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My father was Catholic but in name only. My mother was not Catholic: she never belonged to any church – at least not until she was baptized at 89. But she had promised to raise her children as Catholics and she kept her word. My parents were married in August 1935. By Christmas, she realized she had made a big mistake. She also realized that she was pregnant. I was born the following June .
I wasn’t born a skeptic, but I came close. I was three when I decided that Santa Clause was a lie. My mother and grandmother were horrified and for years refused to accept my unbelief. For me there was no Easter Bunny, no Tooth Fairy. I questioned everything adults told me. And then I was sent to religious classes – Sunday School and Summer School at old St. Joseph’s Grade School which was physically attached to old St. Joseph Church in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where I was expected to just accept what they told me and be able to parrot it back to them.
I couldn’t and I didn’t. I sort of believed in God and I thought he’d probably get me if I didn’t follow his rules, but I don’t think I believed much else. I made my first communion. The thing that impressed me most was that I was not allowed to eat or drink anything after midnight of the day I was to receive communion. If I did eat or drink anything and I went ahead and received communion anyway, I would commit a mortal sin which meant that if I died right after communion and I didn’t get to confession, I would go to hell. I wasn’t sure whether I had swallowed some water when I was brushing my teeth. I agonized for hours. But I finally did go ahead and receive communion. And felt guilty.
I frequented the public library – a fact I carefully kept from my friends. I would go each Saturday and check out twelve books, which was the maximum allowed, and try to sneak on the bus home so no one would see me. After exhausting the children’s library, I moved on to the adult library when I was nine or ten. I used my mother’s card. “My mother sent me to get these books.” I was an eclectic reader and I eventually came across some of the French authors – Sartre, Camus, Anatole France – and read translations of several of their works. They fascinated me. I was especially taken with Sartre’s No Exit which preached that hell is other people and France’s Penguin Island which preached that sexual lust was increased and perverted when the monks made the penguins wear clothes. They seemed to me at the time to make more sense than the Baltimore Catechism.
I was confirmed at twelve. All I remember was getting slapped by the bishop and that my godfather, my uncle Kupie Henrikson, took me up in his plane and did a barrelroll to see if I could take it.
When I was thirteen, my family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico and I was enrolled at St. Mary High School.
I never talked to a priest or sister about my doubts and incipient atheism. I believed that I was smarter than any of the priests I knew or any of the sisters who taught at St. Mary’s. I had always scored high on every IQ test and I knew it because I used to rifle the teacher’s desks when they weren’t around and I found my scores in the sisters’ record books.
I had an inborn ability to draw and paint; I won awards for my writing; I was editor of the school paper and the paper won national awards. I was even elected Prefect of the Sodality. I was popular and careful to conform to peer pressure. I dated, but every once in a while I would feel that I would scream if I had to pretend once more that I was enjoying an inane teenage conversation about trivia. My friends would have been surprised to learn what was really going on inside me.
Nothing was ever enough. No food, no drink, no sex, no nothing. You’ve heard of those teenagers who commit suicide? Well, I understand them from the inside out. Religion? It seemed so phony it turned me off. The priests I knew seemed to live angry lives, like someone had conned them. Most nuns struck me as neurotic and weird – sexual maladjustments wrapped in black. My perceptions were shaped by my own maladjustment.
Everyone told me I had enough talent so that I could be anything I wanted to be. The problem was, there was nothing I wanted to be. All I knew was that I was drowning in the belief that everything was insipid. But still I had to revisit over and over again all those avenues that I knew were barren. As it says in the bible: “Everything is tedious, far beyond words can say. And yet, no matter what our eyes see they are never sated. No matter what our ears may hear, still they lust for more.” [Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) 1– 8]
Now, when you’re sixteen, that’s no way to live. In fact, that’s a reason to stop. And I would have. I would never have lived to be twenty. But God had not let me spiral down into that black eddy to abandon me.
First, through my friend, Tom, I met the Trappists, a group of monks, who at that time were in Pecos, New Mexico, and I said to myself: “These men really live what they profess to believe.” I went back several times and stayed in their guesthouse and I could feel, I could almost smell the peace and truth of their lives.
And one day, sitting alone in their chapel, everything changed for me.
The chapel was small and quiet; you could see the dust rising and descending like angels in the shaft of light that slanted in from the window to highlight the grille that divided the guests' part of the chapel from the monks' choir stalls. The grille rested on a waist-high partition and was made of wooden slats which were joined like little open boxes piled up to the ceiling. On the monks' side the grille was covered with some kind of cloth that looked like high-class burlap. On the guests' side, hand-embossed four-pointed tin stars decorated the grille. Through the grille cloth I could just make out the form of one of the brothers who was sweeping the monks' choir stalls. After a while he left, closing the door to the chapel with no sound but a soft whooshing of the door against the floor.
I sat in the pew knowing what would happen – what was indeed already happening and which had never, ever happened to me before. Even so, it was like coming home to an old familiar embrace. I knew God and I knew he loved me. I knew, for the first time in my life, what I wanted and I knew nothing would stop me from getting it. I would be a monk and spend my life echoing back to God his amazing love.
And I did become a monk. A monk of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance: a Trappist. I made my simple vows, and then my solemn vows. I studied for the priesthood since it was expected of me – all the choir monks at that time studied for the priesthood and were ordained. However, I never had any desire to become a priest. All I ever wanted was to be a monk.
Then two things happened. The first was Vatican II which caused religious orders to reexamine all aspects of their life, and the second was a continuing mix of illnesses which were exasperated by an accident at work.
Even before Vatican II, the role of the priest in the monastery was being rethought, but Vatican II confirmed that there was no need to have more priests in a contemplative monastery than were necessary for the Liturgical services and administration of the sacraments to the monks. So I decided that I would not be ordained. After all, they already had 32 priests.
The second thing was, I got sick. I had hurt my back in an accident and was in the hospital for two weeks. My back never really recovered. But even before the accident, I had problems with headaches, insomnia and various aches, pains, and a dripping nose. Many years later this was diagnosed as Fibromyalgia, Osteoarthritis, and multiple allergies, but at the time the various doctors I was sent to didn’t know what it was. So they decided it was probably psychosomatic. The theory was that it was the monastic life that was making me sick.
At the urging of the Prior, Fr. Benedict, I asked for a leave of absence and went to Los Angeles to test out this theory. I would have gone back to the monastery after I graduated from Loyola-Marymont University, but one day I got a call from my sister who told me that my parents, who were living in poverty because my father – an alcoholic – couldn’t hold a job, had a big problem: My father tried to shoot my mother. So I came back to Albuquerque to see what I could do to solve the problem.
I got a job with the local electric company and supported my mother. I rose from Accounting Clerk to Accountant to Accounting Systems Designer. I was able to maintain my mother in her own house while I had my own.
I dated some nice young women during the years away from the monastery, several of whom would have loved to have me permanently, but there was always in my heart a hunger for God no woman was able to assuage.
My father was put in a nursing home when it became clear that, mentally and physically he was incapable of taking care of himself. I had worked for 15 years supporting my mother when my father died. I then realized that, with the modest pension my mother would inherit, I had enough money in stocks, savings, and equity in my home to retire from my job and still support both my mother and myself. I could, I hoped, at last return to the religious life.
I went back several times to the Trappist Abbey which was now located in Oregon, but though I still loved the Trappist life and the men who lived there, rejoining the monastery didn’t seem the right thing to do. It was as if God were telling me I had finished that part of my life and now I was to move on. Besides, I still had my mother to consider, and moving her to Oregon where she knew no one would have been very hard for her.
I had a house a half mile from where St. Pius High School and the Archdiocesan Center Offices were located. Fr. Robert Brooks, a Norbertine from the recently founded priory of Santa Maria de la Vid, established the parish of St. Joseph on the Rio Grande on the Archdiocesan property and I adopted that as my parish. I got to know Fr. Brooks and through him the rest of the Norbertines at the priory. When I finally did retire three years later, I decided to join the Norbertines. Since my health was still chancy, I wasn’t sure I could make a positive contribution to the community.
First I became an associate to the Norbertines. I spent my days with them but I went back to my home each night. After a couple years of this, I moved in with the Norbertines but I was still just an associate. Two years later, I felt my health had sufficiently improved and I thought I was really making a contribution to the community so I asked to become a Norbertine brother. I made my novitiate, simple vows and then three years later, solemn vows.
That was my life. But what went on inside? Have you ever had your faith purified? Have you ever known the Night? And have you ever seen the Dawn? If you have, you have some idea of what went on. If you haven’t . . . Well, like Louis Armstrong said when someone asked him to define jazz, “If someone’s got to tell you, you’ll never know.”
Did I tell you that I was born with six toes on my left foot? Well, I was.
Click here to learn more about our Norbertine vocation.
Click here to read other biographies of the members of our community. |
