   I went over and over with him that I did not want to stay.  His response was almost always the same – a sadness—and a remark.  “There are two things that you need to be a monk:  good will and generosity.  You have the good will…”

OK, so I wasn’t generous enough to give my life to God.  I had tried so hard to feel generous.  It was obvious to me that I did not want to be generous.  Finally he agreed with me that I should leave.  “Do you want me to talk to the abbot?”  He knew something I did not, but I wasn’t picking it up.  “No.  I’ll do that.”

I packed my trunk.  I felt excited packing my few things.  I would be home in a few days, and I would be free.  I felt I had given it a good run.

I took a deep breath and rapped on the abbot’s door.  A stuffy, musty old place.  Full of old furniture and piles upon piles of dusty books and yellowing papers.  Cluttered beyond telling.

He sat me down in an overstuffed chair—low down into it.  The only place in the monastery with such a chair.

I told him I wanted to leave, that my mother needed me to take care of her since Daniel was already vowed in the monastery and Alois was gone to study banking.  I was the only boy in the family old enough . . .

He cut me off.  He was standing over me, his bony fingers with their rough and ragged fingernails shaking at me.

I don’t know how long the lecturing lasted.  Certainly well over an hour.  He had drilled us endlessly, almost daily, in hour-long doses of instruction in the rule of St. Benedict, that he and he alone was God’s instrument in my regard, that God had obviously called me to the monastic life and the priesthood – and I was saying no!  This NO to God will lead to a whole lifetime of NO to God and I will surely lose my immortal soul.  I will find the way open to hell.

I felt smaller and smaller as he loomed over me.  The finger of God in that old man’s hand.  I was done for.  Defeated.  Now I couldn’t tell him the real reason.  That voice inside me that screamed get out of this place – that feeling of not wanting to be a monk – that came from Satan – and I had better get that straight once and for all.

I felt myself dying.  Closed in on all sides.  I had thought I had found light and the way out.  Now the door was slammed shut and iron bars were enclosing me.  The chain of God was wrapped around my neck, my hands, my feet, my heart.  Trapped, snared, skewered, crucified.

He said forget your mother.  She doesn’t need you.  She’ll do all right on her own.  You wouldn’t help her anyway.  Your selfishness – he used that word over and over.  You are too selfish to give yourself to God, do you expect not to be selfish with your mother?  You’ll leave her too, just as you want to leave God behind.  Selfishness leads to all sin.  The death of your soul.  You can forget the promises of God to enter the narrow gate.

He harked back to an old theme of his.  Father Maurus had been a monk and priest and he left years ago.  Abbot Severin presented the story to us many times as novices, a story of a talented man who tore up his vows to God, who was unfaithful, first in little things, and then he met a woman and was gone.  Just like the last judgment.  God Severin conducted the trial, found him guilty, and proceeded to blackball him.

I remembered seeing an old woman at the monastery door.  She had tried to make herself small, yet had an air of dignity under her shabby clothing. She was begging for help.  What depth of need must have driven her to this place to seek help!  She was Maurus’s woman, not his wife, we were told.  She was left standing patiently at the door for a long time, sorrowfully, painfully exposed.

How could I have told Abbot Severin that I wanted to leave because I wanted to marry, to have a family, to be normal?  That I did not want to be so lonesome, so alone, so dreadfully alone.

He would have gone livid – as he did whenever the dread topic of sex “reared its ugly head.”  Selfishness and now sex.  Straight down the road to hell, both of them lead.  Awful about Maurus.  The woman took away his precious priesthood.  He gave up being another Christ for the body of a woman.  What an exchange!  What a terrible, terrible tragedy that befalls those who give in to Satan and sex!  Once more there echoed his refrain, “Never trust any woman, and that includes your mother and your sisters, and don’t you ever forget it.”

Much later in life I recalled that phrase and asked myself whether he meant that sexually. Perhaps that was part of his concern.  However, I think he was even more afraid that I would come under the influence of feminine logic or feminine influence of any kind, which might lead me away from this vocation.

What you’re heading for, you selfish young fool, is destruction.  Fodder for the flames of hell you are.  You can be sure that any help God has given you and your family will now be withheld.  You will drag them all down with you to everlasting torment.

No, I simply could never bring myself to admit to any of the monks that I longed for another taste of Sally’s forbidden lips, her kiss still lingering fresh and cool and inviting.  That fresh, clean feeling of wellbeing, of being alive, totally alive.  That precious two seconds in the balance against eternal fire.  How could I tell him that Sally and I had reserved a star where we could be together forever?  My body would burn forever – with the worm crawling – the worm that dies not.  The unquenchable fire.

No, it would all have to be forgotten.  Pushed away.  Pray to the Holy Mother, to the Virgin most pure.  The rosary, boy, the rosary will save you.

I slunk out of that room.  Father Martin appeared.  How did it go?  I’m staying, I told him.  He did not seem surprised – did I note a hint of a satisfied smirk?  I think he must have told Abbot Severin that I would be in so that he would be ready for me.  I never went back to Martin for any more advice.

For the next how many years – till long after old Severin died – I systematically froze my feelings, denied them, prayed them away – and most often cried them away at night.  I soaked pillows with tears of frustration and anger – but became a monk anyway.  I made the vows.  I meant them I guess.  But never, never did I want to.  I just HAD to.  I had no choice.  God had spoken and I dared not say no.  Not and risk damnation.

Sadly I returned to the novice quarters and unpacked my things.  I dared not look back.  I tried with all my heart and soul to control my feelings, convinced that they were contrary to the will of God.

If it hadn’t been for the lay brothers who labored in the shops and fields, I would have gone stark raving mad.  I did not share any of my feelings with them, but just to be in the carpenter shop with Brother Justus and Brother Oswald, or in the orchard with Brother John, lifted my spirits at least for the time I spent with them.  They did their jobs day after day without the slightest sign of complaint.  I liked them.

I do not recall any of the details of the day I made my first vows as a Benedictine.  The family attended, as I can tell from photos taken at the time.  I put on a good face for the camera and for the family.  Three years later I made final or solemn vows.  All I recall about that ceremony was the feeling of dying under the funeral pall spread over us as we lay face down on the sanctuary floor during the praying of the Litany of Saints.  I was dying, dead to the world.  I was under the impression that Sally was there, but I did not see her or talk with her or dare to look for her.

It wasn’t all grimness, those first years.  There were times of happiness.  Because St. Peter’s had no ability to train its priests, we were sent to St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, for our two years of philosophy for a Bachelor of Arts, and then four years of theology.  St. John’s was a leader in a liturgical renewal which was beginning in the Catholic Church and which would lead to the reforms of Vatican II General Council.  The professors were world-class.  I loved the studies.    Although philosophy was not my first love, languages, education and art more than made up for that.  And we had a great Scripture teacher for six years in William Heidt.  Some eighty young monks were studying for the priesthood along with about as many diocesan seminarians who attended classes with us.  Most of these men were talented, interesting, and sincere.

When I first went to St. John’s, I was suffering from a very sore back, likely as a result of working like a demon clearing rocks from a field during my novitiate. My back had become so stiff that I could not make the proper bows during the praying of the liturgical hours.

On one of the first evenings there, a deacon, Fr. Aidan, asked me if I wanted to go for a boat ride on Lake Sagatagan.  Of course.  But then I had to admit to him that I could not row because my back was too sore.  He countered that he loved the exercise.  Two things bothered me about that.  First, he was a deacon, and that meant some five years of seniority.  Second, he was black.  I felt somehow that he was being my slave.  He laughed at me.

The sore back persisted.  It bothered me that I was in the front row, and stood stiffly at attention while others were making profound bows.

Very soon after arriving at St. John’s I discovered that one of the deceased abbots was a distant relative of mine on my mother’s side of the family.  Bernard Locknikar had been abbot from 1890-1894.  He had a reputation as a very holy man.  When he died, they buried him without removing the jeweled cross and ring, the signs of office.  He was already in his grave for several months before they realized what had happened.  They exhumed the body, expecting it would be a very unpleasant chore.  On the contrary.  When they opened the coffin, they were startled at the beautiful aroma of fresh flowers emanating from it.  There is a saying that some people die “in the odour of sanctity.”

I paid several visits to his grave before speaking to his spirit about my back.  At the next liturgy after one such visit, I simply said, “OK, Bernard, help me now.”  I made the profound bow without hesitation.  Not a bit of pain.  After that I was able to return to playing handball, hockey, baseball and other sports, and participate in the manual labour that was part of the monastic routine.  That is, until I broke down completely much later on.

I enjoyed coming home to Saskatchewan in the summers in the company of the other young monks of St. Peter’s also studying at St. John’s.  We genuinely enjoyed each other’s company, and worked together in the orchards and hoed weeds along the tree lines.  We younger monks became part of construction crews for new buildings, astounding the contractor for being “perpetual motion machines.”  We played handball and cards for recreation.

Consistently, the cleric masters who were in charge of the younger monks at St. John’s gave me opportunities to develop my talents.  My love for singing brought me into the ranks of the chanters of one of the best Gregorian chant choirs in America.

That brought sorrow of a profound kind.  Our family loves to sing, and when I was invited into the schola of St. John’s I felt it a great honor.  I had a true voice, a lyric tenor, but my voice was thin, pinched, did not resonate fully.  It happened that a man who was a specialist in voice training entered the monastery of St. John’s.  I was one of the schola members sent to him for private lessons.

He made every effort to teach me to open my resonance chambers and let my voice out full and clear.  He struggled with my voice production.   I sang well on pitch, but he asked me to let my voice go out strong.  He used every imaginable technique.  He used love ballads like La Vie en Rose because Gregorian melodies do not allow for sustained holds on individual notes nor for much in the way of feelings.  That created a problem for me.  I found it most difficult to shut out thoughts and feelings about Sally, even though by this time, she was married.  Despite all my efforts at self-control, I could never escape from the memories of every moment spent with her.

Although my voice improved, he was far from satisfied.  Then one day it happened.  For a brief moment I let go.  My head exploded with sound so pure, so magnificent, that the whole room burst into color with beautiful sound.  At first I did not realize that I had produced that sound.  It was too incredible, too alluring for words.  “You’ve got it!”  he yelled in excitement, his eyes glowing with tears, looking at me with such a warmth of passion that it frightened me.  I thought he was going to throw his arms around me and kiss me.

It was the last time I heard that sound.  I shut it down immediately.  It was just too, too sensual.  I could not make it happen again.  I dared not let it out again, and he dropped me from instruction, angry and frustrated.

I have thought long and hard about what happened in that room and why it was that I could not find my voice again.  The ecstasy of the sound alarmed me with its pure pleasure, its sensuality.  Anything that felt so good had to be wrong, even sinful.  That was not a conscious or logical understanding.  My whole being was by that time conditioned to mistrust all feeling, to hold emotion as below the dignity of a true monk, a snare for the unwary.  To revel in sense pleasures of any kind was to court spiritual disaster.  My own personal feelings, I had by that time convinced myself, were particularly inclined to wickedness.  From my teenage years at St. Peter’s I was taught – and I accepted it – that the highest order of human activity was spiritual and mental, and that all corporal, all emotional, all sensory experience was from our lower, animal nature, and would inevitably lead away from God.  The Tyrocinium  had reinforced that in spades.

I was frightened also by the lyrics of the love songs he had chosen.  Such sentiments I could not harbor.  The words and melodies kept resonating inside my head day and night.  I could not allow anything to take me in that direction, since that would challenge my vocation.  Challenge it precisely because that was what I wanted to do – leave the monastery.

That ringing sound of my voice I had heard so briefly brought back to me the essence of Sally’s sweet kiss, equally brief, equally simple and pure.  Afraid and hurt beyond telling, I went back to my adequate but thin singing, good enough even to get me into the ranks of chanters.  I had caught a glimpse of what could be, and yet I could not dare to return to it.  My whole self shut that door with so firm a lock that all through the rest of my life, I have never found it again.

I mourn that loss even yet.  I mourned it for all the time in the monastery and afterwards.  As I grew to accept, so gradually and so slowly, another image of God, richer, purer, I nonetheless have not heard that sound again. Damn the process that killed this beauty.  Damn the stupidity within me that caused such a senseless and  wicked perversion of what is good in God’s material creation.

Another great loss occurred regarding music.  I loved music, but had never had the opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument.  My friends during high school played piano, violin, guitar.  I really wanted to play the flute.  The monastery had a fine old wooden flute hidden away somewhere.  I asked to have lessons.  No, Severin told me, I should  learn  to play the trumpet.  That would be better.  I did not want to play trumpet.  Still, out of obedience, I gave it a try.   There was no driving force to keep me even slightly interested in it.  I hated its sound, and the taste of its mouthpiece.  I dropped it after a few weeks.

My love of art was fostered at St. John’s for carving, painting and calligraphy.  I took several art courses in addition to my full load of compulsory classes.  Joe O’Connell taught sculpture.  His instruction led me toward the simple forms of Henry Moore.  I planned to do a fairly abstract figure of Jesus on the cross.  Abbot Severin made it clear that he was not enthusiastic about my taking art, and warned me that any religious image I worked on must first meet his approval.  I sent drawings to him.  They were “too modern” for his taste.  I changed them to the extent that he gave his consent.  However, I made the mistake of telling him that the final piece might be somewhat different, since I would have to pay attention to what was in the wood.  He removed his permission and I never did the carving.

Later I took an art history course.  Three quarters of the way through it Abbot Severin put me under strict obedience to drop out because he thought I was spending more time on art than on theology.  I was still getting A’s in almost all of my classes, but that did not matter to him.  I obeyed and buried my anger inside.

My love for writing opened the way for helping produce a house magazine for the young monks at St. John’s, the Scriptorium, and later propelled me into regular columns for the Prairie Messenger at St. Peter’s.  My love for sports meant many games of handball, hockey (shinny), and softball.  During the winter I made almost all of the hockey sticks the clerics (the young monks studying for the priesthood) used for our hockey games.  I used the broken hockey sticks from games played by the St. John’s college and high school teams, laminated them together to make sticks even stronger than the original.

My love for physical labor was satisfied by doing everything from construction, to farm work, yard work and janitor work.  You name it, I was anxious to learn how to do it, and do it well, so I always told myself.

As long as I was very busy I could forget the horrible prospect of having to admit I did not belong because I did not want to belong, and never would.  No amount of prayer for the power to make a deep and personal commitment changed the reality that I simply did not want to live this life.  Try as I might, I could not make my heart want what my head had accepted as the hard path of doing “God’s will.”

Before making solemn vows (1955), I pleaded with Father Vitus, the cleric master, and tried to get permission from him to leave the monastic life.   I could not find the words to convey what was in my heart.  All he could judge was my external observance.  Outwardly, I was doing very well.  I loved my studies and did well in them.  I took on every opportunity to develop my interests.  Judged on that, I had a clear vocation.  He could not see any other path for me and told me so.  I continued to cry myself to sleep and stifled my feelings so none could see them.

Spring of 1956 brought the time to make the decision  to accept ordination to the major orders (subdeacon, deacon, priesthood).   If I stayed in this life the noose of holy orders would be added to my monastic vows.

I decided to take my dilemma to Father Vitus again.  I felt confident that I could talk with him.  I asked him to help me make a case to Rome that I had been misled,  that I had experienced undue force and fear in making my original vows for the three years and therefore my final vows were also canonically invalid.  I told him I did not want to be a monk or priest.  I told him all about the meeting with Abbot Severin.

In tears I asked him to consider whether I had a case.  No, he told me, you have not.  That which the abbot did does not constitute canonical force, canonical fear.  Your vows are valid.  You made them freely, he informed me.  You are a good monk, well suited for this life.

Freely???  Again, he didn’t pick up my feelings, how I felt then, how I felt when I spoke to him a year earlier.  I was trapped and it all came down to sleeping in the bed I myself made.  I meant it when I made vows.  Now I had no choice but to live them out.  I must continue on to ordination.

I had no theoretical difficulty with either church teaching or with the rule of St. Benedict. I loved my theology classes.  My problem was that I simply did not want to live the monastic life.  And that was considered selfishness and willfulness in the face of a clear call from God.

Father Vitus and all my advisors came clear on that.  I had all the signs of a vocation.  It was a matter of accepting God’s call, giving up my own will. My will was sinful.  To go against God’s call was clearly to jeopardize salvation.  So frighteningly clear.

Imprisoned forever.  That was to be my destiny.  If I accepted it with good will, so they told me, God would also reward me with the strength to see it through all my life.

My heart became as dry as concrete.  I learned to control my feelings when I could not deny their presence.  I learned to deny their worth, their validity, their dignity.  I learned to name my desires as selfish, satanic, godless.  I did that for many, many years.  I hid my tears from everyone.  After leaving the monastery it was not at all a simple matter of resurrecting my feelings.  It would take years and years to undo the effects of my early Catholic upbringing and seventeen years of monastic practice.

 

 

 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 

I recall almost nothing about the day of my ordination to the priesthood.  I know it was Bishop Francis Klein of Saskatoon who came to the Muenster cathedral for the ceremony, but that is a head memory and has nothing to do with my heart.

I recall only faintly that my brother Daniel, who was already ordained, attended me for the first celebration of Mass at one of the small altars set up in a room off the chapel on the third floor of St. Peter’s.  I recall nothing of the events of my first solemn and public celebration of Mass in Lake Lenore about a week later.  I know that the parish put on a great feast in my honour and had a concert and speeches of some kind, but I do not remember any of the details.

Oh yes, one memory did make an impression that has lasted.  A very old and pious woman knelt to receive my “first blessing” and she grabbed my hands and kissed them in fervent devotion.  I was embarrassed and wanted to tell her it would be far more appropriate for me to kneel before her and kiss her hands in reverence and awe.  I had no use for a priesthood that put me above others.  But I said nothing.

During my ten years as a priest, I did practically no priestly work except to celebrate Mass daily at one of the half-dozen small altars set up in the room beside the chapel.  Each month Abbot Severin handed out a list of mass intentions to each priest.  For two dollars people could request that a mass be celebrated, usually for the benefit of the soul of some deceased relative.  This was important revenue for the monastery.  I took it all very seriously, as I assumed the others also did. However, it was hardly a very satisfying celebration of a service that required a congregation to be meaningful.

While at St. John’s all of us took enough education courses to qualify for teaching certificates in Saskatchewan so that we could teach at St. Peter’s.  We had more priests by far than were needed in the parishes.  The usual pattern was to teach for ten, twenty or more years until you wore out as a teacher and a vacancy occurred in a parish.  Those who taught were often assigned for weekend duty in small parishes.  The monastery was emptied of its priests for Christmas and Easter celebrations in the parishes.

I worked for several years on weekends in two parishes, alternating between Muenster and St. Gregor.  I usually sat in the confessional for an hour or so before mass.  I came to hate my time in that black box.  Although it was impossible to put names to people, it did not take long to recognize penitents.  The same ones would come regularly every two weeks with their lists of sins.  I tried to initiate some sort of dialogue by asking whether they noticed that they were coming with the same list each time they went to confession.  I wanted to help people make changes in their lives if they felt that they were not living according to what they considered righteous.

Invariably I got silence or a completely noncommittal response.  All they wanted was to get their absolution so they could go to communion and start on the list again.  I can’t recall anyone ever expressing any idea that they wanted to change anything in the way they were living.  I wondered whether it would do any good to preach about how the confessional is a useless exercise if there is no effort at amending one’s life, if it really did need amending.  Catholics generally treated the confessional as a spiritual laundromat where they could get their souls cleaned up and life goes on in the same way over and over.  After a while I convinced myself that I was wasting my breath and holding up the line to the confessional, and just let people go their own way.  After all, the vast majority were pretty good folks in no danger of going to hell if they confessed or not.

By noon I would be back at my teacher’s desk at St. Peter’s.  I kept copies of my sermons and now recognize just how irrelevant most of them were for the daily lives of the people about whom I knew nothing.  The training in the priestly arts I received at St. John’s gradually buried themselves under the load of teaching and coaching.  In my years as assistant pastor I did no baptisms, no marriages, no sick calls and never entered the social life of the parishes in which I worked.

Despite my good intentions, I realized after my first year of teaching that I was not a very good teacher.  I could not connect with the students, get them interested in what we were studying.   Although I prepared my material, something was obviously missing.  I knew I had to work on that.

Abbot Severin died suddenly in 1960, sitting in the same chair in which I had suffered my spiritual lashing.  One of the monks found him slumped over, with a magazine in his lap. My monastic and priestly stability died with him.  Now there was no one to stand over me to control my thoughts and feelings. Now I truly had to stand on my own, and try as I might, I could not, before God, pray a lie or pretend to God that I was giving him my life in this way.  I could do it outwardly.  I could not do it with my heart.

And so began the long period of tearing away.  Tearing away a spiritual skin that had become so rotten that I could not imagine how others could fail to smell it, and yet so tightly woven that tearing it away would make my whole being bleed.  Now truly I was on the cross and cried with Jesus, “Why, oh why, O Lord, have you abandoned me here alone?”

I was not alone, but I did not know it until years later.

The answers came so gradually that I scarce realized what was happening.  Part of the answer lay in the new abbot.

In the election of the new abbot, the community at St. Peter’s had the option to elect an outsider.  The election process was most interesting.  Under the supervision of monks from other abbeys, the discussion started from the youngest member of the community and went on to the oldest.  That way, no junior monk had to contradict an elder.  It was clear that the vast majority wanted one of our own.   It did not take long to elect Fr. Jerome Weber.  He had been the prefect of discipline during most of the years while I was a boarder, and had also been my hockey coach and taught history.  Often he worked in the fields beside me during the summers when I was a student.  I liked him and trusted him.

I felt the change very soon.  Abbot Jerome called me into his office about a month after the election. The room had been cleared of all of Severin’s clutter.  Jerome pointed out that the school would need to train a new history teacher since he would not be able to continue in that role.  He had consulted the seniors and they advised him that I would be a good candidate for a master’s degree in history.

I immediately said I would accept that.  “No,” he insisted. “I am not telling you to accept this assignment.  I am only asking you if you are interested.  Take two weeks to think about it and come back to me.”

I didn’t need the two weeks.  I was excited at the prospect of going away to study.  After two weeks I gave Jerome my answer.  I would be thrilled to accept his proposal.  He had, meanwhile, already made inquiries and prepared the way for me to enter the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon and made arrangements for me to live at the minor seminary on Clarence Avenue near the university.

At the University of Saskatchewan I wore a black suit and the white Roman collar. I found the instructors and the students surprisingly open-minded.  They were scholars who sought the truth.  Some of my instructors were outstanding in their fields, wrote books and lectured far beyond the confines of Saskatoon.

I had braced myself, expecting some sign of either overt or subtle anti-Catholic bigotry.  It wasn’t there, except in a few students who objected when a lecture sounded too sympathetic to Catholicism.  Historical fact and clear reasoning dominated the process of historical method.  Before long I was as completely comfortable in my classes as I ever was in my theology courses.

I loved what I was learning.  It fit so well into what I had learned in my church history classes at St. John’s.  It all made sense.  I began to get a picture of how things develop historically, what pressures cause events and institutions to take new or different directions, what great individuals did to colour their world.  As time went on I grew comfortable with the idea that no matter how much you knew, there was always a lot more that you did not know.

I felt my mind expand to take in a broader vision.  These scholars added to what I had seen, confirmed much of what I had learned from Father Walter in  his stories of the popes.  Now I saw the secular side of events.  I came under the influence of departmental chair,  Dr. Hilda Neatby, famous for her seminal book So Little for the Mind.  I reveled in the lectures of Dr. Norman Ward who proved that Canadian politics were anything but boring.  Ward received the Leacock Medal for Humour in 1961.  His anecdotes later became part of my history lectures.

As a bonus, I played hockey for the St. Thomas More intramural team and thoroughly enjoyed the experience of playing organized hockey at a reasonably high level.

Learning that I could get a Masters degree in less time if I transferred to Marquette University in Milwaukee, I made that move.  After the first summer school sessions I was sent to care for a parish in Montana for several weeks while the pastor was on holidays.  In the middle of the first week there, the priests of the area met for a “conference” which I decided to attend.  I got an eyeful.  The conference was a day of poker playing in a smoke-filled room.  Not knowing how to play the game, and not wishing to risk any money, I did not participate.  Despite the woeful salaries priests were getting at this time, the stakes at the table were high.  Within an hour of starting, the priest in the parish next to where I was called it quits.  He had learned to quit when he was not having a good day.  The rest kept playing and losing big time.

He boasted to me that he was driving his car and piloting his own airplane on his winnings from playing poker with his fellow priests. I avoided all contact with that bunch for the rest of my time in Montana.  I studiously avoided even thinking about where the money came from for their gambling debts.  I had been told to deposit the Sunday collections in the bank without counting them.  Obviously it was none of my business nor anyone else’s.  The pastor would take care of that upon his return.  I was very happy to return to Milwaukee for my fall classes.

While in Milwaukee I met the first two women who would change my life, who taught me more about God than all the theology classes and spiritual conferences put together.  One was the daughter of an old army buddy of Father Cosmas Krumpelman,  one of the older monks of St. Peter’s.  Before entering the monastery Father Cosmas and Vic Parmentier had served together in the American army during the Great European War.  Vic and his wife Florence took me into their family as if I were their son.  I visited them as often as I could, traveling by train to Chicago, where they lived.

Some years before my visits Vic and Flo decided to put a wet bar in their basement.  One day Flo told me about their planning.  Vic had drawn up plans, and Flo asked questions and thought she had a better way.  Vic told her that it could not be done her way, and gave her the reasons why.  They sat on the plans for a while.  Then one day Vic said, “I have an idea about how to do this.”  And he outlined exactly the way Flo had said to do it.  “What a wonderful idea!” she told him.  And he proceeded to do it that way.

I asked Flo about that.  “Didn’t you tell him that it was your plan?”  “Why in the world would I do that?  It would only hurt his feelings.  The job got done and that is what counted.”  I was so happy there with them.  I had found family again, something I craved, needed as much as breathing itself.  I had found a way out of the bitter loneliness that weighed upon my spirit.  Deep down in my heart I realized that I would never find that kind of relationship at St. Peter’s.

Their daughter, Yvonne (Bonny), became a dear and much loved sister to me.  We talked endlessly about life and its meaning. She became my sister in ways my sibling sisters had not been, since I never knew them as adults. I loved my time with her and Bud, her husband, and their two children, Michael and Renee.  Bonny shared her feminine vision of church, God, life, opening ways of thinking I had never considered.  Much of our time was spent in art galleries and museums.  And I poured out my heart’s anguish to her.

She tried to help me see that I did not have to be perfect.  She laughed at my attempt at perfection, mocked my meticulous grooming.  “You never have even one hair out of place,” she laughed.  Only God is perfect.  You are too hard on yourself, she insisted.  As she began to pick up on my dissatisfaction of being a monk and priest, she countered that the church needed priests like me, that I was just what most of the priests she knew lacked.

We kept up writing back and forth for a few years, but then later on we lost contact.  Then, almost fifty years later, I wanted to tell Bonny and her family just what they meant to me.  What a shock to discover that Bonny had died about twenty years earlier.  But I did talk with Bud and with Michael and Renee, and was happy to know that they remembered me.

The most remarkable woman I met that year was Sally’s sister, Bertha, Sister Mary Clare, a Franciscan nun.  I say without qualification that she was the most angelic person I have ever met.  Over the next few years we met each other not only through correspondence, but in visits back and forth. Mary Clare’s love and laughter gently stirred me to seek a God other than the ruthless monster of my youth, other than the even more horrific God of Abbot Severin.   She showed me the power of feminine spirituality, and my need to get away from the ferocious God created by fearful and joyless old men.

As time went on I began to see the force of a simple farm analogy.  All through my life I had been wearing myself out rooting out sin and the tendency to sin.  With endless scrupulosity, I had weeded the garden of my soul, cultivated the ground over and over until not a speck of green ever appeared.  The result is exactly the same as if a farmer were to plow his fields over and over and never get around to planting anything.  He will have a nice clean field, but no crops.  So I experienced no fruit from all my spiritual efforts.  It was no surprise that I was so unhappy and unfulfilled.

In Mary Clare’s love I dared to find hope.  In her heart I found a wisdom no theology class ever came close to revealing.  Finally I allowed my own heart to open up, my heart which I had so carefully shut down, discounted.  There, deeply buried, deeper than my thoughts, deeper even than my feelings, in the inner recesses where no language can penetrate, I discovered the beginnings of the peace and joy I so longed for, so profound, so moving, so powerful that once I opened myself to it, no force could ever stem the tide that erupted.  The seeds of hope sprouted and grew ever so gradually.

Mary Clare taught me to have the courage to go into my own heart, to speak to and to listen to the God present there.  She kept assuring me that my heart was right with God, that I could trust the God I would find there.  She is the one who clearly led me to that mountain top with the burning bush.  Finally I paid attention to the raging flame inside me, that burned but did not destroy.  I ventured closer to this holy place.

Who are you, you that speaks from the burning inside?

I am God, came the reply.

But I do not recognize you.

I am the God that has always been with you.  Don’t be afraid to listen to me now.  I have seen your suffering.  I have heard you cry in the night. I know what you are going through.  I am with you, within you. You are most precious in my sight. I want you to be free.

But how can that happen?  How can I tell them?  They will not believe me.

You are right.  They will not listen to you.  Don’t say anything.  Just leave.

But I can’t just go.  They will all condemn me as a traitor.  I have no daring spirit.  I am no pioneer who strikes out into the unknown.  I have always walked the safe path.  I haven’t the courage.

I will be with you.

What about my family?  They will all turn against me.  They will be hurt.  I can already feel their disgust, and their sorrow.  I will bring untold suffering to my mother.

They will understand once they see you on the other side.  When they see you in the land of promise they will know that it is I, God, who have brought you out of slavery, away from the torment and darkness into the light.  I will be with you every step of the way.  When the water seems too deep or too wide, stretch out your arms, and I will carry you across the miles and across the years on the wings of the eagle.  I want you to set Jimmy free.  Your real name never was Anselm.  I called you Jimmy from the start.  That is who you are.  Be true to that name.  I will be with you all the way.  Trust me.  Go.

I wallowed longer in the self-pity of great unhappiness.  But changes were happening.  My tears of frustration and anger and impotence sometimes became tears of hope, of hopes I hardly dared imagine.  I fought against those hopes at times out of fear.  I wanted so badly to follow them, to dream, but what if I did look at them sincerely?  Ah, those little buds of hope refused to die, refused to surrender to any more denial, any more blocking. They grew ever so slowly from tiny buds to twigs, into strong branches and I learned to crawl out on them and look beyond the walls I had built, to peer through the little corners of the dusty monastic windows.  I saw a new Jerusalem, the promised land.

I have dear Mary Clare to thank for leading me to that place.  Without her I know I would never have found the way.  I never told her that, but I have always believed that somehow in her heart she knew what I owed her for the gift she so lovingly and unselfishly gave me.

Mary Clare looked beyond the miserable person I had become and loved me to life.  She understood, as no other person in my life understood, the power of unselfish love.  When I was at my lowest, most unhappy years, I would look into the mirror and see a horrible mistake, a caricature of a man, a monstrous form, the morose visage of Abbot Severin staring back at me.  It was in his image that I had been formed.  That cannot be me looking back at me.  That is not who I am, this Father Anselm, this awful being I had come to loathe with all my heart.  Mary Clare saw all that and still loved me.  She saw something deeper, and gently called it forth.

This sweet woman would die too early in life, yet her presence still fills my heart with love and joy, and laughter.  I did not know she had died until many years after the fact.

I believe that most people are too afraid to make that journey inside through all the layers of who they are.  It is a scary place to go because there in the depths lies the individual’s truth, searing through all the dross and doubt.  Only by entering that mysterious world and trusting it can a person become integrated and find the inner peace of acceptance of all that is.  The rewards of making that journey far outweigh the agonies along the way.  Right there, deep inside is where God is.

 

During my studies at Marquette, I came under the influence of two remarkable historians, Dr. Roman Smal-Stocki, who had been one of the advisers of Thomas Masaryk in setting up the state of Czechoslovakia following the Great European War, and Jesuit Dr. Paul Prucha.  Smal-Stocki’s lectures influenced my own courses by introducing the Slavic component into the story of Western civilization. His principal archive was language.  He used the incidence of Scandinavian words making their way into Eastern Europe to prove a much earlier trade relationship than had previously been accepted. It also explained the early appearance of blond hair and blue eyes among the Slavic people. He taught me the little-known fact of a huge Ukrainian-Polish-Lithuanian empire in existence long before Western Europe’s tiny fiefdoms gave way to larger states.  Prucha taught historical methodology and was the adviser for my master essay on the Chicago Indian Treaty of 1833, in which the Ottawa, Chippewa and Pottawatomie nations ceded the last of their lands east of the Mississippi and agreed to move westward to land “a snake could not live on.” My thesis was later published by the Illinois State Historical Journal.   Both of these men instilled into their students not only a love for learning but a disciplined approach to dig for every scrap of relevant information in research. All these made their way into my classes.

After my return from Milwaukee I settled into teaching history and social studies at St. Peter’s.  I found the key to good teaching.  I had been focusing on myself, my material, my methods, what I had to teach.  Now I shifted all my energy onto the students.  Where were their minds?  What were their needs?  That shift meant moving from teaching to helping students learn, leading them to want to learn what I was prepared to teach them.  I began to use a combination of lectures, which I laced with interesting anecdotes from the lives of the movers and shakers of events, and discussion starters.  I would pick out a student who seemed least likely to want to learn anything, and present material in such a way that he had to sit up and take notice. At times I had to depart from my original lesson plans and become more flexible.  It worked.  On one occasion I used the entire hour-long class to lecture on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.  When the bell rang to end the class, the grade eleven boys burst out in spontaneous applause.  Who says lecturing doesn’t work for high school classes?

I had long criticized the discipline system of St. Peter’s as being punitive and impersonal.  We took the name “Father” but were anything but fatherly in the way we treated students who got out of line.  I doubted that any of us ever really sat down and listened to any of the boys.  We did the talking.  Abbot Jerome asked me to take over the discipline of the school.  I told him I would do so if he allowed me to pick the men who would assist me.  I chose Raymond ven der Buhs, Alvin Hergott and Rudolph Novecosky.  Through the summer the four of us hammered out a new system which included the provision that each student would have a counselor from among the priests who taught at the college.  These monks had to meet with their boys within the first few weeks of the school year, and then a minimum of three or four times each term.  Instead of the old rule book, we installed principles of respect for each other, for us, for the buildings and grounds, and for the situation, listening to each other, and internal correction for unacceptable behavior.

If a student misbehaved enough to be sent to me as dean of discipline, I promised that he would have an opportunity to see his counselor before I dealt with him.  Corrections centered on the likelihood of altered behavior, in which case no punishment would be administered.  The system caught on. Yes, there were glitches that had to be worked through, but we held on.  The young men appreciated the change.

Raymond, Alvin, Rudolph, and I met very frequently late at night when the students were sleeping, and many times during the summer months.  We developed a very close working relationship of trust and service to the students.  Each of us brought our own set of talents to the enterprise.  Later on three of us, Raymond, Alvin and I,  left the monastic life and married.  We mostly lost touch with one another until late in life I made some contact with Alvin, who was living in Brazil at the time.  It was only much later that I realized that for all the time we spent together and liking each other, we never shared a scrap of information about each other’s personal lives.

When the monastery published its hundred-year history in 2003 and reported the discipline change our names never came in.  The change was ascribed to a monk who wasn’t even there when the change was made. So much for truth!

Although I never played the game myself, I was assigned to coach the basketball team.  While in Milwaukee, I had been close to the members of the Marquette University Warriors.  Most of the basketball players lived in the same dorm as I did.  One of them, a 6-foot-11 third-string center, served Mass for me almost daily. I went to most of their home games and learned some of the fine points of the game.  Before beginning to coach, I attended a weeklong basketball seminar by Johnny Bright of Edmonton Eskimo fame. I coached St. Peter’s to two provincial championships in my three years as coach.  Again, this was not mentioned in the aforesaid history, though lesser achievements by others was reported.

Some time around 1965 or 1966, despite the satisfaction I experienced in my teaching and care of the students, I could no longer sustain a vocation that completely fell apart at the seams.  My body just gave up.  It simply quit.  First I could not walk, sit, or lie down without severe pain in my back and legs, and then finally I could not walk at all.  The doctors tried heat and cold, they tried traction, and as a last resort put me in a full body cast.  It was horrific.  Every remedy only made things worse.

I was sent to a specialist in Saskatoon, and underwent an operation to remove an offending lower back disc.  After a long period of recuperation, I was back on my feet, but miserable beyond words.  I could no longer do physical labor, play handball, skate, or anything that required full body movement.  I did not fully realize that the pain in my body arose from a much deeper pain. It was clearly time to reevaluate my life.

I had long been in the habit of writing to my mother, mostly about what I was doing.  Early in the summer of 1967 I opened my heart to her.  I wrote something that upset her.  In response to her questions I poured out my soul.

 

 

Dear Mother,

Your letter was a bit disturbing.  I’m not sure what I wrote to you to make you think I was going to “do something foolish.”  Mom, I am in a deep rut and I have to get out of it.  I have no intention of running away.  I have had a terrible year in many ways, but I have come to understand myself much better.  As I get to know myself, what I can do and what I can’t do, I have to also be honest with myself — and with this community.  There are some things I’m not suited for.  It is no use trying to do something you can’t do well — and leave undone the things you can do well.

Nobody votes me in as dean of students.  This is an appointment from the Abbot.  I had him pretty well convinced this spring to put someone else in.  But two days ago he again asked me to reconsider.  I just don’t see how I can in all honesty accept the job.

Mom, it just isn’t true that priests have it easier.  We can’t get any closer to God than anyone else just because we are priests.  We are made of the same stuff as everybody else.  In many ways we have it much harder.  It is a damnedly lonely life.  Sure we live together here and can share our joys and sorrows.  But there’s one thing about men.  You probably know this, but most men don’t find it very easy to take their deepest problems to another man.  Some men find it impossible– even to a priest.  So they have to find a woman.  Marriage is the normal answer, of course.  But what of our priests?  We also need the sympathy and understanding of women.  Only it is risky and it is almost always misunderstood.  Many priests fear this danger and avoid women like the devil himself.  They are only half men.  They are warped and sad people.  I have no intention to become that way.  I’ve always enjoyed the company of women and never intend to get along without it.  My closest friends are women.  You know this part of my whole life.  I realize fully the risk and the danger of being misunderstood.  I have been misunderstood and judged falsely many times.  But that will never make me shun women.  As long as I know and God knows that there is nothing evil in our relationship, I don’t care what people think.  That’s not very easy really, because I do want to be understood, and that people know the truth.

Anyway, Mom, don’t worry about me running away.  I have no such plans at present.  If I would ever feel it necessary, I will get approval from the proper authorities.  If I were to live my life over, I know I wouldn’t do what I’ve done about my life.  But I can’t change that.  I’m not crying over that.

What I am trying to learn is how I can live this dedicated life honestly.  In my whole being I feel the greatest conflict in being a priest and a teacher.  I simply can’t see my way to doing justice to both.  I can be either one or the other, not both.  Others may not see this.  Others can handle both.  But that doesn’t mean I have to be able to.  Maybe some day I will.  Meanwhile I suffer the tearing up of my whole person.  It means I cannot do my work here in this school in a way that satisfies me.  I have done a very poor job this year.  I know that, and those who live here, if they are honest, will say the same — and have in fact told me.  I must do better this coming year.  But I must then solve my problem.  I’m getting help — and it will be a long rebuilding program.

I hope this will help you understand me a little better.  I know you pray for me.  I love you, mother, a lot more than you know.

Your stubbornest son,

Fr. Anselm

That summer the path opened through the sea of despair.  Hope sprang up like a little girl, like the budding of twigs at the end of the long winter, green and tender.  I touched them ever so carefully.  They wiggled in delight and burst from their bindings.

When I review my twenty-two years at St. Peter’s I realize that the five years as a boarding student were relatively happy.  The seventeen years as a monk?  I am bound to say that the best of those years were the ones I spent outside the walls of St. Peter’s, six as a student at St. John’s,  and two years outside the monastic enclosure to study for my history degree.

Although my brother monks were wonderful men, the years inside St. Peter’s Abbey were mostly unhappy for me.  And yet, I loved St. Peter’s and still do, with the love reserved for home.  I worked like a dog there.  I did have good times, and I did accomplish a lot.  I tried to change some of the atmosphere of St. Peter’s College.  I am proud of the work which Alvin, Raymond, Rudolph and I did as the discipline staff.  I had some real success as a basketball coach. I also wanted to change the artistic atmosphere of St. Peter’s.  That proved to be a life-altering experience.

In 1967 I requested a summer course at the Banff School of Fine Arts, and Abbot Jerome gave his approval.  That is how I met Ruth Whitney, the third remarkable woman who would change my life.  At the end of the summer there was no longer any doubt in my mind about where I wanted my life to go.  Now the struggle was to find a way to realize it.

 

 

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

 

I arrived in Banff by bus, thrilled at seeing the Canadian Rockies for the first time.  I found my room in the dormitory and registered for my class at the Banff Centre.  On the first day of classes, I stood outside the studio door with about a dozen other students.   Only a few had ever met before and they talked in low tones so no one else could hear.  The door to the studio was locked.   All of us must have been wondering what kind of a teacher we would have.

I can’t remember when Ruth appeared in the hallway, but I’m sure she was one of the last ones to show up.  We all made our way into the studio with the teacher when she finally came, unlocked the door and introduced herself.  She would be our summer school instructor, a perky, vivacious woman, Ilda Lubane.

After introductions, we began to jockey for easels and space.  I had told myself that I wanted a position with light falling from left to right if possible.  Ruth’s easel and mine ended up side by side.  The two of us, for the entire summer, occupied the southeast corner of the studio.  In that room we lived and breathed charcoal, canvas, and turpentine for six weeks.  I can’t remember exactly when I paid closer attention to the thin little woman beside me, but surely it must have been when we were told to get out our supplies.

Everything in my paint box was in perfect order.  Her brushes and tubes and drawing materials were scattered in an unbelievable tangle.  I would use only the barest minimum of paint, while she sloshed on great globs of oil.  I painted carefully and meticulously, but she painted without inhibition.  My work was small, hers was as big as she could make it.

Within a week it became apparent that Ruth would be my teacher as much as Ilda.  Ruth taught me how to see colour and line, how to mix colours, how to draw, how to stretch canvases, what supplies to buy and why.  The bond created in the studio blossomed into friendship in outings, walks, evening performances.  I felt comfortable in her presence and bonded easily also with Theresa, her eleven-year-old daughter, who was studying piano.

Among the many studio experiences that shook some of my reserve was the introduction of drawing from life.  Here I was, 35 years old, and had never in my life seen a naked woman.  Oh, I had the usual little-boy kicks out of searching the brassiere ads in the Easton’s catalogs, and had leafed through some girlie magazines, but now I would see a live woman without clothing.

My distorted sexual formation did not prepare me for the turmoil that clung to this aspect of art education. It took several sessions before I became comfortable enough to do some decent drawings, and to see the human form as beautiful and as innocent as the flowers and trees and mountains, not there to be ogled, but to study.

As Ruth and I shared more and more time together, we told each other our life stories, then our feelings.  A full day at Sunshine Village ski resort found us walking the high alpine meadows, reveling in the beauty of the scenery, reveling also in each other’s company.

By the end of the fifth week we knew we were in love with each other.  What we did not know was how we would deal with that reality.  The frenzied activity of the last week, preparing for our final showing, finished paintings, allowed us little time to pursue anything like serious plans.  On our final evening, we kissed each other for the first time, and the floodgates of tears were let loose.  How long we clung to each other I do not recall.

We cried with the joy of being close, cried with the fear of a final parting, cried with the agony of my life-long penchant for allowing others to make my life decisions for me. We parted suddenly, with empty and heavy hearts.  The next morning I could not find her anywhere.  I had to talk to her, to tell her I loved her and I feared she had left for good.

And then around noon we ran into each other.  Light and happiness flooded my whole being.  Quickly we rehearsed what we would be doing in the next weeks, where we could reach each other by telephone.  What was the best time and place to call.

We decided to go down to the church.  We had prayed there together many times during the summer, but this visit was special.  The church was cool and full of the presence of God.  Together we walked down the center aisle. Together we knelt at the altar railing and in silence held hands.  Before God, there in the church, we felt the love of God pour down upon us.  Surely God would not make us feel this way unless he blessed our love for each other.

It was the culmination of the many hours of the summer spent so closely together that we consciously or otherwise put ourselves in God’s presence before conversing or before carrying out a chore.  With her I met a God I had not met often, a God full of love for me, blessing my inner desire to be at peace with myself and with God while loving another human being with all my heart.

Our love must not conflict with God.  We prayed for God to let us know in both our hearts that if God did not bless our love, we would say our good-byes to each other then and there in the church and that would be the end of our romantic summer.  Our prayers were earnest and sincere.  We honestly opened our whole beings to that possibility, painful as it might have been.

But God smiled on us.  We felt our hearts expand, our spirits soared and in the joy of the moment we lifted our hands and hearts and praised God.  At that very moment a bright ray of sunshine burst through the stained glass window above us and flooded us in color.

She slipped away late in the afternoon, but there was hope in my heart.  Only a little, but it was there.

 

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

 

Shortly after returning to the monastery, I shared my deepest feeling with my mother.

Aug 20, 1967

Dear Mom,

I am sorry I did not write sooner.  I was going to write as soon as I got back from Banff, but then Danny said we would drive out to see you at the end of the week.  Now this plan fell through and I must write.  I know you are lonesome there, but no doubt the children keep you busy.

I guess you know I had a most beautiful summer in Banff.  I learned a great deal, Mom, and what I learned is going to change my life — at least I hope so.  What this change is, I still don’t know.  I got to know some things about myself that I never knew before.  I did a lot of things I have always wanted to do..  I found something that I have been looking for all my life.  Now that I have found it, can I let it go?  Can I pretend that I am the same?  I believe with all my heart that God’s hand has been with me this summer.  And if these beautiful gifts did not come from God, then I’m afraid I don’t  believe in the right God!  Don’t be worried about that, Mom.  I’ve come closer to understanding God too this summer.  I know I love him more.  There are going to be some painful decisions.  Again, I still don’t see clearly what directions those decision go in, but I’ll find out this year.  I need the constant support of your prayers and your understanding.  I know you pray for me.  Sometimes I wonder how much you understand me.  We have had so little time to get to really know each other.  As soon as I was half-grown, I left home.  Mom, this was NOT healthy in all ways.  Deep in your mother heart you know I lost something mighty important when I left the family circle.  In God’s plan young people are to reach maturity in the bosom of the family.  I have not had this opportunity, and I am less a man for it.  I honestly feel that I made up for some of that this summer.  I may be wrong, Mom, but I doubt it.   In saying all this, dearest Mother, I am NOT in any way criticizing the way you brought me up.  I wouldn’t want ANY other mother.  To me, you are simply the greatest and I love you immensely.  Maybe you don’t understand what I am trying to say to you.  I feel you do understand, otherwise I wouldn’t write this way.  You have deep insights into my heart, but we haven’t had the chance to share these things.  Maybe it had to be this way.  Anyway, I am searching for the meaning of my own life.  And I intend to live my own life.  If this will involve pain, I am sorry.  But why should I go on pretending to be someone else than I really am??

Mom, I am crying, crying painfully.  And you know what it is for a man to cry because you experienced our Dad’s sorrow.  I am not ashamed of my weeping any more than Dad ever was.  I beg you for the same strong heart you gave to him.   You are a strong woman otherwise Dad couldn’t have loved you the way he did.  I’m sure you understand more about a man’s heart than we ever talked about in words.  Mom, I am giving you my heart’s pain.  It is not an easy thing to do.  A man hates to admit his weakness.  He can only do it to someone he loves beyond all telling.  When he finds someone like that, his heart is no longer his own.  His life is no longer the same.  You KNOW that because you lived it.  I know this letter will give you great pain.  But it is mother pain, and you will not resent my having asked you to bear it.  I wouldn’t be truly your son if I did not come to you at this time.  Mom, don’t try to answer this letter.  Just tell me you understand.  All I want is your acceptance of me AS I AM.  Otherwise I can’t live.

With all my love,

Jimmy

P.S.  Please don’t conclude from this letter that I am sad, because I AM NOT.  I AM HAPPIER.

 

Among all the letters I wrote to my mother, the two letters I have included here in their entirety are the only ones she kept.  My sister found them among her mementos after she died.

Meanwhile, Ruth went back to settle her affairs in preparation for the year of study in Paris.  I went back to plan my next year of teaching and school responsibilities.  The dryness of spirit which I felt in the monastic garb now had an edge of color and excitement, because Ruth arranged her flight to Europe so that she and Theresa could spend  five days at the monastery.

How we ever arranged that so that no one suspected anything is still a mystery because deep in my heart I knew I could not successfully hide my feelings. The days sped all too quickly.  She helped me prepare my new art room.  She painted a picture for the sisters in the kitchen.  We spent time on the many walks around the grounds,  in the cemetery, and on the farm.

And we prayed together with the other monks in the chapel.  We decided we needed to tell Abbot Jerome of our summer and our love for each other.  Bless the man, he was not shocked or surprised.  He tried so hard to understand, but he was frank about his views.  He could not see our love as part of God’s plan for me even while he made no personal judgments about us.

One evening just before she was making ready to depart, Ruth had a heart-to-heart talk with Abbot Jerome.

“Let’s pray for him that he may find his way,” the Abbot told her.

She agreed. But she added, “But you must not pray selfishly.  I promise that I will not, so you must also.  I know you want him to stay in the monastery.  And I want him.  We must both pray that he find the will of God.”

I drove Ruth and Theresa to the airport in Saskatoon and watched the plane take off.  Would I ever see them again, I wondered.  What if we decided after months of separation that we had made a mistake?  We had lots of time ahead to think and pray.

The letters started coming and going regularly, crossing each other.  We never waited for responses, but wrote out of the depths of our hearts at least once a week.  What agony of spirit I went through again and again, back and forth.  There was no denying what I wanted to do.  Finding my wants coinciding with the will of God for me was a step of major proportions.  Every moment of contact with Ruth was joy.  Every moment of separation was sorrow.  If the spirit of Jesus Christ is to be found in peace and love and joy, then I had found it in company with her.  That message got clearer and clearer as the months went by.

As Christmas neared, Ruth decided she had had enough of Paris.  We were certain about our future together.   Nothing was more important than that.  She was coming home to North America and again stopping at the monastery on her way back to Washington.

Meanwhile I had gotten permission from the Abbot to discontinue priestly ministry to concentrate all my energies on teaching.  Rarely did I celebrate Mass or go out to help in parishes.  He apologized when he had to call on me because no one else was available.

After Ruth’s visit, the Abbot and I put together a petition to Rome for a dispensation from the priesthood and monastic vows.  The months now went swiftly, for I had made the decision to leave immediately after the school year was over.

I grew impatient about an answer from Rome.  Abbot Jerome finally called to find out where the case was.  We had filed the wrong papers or had not done all the paperwork.  With only a short time before it was time to leave, I told him that it was not that important for me to get the dispensation.  I was going whether Rome granted it or not.  I did promise that I would make another effort for a dispensation in the future.

I told no one at the monastery that I was intending to leave except Abbot Jerome and Father Vincent Morrison, the principal of St. Peter’s, who would have to plan a replacement for me as dean of discipline.  The abbot gave me sufficient money during the Easter holiday to seek employment in the Marysville/Everett area where Ruth lived.

I spent a week at the search and had to give it up.  When I returned to St. Peter’s I began to watch the newspapers for potential teaching positions in Alberta.  I selected one from Rocky Mountain House.  They were looking for a Social Studies teacher in the Junior/Senior High School.  I called to inquire.  I would send my resume, I told the chairman of the board.  He seemed confident that he would hire me.  I asked about housing and other details, including the kind of town it was.  Near the foothills of the Rockies, he said.  It sounded a lot like Banff to hear him talk, and that was exciting.  We would start our life in the same kind of atmosphere where we met.

Within less than a week I was offered the position.  I called Ruth in a state of some excitement, and she said I should accept.  And so I settled into the last months of teaching at St. Peter’s, knowing that my time was coming to an end.  I wondered how I would feel, whether I would discover after a while that I would fret about guilt.

As the school year wound down I began to pack my things, taking only what I would need, but planning also to recover my books and my desk at some future date.  The actual day of leaving was July 4, Independence Day in the country I would live in for the next few months before packing up for Alberta.

Before leaving, I typed out a passage from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, which expressed my feelings upon leaving.

How shall I go in peace and without sorrow?  Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.

Long were the days of pain I have spent within its wall, and long were the nights of aloneness;  and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?

Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache.

It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.

Nor is it a thought I leave behind me, but a heart made sweet with hunger and with thirst.

Yet I cannot tarry longer.

The sea that calls all things unto her calls me, and I must embark.

For to stay, though the hours burn in the night, is to freeze and crystallize and be bound in a mould.

Fain would I take with me all that is here.  But how shall I?

A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings.  Alone must it seek the ether.

And alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the sun.  

 

I gave it to Abbot Jerome to put on the bulletin board after I was well gone.  Whether or not he did this I never knew.  I suspect that he did not.

How did I feel when I doffed the Benedictine habit for the last time?  I folded it carefully, as I always had done.  The black serge still seemed somehow friendly, but I knew I would never put it on again.  That part of my life was over.  I did not even consider taking my black clerical suit and the white collar, and dressed in nondescript lay clothing.  Then I set my room in order so that whoever had the job of clearing it out after me would have no mess to clean up.  I scrubbed the toilet and bathroom floor for the last time.  Father Vincent drove me to the airport in Saskatoon.

I cannot describe the feeling of freedom and elation I experienced as soon as we left the monastery grounds, crossed the railroad tracks that led into Muenster and to Highway 5.  I felt so blessed by God that I could have shouted and danced.  I was no longer the unhappy Father Anselm.  Now I was Jimmy Gerwing again.  That feeling has never left me.  Not for one second have I ever felt any misgivings of any kind, nor any guilt about leaving the monastic and priestly life.

Ruth was waiting for me at the airport in Vancouver.  She drove us over the border and into Marysville.  In the next few days we got our marriage license, our rings, and prepared  for a brief honeymoon at the ocean beaches of the Olympic peninsula.

We were married in Seattle on July 11, ironically the Feast of St. Benedict.  Ruth’s dear friends, Hilton and Juanita Henry, were our witnesses before Judge James Dore in Seattle, and we celebrated with a dinner at the top of the Space Needle.

 

 

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

 

And so my adventure as a married man began.  The relationship between Theresa and me blossomed into a truly father-daughter bond.  The summer-long strike by Canadian postal workers made it easier for me to justify not contacting anyone back home about where I was or what I was doing. Much later I learned that some people had spread the rumor that I had run off with one of the Ursuline nuns from Bruno.

On one of the first Sundays we sought a Catholic place of worship, even though Ruth was a Baptist.  We decided to try a church in Everett.  It was a bitter disappointment for me.  There was no singing.  The priest announced that he would not preach during the summer to shorten the service.  I asked Ruth if she knew of a place where people worshipped joyfully.  She suggested her Baptist church in Marysville.  It proved a joy to be among these people, some of whom have remained life-long friends.  We went every Sunday.

The summer passed all too quickly.  Ruth continued teaching art until it was time for us to pack up and leave for Canada.  We needed a car powerful enough to pull a trailer full of household goods across the mountains and into Rocky Mountain House.  We picked an old 1962 white Oldsmobile.

Hilton Henry helped me do the packing.  Not once did my back give me any trouble.  We fitted all our belongings into the trailer like a giant 3-D jigsaw puzzle, and speculated that a fly would have suffocated had it become stuck in there.

We left on a rainy morning.  A moment of panic hit us when the tires slipped on the wet pavement up a steep hill just east of Marysville.  Would it make it to the top?   Was the transmission failing?   We crawled up the hill and had no further trouble.

We crossed the border into Canada with no difficulty.  North through Calgary, we turned left off Highway 2 at Red Deer toward Rocky Mountain House.  At  Sylvan Lake we plowed our way through a major hail storm.  Behind it the sky cleared.  We thought we should be seeing mountains on the horizon.  None in sight.  We sailed into Rocky around dinner time.

It was immediately evident that this was no Banff. The mountains were another 75 miles farther west.  Basically, Rocky was made up of one street of very ordinary businesses and not a great many homes.  Nor was there much of a choice of restaurants.  We ate at a tiny place and I called the chairman of the Board of Education to tell him that we had arrived.  Where was the house he had promised?  He laughed.  There is no such thing around here.  We do have a basement apartment to show you, he said.

It was a dismal and very unclean hole under a not-too-fine house.  We would never live here, we informed him.  There was another possibility, he said.  That was a six-plex only a year or so old. It was owned by an elderly gentleman who might have reservations about our dog and the rent would be more than we had anticipated spending.

We gave it a look and found it acceptable, only a block from the high school.  Ruth explained with all the charm she had that Rigel, her Scottie, was part of the family and  would cause no difficulty.  He relented.  I believe he lived to regret his kindness.   By allowing us to have a dog, he discovered he could not refuse others. Soon a German shepherd, a Springer spaniel and a huge Samoyed joined the households of the other tenants.

Curt Kroschel, one of the teachers already living there, helped us move our things up to the top floor.  He and his wife Rose soon became fast friends and have stayed so through the years.  Curt showed us his great strength by picking up my filing cabinet, almost fully loaded, and walking up the stairs with it.  We needed a bit more power with the piano.

There, in that little apartment, in that remote little town, I learned the ways of the real world.  When I discovered what my salary would be as a teacher in the public school system of Alberta, I thought we would be rich.  How little I knew about real life!  Nothing in my monastic or priestly education prepared me for what was ahead of me.

Where does all the money go? I asked Ruth over and over.  Once you add up the rent, car payments, car upkeep, licenses, clothing, utilities, groceries, pharmaceuticals, health care, insurance, gas, and a few incidentals each month, there was nothing left for entertainment, much less savings.

I don’t recall what I taught at the Junior-Senior High School, but Theresa was in one of my classes, Reading.  One of the things I taught them was to have the confidence to walk into the library, pick out any book, and in ten minutes give an account of what information would be found in the book.  They found the exercise most interesting.

Several months after we had settled down in Rocky Mountain House, two of the monks paid us a visit.  With nothing much else to do, we took them window shopping.   They appeared obviously uncomfortable and out of place.  Ruth reminded me, when I made a comment, that just a few months ago I was exactly like that myself.  How fast I changed.  At the time of the visit, it did not cross my mind that this might have been a rescue mission.  Nothing was said about that because they found me a very happy man.

One of the changes I took to most willingly was cooking.  I loved the kitchen, making meals with Ruth, baking things, experimenting with tastes. Ruth was as creative in the kitchen as she was with her paintbrush.  Long after we were married I looked back and thought that we had not had one repetition of a main meal through years of eating at home.

As we had done in Washington, we decided to try the Catholic church for Sunday worship.  One Sunday was enough to convince me never to set foot in that church again.  We made the rounds of every church in Rocky Mountain House until we found Peter Sluys at the Dutch Reformed Church just outside town.  His sermons were thoughtful, and the singing was great.  We settled into regular worship there.  Before long I became the director of the little choir of nine men.  They had fine voices.  All they needed was a leader to keep them together.

I had not made any contact with my family all through the summer and fall of 1968.  We decided to visit Saskatoon for Thanksgiving to test whether we would be accepted.  I did not know what to expect and prepared myself for possible rejection.

After school on Friday the three of us hopped into the car and headed east.  We arrived in Saskatoon some eight or nine hours later, taking the first motel we found on the west end.  Next morning I called Mom.

“Oh, Jimmy, were you allowed to do that?” was her first question.

“Before God or before the church?” I asked.  Before God, she wanted to know.

“Yes, Mom, before God I did the right thing.”  She said it would be all right to come, but cautioned me.  This was not a good time because Uncle Mattie, at whose home Mom was living, had just died the night before.  It would be a house in mourning.

When we walked in the door, Ruth opened her heart, she told me, to Mom.  She has every right to know who took her son away from the priesthood.  From the first moment of their seeing each other a magic occurred.  Those two women understood each other immediately, an understanding that deepened each year and lasted until that evening in Humboldt when we were present with Mom when she passed away.  Ruth often said they understood each other because both were Gemini.

With Mom’s acceptance came the acceptance of the rest of the family.  My sisters quickly shed their original distrust of Ruth as they got to know what a fantastic woman she was.  They also saw a happy brother for the first time in years.  They had gotten their Jimmy back.  For the first time in my memory I kissed and hugged my Mom and my sisters.  What a glorious feeling.  For the first time in my memory I told then I loved them, something we simply did not do before.  And what a great feeling to have them call me Jimmy again.  I was home again, family again.

Mom had a favorite uncle, Uncle Jim Britz.  In the early days of settlement his family had decided to remain in the USA.  He had a sweetheart whose family decided to come to Canada.  Uncle Jim married another woman.  They had a large family before she died.  His brother had moved to Saskatchewan and invited Jim to come up north.  His children would be most welcome to live with their uncle and aunt.  And that is how Uncle Jim ended up living very near his old girl friend, Rufina.  When her husband died, she and Uncle Jim got married.  They were both well into their sixties by that time.  Their obvious love for each other was beautiful to witness.

By the fall of 1968, Uncle Jim was long gone, and Aunt Rufina was living in a senior residence, St. Mary’s Villa, in Humboldt.  I wanted to see her and introduce Ruth to her.  She listened to our story, eyes aglow.  “Oh,” she said, “I think what you kids did was so wonderful.”  Her blessing meant a great deal to me, because she was someone who knew what enduring love means to couples.  We drove back to Rocky Mountain House on a high.

Somewhere around this time, though I can’t recall exactly when, the recurrent nightmare of being chased by an angry bull stopped.  These dreams simply faded away into dim memories.  Later I considered that the bull was an image of God, pursuing me relentlessly, allowing no escape.  Well, I had escaped and lived to tell of it.

Ruth expressed dislike of my continuing to correspond with Sister Mary Clare and Bonny, and I made the mistake of dropping my contact with them.

The teaching staff had a lot of parties.  I thoroughly enjoyed the camaraderie of peers.  Eating, dancing, playing cards, these simple pleasures which I so much enjoyed as a youngster in Lake Lenore became a part of my life again.

We knew from the beginning that we would not stay at Rocky.  Ruth began to scout the scene in Red Deer and found Joyce and Cliff Walsh.  They owned an art gallery and were open not only to taking Ruth’s paintings on consignment, but also to providing space for her to teach art.  Our association with Joyce lasted for almost 30 years even with all our moves.

I also made inquiries with the Public School Board and with Red Deer College.  The superintendent of schools was also on the Board of Governors of Red Deer College.  He informed me that the principals hired their own staffs, but that he would pass my name on to the most promising schools.  Some time during the school year I got a call from Alan Gibb, the principal at Eastview Junior High.  He was looking for an art teacher who could also teach Social Studies.  We hit it off and I was offered a job for the next school year.  We found a duplex that suited us and at the end of June we moved to Red Deer, which would be our home for the next twelve years.

In the meantime a miracle was occurring inside Ruth.  She became pregnant and we looked forward to an addition to our family.  The need for more money prompted me to inquire about a construction job a few blocks away from our new home.  Bill Welikoklad took me on.  My childhood experience with tools and work on construction jobs at the monastery paid off.  I wondered whether I would be able to handle the heavy work.  Following back surgery several years before I left the monastery I was warned not to lift anything over 25 pounds.  Yet, I had had no trouble lifting and carrying our household belongings on our moves.  I found myself able to sling full sheets of plywood up to the next floor.  When I did get a sore back, I visited a chiropractor, took a day off with pay to paint a better sign for Bill’s construction company, and never missed another day of work.

Teaching at the junior-high level wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.  Although I enjoyed the enthusiasm and even the craziness of young people in their early teens, I missed the intellectual stimulus of higher education.  I kept on the lookout for positions at Red Deer College.

In late November, our baby arrived, a little girl.  We named her Jennifer Jay.  She and Ruth spent the first week in the hospital due to complications.  Jennifer was a week old before I was able to hold her.  I really did not understand why the hospital would find me too unsanitary to hold my own child, but that was how they did their business.

I had been working on a crib, but it was not quite finished when they came home.  Jennifer slept in a dresser drawer for the first week or so.  I wanted very much to be close to her, so I got up in the night when she demanded feeding.  I gave her to her mother to nurse, and then changed her and let her go to sleep on my own chest before returning her to her bed.

Somehow, despite my early training and monastic indoctrination, I had the good sense to know that physical bonding is essential to a healthy relationship between a father and his children.  Somehow I realized that I ought to be as tired as her mother for those first months and years.  Child rearing is the job of both father and mother.  I embraced every part of it with all my heart.

 

 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

 

An opening appeared to teach history and philosophy at Red Deer College.  I submitted my application and sat back wondering whether my BA in philosophy would be enough.  At the job interview I met a man whose enthusiasm sparked much of the early years of Red Deer College, Gilbert Farthing.  I have always felt that he was a key to my being hired.  In the fall of 1970 I started an eleven-year association with the college.

As usual I  had scouted the Catholic churches for Sunday worship.  We met Father Werner Merx, pastor of St. Mary’s Church designed by the renowned Douglas Cardinal.  We struck up an immediate friendship.  His sermons were generally appropriate, even inspiring at times.  Under his guidance I submitted my application to Rome once more.  I sent in the same statement, but added that now I had left the monastery, was married and had a child, and that I had no intention of returning to the monastic or priestly life.  In a matter of months I received a complete dispensation from all the obligations of the priesthood and monastic vows.

Father Merx became a regular at our table.  He would bring his French horn and play duets with Theresa at the piano.  He baptized Jennifer and celebrated Theresa’s wedding.  He resolved our marriage according to the Catholic tradition.  I became chairman of the pastoral council.  I truly enjoyed our association with this wonderful priest.

In the summer of 1971 we took an extended holiday of seven weeks to visit Europe.  Most of the time we visited with Ruth’s relatives in England.  We drove up to Edinburgh, stopping at bed and breakfast places without making reservations ahead of time.

I have many wonderful memories of that summer.  In England we visited many of the touristy places as well as driving around the country.  Ruth’s cousin, A V Hirst, a gentleman farmer, showed me the difference in the farming methods of the midlands as compared with Saskatchewan.

As awe-inspiring as the great Gothic churches like Yorkminster were, I felt more comfortable in the warmth of Durham cathedral.  Spending time in London brought us to the London Tower, where Ann Boleyn and Thomas More and other historical figures underwent execution.  Coventry cathedral’s ruins left standing beside the stunning modern replacement was a reminder of the horrors of total warfare.  I stood at the spot of the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury.  We spent time wandering on the site of Bury St. Edmund’s ruins.  On the high altar of that church the leaders of the revolt against King John swore an oath that they would force the king to sign the Magna Carta. We did a great many brass rubbings in the churches in that area as well.

We made a ten-day excursion to the continent, spending time in Paris, visiting the Louvre and other art galleries.  One evening Ruth and I took in some of the night life of Paris, ending at the Lido.  What a magnificent show!  A day in Versailles, with the oppressive presence of Louis XIV and Napoleon lurking in almost every corner, brought us into the Hall of Mirrors, the place where the treaty ending the Great European War was signed amid great drama.  We did a whirlwind tour of Germany, to Wolfsburg, where we met Father Merx and his brother Paul, who was one of the managers of the Volkswagen plant there.  That was very near the East German border where Communist guards fired into a crowd from one of the many towers the day following our visit.

Back in Alberta we were amazed at the size of the Pontiac we had been driving, and decided that our next car would be a smaller one.  So many of the experiences of Europe enriched my history lectures.

Father Merx had been the priest at St. Mary’s when Doug Cardinal designed it.  He had been promised by his Oblate order superiors that he could retire at St. Mary’s.  He was already an elderly man when a new superior informed him that he was to be sent to the northern city of Grand Prairie.  He wept bitter tears at our home as we tried to console him that we would attempt to convince his superiors to rescind the assignment.

When the parish presented its objections, we were informed that we should mind our own business and let the priests do theirs.  Father Merx made a vow of obedience and that settled it.  I felt there was absolutely no compassion in the way he or the parish had been treated.

When the time came for him to move, Ruth and I helped him pack his few belongings, and drove to Grand Prairie with him.  We stayed with him for the first few days until he was oriented and felt at home.  He worked there until he died.

He was followed at St. Mary’s by a very different man, a gruff individual, whose weekly sermons infuriated me with their inanity.  He bemoaned the fact that the church had replaced the medals of Mary and the saints with symbols of peace, and the rosary with bible reading.  While wearing his microphone, he scolded the altar boys for everyone to hear.   In disgust, I sought other places to worship, and found none to my liking in Red Deer.

One of the more interesting characters at Red Deer College was an English professor, Charlie Campbell.  Ruth was teaching art there and usually brought Jennifer with her.  Charlie used to intercept them, and walk up and down the hallways with Jennifer on his shoulders.  She loved it.  We used to say that she teethed on the door knobs of Red Deer College.

In the art studio, the art instructors had a life-size skeleton for anatomical studies.  Students had named it Charlie.   The first time Jennifer saw the skeleton, she stood there staring at it.  One of the students came by.  “So you like old Charlie, do you?” he asked her.  Jennifer stood there horrified.  It took Ruth some time to explain that this was not her beloved Charlie Campbell.

Red Deer was home to us for twelve years.  They were years of social, financial, and emotional growth.  I found the world of education too narrow and expanded my interests into the community.  Community service was expected of employees of the college.  If I was a workaholic at St. Peter’s, I became an even more active one in Red Deer.

Prime Minister Trudeau was pushing bi-lingualism and bi-culturalism as essential to Canadian identity.  In the West we tended to disagree.  Our experience in Western Canada was decidedly multi-lingual and multi-cultural.  I became part of a Canada-wide series of discussions among College educators from across the country in Canadian Cultural Identity seminars.  We met for years in different provinces coast to coast.

I also headed a federally funded study of ethnic craftspeople in Alberta, organizing a team to survey the finest examples of ethnic crafts, judging the quality of their work, where they got their supplies, photographing their best work, and sending the results on to the federal government.  Similar studies were done in all four western provinces.  We came to the conclusion that families from all over the world had continued to pass on their traditions in arts, crafts, cuisine, music, and dress, but they were doing so within the Canadian context, thus enriching the entire community in which they lived.

Meanwhile Ruth and I had become active in the Red Deer International Folk Festival Society, of which I ultimately became president.  Each summer around Canada Day we put on week-long shows of arts, crafts, cuisine, dances, costumes, music.  We were able to use the results of the federal surveys in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and brought the very best artists to Red Deer one summer to put on what was termed the best ethnic craft show ever produced in western Canada.  Don Herron (Charlie Farquharson) was our special guest.  He gave me a draft of Charlie’s version of the bible (Old Charlie’s Testament) and asked me if I thought it would be considered blasphemous.  I reviewed it and told him I thought it would go over well with anyone who had a sense of humor, and not to worry about anyone else.

During this time Alberta was putting major funds into cultural affairs, funding an untold number of community projects all over the province.  We got involved at the provincial level.  Minister of Culture Horst Schmidt became something of a personal friend.

We had dreamt of owning our own home, and the opportunity came about in a most peculiar way.  While house-hunting, Ruth met Norman and Mary Bowles.  They owned an unusual house on Ross Street but could no longer keep it up.  At first glance it looked like a nightmare, but Ruth saw the potential.  It would need thousands of dollars of renovation.  We made a deal that can only be described as fictional if it weren’t so true.  We wanted Norman to sell us the house on condition that he carry the mortgage and that we would make no payments for the first year, putting all the money into renovations.  His lawyer thought it absurd and cautioned him against making such an arrangement.  Mary, who was near her death, wanted us to have the house.  We got it on our terms.

We spent several years doing almost all of the renovations ourselves and made it a real showpiece.  Jennifer grew up in that house and in that yard, discovering the delights of self-entertainment as well as beginning her study of piano and flute.  Theresa grew up into a very fine young lady.  Ruth produced a huge number of great paintings. I carved many good wood sculptures in the garage, which I converted to a sculpture studio.

I became involved in leadership roles in the faculty association of Red Deer College, chairing many committees, becoming vice-president of the faculty association, working on the negotiation committee, aiding in dispute resolutions, chairing the Professional Standards Committee, and being voted the faculty representative to the Board of Governors.  I lectured regularly with others on  interdisciplinary studies for the community, speaking mostly on the religious perspectives of the issues.  I chaired a standing committee on program development, ending up coordinating a new program for teachers’ aides.

I decided also to expand my educational world and worked my way through a Masters degree program in Education from the University of Alberta.  The university graciously waived residency requirements in my regard, so I never had to take a year off.

My taste for public life led me into the world of politics.  Despite being a bearded, obviously left-leaning college educator, I showed up very well in a nomination convention of the Conservative party.

My success had little to do with bringing  new members into the convention to vote for me.  I changed a lot of minds with my presentation.  A group of dancers from the Folk Festival Society had asked how they could help me.  They could kick off my speech with a dance, I told them.  They did an eye-popping rendition of the can-can.  Having caught the attention of the convention, I delivered my address.

I spoke of leadership in a world in “future shock.”  That was the buzz word of the day.   Who can we trust to provide leadership?  Politicians?  Scientists? Media? Philosophers? Educators? Religious leaders?  And who will we trust to give us the truth?  I spoke of  the need to make informed decisions in choosing the person to represent Red Deer.  At the end I was greeted with booming applause.  The others had stirred only polite response.

When the balloting took place the first casualty was the party favorite.  The second ballot dropped the popular school board chairperson.  I was a close third to a prominent alderman and a wealthy businessman.   Party personnel urged me to “work the floor” but I did not know how to do this.  I lost on a nail-biting third ballot.  Later I thought that had I made sure that all those who purchased party membership from me actually had attended the convention, things might have been quite different.  Both of the other two men eventually went on to represent Red Deer in the provincial government.

The winner asked me to help in his campaign.  I told him I was willing to write position papers for him.  He accepted that.  At one of the first public meetings he was asked to speak up on an issue about which he knew nothing, but he remembered that I had provided him something on the topic.  He hauled it out and began to read it.  To his horror, he realized, too late, that he was putting forth a very liberal proposal.  Red-faced, he stopped mid-sentence, and threw up his hands.  Showing up well on the political scene led to my appointment to the board of the Red Deer Exhibition Association, which was entering the initial phase of a major move to the south side of the city.  No stipend was connected to this position.

When the house next door to ours came up for sale, we decided to buy it, renovate it and turn it into housing for college students.  I began looking at the next two houses as well, both of which were in something less than ideal state.  I thought that some day a developer would come along to purchase the four lots for a major housing project.

Through the years both Ruth and I had also become heavily involved in community theatre, doing the make-up for numerous shows and painting scenery for countless others.

As I look back at my work in Red Deer, I recognize that good things happened to us there.  Theresa fell in love and married, going on to a career as a legal stenographer.  She helped her husband through law school.  Jennifer grew into a lovely pre-teen.  Ruth assumed leadership roles in many community celebrations, finally chairing the 75^th anniversary celebrations for the city of Red Deer.  We were happy to think that we were making a valuable contribution to our community.

One of my treasured mementos of my time in Alberta came unexpectedly.  Cal Dupree, a regular participant at Alberta Cultural Heritage Council meetings, and a leader of the First Nations people in southern Alberta, presented me with an eagle coup feather.  This is traditionally given to members of various Plains Indian tribes for a “highly successful stroke” or for someone who has benefited the whole tribe through unselfish work.  In presenting the coup feather to me he wrote, “Thank you, Jim, for your work with the Alberta Cultural Heritage Council and for the help you have given me.  I am grateful.  May the Great Spirit continue to brighten your path daily.”

I grew restless at Red Deer College.  Although I was attracted to administration, the institution had become so extremely top-heavy with support staff and levels of administration that non-teaching employees outnumbered the teaching faculty.

My taste for politics scared me.  Red Deer was booming with companies providing oil well servicing.  Just before the convention to nominate the Conservative runner, one of my close friends in the oil patch informed me that they had spread rumors about one of the other candidates.  “You don’t know anything about this if you are ever asked.  But we think you should know.”  I wondered how I would find the courage to refuse payback if I ever did get into the legislature.

Ruth kept saying that she never really liked the prairies, especially the cold winters and the distance from the sea.  The west coast where she grew up was calling to her.  We started making inquiries for employment opportunities in Victoria.  We met several times with Bishop Remi DeRoo, a man who had a reputation for his outspoken views on social justice issues.

Most summers we holidayed in Washington State or on Vancouver Island.  We even visited Sitka, Alaska, the home of Ruth’s grandfather, Bernard Hirst, who was a leading businessman there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  On our first visit, Ruth discovered something she had no inkling of before.  Her grandfather had married a Tlingit woman.  That made Ruth one quarter Tlingit, and allowed her to enroll in the 13^th region as a member of her people in Alaska.

 

 

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

 

In our conversations with Remi DeRoo, we felt we had assurance that there would be work for us in Victoria.  He had two projects, either one of which I would be suitable for.  One was the administration of the diocese.  His administrator was ready to retire in a year or so, and he would be happy to train me.  The other was a housing project in Gordon Head near the University of Victoria on land that had been held by the diocese for a long time.  It was being used for community gardening.

An architect had drawn up plans for a housing complex to be used by single-parent students who could not secure other housing.  The low rental project was to be made into a non-denominational intentional Christian community with residents committed to helping each other with laundry, baby-sitting, shopping, and other chores so that they could get on with their studies without having to worry about paying for such services.  The plan caught my attention because I had some dreams of that sort coming out of the experience of teaching adults at Red Deer College and knew something of the fears preventing single women from getting on with additional education once they had children..

So I resigned my post at Red Deer College and made plans to move the family to Victoria. We turned our properties over to an agent to care for until he could sell them.   About two weeks before leaving Alberta we had a car accident.  We were rear-ended violently.  We did our packing in pain, trying desperately to have our car repaired before moving day.  Our insurance company proved very unhelpful when they realized we were moving out of the province.  The police refused to charge the driver of the vehicle that hit us, since he was a worn-out old man who had admitted that he was not paying attention to his driving.

The move to Victoria was costly. We had to drive a rental vehicle, and we were still suffering from severely sore necks and backs from the effects of whip-lash.

Then we got the bad news when we arrived in Victoria.  There was no job waiting for me and no house to move into.  The administrator had second thoughts about retiring.  The Gordon Head project was on indefinite hold. DeRoo was not helpful, saying that he had made no promises.  He was right, of course.  I had interpreted his dreams as expressions of concrete plans.  Desperate for work, I found that the principal of St. Andrew’s School was looking for a teacher.  At a salary less than half of a living wage, I took the job, feeling sure that we would survive and find something else soon.  After all, we had two great properties in Red Deer on the market and once they sold we would be comfortable again.  With my qualifications and experience, I was sure I could find other work.

The car finally arrived and leaked like a sieve and the frame was still bent out of shape.  Again we struggled with the insurance company to redo the work on the car.  We had to resort to a lawyer to get this done.

This was a very difficult time for Jennifer.  She could not understand why we had to walk the mile or more to school every day, lugging our books back and forth.  Every morning the same argument took place.  I did not budge, no matter what the weather.  Then she had to wait for me to finish my work before returning home.  I did not want her to know that we simply could not afford the gas, that my wages were not making a living for us.  She had no experience of economic hardship to fall back on.

I was teaching grade eight to ten math and science, neither one of which was in my field of training.  But I found I could manage the classroom, and came to like the kids at that level even though my experience had been at the college level for the last eleven years.

Ruth had a private meeting with DeRoo demanding some explanation,  but he reminded her that it was our own doing to come to Victoria and he could not help us further.  Jobs for Ruth were not easy to find and the art community did not open to Ruth’s work.  We found Victoria indeed very provincial.

At work, I tried to get the school board to look at the salaries they were offering, suggesting that they should show me how to work out a budget for a family of three and ask themselves if what they were paying their teachers could possibly be justified..  They would not hear of it.  And when they thought I was attempting to speak for all the teachers, they threatened that any move on my part to do collective bargaining would mean my job was at an end.  Then I would have no salary at all, they reminded me.

Now, this was indeed interesting.  Here we were in Victoria, in a diocese whose bishop prided himself on social justice, working for a church whose teachings on social justice were uncompromisingly in favor of the worker and the powerless, were being paid dismally bad wages and then threatened if we tried to do anything constructive about it.

Given my placement on the salary grid, the public school boards told me they could hire two young teachers for what they would have to pay me.  Community colleges had no openings in history or education.  As a generalist, I did not fit neatly into any one department.  I did not even consider looking for any employment other than teaching.

Worse than that, the economy of Alberta was taking a down-turn and our houses were not attracting buyers.  Those who were overseeing the rent of our places began to cheat us out of rent and later we found that they had somehow lost all the furniture and furnishings we had placed in the college rental house.

One day at the end of the classes, the principal, Don Greene, called a quick meeting and informed us that he had been summarily removed from his job, that he had only a few hours to clear all his personal effects from his office.  Although I was dimly aware that there were some disagreements between Greene and the board chairman, he had been there quite a number of years, and had a good reputation among staff and parents.  He asked us to come to school next day as if nothing had happened and that he wanted no disruption of any kind.

Over the next while, I assisted in the administration of the school while they sought a new principal.  And I applied for the job as well, believing my Masters Degree in Education, which involved administrative courses, would stand me in good stead.  I was not even interviewed.  They hired an elderly nun, Sister Carmelita.  Within a few days of moving into her office she called me in.  “I want absolutely nothing to do with the middle school children (grades eight to ten).  You take care of them.”

In effect, I became the vice-principal (but not in name) and disciplinarian for that section of the school.  They offered no extra pay, and at first no time off teaching to take care of new duties.

I wrote the following into my journaling:  This has been a depressing two years personally.  Over and over again in my work I have been overlooked by those who are in power for people considerably (in my opinion) less capable than I am. 

I have not been given honest answers to my inquiries.  To say that I am too philosophical is to overlook that I am also practical.  I did the job of holding the school together when it could have been torn apart just as easily.  I think others also deserve some of the credit, but I was the centre of it.  Board members told me they liked what was being done, said on many occasions that the school atmosphere had improved, that there were fewer complaints from parents, that I taught them much about budgeting.  But somehow it was not good enough.

I know that one of the key decision makers was the ex-superintendent, who had his mind made up before he ever listened (did not listen at all) to me.  I met him later at a parish discussion and he showed himself superficial and easily influenced.  To let someone hold power who does not know the situation is to abdicate responsibility.  The chairperson of the personnel committee didn’t help either.  She seems not to grasp educational principles, even to fear them.  So she tends toward those who do not threaten with fresh ideas or a different point of view.

As it happens it is also obvious that they were looking for nuns.  They demand less pay since they have no need to receive a living wage.  They add to the prestige of the school, at least in name, for those looking for a return to the old days.  This is fine if the nuns are competent.  What if they are not?  Then the structure is even more weakened because they are harder to get rid of.

What the year has done to me is to drain much of my sense of well-being away, much of my pride in my ability and worth, much of my joy in being myself.  Financially, we were worse off than we had ever been.

The government of Alberta expressed interest in our properties in Red Deer.  Ideally located for offices and counseling services near the Alberta School Hospital, they were willing to meet our terms.  But a fearful old neighbor got wind of it, and marshaled the nearby residents to oppose the sale.  They succeeded in blocking it.

Meanwhile, talk was active around Victoria  to form a new high school.  The Sisters of St. Ann and the Christian Brothers had closed their schools in the nineteen seventies.  There was a lot of support around the idea of a coeducational Catholic high school.  I got on the committee to do the planning.

Long ago, while studying educational administration at St. John’s in Collegeville, Minn., I had written a paper in which I worked out what I would do if I were the principal of a Catholic High School.  I returned to my ideas and began to dream.

Eventually we found a place to begin in the old Sacred Heart Elementary School on McKenzie Avenue.  We started in the fall of 1983 with 127 students in grades eight to eleven, with plans to add grade twelve the next year.  Sister Pat Dickenson was named principal.  We had no gym, no playground, and just a few very simple computers.

It soon became evident that for all her good will, Sister Pat was not cut out for the job she had undertaken.  I became a thorn in her side, not out of any other motivation than that there were things that needed doing if we were to survive.  She fought back, and again I found myself on the verge of being fired.  She resigned within a few months and the search was on for a new principal.  The board found that the married pastor of the Ukrainian Catholic church, Fr. Steve Wojcichowsky, was seeking part-time work and was interested.  They hired him, and then sought a second-in-command to do the day-do-day running of the school.  I thought I should be the one, but that was not to be either.

I bit my lip and kept working and helping wherever I could.  Father Steve and I hit it off well.  Then, late in August of 1984 I got a call from the board chairman.  The person who was to do the actual administration had second thoughts and had resigned, having done virtually nothing during the summer in preparation for the new school year.  Would I be interested?  I agreed without hesitation.

With only a few days before school was to open, I discovered that we would have an almost entirely new staff of teachers, most of whom had no teaching experience, and who were unavailable for consultation though I was told what their primary teaching skills would be.  Both PE teachers were handsome young men.  No schedule of any kind had been prepared.  The list of students was relatively settled at slightly less than 160.  The building was really too small for that number.

Given the limited time and physical space, the task seemed daunting.  Father Steve was needed over  the weekend in his church, so I worked alone.  When the first day of school arrived I was ready with a tentative schedule, but it depended on some extremely generous teachers.  A few would have to come early, have the middle of the day off, and return to work late.  We crammed the core subjects into the middle of the day.  Half the students came early and left early, the rest came late and stayed late.  My work day started well before eight and ended near six o’clock.  Father Steve and I shared a very small office.

We made it work, but plans were already underway to build.  The prospects for additional students were excellent.

By this time DeRoo had hired Les Bullen as his educational consultant.  Les and I spent an enormous amount of time planning, speaking to anyone who would listen, and became instrumental in forming a building plan.  The architects had come to us with a conventional plan, but we convinced them to adopt our drawings to make the library the center, with classrooms, offices and gymnasium around it.

When the contract was ready we encountered several problems.  The committee had given diocesan financial leaders some suggestions on funding the project.  St. Andrew’s Cathedral under Msgr. Phil Hanley agreed to fund half.  If the dioceses took on a quarter or the costs and all the parishes around Victoria took the other quarter, then we could go ahead.  We had no idea that the “for example, if the costs were…” would be taken as an actual budget.  The diocese considered it could not come up with enough money to begin the project.  However, a project manager with a creative solution made himself known.  He could “save” a lot of money through an unconventional system.  His plan was accepted, but the architects withdrew their support.  We found another firm which would supervise the building.

The project manager’s cost cutting meant that he would hire in the open market.  Much of the work went to non-union builders.  A great ruckus was created over this when DeRoo was vilified in the local media as hypocritical, since he posed as a social justice theorist but would allow the school to hire “cheap” labor.  (Funny, they said nothing about the poor wages of teachers!)   In fact, several union companies also worked on the job.  We survived the series of crises, and the building proceeded apace even while the school year continued.  The students and the staff were terrific in their support, making great sacrifices so that St. Andrew’s High School would survive.

Although we had the usual mix of good and indifferent teachers, one of the outstanding hires was Mary Kennedy.  She anchored the fine arts with a choral program that produced some standout graduates, notably Ken Lavigne.  Another program that became outstanding materialized through hiring a series of exceptional rowing coaches.  We took the city championship away from the big schools.  Several graduates of St. Andrew’s were selected on national rowing teams and won Olympic medals for Canada.

The student population grew.  Additional government funding brought on a feeling that we would not only survive but would flourish.  Steve and I continued to work well together.

Then one day two teachers asked Steve and me for a talk.  They informed us that they were in the process of forming a union to bargain for better wages and better working conditions.  I was immediately excited.  This was good news to me.  Father Steve was also supportive.  We offered whatever assistance they would need.

No, they informed us, you do not understand.  They were forming a union under the BC Labor Code.  Any attempt on our part to become in any way involved with this would result in actions by all the labor organizations of Victoria.  We were stunned.  Les Bullen was extremely upset.  He did not oppose a union, but he was opposed to the divisive philosophy underlying the BC Labor Code.  We would have liked to see something with a focus based on the social teachings of the Catholic Church.

A new Code of Canon Law had been adopted by the Catholic Church in 1983.  For the first time in history, the code contained a section on the rights and duties of lay people employed by the church.  Canon 231 says in part “lay persons have the right to decent remuneration appropriate to their condition so that they are able to provide decently for their own needs and those of their family.  They also have a right for their social provision, social security, and health benefits to be duly provided.”  A golden opportunity lay before us to implement justice in the work place for lay teachers in Catholic schools.

It was not that easy.  Relations between the administration of the school and the staff took on a tone which we had successfully avoided before.  Now it was confrontation at every turn.  We really tried to be supportive, but sometimes it was simply impossible.

And yet, the school survived.  Two of the board members had extensive experience with government collective bargaining and were prepared to begin the process of coming to an agreement with the teaching staff.  The budget for the next year would be able to manage a reasonable wage improvement.  I informed both sides that I would be happy to assist with whatever administrative information was available.  I met regularly with the board team, but the staff never asked me for anything.  It was strictly according to the labor code.  I was enemy simply because I was an administrator.

The bargaining was difficult.  The staff was getting nowhere.  Finally I decided to intervene.  I found a way to convince both sides to back away from confrontation and to adopt a more cooperative way to break the impasse over the salary grid.  I met with each side.  I pointed out to the board that they had the money to give the faculty a reasonable salary increase, and that changes they requested to working conditions would cost nothing.  I showed the faculty representatives that their tactics were counterproductive, and suggested a different approach.  I was relieved and pleased when the meeting resumed in a more fruitful direction, and negotiations went smoothly to a resolution within a few more meetings.

One of our first chaplains was Father John Mott.  John Mott had problems and we all knew about that.  The students loved him, likely because he did not let his problems take away his natural goodness of heart and his hopeful manner.  They understood that when he did not show up it was not because he did not care.  He was a very accomplished organist.  He died suddenly, not even 60 years old.  At his funeral the students filed past his coffin and lovingly paused and touched it as they went by.

When Father Steve resigned, I felt this was the right time for me to become principal.  I had for all practical purposes been administering the school for about four years, since Steve was part-time and did not fully involve himself with all the details of the working of the school.  I had also attended several summer schools for principals.  I felt secure.

Finally, I was named the principal.  Not long afterwards Remi DeRoo met with Ruth and told her that now her Jim was where he belonged.

Every year, even before I became principal, I visited every parish that was in any way paying anything for St. Andrew’s and spoke at every Mass to report on the high school.  For the cathedral that meant six masses and for some other parishes it was three.  The pastors always gave me the time for the homily, and I found ways to weave my report on the school into the themes of the readings of the day.   After one of my “sermons” at St. Patrick’s, a woman stopped me after mass and asked me if I remembered Bishop Fulton Sheen.  I had often listened to him on the radio and watched him on TV.  I told her so and told her how much I liked the way he taught.  Then she said, “You, sir, are in that same class.”

Meanwhile, board membership changed, and the new board chairman conceived his own vision for the school.  He had plans to put St. Andrew’s on the map.  “Just trust me,” he insisted.  “I am not at liberty to let you in on my plans at this time.”  It became plain after some time that he dreamed of making St. Andrew’s a basketball power by hiring a professional basketball player.

What distressed me most was the fact that the chairman of the board ended up paying the basketball coach a higher salary than anyone else at the school, including me.  I believe none of this ever went to the full board for a decision.  The new coach never did a day of teaching in the classroom, and never attracted one student to St. Andrew’s who would not have come anyway.  At the same time our teachers could have used the money, or it could have been put to other places on the budget where we were scrimping.  I resented that but did not feel free to reveal what was going on.

Much later, after Remi DeRoo had resigned as bishop, an interesting financial revelation hit the presses.  The diocese of Victoria, which had from the beginning struggled over its financial woes, had become embroiled in a scheme that resulted in enormous debts to American bankers through ill-advised investments in property in Seattle-Tacoma.  Whatever the plan was, it did not work out, and the diocese of Victoria wound up in even more serious financial distress.

The chairman of the board, believing that I did not share his dream for the school, did what he could to make my life as principal difficult.  Almost daily I would find him lying in wait in my office, constantly interfering with the day-to-day operations of the school, and wasting my energy with lists of tasks he wanted done, most of which were entirely irrelevant to the functioning of the school.  It became clear that my position as principal had become untenable.  I could not expect DeRoo to intervene.  Nor was his new superintendent helpful.  Not being inclined to fight in what could have become a messy situation, I made the best deal I could and took up a different assignment within the school and prepared to look for another job.

My home parish of Holy Cross lost its pastor with the unexpected death of Father Leo Robert, another outstanding priest.  He died of stomach cancer, having suffered horribly before he finally saw a doctor.  I have often thought that had he been a married man, his wife would never have allowed him to suffer so much and would have intervened long before that time and perhaps he would have lived a lot longer.

With the growing shortage of priests our parish now had to celebrate Sunday liturgies in the absence of a priest.  I volunteered to take a turn at doing the reflections on the readings.

I had continued to speak at Sunday liturgies in parishes even after I was no longer principal because the new principal was not prepared to do the visits I had committed myself to.  I was delighted when the parish liturgical committee accepted my offer to preach.

I spent the week preparing what I would say.  On Saturday afternoon I got a call from the chairman of the liturgy committee.  “You are not allowed to preach tomorrow,” he informed me.  He was not prepared to say more, but I pressed.  “Who made that decision?” I wanted to know.  It was not the committee.  It came from “higher up.”

I asked, “How high up?”  He told me it came “from the top.”  So here I was.  I was never challenged for all the years of speaking at the Sunday masses during the homily time and now I was banned.  I was told that “former priests” were not supposed to be involved in any way in church leadership.  I had done everything according to the rules.  I had gotten a full dispensation from all the obligations of my religious and priestly vows from Rome.  I wondered why I had bothered, since I was not being treated like a regular member of the congregation.  The immense gulf between the theory and practice of justice by church administrators struck me again like a ton of bricks. Not one member of the parish protested the decision to bar me from preaching.  That is typically the “Catholic” way.  Do not question the priests.  My painful frustration was my own to deal with.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER TWENTY

 

As I looked back years later on my ten years with St. Andrew’s, I recognize the many good things Victoria gave us.  However, the bitterness of the last two years weighed heavily upon me. I sought a way out.

It came as a surprise, as so many turns in life come.  I had organized a retreat for students and hired a young man from Sumner, Washington, who had impressed us at youth gatherings.  He worked as a youth minister in the Seattle archdiocese.  We spent hours together in the late evenings when things quieted down.  He remarked that Washington offered much greater scope for me than I would ever find again in Victoria.  Somewhat jokingly I told him that if he could find a place for me, I would accept.

Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen had gained a great deal of world-wide respect as well as notoriety for his strong social stand on peace and justice, having also survived an attempted ousting by the Vatican.  Not long after the retreat I got a call.  There was a position opening in a small parish in Bellingham, whose pastor had been a Benedictine monk, Steve Sallis.

Ruth and I decided to check it out.  We took an early ferry across in time to attend Sunday Mass at Sacred Heart Church.  We liked what we saw.  I talked to Steve.  Yes, he had an opening, and interviewed me on the spot.  Within weeks I had a job offer.  That was in 1991.

Bellingham and Sacred Heart Church turned out to be the very best of what Roman Catholicism can be, and then also everything that is the worst.  Everything I had ever learned about my faith gradually began to make sense.  Members of the parish led me graciously but firmly into the heart of my religion.    At Sacred Heart I had the most wonderful circumstance of six years of working inside the church in an atmosphere of complete acceptance of all the gifts I had to offer.

I was able to use my education and my previous experience toward an integrated and coherent ministry.  Although my Benedictine heritage had impressed upon me the importance of the liturgy in spiritual formation, I did not understand its real significance until I was brought deeply into the theory and practice and finally the mystery of the Rite of the Christian Initiation of Adults (the RCIA).  I had observed a bit of it in Victoria, but discovered that they, like the vast majority of North American parishes, were not even scratching the surface of its power.  I witnessed and became part of the transformative potential of the Catholic liturgy, not so much in converting people to the Catholic religion as in enlivening and empowering the people in the pews with the Living Spirit.

There is an old Latin saying in the Church:  Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. This means that we develop our relationship with God through what we hear and say in the official prayers of the church, and that in turn tells us how to live a life of faith in harmony with the will of God.  That has nothing to do with accepting official doctrine.  Salvation by faith is not the same as accepting a creedal statement.  This distinction became clearer and clearer as the years in Bellingham progressed.

I gloried in the vision of the Archdiocese of Seattle in formulating its lay employee policies. I became involved for two years in a complete overhaul of the policy manual, which had been put together haphazardly through many years by different committees.  After thorough committee discussion of every provision, I was instrumental in putting it all into simple, straightforward and coherent language.  Finally a computer specialist formatted the whole document.  It incorporated the best of the last hundred years of Catholic social teachings, and the latest provisions of Canon Law as to the rights and duties of the laity within the church.

I joined the ecumenical forces of the city of Bellingham in the cooperative efforts of the religious education coordinators of six Christian churches to produce weeklong summer camps for children to “live in Biblical times.” Our group met almost weekly, and we became a spiritual support group for each other.  Before long I was also writing a regular column on Catholic issues for the Bellingham Herald.

All three Bellingham funeral homes began to call on me regularly to provide funeral services for people who had no religious affiliation or who had been alienated for one reason or another from formal religion.

When Catholic people lay dying at the hospital in the middle of the night and could not reach a priest because they had turned off their phones, the sisters called on me.

On one such occasion I saw the power that comes from the laying on of hands and the anointing with oil.  Although I had brought the emergency small vial of oil, I asked the sister in charge to bring the hospital’s larger supply.  I was attending a young man with serious trauma from a fall.  I followed the ritual, but elaborated on some of the prayers.  When it came to anointing, I poured oil into my hands, rubbed my hands together till the oil was warm, and began to massage it into the head and face and hands of the young man, and asked Sister to do the same.  She in turn invited the whole family to participate.  We kept anointing his face, his hands and arms and his feet and legs.  Then Sister broke into beautiful spontaneous prayer, asking for healing of body, mind, spirit, not only for the young man but for the family.

Time seemed to stand still.  The warmth of the touching, the sincerity of the prayers, brought powerful light and comfort into the room.  We all felt it.  After the session was over, Sister and I discussed what we had done, and agreed that a true sacramental event had taken place.  The man died that day, but I know that the family felt a peace they would not have felt without the anointing and their own part in it.

Theologians might be tempted to fall back on their sacramental theology of sacred oil to explain the power behind the sacrament, but I believe the human touch was far more significant in healing than any magical explanation of blessed oil and priestly ministry with the touch of their thumbs.  All God’s people can enter into such mystical and mysterious experiences.

In the fall of 1992, I was blessed with the experience of being at my mother’s death in Humboldt.  She had been in the hospital for several months, and woke up just moments before dying.  She died peacefully with a look of recognition and excitement on her face as I was singing the last line of St. Francis’s peace prayer, “in dying we are born to eternal life.”  Abbot Jerome was there with us, offering the prayers for the dying.

Her funeral in Lake Lenore a few days later brought together many family and community members to celebrate the life of this unassuming, simple woman, whose faith inspired all who knew her.  Her impact went well beyond her own family.

Back home in Bellingham, as the Coordinator of Religious Education in the parish, I worked in all sacramental preparation except marriage (which the priests kept to themselves), and all the religious education of youngsters and adults.  Every year I gave 36 sessions of adult education topics that varied from scripture to history, to current issues.  Soon I had developed a reputation of leadership in the parish, the deanery, the archdiocese and the Bellingham community.  As the years progressed I did more and more of the Sunday homilies, though because I was not a priest they were called reflections.

The Jesuit Seattle University employed me to teach their Scripture and Leadership Training program in Bellingham.  I loved all this work.  It suited my temperament and my training perfectly.  I could speak my heart and it spoke to the hearts of others.  Maybe officialdom found that troubling.

During one of our reflection sessions with a prayer group, a lady gifted with the ability to pray in tongues told me that she saw a very powerful spirit who was always at my side.  “You have an extraordinarily mighty angel that has protected you and will continue to protect you throughout your life.  Trust that spirit.”  As time went on I felt that my guardian spirit was the archangel Raphael, a conviction that grew more and more certain as the years went by.

Some time in the second year of our stay in Bellingham Ruth suffered the first of what proved to be an unending series of micro strokes.  She suffered a terrible reaction from a combination of prescribed drugs.  Covered with ugly sores over all of her body, with joints so stiff that she could hardly move, and close to death, she sought help from a specialist.  She recovered from the effects of the medication, but then refused to take any medication for several years while continuing almost imperceptibly to deteriorate.  She finished one large oil painting, but could not go on with the meticulous water color creations she had been doing.

I kept thinking all along that she would recover, partly because she never reached a plateau.  Maybe also I was too self-absorbed or too busy.  I felt so completely at home in this church and this community.  I liked the feeling of belonging to the institution in a significant role.  It seemed like the culmination of my life dreams and ambitions.

Then the roof caved in.  Archbishop Murphy, who had generally followed the policy directions of Hunthausen, died unexpectedly.  Rome, as it had been doing all through John Paul II’s pontificate, appointed a more conservative successor.

Confrontations arose between the archdiocese and its lay employees over a number of issues.  Lay employees had gotten used to being consulted on issues affecting their welfare and their work.  That was coming to an end.  At one of the gatherings to deal with this, an archdiocesan spokesperson informed us haughtily that “you people are not part of the formal structure of the church.”

Then a new pastor was appointed to Sacred Heart parish to replace Gary Morelli, who had been assigned to a larger parish in Seattle.  It had long been understood in the archdiocese that new pastors were not to make any changes in their new parishes during the first year.  They were expected simply to observe and follow along with current practices before attempting to give their administration a personal stamp.  Parishes had also been given the opportunity to interview prospective new pastors before agreeing to accept them.  The prospective candidate duly promised to follow these guidelines, and was appointed.  It did not take him long to make his mark.  Even before he arrived, he began to introduce changes without consulting anyone.

The first day I arrived into my office after a brief holiday, I was summoned to his office, facing a reptilian stare.  Ten minutes later I had no job at Sacred Heart.  Here I was, 65 years old, with a wife whose health was now seriously compromised by the ravages of recurring strokes, and with virtually nowhere to go next.  The new pastor could not have cared less.

The office of lay employees informed me that they were in no position to assist me.  The legal system of the United States, with its inane understanding of the separation of church and state, pretty well allows churches to do anything they please to their employees regardless of natural justice.  The hierarchy of the Catholic Church is committed to protect the institution regardless of personal cost to anyone.

I left Bellingham in bitterness of spirit.  So began three years of desperate wandering, selling off our art collection at less than its value, selling everything we could think of, cashing in every bit of retirement savings in order to get through another few months..   We lived in  Louisville, Kentucky, for one year, a year of financial and emotional hell.  Our daughter, Theresa suggested we look for work in California.  We spent two years near Theresa and her husband William, living in Fremont while I managed a tutoring establishment in Milpitas, just a few miles down the freeway.  More and more Ruth needed care virtually 24 hours a day.  She spent her days in front of the TV or sleeping.  She would leave something on the stove, forget about it, and not know what to do about the heavy smoke, waiting for me to come home.

Several times during these three years members of the congregation of Sacred Heart bailed us out of financial straits.  The last straw came with a notice that the monthly rent in our small apartment would go up by $450 to just short of $2000.   My job provided less than half of what I needed to make a living in these circumstances.

I looked back at my life and cursed myself for the bad choices I had made.  Although my life had been very interesting and allowed me to take pride in knowing that I had done much good, I had blundered back into the clutches of the Catholic Church and paid dearly for it.  Now in my late sixties I had no energy to start over. No one hires people my age.  I screamed my grievances at a God who seemed distant again. Despite the silence from above, somewhere deep down I never lost the conviction that somehow a good spirit was still near and that all our needs would again be met even though I  had not the slightest inkling of just how this would happen.

All through my life with Ruth we had lived paycheck to paycheck.  Every time it seemed as if we could no longer go on, something would come up, and we would survive for the next month.  So it was again.  This time Jennifer and her husband, Ian Putnam, came to our rescue, and we made the move from California back to Victoria in the fall of 2000.

Around this same time, I learned that Sacred Heart parish in Bellingham had risen from the ashes and forced the archbishop to remove their pastor.  I wondered how long it will be before other parishes would get their act together and eliminate incompetent and abusive pastors.

 

 

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

 

Leaving.  I have been part of so many leavings that I find it impossible to focus on any one of them without others pushing their way forward as more significant.  People dear to me have left, some without a goodbye.  Like my father.

Ruth left me very suddenly too.  Well, not exactly.  It was almost eight years after the initial stroke before the end finally came. I discovered just how difficult it is to deal with loved ones with dementia, whatever the kind.  I watched as the person who had been my life companion for over thirty years slipped ever so slowly into a world of confusion which I could not fathom, could not enter.  I hardly noticed the changes day by day, but as the years passed I could no longer deny the horrible devastation that was taking place.  “I don’t know” had become her mantra.

I found myself living with someone I did not know, someone silent, someone strange.  I wondered who she had become.  Each new brain scan revealed another thousand tiny infarcts, so infinitesimally small the doctor had to point them out.  It was no consolation to know that we humans have more synapses in our brains than there are stars in the known sky.  The ones that were blasted by whatever monster it was that lurked in the folds of her brain were the ones that counted.

The time came when I acknowledged that I could no longer cope by myself.  I used to think I could take anything but now I needed help.  More than she did.  She was content to live in our house, eat our food, drink what I put in front of her, sleep at my side.  I hated to admit it, but she was now more like a simple child than the person she used to be.  Friends now said she is so sweet, but they would never have used that adjective to describe her before.

How long would this deterioration last?  How many years?  I dared not voice my hopelessness. By far the most debilitating part of living with someone suffering from dementia is what it does to personal intimacy.  The woman I loved was gone.  In its place that silent, empty shell.  She still got up every morning, dressed, and made herself presentable.  I wondered how long she would be able to keep that up.  All I could see ahead were years and years of continuing decline until she would have to be placed in a nursing home.

I sought counseling.  I broke down and accepted antidepressants.  I joined a support group with the Alzheimer’s Association.  There I discovered that I was still very lucky compared to what others in the group were going through with their mothers, their fathers, their spouses.  I watched the men closely.  How did they manage to make it through the days, the weeks, the months, the years of terrible loss and loneliness?

I stayed closer to home.  I waited.  There was nothing else to do.  I waited for her to leave.  She would leave, I knew that.  But will it be tomorrow?  Next week?  Five years from now?  I waited in a terrible darkness.  Every time I opened the door I wondered, what will I find?  Will she still be sitting there where I left her staring motionless at the TV fumbling helplessly with the remote, or will she be sprawled on the floor?

I found myself hoping that she would finish her journey sooner rather than later.  And then I felt guilty for having those feelings.  “She left you a long time ago.”  “Her spirit has been leaving for the past eight years and only a little of it remains behind.”   “It is all right to feel that way.”  I would like to believe all that, but I still felt guilty for wanting to believe it.

In the summer of 2001 we paid what proved to be her final visit to friends and family in Alberta and Saskatchewan.   Instead of the usual running from place to place, we took it easy.  In Red Deer we attended the funeral of a much loved colleague, Roy North.  People said nothing, but their questioning looks told me they noticed.  We spent several days at Chitek Lake in Saskatchewan with my sisters and their husbands, savoring the most delicious fresh perch, breaded and fried in butter.  And quiet days on the Bauml farm in Marysburg with my sister Lillian and her husband.  We made a short visit to the monastery.  Although they said nothing, my family saw the devastation the strokes had caused.  My sisters tried their best to appear cheerful, but I was not blind to the concern often registered in their faces.

Back in Victoria, we tried to go for walks each day.  Ruth’s walk had been reduced to shuffling along with small steps.  One day, while we were out, she stopped suddenly, and turned to me, “I’m going down, aren’t I?”  I could not lie to her.  “Yes, Ruth, you are going down.”  Somewhere around that time she stopped fighting it.

To keep some sense of worth I had taken the opportunity to become involved in volunteer ventures in a downtown soup kitchen, the provincial museum, a community theatre, and a local school, things that would not keep me away from home for any extended period.

We had again sought meaningful Sunday worship upon our return to Victoria.  It was no use.  Just how ignorant some priests are about the nature of the Eucharist came home to me one Sunday.  Immediately after the words of consecration (This is my body.  This is my blood), the priest paused, looked up at the congregation and solemnly announced, “Let us now pause as we welcome our Lord into our midst.”  It was all I could do to keep myself from getting to my feet and shouting out in protest.  What in the world was he saying?  That Jesus was absent until he worked his little piece of magic on the host and the wine?  It is a good example of the stupidity in the superstitious mentality that still surrounds Catholic worship.

My disgust was reinforced when I attended several funerals of Catholic friends.   The priests showed not a glimmer of sensitivity to the bereaved families.  Their ministration entailed a quick mouthing of the prayers which they read out of the Roman Ritual without the least indication of understanding or humanity.

I finally had to give up attending Catholic worship.  Nor could I find any other church that could satisfy my longing for spiritual food.

One evening in early October of 2001, as she was eating dinner, Ruth collapsed.  Paramedics were on the scene in minutes and hustled her off to the hospital with me in pursuit.  The brain scan revealed a major hemorrhage in the top part of her brain, possibly an aneurism.  The doctor was not hopeful and advised that they would need to do more tests in the morning.  She regained consciousness for a brief moment, indicating she knew she was in the hospital.

Very soon after being settled into a private ward, Ruth suffered a second hemorrhage, this time in the brain stem.  We had been in constant communication with Theresa.  They were flying in next day.  I asked the doctor if we should try to keep Ruth alive until Theresa and William arrived.  “Don’t even think of it,” was his answer.  Jennifer and I watched as her spirit struggled for a few last breaths, until slowly her heart ceased beating and she was gone.  I watched her go with a mixture of relief and immense sadness.  We had not said Goodbye to each other.  It all happened too quickly.  The stab of painful loss kept trading places with relief.  It was over, finally over.  Mercifully over.  I knew I should cry, but I did not cry right then.  I had shed my tears during all those years of loss, and now her spirit was free of a body that had refused to behave normally anymore.  How much her life had transformed me!  What a vital force she had been beside me for over three decades. What incredible daughters she had given me.  How gracious of nature to take her while she was still so beautiful.

Family and friends gathered around me and the girls to celebrate her life.  My girls and their husbands were particularly strong in their expressions of love and concern for me.   Together we took care of the arrangements for the funeral and reception.  We produced several collages of photos and art work to celebrate her life.  The girls took charge of seeing me through the first few days and weeks. They knew when it was time to leave me to my own private time.

I cannot express the hurt I felt when there was no expression of sympathy from any Catholic source except from the people of Sacred Heart Parish in Bellingham.  Not a word from the monks of St. Peter’s Abbey.  Nothing from the Knights of Columbus of which I had been a member and leader for many years.  It struck me like a blow to the midriff to admit that no matter how hard I had worked in my church, the institutional leaders were completely indifferent to my personal pain.  A belated expression came from the monastery only after someone scolded them for their indifference.  Some time later one of the monks even suggested that now that Ruth was out of the way, I could return.

For a while Ruth visited me in dreams, in crystal clear memories.  And then even those began to fade. I learned to take that departure in stride as well.   Life continued, shifted into another gear, and I would be bowled over at the power and beauty of a new relationship.

Ruth always said she wanted to be buried at sea, in the Pacific waters she loved so much.  I made a papier-mâché boat about a foot long to hold her remains, using a paste of flour and water.  Theresa and Jennifer helped place her ashes into the boat.  I sealed the boat and gave it a  rudder to keep it stable, and then placed a papier-mâché  globe to fit over its top, pinning it lightly to the boat with more flour and water paste.  Colorful tissue paper made it look like the earth, with blues and greens predominating.

Then one weekend the summer after Ruth died, on a gloriously sunny day, the two girls and their husbands and I rented a boat and captain in Sidney and had him take us into the gulf islands.  We released the little boat into the water between South Pender Island and Stuart Island, as close as we could to the international boundary.  We watched as the little vessel bobbed lightly on the waves and floated away.  In a few minutes the boat broke off from the balloon top and down it dove into 500 feet of water.  We said our last tearful goodbyes. Then we proceeded to Saturna Island to a small winery for a family lunch, toasting once more the wonders of Ruth’s life with a few bottles of fine wine.  We all felt that Ruth would have approved.

A few months after Ruth died, I took the opportunity of visiting my Australian siblings, Ray and Alma and their families,  going back and forth between Melbourne and Adelaide.  I found healing in spending leisurely time getting to know them better.   It was the first time I had spent quality time with them as adults.

Upon my return to Victoria, I stayed close to home, continuing volunteer commitments, helping children with reading at a local school, serving soup to homeless people at a down-town soup kitchen, helping to build sets at a community theatre, and being a docent at the provincial museum.  I took my time to mull over my memories and feelings about the decisions I had made.  I realized very soon that I would not settle for a  life alone.  A little over a year after Ruth died, I thought it was time to look into the possibility of finding a new partner.  At 71 years old dating was a new experience for me.  Although I did not want to rush things, I also felt that my time could be limited.

My sister Marian sent me a prayer to Archangel Raphael, long considered in the Catholic tradition as a powerful protector of travelers, a healer, and a helper for those seeking a life partner.  This devotion comes from the Biblical book of Tobit.  I directed my thoughts to him and promised myself that I would pay attention.  I do not communicate in words with this presence, but it is nonetheless very real to me.  I know I can place my trust in his safekeeping.  I believe we live among a whole host of beings whom we cannot see, but are nonetheless real.

Meanwhile my chiropractor asked me how an eligible bachelor like me meets an eligible woman.  I told her that maybe someone has to know both of us and introduce us to each other.  “Funny thing,” she said, “I know someone you might like to meet.  And I think she would like to meet you.”  She told me a few things about this woman and gave me her phone number.

A week later I met Sharon Max at one of my favorite little cafes in James Bay, at Ogden Point.  Before long we were seeing more of each other, taking in a series of informative lectures on Taoism and discussing our thoughts over coffee afterwards.  Both of us liked what we were hearing, but when they tried to “sign us up” to join their religion both of us declined.  Neither of us wanted anything to do with organized churches no matter what kind.

In the next weeks and months we met frequently over coffee and treats, went to some movies, and shared meals together.  We found a common spirit despite our very different life experiences.  She came from a Jewish family and had spent most of her life in Eastern Canada, in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto.   She never seemed to weary of my stories, no matter how often I repeated them.  One of her gifts is to ask penetrating questions, and to point out places where things did not appear to be quite what I thought they were.  I introduced her to Jennifer and they found an immediate bond.

In the summer of 2003 we made the decision that we should join our lives, and took the opportunity to purchase a condominium in James Bay.  I delighted in the tasteful way Sharon planned the painting and redecoration of our home.

That same summer the Gerwing family celebrated the 100^th anniversary of coming to Lake Lenore.  At the registration desk, I renewed my acquaintance with Bernadine.  The year 2003 was also the centennial of the entire colony of St. Peter’s and the arrival of the monks to Muenster.  Finally, after more than fifty years, I got to meet Sally again.  If anything, she was more beautiful than ever.  What a pleasure it was for the first time to hug her, and to tell her and her husband, who was at her side, that I had been in love with her all my life.  He smiled, “I know that.”  Wonderful as it felt, I realized that I was not in love with this woman.  I had been in love with a fantasy image of my own creation.  Another ghost of my life, this one ever so precious, was put to rest.  And it felt right.

Sally represented much of what was best in what I had left behind.  The memories of her kept the love-light flickering within me long enough for it to burst forth into flame in my love for Ruth and then later for Sharon.  First love lives forever, and we need not be ashamed of it or try to deny its power, so long as we accept the wonder and the unreality of it.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

 

Sharon listened patiently to my accounts of my experience with church authorities.  She picked up on the buried anger that clung to my spirit.  “You need to find out what is really behind your anger.  I think it goes back a long way, maybe well before you went to the monastery.”  She introduced me to Marion Ellis, a skilled therapist.  Finally, after many sessions, I found a way to deal with my experiences more fully and openly.

I found it extremely difficult to get away from intellectualizing.  After a life-time of trying to convince myself that I had made my decisions and ran my life on the basis of reason, discounting the value of emotional and physical impulses, I resisted going into an unclear world where words could not penetrate.  With patience, I learned to listen to other memories, body memories, emotional memories.  As these parts of my person began to emerge and communicate with each other, I came to realize the depths of my rage, see it clearly for what it was, and then begin to deal with it honestly and completely.

Throughout my life, I have had to leave behind precious persons, places, and ideas.  Much as I mourned these losses, I had clung most tenaciously to my conviction that I had mastery over my head.  I had to give that up as well in order to become free.

With the combined efforts of Sharon and Marion  I came to understand that my deepest anger was at myself for having made the decisions I did.   Sharon helped me see that at every turn I did have the opportunity to go a different way and chose not to.  In a way it was easier for me to do that.  If things went wrong I could readily deny responsibility and complain about what “those people” did to me.  As early as I can remember, the big virtue to cultivate was obedience, unquestioning obedience to anyone in authority.  That was part of our Catholic family tradition and confirmed by my monastic training.

My conversations with Bernadine brought it all together in a coherent way.  I reviewed my entire life with a new perspective: what drove me to make the decisions I made?  As long as I clung to the image of the God of churchmen wielding God’s hammer, I was powerless to resist.  I lived in fear.  I needed advice; I was given commands. They taught me to obey.  They did not teach me to love or to think for myself, nor to trust my own heart.  That was very wrong.    Still, I consider my life was enriched by what I have suffered.  I do not regret a bit of it.  Somehow, with great support, I overcame my penchant for considering myself a victim.  From that change of view I was able to start walking away from the darkness.

I began to experience a new and deeper form of liberation from the stifling shackles of my past and learned to deal with the worst effects of deep-seated anger.  As this was happening I found myself revisiting my life with more tenderness and understanding than I expected.

On balance, I was satisfied that I put in so many years in the monastery and accepted the choices I made later as well.  Had I taken a different path, who knows where my life course would have run?  I would not have met Bonnie, nor Mary Clare, nor Ruth, nor Theresa, nor Jennifer, nor Sharon, nor Bernadine, nor any of the other beautiful people who have loved me and whom I love.  Terrifying as it is to make that journey inside and face all that is there, that is where love and peace and joy reside.  And that is ultimately where I found a driving energy worthy of my total devotion.

Now that I had taken a greater responsibility for my own decisions honestly, I was well on the way toward a more integrated freedom, freer in spirit, freer in my intellectual life, freer in my emotions and freer physically.  It had taken me a long time to liberate my body from the restrictions of religious pressures. I believed I was on the way to total liberation.  Sadly, this meant I found my old religion in its present forms more and more irrelevant.  I mourn the loss of my religion.  Yet, I felt inside myself a growing sense of oneness within.  It is in the oneness of this phase of my personal development that I experience hope and joy.

In March, 2006, Jennifer surprised me with tickets for me and her to spend two weeks in Australia.   She had visited Ray some time before and wanted to see the two of us together because she said we were so much alike.  Ray has been struggling with heart problems.  We traveled via Hawaii, but only to stop briefly to go through American security, off the plane into security, scanned and questioned, and then allowed to go back onto the plane.  The preoccupation with terrorism has untold stupidities and costs.  Fear makes people crazy.  However, Australia was another great visit with family.

For my 75^th birthday, my two girls and their husbands gifted Sharon and me with two weeks in Italy with them, a week in Rome and a week in Florence with a side trip to Naples.  What a wonderful gift this was for the six of us to witness together the wonders of these ancient cities.  To stand at the Coliseum and the Pantheon and all the ancient ruins, and the galleries containing the great works of the Renaissance in Italy was something I never in my wildest dreams thought possible.

The Vatican Museum along with the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s affected me profoundly.  The incredible wealth of the Vatican screams still in my ears.  There was absolutely nothing the least bit sacred about the Sistine Chapel or St. Peter’s.  These are not places where a person can pray or meditate.  St. Peter’s speaks only of oppression, unholy accumulation of power and wealth.  Never would Jesus be comfortable in such a place.

Florence was, if that is possible, even more of a thrill than Rome.  The carvings of Michelangelo in reality are so much more powerful than any image, however skillfully made.  The slaves emerging from the great slabs of marble in the corridor leading to the magnificent David touched me as no other sculpture ever did.  I could have stayed forever, I believed.

Twice within a year Jennifer supplied me with tickets to spend two weeks with her in Oslo where she was conducting research with NAKMI, an organization devoted to research in the health field.  Again, words fail to describe the experience of this great city and the people who inhabit it.  I am so blessed with these experiences.

In 2004 Dr. Janet Bavelas, Jennifer’s advisor and a renowned specialist in micro-analysis of communication, delivered an address on the six formal expressions of apology offered to the First Nations by the churches for their part in the abuses suffered in the Residential Schools of Canada.  She sought my help in trying to understand what was behind the language used by the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and United Church to distance themselves from clear admission of responsibility for these crimes.  They expressed deep regret without taking any real responsibility.  Some time later she asked me to help in the grammatical analysis of these apologies.

This, in turn, led me to get in touch with an old monastery friend from St. John’s.  Richard Sipe, then known as Fr. Aquinas, and I had been close friends.  I looked him up on Google and made contact.  He was happy to reconnect.  He had left the monastery a year or two after I did, had become an expert on clerical celibacy, and wrote books about it.  I read his first book and then more.  We met along with our spouses in Vancouver.  The old magic of good friends was still alive.

Our acquaintance led to increased contact.  This brought me into the maelstrom of clerical abuse of minors.  Dick is an expert witness in countless trials in the United States.  I read voraciously, and subscribed to the online National Survivor Advocate Coalition News devoted to support the victims of clerical abuse.  I had also been writing articles for the Island Catholic News, an independent paper in Victoria edited by Patrick Jameison.  I began to focus my attention on the grave problems in the church’s hierarchy.  I became more and more immersed in the unfolding stories of clerical abuse of minors and the hierarchy’s incredible unwillingness to deal honestly or openly with the horrific mess of abuse and cover up all over the world.  This angered me to the point that the topic insinuated itself into almost every conversation, every relationship.

I tested the water at St. Peter’s, discovering that the Prairie Messenger welcomed my articles.  In these I tried to be gentle and still honest, expressing my conviction that this was a problem to be solved by the entire church. I wanted to do what I could to awaken the people in the pews to the crimes of their pastors and to do something about it since the clerics, all the way up to the papacy, clearly did not intend to take responsibility.  The soul-destroying sexual abuses by priests in virtually every country and every diocese, mirrored the feelings of emotional and psychological abuse I felt I had suffered.  I became more and more consumed by a new rage against church authorities.  My religion was again poisoning my life.  Once again I had allowed it to enter my heart.

I even tried going to go to church again, but ultimately found it less than inspiring, even deleterious to my feelings of joy.  It was time to take stock once again of the destructive force of Catholicism and organized religion in my life.  Time to reconnect with Bernadine to sort out the mess in my head and my heart.  A few days with her, preceded by numerous e-mails, brought me back to sanity.  I needed to make a clear and final break with all that the church stood for, both the good and the bad.  I could not take what was good and useful without assuming also the burden of the evils.  I could not denounce the evils as if they could be divorced from the good.  I could not separate the essential meaning of what was good in Catholicism from the institutional bullshit, nor from the sterile theological formulations.  Once again, decision time.

I decided to walk away from all of it, carefully abstaining from conversation about church affairs of any kind.  I stopped writing for the Catholic press and tried to focus my life on family and friends.   Gradually my sense of peace returned.  The fiery anger cooled and subsided.  It simply felt right to step aside again.  None of my family was surprised at my decision, supporting me for what I needed to do with my life.

Within a few months I could converse without anger if I so chose.  I even wrote a little to myself of what I do not believe, and that covered pretty well all of the creed statements of Catholicism.  Funny, I still feel Catholic, but without connection to any official part of it.  When visiting Saskatoon to be with family, I chose not to attend church on Sundays. Nor did I visit the monastery this time.  It felt right.

 

EPILOGUE

I wait and I watch.  Physically, I have some trouble with my old heart, somewhat corrected by the insertion of a pacemaker.  Then symptoms began to appear which led to numerous tests, culminating in several stents and opening of arteries that had become partially blocked.  There are times when I feel healthy emotionally.  I wonder about my spiritual health, given my propensity to return to the poisonous atmosphere of organized religion.  My family connections are ever so precious.  During the years I have come to realize that those who understand my faith journey accepted whatever path I chose for myself without judging me.  Their abiding love has encouraged me to write these memories as honestly as I could.

This was emphatically underlined when we celebrated my eightieth birthday on the last weekend of May in 2012.  We invited members of both Sharon’s and my family, as well as some old and new friends, and prepared loads of food and drink.  The whole atmosphere was great, with lively interaction and much laughter.  We had asked guests to bring stories of memories and photos.  It could not have been more wonderful.

Now, looking back over my life, I see that I did myself no favours in  crawling back into the bosom of the Catholic Church.  Each time I did that I paid a huge price financially, physically, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually.  Late in life I finally admitted to myself that it has not been worth it for me personally.  The institution has sucked the life out of me at every turn, used me and then tossed me aside without compunction.  What made me go back so often?  Was it some vain hope that I could make a difference?  Was it some delusive belief that in the end I would gain the admiration of the hierarchy?  Or an admission of their abuse?  Was it some simple-minded notion that I could rise above the stench and save what was best in the church?  Maybe all of the above; maybe none of the above.

My hope right now is that I am free from these destructive bonds and never look back.  Will it be the same liberating experience that I experienced when I turned my back on the monastic and priestly life at St. Peter’s?  I live in hope and wonder.  Yet, I am well aware that I will only be really free on the day I die.

 

A while ago I had a dream that moved me more than most other dreams.  I was at a convention of some kind.  Off and on I saw a woman I wanted to meet, but never did.  She was gone by the time I was ready to leave. As I was driving away she was just coming back.  I waved at her that I wanted to talk, and she nodded and drove on.  She came back and suddenly we were in each other’s arms, tightly embracing.  I looked into her eyes.  She was so serious.  “Jim,” she said, “I see that you are in some deep and abiding sadness.”

“Yes.”  That was all I said, but we stayed in our embrace.  It felt so good to hold her, to feel her body against mine, to feel the curve of her back and the firmness of her buttocks.  I didn’t want to let go.  We belonged to each other.

I woke up to a sense of understanding.  I do not analyze my dreams as a rule.  It struck me that I mourn and am deeply sad at the realization that I have lost my religion.  And yet, not really.  I have lost almost all of the outward trappings of my Catholic religion.  But I have not lost the essence of my faith, that pearl of great price.  I have found peace with that conviction.  I can hold on to the inner faith I have inherited without holding on to the externals.  Just as I did  not want to let go of this precious woman, I will not let go of my deep and abiding faith in what I have learned and lived.  Nothing is as important to me as that.

            Years ago, as part of a creative writing course, I penned the following poem.  As I read it over, I believe it expresses where I still am today.  The setting: you open a door, and see into a room….

Has it ever changed!

This room.

Used to be a chapel.

Now why did they put old Abbot Severin’s chair over there?

Over-stuffed

And ragged.

I remember sitting in that chair

Once,

Long ago.

The old bell in the tower is ringing out the Angelus.

God knows I’ve heard that sound

Maybe a thousand times in those days so long ago.

A pleasant enough sound,

But thin.

Tinny, I guess.

I wonder if they put richer bells,

Richer sounds,

In the new church,

And if they still ring the Angelus three times a day.

 

Back to the chair.

He speaks again,

Old Abbot Severin.

But now it doesn’t sound like much.

Back then it had a ring to it,

A ring of power

And authority,

The Voice of God.

Now it is hollow,

Not worth hearing,

Not worth heeding.

I’m free of all that.

 

So why am I here?

Visiting this place of so many deaths,

Of unspeakable agony.

And yet of unexplainable peace too.

Maybe God still speaks out of that chair.

Will it be the old song,

The creaky, squeaky Gregorian chant

Of men who can no longer sing,

Or never could?

The ghosts of black-robed, wrinkled old men

Hover about that chair,

Flit about in this room.

Maybe if I start to sing the old melodies

They’ll fly right over to me,

Sit on my shoulder

And hum along with me.

How much do they weigh — now?

How loud would their voices be — now?

Would any of it make sense — now?

Now that I am long free of this past,

And yet not free,

For who can flee the children of loneliness and pain?

Why would I even want to?

I find myself embracing once more the sounds,

Now more sympathetically.

Once more the smell of tired old bodies

Of unwashed black serge habits,

Once more the soreness of knees

Not meant to kneel on stone.

 

 

 

POSTSCRIPT #1

 

Catholicism will always lurk deep in the core of me.  That is part of who and what I am.  However, my Catholicism has undergone a fundamental transformation.  I find an immense chasm between the Catholic faith and its theology, between its teachings and institutional practice.  Through the theological system of the catechism the clerical structure protects its position with all the coercive power in its tremendous arsenal of weaponry.  The structure is held together by fear.  Fear petrifies the Petrine office.  The establishment fears that it will lose its power, lose its credibility, if it allows any questioning of its hold on its jealously guarded orthodox tradition.  Change is inadmissible in the climate of infallibility.  And, of course, they fear losing their money.

 

Judged from the perspective of my own personal journey and what I have witnessed in the countless priests of my acquaintance, I have come to the conclusion that the root of the problems of  institutional Catholicism is its inability to deal honestly with sexuality.  Clerics panic at the very idea of revisiting the sexuality of Jesus and Mary and Joseph.  Perhaps this fear is expressed most clearly in the law of compulsory clerical celibacy.  Say what you will about the many good works of countless priests and religious men and women through the centuries, the law of celibacy has also created a whole menagerie of lazy, selfish, warped, unhappy, lonely and dangerous men, a surprisingly large number of whom live a tortured existence with homosexuality, which the official church condemns.  A very large number (some researchers put it at over 90%) of the rest of them suffer from arrested maturation and an unhealthy obsession with sex.

 

The mystique created around the concept and practice of celibacy is a false one.  Those of us who left the active priesthood recognize that we are better husbands and fathers for having been priests, and that we are better priests because we are husbands and fathers.  But the official church will have none of us in ministry.

 

A very good friend of mine who was a Benedictine monk at St. John’s when I was there has been studying celibacy for over 50 years.  He has published numerous books and articles and has given countless lectures on the subject.  Richard Sipe, formerly Father Aquinas, concluded that only a small percentage of Catholic priests achieve true celibacy (emotional and spiritual as well as physical), and less than half actually practice the celibate life.  The official church stubbornly refuses to face such studies, hiding behind silence and fear-mongering to shore up the unwarranted privilege and social esteem of the clergy.  They fully intend to keep doing it forever.  It is the most effective way to control their workforce.

 

Most Catholics do not think critically about their church.  They are simply content to trust their priests to do all the thinking.  Even to suggest that perhaps priests are not altogether trustworthy raises cries of alarm.  Simply unthinkable, sacrilegious, treachery.  The conspiracy of silence about clerical abuse is as active among the laity as among the clergy.   People prefer ignorance because it is easier.  They stolidly attend Sunday mass in the belief that it is somehow a form of eternal fire insurance and they don’t want to take the chance of letting their policy lapse.  They have been taught that the Catholic Church is the only true church, is perfect as God made it and therefore in no need of change.  Only malcontents speak up.  The church is better off without them.  Clerics who speak out are quickly relegated to obscurity.

 

Very few institutional leaders appreciate the value of their loyal dissenters.  Dissent does not necessarily mean the person is disobedient.  Obedience without question is not a virtue and is much overrated in ecclesiastical circles.  I think that kind of obedience is a liability and very dangerous in an organization because the talents, the wisdom , the search for truth of individuals is lost.  Unfortunately, the church has too few hierarchs who are comfortable with those who challenge, who question, who wonder out loud.

 

The second aspect of unwholesomeness in regard to sexuality is the persistent and stubborn misogyny that underlies the clericalization of the priesthood, that makes Rome go apoplectic every time anyone even suggests that we use feminine language to refer to God.  Not only is the hierarchical structure a world without laity, it is a world without women.  The division of the church into clerical and lay is an affront to the gospel message of fundamental equality of all people as expressed in the early documents, “in Christ there is no more Jew or Gentile, no more slave or free, no more male or female.”  All are radically equal.  Clerical privilege creates two-tiered Christianity.  That is intrinsically incompatible with the express will of Christ.  Thus, the double split has created a culture that inevitably leads to injustice, intolerance, abuse, and arrogance in the exercise of power.

 

The official church has never asked itself why so many of us left the ministry.  The extreme shortage of priests has led to the death of small parishes.  As a result, the hierarchy bullies people into donating millions to build huge churches which serve not the reign of God but rather the reign of Roman intransigence.  They will keep doing that as long as people are willing to pay.

 

The older priests today are beyond retirement age and confused.  The new ones are ignorant and unaware of it, conceited with little justification, poorly trained and will not admit it, and are not called by the congregations which they serve.  Very few priests are even dimly aware of what it is to be tired to the bone from being up night after night with a sick child or spouse.  Visits with relatives give them no reason to think they understand the dynamics of family life.  They are out of touch.  They had and have good intentions, but they lack experience and therefore lack relevance.  It is a mystery to me why the truth is not being faced honestly and openly.  Survey after survey indicates that the laity would have no difficulty accepting married priests and women priests.  The clerical world can safely ignore such statistics because there is no tradition within Catholicism to allow the laity to take the lead.   After all, in the words of the late John Paul II, wisdom does not come from below.

 

As I enter the twilight of my years, I find myself going more and more into the Jewish roots of my faith.  The human Jesus Christ makes sense only in a tradition where God is a living presence which cannot be named, defined, or pictured.  God is nowhere and also now here.  God is no-thing.  How can I worship that God?   By a radical and consistent respect and awe of all that is, all people, all animals, all plants, all nature, and it starts within myself.  By being what I am in all the wealth of physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual realms. That seems to me the essence of the wisdom of the late prophets who inspired John the Baptist and Jesus.

 

As for my view of Jesus, I consider that Jesus lived and died a faithful Jew.  After he died, his spirit was poured out in great abundance upon all, men and women, Jew and Gentile, slave and free without distinction.  That spirit manifests itself in love and peace and joy and gentleness.  That spirit enabled his followers to do as he did, heal the sick and give life to those who were lifeless.  And thus, through his followers, Jesus lives on.

 

The Bible is not the only place where we encounter the “word of God.”  I believe that God speaks from burning bushes in every blade of grass, in every thought and feeling of every creature.  All we need do is learn to find God, as one person put it, in the wild state, to listen and respond.  For the most part, there are no words in this dialogue.  Saint Benedict urged his monks to seek God.  That pretty well describes my life.  I keep on looking with the clear knowledge that I will never find it all.  And that is more than just all right.  It is immensely exciting.

 

Looking back at my experience with Abbot Severin, I recognize that his treatment of me was not done out of bad will.  I believe he was sincere in his convictions.  With his consecration as abbot, he believed that he had become an authority on all things theological and spiritual by virtue of his office as abbot.  Over and over in his talks he spoke of the “grace of office,” and how sacraments work.  He would not use the word magic, but in some automatic fashion God gives the office holder all the gifts he needs to fulfill his role.  Thus, it is always wrong to question church authority.  He was absolutely confident that he was that authority.  A very intoxicating formula. In compelling logic he repeated these ideas so often that he believed that himself and got me to believe it too.  The absolute obedience he taught reinforced the obedience we were taught as Catholic children.

 

That is precisely why spiritual abuse is so difficult to come to terms with.  A supposedly benign person causes untold suffering and injustice.  It is the father who strikes his child “for your own good.”  The child does not share that feeling but cannot question the father.  Compliance with authority mistakenly assumed to be love takes precedence over freedom.  Forced obedience even out of divine conviction is still slavery and wrong.  It is a form of emotional and spiritual abuse that cuts as deep as, if not deeper than, physical and sexual abuse.

 

From where I am now, I think I have spent far too much time feeling sorry for myself, feeling helpless and hard-done-by.  I spent too much energy on impotent rage against an institution that will never admit its abusive behaviour.

 

In order to be healthy, victims of abuse have to move on.  That is easy to say.  But it is absolutely necessary, and the only way is to search inside for the inner strength to take full responsibility for their own well-being.  Even when abusers voice apologies, (they rarely do) there is not much they can do beyond that.  The past cannot be altered.  No compensation can undo what has been done.  Scars always remain.

 

An inner sense of worth welcomes outside validation, to be sure.  But the key to health is the journey inside to self-discovery and self-acceptance with all the good and the bad that has happened.  I worked hard at making that journey, brought all of it into conscious thought as honestly as I could, and with the help of many others have arrived at a measure of peace.  I realize that the perpetrators of abuse simply do not care enough to admit anything, and no amount of fretting and fuming will make them care.  I do not have any control over them.  I can control only what is inside myself, and that is where healing takes place.

 

In the light of all that I take comfort in how much I have learned, how much I have benefited from my experience, and how much I owe to so many who loved me.  Although some bitterness persists, and likely always will, that is also what I accept.  The more such feelings recede, the healthier I feel.

 

 

POSTSCRIPT #2

 

As I write this I am about to celebrate my 84^th birthday. I have had a very difficult five months. A blood clot lodged in my left atrium flung itself down my left leg. In these months I have lost well over 20 pounds, mostly fluid, have been hospitalized three times, hit a deep trough of depression, and am just now beginning to feel somewhat normal. During this time I have also faced several near-death situations, arriving at a somewhat ambivalent conclusion that I am ready to go, but have absolutely no idea what is on the other side.

 

Whatever lies ahead is just something I face now just about every day. All I really have is my loving family. Because of the possibility that my end is much nearer, we decided to register with Hospice. Victoria’s team is superb, and I feel confident that what help we need will be readily available when that time comes, whether it is days, months, or years. And so I wait.