Frances and Bernard Read Online Free Page A

the police but then decided that that was an overreaction. She wanted nothing more to do with me. I used to get in fights all the time in school—anyone without an older brother, I came to his defense, and this was partly a function of my being an only child and missing the chance to be heroic for a younger sibling—but this was different. I had been violent toward a woman. This made me sick. I started to feel nauseated when I thought about how bellicose, how thunderous, I’d been all my childhood—and I saw my time at Harvard as childhood. I thought I had been growing up by unleashing my strength and mind onto the world, by imposing myself and not being afraid of it, but this suddenly began to seem like a lifetime of tantrums. I’d gotten used to having too much, at having whatever I willed become real, which had made my will promiscuous. Not strong at all.
    My mother had a story she would occasionally tell me whenever I refused to go to some family engagement or to dress up for these engagements, or when I rejected their offers of money or their ideas about law school. “When you were about four years old,” she would say, “someone gave you a scooter for a present. And one afternoon, when you were out with your father, you kept trying to see how far you could go.” At one point my father told me to come back, but I just kept rolling on. “No one can stop me,” I am supposed to have said, “only God.” I thought about that story many times after what happened with Maria. I started to feel that I needed to stop thinking only God could stop me. Perhaps I should try to submit myself to God, rather than try to be him.
    Then, at 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