A Going Away Present

Twenty one years ago, Brother George, Brother Hugh and I celebrated my 21st birthday in a field on the side of a small mountain in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts. We were all seminarians at Shadowbrook, a Jesuit novitiate, whose main building was just out of view in a grove of spruce trees below. It was a clear, late winter day, and mild, our field dry and plushy with brown matted wild hay. Our party was private, even secret, because birthdays were officially thought to be faintly narcissistic; more important was one's vow day. On mine, six months earlier, I had knelt on the top step of the novitiate altar and vowed to be a celibate, poor and obedient Jesuit for eternity. Even so, on my birthday, my breakfast plate had been covered with holy cards with little pious messages from my brothers and a few cracks from my friends about our lack of the traditional wherewithal for a "real twenty-firster."

And that was not all. By happy coincidence, my birthday falls on Feb. 2, Groundhog Day to the world but the Feast of Purification to the church - Candlemas Day, when candles are blessed as an assertion that even artificial light reflects the divine spark. Thus, my birthday was a holiday in the novitiate, with singing at mass, the afternoon free for sports or walks, and a first-class feast for dinner. In a Jesuit house this meant a forest of utensils for the fruit cup, fish course, meat course, vegetables, salad, dessert and nuts, followed by good cigars sent up from the Jesuit missions in the tropics. Even if none of this would be done specifically for me, was not grace supposed to be unearned? The motto of the Jesuits seemed to me - a blue-collar kid who had to be taught to use the proper fork - "All this and heaven too." After breakfast I had sat at my desk for a required hour of inspirational reading, but my eye kept wandering to the view outside my sunny window, and I kept thinking about the feast of words my friends and I had planned. Taking vows had been tantamount to gaining entrance to college in the novitiate, where, after two years of ascetic training, we began to study Greek, Latin, French, German, English, math and history as foundation stones for the earnest study of philosophy and theology later on. My friends were those like myself who had become intoxicated with poetry and the classics. For my birthday party we were going to chant Virgil's "Eclogues" - his bucolic poetry in praise of men who farmed the hills of Rome, which, we imagined, looked very much like our own. As the three of us found our special spot on a high field, most of our brothers down on the plain vigorously went about the sports of the season. We could barely hear their shouts after the breeze shifted around the cupped landscape of the Stockbridge Bowl. Across the valley, we could see the long meadow below Edith Wharton's home and the rock where, in local leg. end, Melville practiced harpooning. Closer at hand was the silver glint of the Shadowbrook, which Nathaniel Hawthorne had named during a picnic with his children and after which the Jesuits had named the novitiate. I had brought a recorder, and each of us had a copy of the "Eclogues." We took turns reciting the poems in rhythmic Latin hexameters and passing the recorder after each poem, to tootle an accompaniment to the wonderful spill of light consonants and long Latin diphthongs and vowels. To us the "Eclogues" were the songs of men who worked hard and enjoyed one another's well-earned leisure; and, of course, the hard-working men could speak beautiful Latin, and so were in many ways as we wished to be. Reciting their songs expanded us and provided a small ritual of release. Like us, the herdsmen lived most of their lives without feminine companionship. Their longings vicariously became our own - but safely - lasting only as long as the poem. Reading literature this way seemed a vigorous team sport; and I have never understood poetry more fully than I did that day. What better thing could I do, I thought, than be a Jesuit forever, with companions like these, who, on any hillside, could travel with me any place, any time, on the breath of words? Here was a workable eternity. Yet the gift Brother Hugh gave me, also classically inspired, proved more prophetic than our performance. It was a bold, stylized painting of Odysseus' ship, with a huge eye on the bow, pushing out into the Atlantic past the Rock of Gibraltar in the background. We had been studying the classics together, and, both having grown up near the ocean, we loved the "Odyssey" for its sea voyage and the wily Odysseus for his domestic yearnings. The rock in the background managed to look like both Gibraltar (a detail Dante had added to the story) and Indian Head Rock across the Bowl. Brother Hugh told me he had painted the picture with house paint on a can- vas scrap he filched from the stage set of the Christmas pageant after his request for artistic supplies had been turned down as vanity. His story, combined with the image, made his painting a virile act, pushing against the limits of what is allowed.

The painting's colors have lasted. Its blue sea, red sky, yellow sun and black ship are as vivid as my memory of receiving the gift, when, for the moment, time was at rest, and classically simple. But since that day many things have changed for me. After taking my degree in Jesuit philosophy, I went to graduate school to study comparative literature and during a term in Germany met a woman and fell in love. I was torn by loyalties until Father Provincial told me absolutely the right thing: "We would have loved to have had you with us for good, but we are grateful for the time we had." 

On my 26th birthday, I signed my dismissal papers, and I was married soon after. Now, 16 years later, I have discovered that vows of marriage, like perpetual vows of celibacy, and even a university's promise of tenure, provide only temporary toeholds in a restless life. The painting hangs in my study by a portrait of my second wife and two sons. It now tells me that the story of the painting was about change. Odysseus heading into the Atlantic was going in the wrong direction, but his errancy was what taught him to value what he eventually found.