Prince of Peace Read Online Free Page A

lubricating wakes to tell the raucous and irreverent stories that alone make us know that we survived. You survived. I survived. Even if they don't know it anymore, the artists, soldiers and priests survived. And by God because
story
outweighs
history
—if I didn't believe that would I even begin?—so did the dead survive.
    But dear old Henry James says, Don't state! Render! Don't describe what happens, let it happen!
    So, my friend, I catch myself. No fustian pronouncements here, no lecture on the salvific effect of narrative impulse, no discursis on Coleridgean
biographia.
Don't explain, create!
Ex nihilo?
Not quite. The events and the people are real. And the time was that stretch of years in which we both came of age and went to the-edge. This is the beginning, like all good ones, which contains the end.
Eschaton,
therefore. It was August of 1982. I was in Israel. And Michael Maguire was dead.
    And with Molly, riding from Jerusalem, I could barely speak. I was filled with grief for Michael, but also for what I had not had with her. An infinity of tender moments seemed to have been squandered. I watched Molly's sparkling eyes and saw her mother's, that finely formed face, but every memory of Carolyn was a rebuke and I turned from it as I had ruthlessly for a dozen years.
    Molly waited in the taxi down on the public road. She assumed I would accompany her back to America that night. She thought we'd returned to the monastery so that I could change from my habit into lay clothes. But what lay clothes? My overalls? How could I have explained to my daughter that her once distinguished father had returned to Holy Cross to ask the old goat prior for permission? The crunch of gravel under my feet was the only sound and it filled the night. It was only midnight, but not a light showed as I approached the monastery. Surely they had noted my absence at Compline. In more than a decade I had never missed an exercise.
    With the hem of my habit in hand I leapt the stone wall and circled furtively behind the building toward the prior's room. Once beyond the chapel corner I saw that his light was on. I imagined him talking on the telephone to the Israeli police. But they would have been too busy on that feast night to come out until the morning. A search of the wadis would have been impossible in the dark in any case. If I had just secretly gone off with Molly wouldn't they have assumed I'd wandered into the desert in a mystical trance like Bishop Pike? They would have revered my memory. Monks and prelates
should
disappear without a trace, like Elijah.
    This train of thought stopped me. I was standing in the ludicrous arrangement of stone and cactus that the prior referred to as his Zen Garden. The door of his room stood open to the night, and I could see him, a small, frail figure. His bony shoulders protruded under his Benedictine robe. He was bent at his table, like an old man over the wheel of a car. He was not on the phone. A wedge of light fell toward me, inviting my entrance, but I could not bring myself to approach him because suddenly I realized there was every likelihood that this man for whom I had such disdain was praying for me. And all at once my impulse was to throw myself upon him and cry, "Michael is dead!"
    Â 
    Michael was on Nixon's enemy list. J. Edgar Hoover denounced him before Congress. He was the most famous priest in America for a time; the priest against Vietnam. You remember him surely as one of the leading opponents of the war. But there was a secret Michael whom many fewer knew. Despite his reputation as an activist, he was sought out as a Confessor by many Catholics throughout his years as a priest. The elegance of his sensitivity drew people, and not only from among the antiwar crowd. I never confessed to him myself, but Carolyn did. Certainly their encounters in the Sacrament sustained their intimacy and the irony in that, in hindsight, seems particularly poignant to me.
    Once I admitted to him