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A Long Retreat

In Search of Religious Life

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

PART I

By experience we have learned that the path has many and great difficulties connected with it. Consequently we have judged it opportune to decree that no one should be permitted to pronounce his profession in this Society unless his life and doctrine have been probed by long and exacting tests.

— from The Formula of the Institute of the Society of Jesus

Even now my memory is never far from a composition of that time and place. Saturday, the twenty-fifth of August, the skies — at least for an hour or two — a rare blue, with a nudging breeze on which wafts the brewed-tea smell of an early autumn. The sun feels warm but weakening. Inside a high-ceilinged, stained-glass-lit modern sanctum of the Jesuit Residence on the campus of Le Moyne College in Syracuse (the chapel of St. Andrew's novitiate too small to host everyone), the air is conditioned slightly toward a chill. A staggered collection of thirteen young men dressed in khakis, polo shirts, and button-downs sit in a semicircle of chairs in front of the simple altar adorned with a white cloth. To five of the men belongs a smaller cadre of parents. A few middle-aged priests dressed in their own street clothes sweep into the room through swinging doors and join the company of worshipers. Another priest, wearing on this day a white stole of the liturgical celebrant, sits in a larger chair facing this congregation and stands when everyone has settled. "Welcome," he says.

An entrance hymn is held up on the confident voices of those who are at home here. The penitential rite at the beginning of the Mass feels, as it should, consoling. The readings are taken not from Sunday but from Saturday, the twentieth week in Ordinary Time, the Gospel for which is Matthew 23:1–12: "Whoever exalts himself will be humbled. Whoever humbles himself will be exalted." And then, Father Don Gannon, SJ, Master of Novices in the New York Province of the Society of Jesus, waits as we all sit back down again to begin speaking to us as a tribal father might to his many sons, we who have gathered to begin religious life as Jesuits at a time when a first-year class of five is considered a respectable number of vocations (the eight remaining in the second year suggests something of a boon). Having seen them come and having seen them go for nearly six years as superior of a house of formation, Father Gannon — in the unshakable attitude of the forgiven — says, "Some of you will leave this community after having joined it today."

He means this to be neither insight into a betrayal nor a taunt, but a fact of religious life, in the present and of the past, for the earliest Jesuits knew this, too, in sixteenth-century Spain, France, and Portugal. I watch some of the mothers shift in their seats and fidget slightly, perhaps conscious for the first time that the odds are against their sons ever being ordained priests, regardless of how hard they have prayed. And I realize myself that, after having arrived in Syracuse this morning on emotional autopilot, not knowing how to respond to the enormity of this day, I suddenly feel as though a challenge has been thrown down before me. "One year ago, odds were I wouldn't have made it this far," an internal voice responds, as though wanting to vent its own tough, screw-the-odds-I'm-staying attempt to pray. Then, as if he can hear a fuguelike variation of that same prayer in each one of our heads, Father Gannon goes on to insist that the work of the Jesuit novitiate is to allow both the novice and the Society of Jesus to make a deeper discernment about the man and the men who surround him. Should the novice stay and take vows to remain in the Order, it doesn't indicate spiritual success, for the journey that is religious life then becomes the journey of a lifetime, bringing with it failures beyond the imagination, yet those to which each one of us has been called by God. Should the novice leave and go back out into the world, it doesn't mean he has failed. A lifetime of journeys remains there, too. "He's still called to discernment and discipleship," Father Gannon says. "And who knows? That may mean a more difficult path."

"He." Not "you." Not me. But surely one — if not all — of us. Who then? I wondered, as I looked around at the other men who had traveled from New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey to gather in that place on that morning. If not me, who?

Chris Bellito was the most energetic and talkative of our class. He was from the Bronx, the North Bronx, and had been teaching history at a Catholic high school there. He was short, with dark, tufty hair and a beard. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and drew attention to the obvious fact that he was Italian, at times dropping into a Goodfellas accent for humor, appearing sure of himself, almost fearless.

"So you're Andrew," he'd said to me as we lingered in the novitiate refectory that morning, before we walked over to Le Moyne for Mass. "I read your bio. You spent the entire summer sailing?"

I had forgotten about the short personal blurbs that had been printed in the Jesuits' Company magazine along with the photographs of all the new novices in the American Assistancy. I'd read the ones on the guys from New York, but I resisted memorization. "I was helping out on a boat delivery from the Bahamas to Cape Cod."

"Delivering, like, on what? The ocean or a tractor trailer?"

"On the ocean. Eight days, sometimes a hundred miles out."

"Whoa! I'd get sick or go crazy."

I smiled. "Or both." I admired him, but there was something as well that made me resentful of his ease. You could be fearless and still be scared, like Faulkner's young man in The Bear.

When at some point I broke off from that conversation, Frank Evans stepped away from the group he was in, walked up to me, and said in a conspirational tone, "I don't know about you, but I can only take so much of these family gatherings before I'll do anything for a beer. Jee-zus Christ!" He started laughing as though both of us had been watching the entire day from a separate vantage point, and I started laughing with him from sheer relief — and disbelief — at his lack of piety.

Frank was a tough, barrel-chested guy from Upper Montclair, New Jersey, who had that rare quality of always being able to summon respectful satire. It wasn't a mask so much as a criterion, for behind the humor and the healthy irreverence (I would discover in time), he maintained a deep faith and a desire to express it. He had gone to Boston College and worked as a consultant in Manhattan, giving up a real career to join the Jesuits. His father had driven him to the novitiate that morning; his mother had died sometime in the recent past.

"All right," he said. "I'll be good. Let's go see what the guy who won't shut up is all about."

Frank meant Billy McGuinness, another one of us who stood close by our more sociable parents as though protecting them, or they us. Billy was an elevator repairman from Oceanside, Long Island. He had entered not to become a priest but to be a brother, a man who takes vows in the Society of Jesus but chooses not to get ordained. A Jesuit brother's vocation is described as sharing "in the same religious commitment" as the priest's, one complementing the other, each serving the Church. In the past that meant they took their vows and got to work without any further education. These days they were artists and physicists with Ph.D.'s. They taught in schools, after they built them. At the time, though — brother or priest — it all seemed the same to me. I had heard that Billy was next to the youngest in our class, and that he had chosen not to go to college. At twenty-one, he had the stolid look of a man who knew physical work more intimately than he knew books or leisure.

David McCallum, the youngest by a few months, was mingling with the second-year novices, whom he clearly already knew. David was from Rochester and had just graduated from Le Moyne. Two priests teaching in the English Department there had inspired him to think about life in the Order, and so he'd made his way across the street enough times in his last two years of college to see what went on at St. Andrew's. It was clear from the start that the spiritual knight-errantry of St. Ignatius of Loyola, and all of his followers since, appealed to David's romantic and literary side. But he entered, he told me later, out of a desire for a spiritual freedom he couldn't define. David was on the universal path of that ancient struggle to "Know Thyself." We all were, I suppose, but David's path was being paved by adversity. His decision to enter the Jesuits had not gone over well with his parents. He and his sister were their only children. Priesthood meant the family name would stop with their son — outgoing, intelligent, attractive with his Roman nose and slate eyes ... and celibate. They loved the Jesuits they had met at Le Moyne, but you could see the awkwardness and disappointment on their faces that day. It said enough: let some other mother's son do it.

How can you place odds on a first impression of lives like these? And was I so sure I wouldn't be the first one to come and go from here, once the reality of this adventure emerged and the ideal I had fomented in my imagination wore off? In some ways it was a move lucid and right, as though I had returned home after a long time away. And yet, I also couldn't shake the sense of being disoriented because I had decided to give up the idea of home for the rest of my life. Maybe the two were the same. I thought of my own drive here with my parents that morning, through Wilkes-Barre and Scranton and up into the Endless Mountains region, passing the sign on Interstate 81 for the town of Great Bend, where the Susquehanna River makes a full 180-degree turn, retreats north, wanders west toward its confluence with the Chemung, then threads its way south and east again through a labyrinth of dense and reclusive forest until it arrives at the exact point to which it would have been drawn had it not been sent out into a wilderness. I could cross that bridge a hundred times in one day and still feel as though the river had tricked me into believing I was suddenly moving in a new direction while I traveled steadily in the same.

I wasn't driving, though. My father was. It's what he always did when we needed him, drive us from place to place, as though his vocation was to ferry others from one shore to another, then let them get on their way. At sixty-six, he was still a tall, handsome man with a sharp profile and a full shock of gray hair that over the years had passed from the look and texture of steel to cotton wool. Everybody loved Tom Krivak. Strong and exacting with his children, he was an ebullient and generous man toward anyone who considered him a friend. His father had died in a Wilkes-Barre coal mine at the age of thirty. He was three and so never knew what it was like to feel a father's commanding presence, a presence every single one of his seven children spent a lifetime under the aegis of. I loved him, too.

My mother, Irene, a petite woman with black hair and olive skin (perhaps giving away the presence of a distant outsider in the family generations ago), began her habitual rosary as my father drove and I pondered my future that Saturday. She prayed not out of timidness or dread, and not because I was being delivered to a Catholic seminary, but out of her lifelong desire to transform everything she did into worship. No distractions, no noise, she craved a contemplative life that, like those of the desert saints, would never falter or cease. I often wondered how the ferryman and this mystic were partnered so well, but in the Greek of the Church Fathers, eirene means "peace," that thing for which every traveler and anchorite longs.

My mother's Marian devotion wasn't thoughtless piety. It was an invitation, as though a call or reminder all its own of what remained important in our family, in our world. Anyone present was expected to respond. I can hear the rising and falling recitation that my parents and I uttered together as we crossed the border into New York State at a steady sixty-five miles per hour. I had heard it moving along glass, wood, and stone beads my entire Catholic life: before daily Mass in the mornings; after dinner in the months of October and May; at penitential intervals during Lent; and on the lips of great-aunts and -uncles sitting in their sorrow at a loved one's wake. It's an atonal but heavily accented dactyl-like profession of faith in Christ and the Virgin, as Hail Marys and Our Fathers stress one word over the elision or silence of others — "... who ART in heaven, HALLOWED be thy NAME ..." — an articulation and silence that would keep this man and woman bound to each other, in the end, for fifty-three years. At the age of twenty-seven, though, I turned elsewhere for my vows, my own sacred union.

In 1986, after I graduated from the close and lettered world of St. John's College, Annapolis, I spent time as an ocean lifeguard, worked in boatyards, chipped away at a collection of poems, got accepted into a good graduate writing program, and went. I dated some interesting and attractive women and told them that I dreamed of sailing across the Atlantic and buying a house by the ocean. But a more fervid corner of my heart lay hidden, biding its time. I knew what I wanted to do. What I didn't know was how to go about it, whom to approach or where, though I trusted that these details would take care of themselves. Meanwhile, friends and classmates became bankers, lawyers, mathematicians, carpenters' wives.

Eventually the details fell into place and the path appeared as I had pictured it: a disciplined, prayerful, and intellectually engaging community that wanted me to be a part of it.

But once I began to say that I was going to become a priest, it came as a shock — sometimes humorous, sometimes cautious — to everyone I knew, even those who were Catholic. "A priest?" they'd say. "My God, what for!" "Father What-a-waste." "I thought you were smart." As we sat at the bar of old Cannon's Pub after a poetry workshop in our last semester as graduate students at Columbia, my friend Greg slid Narcissus and Goldmund across to me. "Read this," he said, in his habit of using as few words as possible (the book now among my favorites). The idea of becoming a priest — once as common-sounding to me growing up a Catholic in rural Pennsylvania as the idea of becoming a fireman or a truck driver — suddenly sounded more uncommon than I realized. Only from my family was there no resistance. What seemed initially like indifference among my brothers and sisters I realized later was their own insight into what kind of life I'd probably lead. "I'm not surprised" was the answer I received from each of them, not because they considered me a freak or a misfit but because they sensed that I had been searching for this the whole time. My parents, visibly pleased and yet respectful of my decision when I told them, seemed most of all to believe that I had chosen a path deserving and lasting. More important, I was doing something they could point to and be proud of, something that proved my intelligence and in some way offered more than I took from the world. "He's a doer" was the highest compliment my parents could pay a person. And I had finally decided what it was I wanted to do.

For my part, I believed that I had, after years of running, stopped resisting the Hound of Heaven and turned in a direction that was meant for me. It's hard to explain what goes through the mind of a young man when he feels as though he's being "called" — the prophetic voice that's supposed to single out God's ordained — to serve in this way, a Catholic male brought up to believe that priesthood is the noblest path a man can walk. Poverty, chastity, and obedience? So be it. Every life demands sacrifice. What about freedom, or a sense of adventure for the sailor and ex-lifeguard? What an adventure, a kind of exploratory team or Foreign Service for Christ. Something countercultural, then, from the boy who wanted and yet refused to belong? Could anyone have moved any further counterculturally in the late 1980s, when priests were being assassinated in El Salvador, monks decapitated in North Africa, and most Catholics had yet to line up politically with conservative Evangelicals? And of all the orders, I had chosen to join the Jesuits. Perhaps I should say that they chose me, but like the brag of the English martyr Edmund Campion before he was hung, drawn, and quartered during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, I wanted to walk this path no matter what was required. Life — and death, should it come to that — would mean something for me and thereby, I hoped, for others. "The expense is reckoned," Campion said, "the enterprise is begun. It is of God; it cannot be withstood."

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Excerpted from A Long Retreat by Andrew Krivak. Copyright © 2008 Andrew Krivak. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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