who felt he should be more mature than his few years allowed him to be. Although I was simply a boy, I was a boy filled with expectation, one brimming with hope. The desire to be a priest had been a constant in my life for years by that time. No—I must correct that. It had not been a constant, at all. It had been growing steadily and powerfully until I had come to see it as a wonderful inevitability. I realize that on that June day in 1951, I could no longer even imagine a life that did not involve the priesthood.
Because of that feeling—that joyful obsession—I don’t really know if I truly appreciated the finality of things as I awaited the train that would carry me far from New Jersey, far from my family and the only life I had ever known. I suspect it had not completely sunk in that I would never again live in my parents’ home, that they and my brothers and my sisters would no longer be intimate parts of my daily life. I also suspect that I didn’t completely appreciate the effect my leaving must have had on my father, and especially on my mother. From the day I departed to the day they died, my parents never failed to support my vocation; never once did they try to dissuade me from what I was convinced that God was calling me to do. I know they were proud of me, and the memory of their pride is something I treasure today every bit as much as I did sixty years ago. I know that they prayed every day for my success and perseverance. But what I didn’t really know—or at least didn’t understand—back in 1951 was that it must have hurt them to see their eldest son leave at such a young age.
After I boarded that train, the family they loved so much was forever changed, and this must have been a source of sadness for them. They never spoke to me about this; they never even hinted at it. But from the distance of many years, I can see it in a way I could not back then. Youth is oblivious of so much. That lack of awareness protects young people in ways they never suspect until they are much older.
The train finally arrived with all its irrevocability. I kissed my mother goodbye. Then I shook hands with my father. I’m sure an onlooker would have seen our leave-taking as formal, maybe almost emotionless. But it wasn’t. The depth of feeling was there, and it was powerful; yet it was contained, even hidden, because that is simply the way people acted back then. It was a far more reserved era, a time when emotions were considered private, not suited to public display. Time conceals many things, but other things it actually reveals or at least makes clearer. And I believe I can see that day as it really was far better now than I did then. As I look back at that moment, I find I am actually a little overwhelmed at my parents’ love for me, at their pride in me, at their strength in being able to surrender me to God. Perhaps I didn’t feel all that as I waved goodbye to them and boarded the train, but God has allowed me to feel it now in all its wonderful intensity.
I can remember walking down the aisle of the train in search of my seat, my ticket clutched a little too tightly in my hand. I can remember the lurch of the train as it pulled out of the station and headed west, and I can remember feeling that the first part of my life was ending and the second beginning. I have to say that I was filled with excitement and nervous anticipation.
The trip to Huntington, Indiana, where the Capuchin novitiate was then located, proved to be long and somewhat boring. It was also hot, as there was no air conditioning in the summer of 1951. I could see that the land was becoming flatter and flatter the farther from home we got. That must mean we are getting close to Indiana, I assumed, dutifully remembering what the sisters had taught us: that Indiana was part of the Great Plains and that plains are, well … plains and lacked the hills and valleys that are so common on the East Coast. The train sped on, with me doing my best to imagine what the strange land of Indiana would be like, what the Capuchins would be like. I knew Indiana sometimes had tornados (another bit of information I had gleaned from the sisters), and I was still young enough to hope that I might actually experience one. I read for a while but couldn’t concentrate on what I was reading.
I tried to pray, but even that was difficult until I reached into my pocket and found my rosary beads. It was so familiar and the feel of the beads slipping through my fingers so comforting that I was able to let the contemplation of its mysteries enfold me as the train traveled on. I even discovered that the gentle rocking of the train seemed to help in praying the Rosary, or perhaps that was just a little gift God was giving to a nervous boy on his first trip away from home. Whatever the case, my rosary made me feel less alone. 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
