Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,8

the start of my senior year, a theologian came to dinner at a professor’s house and we talked. He spoke of Maritain, who said that art was the practical virtue of the intellect (you know this), and after reading Maritain I decided that art should be my action, and that I should become a Catholic. It was as simple as that. It happened in one night.

And I wondered, I still wonder—I want to think deeply and not have it carry me off to some place where I’m useless. I mean, I carry myself off enough when I write, and I fear that, although it may make me great, it may make me useless as well. My politics might become an unintelligible mess. I saw in that theologian, in his Catholicism, a way to make a sustained and coherent statement about what I believed. And that seemed a sign—when you see what is possible, and you become less afraid. I became a Catholic that Easter.

So I was a senior, and I could have gone on to get a PhD after graduating, but I decided to become a Trappist monk instead. My parents were livid. They still imagined that I would suddenly straighten up at the end of college and decide to go to law school, which demonstrates how little they know me, or want to know me. I went to a monastery in Virginia for about two months that summer. At the monastery, the monks thought—they knew—I meant well. But there was the sense that I would not last. Near the end of the summer, the abbot said he thought he saw me, as he put it, sweating at the communion rails. He told me to go back out into the world. He did not want me using the religious life as atonement or refuge. He thought that if I persisted I would eventually be miserable. He thought I would be better off living a faith in the world, writing of God to the world from the world. In the monastery, he thought, I would try too hard; I would make a commotion. He told me that my penance would be noisy, but it would not make a joyful noise, and because my penance would not be joyful, it might distract my other brothers. He was not saying, he told me, that a religious life should be free of anguish, but that there was joy in the Psalms too, and he thought that it might be easier for me to find joy, if I could find it, in the world, in marriage, maybe, he said, and family. He thought I needed to be among people, not to renounce them. He reminded me that Maritain was not a priest.

Then, seeking a way to be prostrate before God while also in the world, I went to a Catholic Worker, the one in the East Village. And soon I got asked to leave. This involved a girl. A girl who lived there thought I liked her too much. She was bothered by the fact that I had written her a few poems. (Yes, I suppose that can look rather menacing if the one writing is well past his teenage years.) She once told me that the amount of time I spent in confession had convinced her that I saw it not as an opportunity for contrition but as a chance to perform an aria. This girl was a blonde. She wore her hair in braids. Her name was Ellen. Her soul seemed clean and well ordered, and now that I think about it, I might have gotten that impression solely from her braids, her tightly, very tightly, woven brass-gold braids. They had me thinking of the purity and severity of childhood. With those braids, and her padded pink-and-ivory face, forehead an imperiously vaulted arch, I’d turned her into a long-lost virgin companion of Saint Ursula—have you seen those Flemish busts at the Cloisters? Now I see that I mistook her severity for true spiritual radiance, but at the time, when I was convinced I was in love with her, I told myself that perhaps the abbot had been right, and God had led me out of the monastery because he knew celibacy would be disastrous for me. Because I thought I was in love with this girl, and I was writing poems in this place, where I was also doing good, I hoped. So even after I was asked to leave, I was undaunted,