May 22, 2020
When I was a novice in the Paulist novitiate, we were led by an asthmatic wheezy old priest who smoked excessively and doted on “Jiggs,” a fat and lazy black Labrador dog.
Jiggs was loathed and envied simultaneously by the 16 novices. We, as beginners in the spiritual life, were taught that while proper formation for the priesthood essentially included “near starvation,” proper treatment for non-humans, like Jiggs, required a belly-filling diet. So, as we ate lettuce sandwiches during Lent, we watched wide-eyed as Jiggs slobbered down sweet-smelling sausages to the delight of his master.
Apparently, there was some of kind of fundamental spiritual message locked in this experience but none of us seemed to catch the meaning.
It was a time of a total war in 1942, with endless restrictions on butter, gas, sugar and showers. Saving water had high priority. We were rightly expected to share in the privations – at least symbolically – of our 20-year-old peers as they faced fear, loneliness and boredom around the various theaters of war. So, we faced our own trial for a year and a day, on top of a mountain in New Jersey called “Mount Paul,” which we rarely left except for brief periods of exercise and shopping.
The novice master (our fearless leader) was expected to teach us, through frequent conferences, the basics of spirituality and life in community. Afflicted with an almost painful shyness, he, under his role prescription of a weekly instruction to us, managed only two all year. One of which was to castigate the novices because some boob had thrown a toothbrush down the toilet with subsequent plumbing blockage! It was up to the leader to stick his consecrated hand down the smelly bowl and extract the offending article. Apart from such illuminating tutelage, we were on our own.
Each day, unending sameness. Same faces. Same awful food. Same undeviating schedule. Silence. Deadening boredom. Nothing new or different. Even the visiting weekly confessor became an oasis to us in this desert of monotony as we recited our piddling little offenses of distractions in prayer and irritation at a fellow novice’s idiosyncrasies. But at least confession was something different!
Yet, there were good books to read and there were some young men with active and curious minds in that contingent. Somehow, as we labored cutting ice or mowing lawns, we came up with some survival techniques which have proven priceless in the many years that have passed since then.
Out of necessity, there came a kind of invention!
We discovered the Mass. It was not a Mass of rote nor a vehicle to arm-wrestle the Lord. It was not a service of elegance or scholarship (celebrated as it was) in an almost sloppy mechanical manner. It was a discovery that burst on us like a summer sunrise. It mattered not who celebrated the Mass. It was Jesus Himself who was the Power behind all the wheezing, sneezing and the smell of stale cigarette smoke. It was Jesus who was sustaining us. “Offering it up” became more than the platitude we prattled in the sixth grade of St. Paul’s grammar school. We joined our “suffering” to Jesus on His cross and there found the strength and the reason to carry on.
We rooted our day at its beginning in the Mass, in an experience of the infinite power of Christ, Jesus Himself. It was like a mantle which would cover all our endeavors that day. Somehow, the nonsense became meaningful. No matter what balderdash surfaced in that narrow community, the day had value and the sense of daily spiritual increment became palpable. “Increment” became the operative word.
We discovered also a truth which now seems elementary: Life itself is routine and filled with non-appreciation and dullness. It isn’t a series of endless sky rockets and peak moments. It is a string of unchallenging repetitions and much emptiness, spiked occasionally by a passing delight. One discovers that the priesthood is a repetition of many small dynamics, replicated over and over again. To expect perennial paradise would be unreal, even infantile.
The lesson of our otherwise diddering novitiate was enormously important. One must learn to deal with non-skyrocket days. If one does not, the result is a dead soul. Life becomes increasingly heavy and boring. Even a too-soon, too-much exposure to sky rockets can result in human burnout or meltdown. But by a strange spiritual alchemy, life becomes exciting when lived with the insight described above. Life is lived to please God and, in a way, the self (a kind of legitimate narcissism) wherein joy and “appropriate” fun are had in almost every instance.
Paradox? Less can mean more!
It means that one must learn freedom from the temptation to impress others. Once the adolescent pathway of people-pleasing is followed, one loses freedom and indeed joy. But, joy can be discovered in an immediate task which, at first sight, seems so hopelessly overwhelming and uninteresting. The reward (and secret) is ultimately in one’s intentionality. The approval of others is not needed. One doesn’t do “it” for others! Even the fulfilling of obedience began to make sense. When the “obediences” were absurd and patently unmanageable – as they sometimes were – it made sense to obey because of the insight that the Lord is the One we try to please.
Strangely, we found that obeying His ecclesiastical representatives was a way of finding Him. External success becomes strangely unnecessary even though so delightful when it occasionally comes.
Life does seem, overall, to be repetitive. Often difficult and perhaps not so dark as the famous “nasty, brutal and short” description, but always in need of fresh and interesting discoveries which are usually there if one can “see.” It is how I deal with the “why” of things of life which determine happiness and contentment.
It seems so obvious to me now in my late 90s. But at 21, it was finding an oasis in a terrible desert.
At least it is a crack at making monotony meaningful and sense out of unavoidable problems and dullness.
One cannot run away from human travail but one can try to survive with as little damage as possible. But more than survival, life, I believe, is meant to be appropriately enjoyed. The above is how one dinosaur found a way to just that. And wonder of wonders, the obvious, after all, is the answer. God has made us for Himself and “our hearts are restless” until they rest in Him.
Paulist Fr. James Lloyd, 99, is the oldest-living Paulist Father. He lives at the Paulist motherhouse on West 59th Street in New York City, just blocks from where he was raised on Manhattan’s West Side by his vaudevillian parents. Ordained in 1948, Fr. Lloyd served a missionary in South Africa and as a professor and administrator at Iona College. From 1958 to 1973, he hosted “Inquiry,” a Sunday morning television program on WNBC in New York.
Editor’s Note: Dogs are no longer permitted in the Paulist Fathers’ seminary and novitiate. Also, lettuce sandwiches are no longer standard fare for Paulist novices during Lent.