A Friar's Tale. John Collins
It made me feel that Our Lady was supporting me in choosing the life I was determined to follow.
The train stopped from time to time for people to get off and for new people to get on. I found myself staring at each of the new passengers, trying to figure out what their lives might be like and where they were going. After a certain point I began to realize that the new people actually sounded different. They formed their words in a way that seemed odd to me, and they spoke with a peculiar rhythm I wasn’t used to. Actually, their words seemed every bit as flat as the landscape through which we were traveling and utterly devoid of the ethnic elements that I loved to hear and were so much a part of the speech of the people with whom I had grown up.
I listened closely, silently repeating their words in my mind, wondering if I could make myself sound like them. Would the Capuchins speak like this, I wondered. I knew that many of my fellow novices would be from the Midwest. Would my speech mark me as being different from them? Would it make me an outsider? If I stayed in Indiana long enough, would I begin to sound like these people, like a Midwesterner? As these thoughts flowed through my mind I came to the conclusion that it was probably best to abandon my occasional use of Yiddish words for emphasis … at least for the time being.
From time to time I talked to some of the other passengers, although I usually let them initiate the conversations. Whenever I was asked about my destination—which is always the most common question on a train—my response invariably elicited a look of surprise or at least a raised eyebrow. “Are you old enough for that?” a motherly woman demanded with obvious concern. “I’m almost eighteen,” I asserted, a bit stung that she hadn’t discerned my obvious maturity. Hadn’t she noticed the seriousness of my black suit? Looking down at it, I was embarrassed to realize that somehow it had become a mass of wrinkles during the long trip, so I immediately glanced back up.
Suit or no suit, she didn’t seem very impressed with the revelation of my advanced age, and she looked at me skeptically. I remember suspecting that she was working hard to avoid saying something like: “You’ll have plenty of time to make a decision like that in the future. You should be going to parties and having a good time. You should find a nice girlfriend and go to a regular college.” I actually don’t remember that she ever said anything at all. Perhaps she just nodded. Maybe she wished me luck. I think I would have remembered if she had offered to pray for me.
But even if I had not been going to a monastery, I would have rejected the idea that I should be leading a carefree life. The Korean War had begun almost exactly one year before I left New Jersey. I was very aware that boys only a little older than I were going into the armed services and that some of them would never come home. The confrontation between Western democracy and communism was a constantly intensifying, and very alarming, reality back then, making it seem as if the world was determined to rush headlong into terrible disaster.
Much of my childhood had been spent during World War II, a time of great anxiety and enormous loss of life—an apocalyptic time, the memories of which were still very fresh in people’s minds the day I boarded that train. Those memories were irrefutable proof of the demonic depths to which mankind could sink, of the terrible evil and consuming destruction that could spring from the human soul.
Such things meant that my generation was very different from young people of the present time. We were not inclined to be frivolous. We were too intimately acquainted with the possibility of tragedy. We had learned too early and perhaps too well of the uncertainty of life and the transience of worldly pleasures—of the ephemeral nature of earthly life. The era in which we were born and grew up formed us. It drove us to look beneath the surface of things, to be dissatisfied with meaningless entertainments, to search for something deeper. It was this depth that I believed I would find with the Capuchins, this mysterious depth that transcended life and death and overcame the tragedy of our earthly existence. That, and only that, was the reason I was on a hot train in a wrinkled suit bound for a novitiate in Huntington, Indiana. I had no time for parties. I was in search of treasures that would last. I reached for my rosary again, and the train rumbled on.
Indiana, as it turned out, was different from what I expected. I remember standing in front of the novitiate, my bag in my hand and my heart in my mouth, looking to the left and to the right. My first impression of Huntington was that it was comprised of nothing but Capuchins and cows. Because of the flat landscape you could see a great distance in all directions, but that didn’t matter very much because once the novelty of seeing cows wore off (which it did rather quickly) there really wasn’t much else to look at. I realized right away that I had arrived in what we in Jersey City used to call the boondocks. It had never occurred to me before that day that the boondocks could be quite so empty. However, if God wanted me to be in such a place, then that is where I would be—and I would learn to love it … or, failing that, to like it. At least that was my plan on the first day.
My heart was pounding a little as I walked up the steps, but my nervousness evaporated as soon as the door swung open, for I was greeted by the most perfect monastic doorkeeper in the entire world. This was Br. Ferdinando Piconi, about whom I have written before. He had the power to make a scared, young novice-to-be forget his fear and misgivings in an instant. Br. Ferdinando also had the gift of being able to make people smile, and he didn’t have to work very hard to do it. He was very short and very round. He also had what I have always thought of as a God-given natural tonsure. He was an elf of a friar and seemed incapable of being in anything but a good mood.
Br. Ferdinando welcomed me enthusiastically, but in the midst of his exuberant greetings, he kept asking me to pray that he would have a happy death. I readily agreed to do so, of course, but the request startled me. In fact, it took me aback. I looked at him closely but on the sly, figuring that there must be more going on with Br. Ferdinando than what appeared on the surface. Maybe he’s very ill, I thought. Maybe he’s near death and is only putting on a brave front. Maybe it takes all his strength just to open the door and show me to my room.
As it turned out, none of that was the case. Br. Ferdinando did die during my year in the novitiate. Yet it was not any slowly advancing and valiantly fought disease that took him, but a massive heart attack. He went quite suddenly and perhaps even painlessly. So I believe I witnessed him receive what he had so ardently desired. He had been asking people to pray for his happy death for years. Hardly a day passed when he did not mention it. I realize that for most people this might seem as bizarre a request as it did to me on that first day in Huntington. Br. Ferdinando, however, thought it the most natural thing in the world. And I find I understand that far better now than I did in 1951. I have come to see that he was completely focused not on the present and not even on the future, but on eternity. His was a simple and slightly unusual way of expressing such things, but his was also a simple if profound faith. I believe that it was this focus, this awareness of eternity that enabled him to be so cheerful and optimistic, yet so very aware of death. I also believe that in the final analysis his requests for prayers paid off rather handsomely.
Chapter V
The Capuchin Way
The Tale As Father Told It
I quickly got the lay of the land at Huntington and realized the novitiate was comprised of two wings extending in opposite directions. They were joined to each other by the chapel, which was right in the center, just as it should have been. One wing was for the novices; the opposite one was for the professed friars, many of whom, at that time, were elderly. As I look back at those days I can’t help but think that those two wings may as well have been in two different universes, because the friars’ wing was absolutely off limits to the novices, and our contact with the professed friars was designed to be as minimal as possible. I have to admit that this is something that has always baffled me. How can novices be properly formed if they are prevented from associating with the very people who should be their role models? Despite the apparent illogicality of it, however, this was the way things were done in the religious life before the Second Vatican Council; in fact, this separation was an almost universal feature of both men’s and women’s religious communities at that time.
Of course, we did see the older Capuchins from time to time, in the refectory and especially in the chapel. And,