could see or sense or feel that some of the older friars possessed some spiritual quality that made them very different from most of the people I knew. As I look back at them I realize now that they had probably arrived at the spiritual clarity of the illuminative way. They fascinated me, and it was frustrating not to be allowed to speak to them except on very rare occasions. I watched them as often as I could, however, trying to discern from their manner, from the way they moved, from the look in their eyes, why they were so different, so special. I could not, of course, but the fascination persisted, making me yearn for a glimpse into their souls, the way I had yearned for a glimpse into the tabernacle in Corpus Christi Church when I was five years old.
But I must say something more. There was one friar whose holiness was so visible, so very tangible, that he stood apart from all the others. That was the Venerable Solanus Casey, a remarkable man in every sense of the word. I have written and spoken about Fr. Solanus Casey more times than I can count, and yet every time I look back at him it is as if I see him anew. He was quite old and gray by the time I met him at Huntington, and he was a man of profound silence as well as great humility.
As a young seminarian he had not been thought intelligent enough to complete the studies necessary for priestly ordination. In fact, he actually failed theology. Yet for one reason or another it was decided that he should be ordained anyway. It was, however, understood that he would not ever hear confessions or preach. He accepted these limitations meekly and spent most of his life as a humble porter in his Capuchin monastery. Yet the depth of his spirituality became impossible to deny, and throughout much of his life miracles of one sort or another accompanied him. When I was a novice it was not uncommon to see people come from great distances to receive his blessing and to ask for his prayers.
It was clear to me that he was unique among the friars, that he had arrived at a place in his spiritual life that few people reach—that few people even approach. I chanced upon him in prayer once, alone in the chapel late one night. He was in what I can only call a type of ecstasy before the Blessed Sacrament. He was aware of nothing but his mysterious encounter with God at that moment. The world around him had lost all meaning for him. I don’t know that I have ever seen anything quite like it since. Seeing him like that was the sort of experience that transforms you. It dissolves all doubts. Through Fr. Solanus Casey I, as a young novice, was given an extraordinary gift: a glimpse into a type of holiness that was too real and too powerful ever to be ignored. It is a gift for which I will be forever grateful.
As I let my memory drift back to my days as a Capuchin novice I am amazed at the odd things that appear to my mind’s eye. Some are full of meaning, such as the great depth of prayer displayed by the older friars. Others are quite trivial, such as the immense beards worn by those same friars, which—amazingly—is what I’m thinking about right now. Why two such different things should be juxtaposed in my thoughts I have no idea, but they seem to be, perhaps because beards were such a constant feature of Capuchin life back then. They were by no means optional, you understand. If you were a Capuchin in 1951 you grew a beard, and that was all there was to it. This rule, to put it very mildly, was taken with the utmost seriousness. In fact, when it came to beards, the Old Testament patriarchs had nothing on the Capuchins I knew. Some of those old friars really did look like Moses or Abraham, and by the time I got to Huntington, their beards had been in progress for far longer than I had been alive. As a seventeen-year-old I guess I was impressed.
Yet it must be remembered that even those immense beards had come about for reasons that were ultimately spiritual. Beards were part of the ancient Capuchin constitutions because they were considered to be a direct imitation of Jesus and St. Francis, who both were bearded. Like our Divine Savior and St. Francis, the Capuchins did not trim their beards; they simply let nature take its course—which, in the Capuchins’ case, it sometimes did with a vengeance. I came to love this part of the Capuchin way of life, the fact that every aspect of daily living—even shaving or not shaving—seemed to be infused with a spiritual dimension. If one truly lived the Capuchin way of life the way it was meant to be lived, it would be hard not to advance in holiness.
And so, with great determination, I set about to grow a beard just like my Capuchin confreres. If I couldn’t pray like them I could at least look like them, I figured. Those who know me are aware that I have always worn a beard, not an immense old-style Capuchin one, but a modified one that is kept well under control. At seventeen, however, I must admit, the beard proved to be a challenge—one I began to fear might be insurmountable. The initial results were decidedly disappointing. Some people (those slightly lacking in charity) even said they were unnoticeable. If I had known about Miracle-Gro back then I might have been tempted to try it, but persistence (and getting a little older) finally paid off, and eventually I managed to produce a reasonably acceptable beard. I have kept it ever since. I consider it very much a part of my Capuchin identity. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I’d even be able to recognize myself without it.
Only a few other new novices arrived with me that June, as the prospective new Capuchins showed up in Huntington every year in two distinct waves. The first was for boys like me, who had not attended the Capuchin minor seminaries. We arrived over a month before our more seasoned confreres-to-be. That head start was used to give us a crash course on the Capuchin Franciscan charism and way of life—a postulancy in the fast lane, you might say. It was a sort of Capuchin boot camp, and I remember it as a whirlwind with much to learn, and even more to do.
The second and slightly larger group showed up in late August. I must admit that I was just a little nervous at the arrival of the Capuchin-trained novices, wondering how far ahead of the rest of us they would be. They were ahead; there was no question about that, and both they and we were very aware of it. For a while this fact seemed to create two distinct subgroups among the novices. It was not unusual to hear the Capuchin-trained novices speak about the rest of us as “the outsiders.” Now, that may sound insulting, but I don’t think it was ever meant as such. It was really a simple statement of fact, especially in the beginning. In a sense they were already Capuchins and we, as yet, were not. As the months went on, however, the difference between the two groups became less and less noticeable, until by the end of the novitiate, a period that lasted one year and one day, I would say that the two groups were all but indistinguishable.
At that time, Huntington was the novitiate for the Capuchin Province of St. Joseph, which extended from the East Coast to Montana, so I found myself among novices from a great many places and a great many backgrounds. Those from the Midwest were about double the number from the Eastern Seaboard, and this was the almost unvarying pattern back then, with the East supplying one Capuchin friar for every two who came from the West. As I think back on those young Midwesterners I am again reminded of how much things have changed since those long-ago days.
Back then, before the media and increased mobility had more or less homogenized our society, people from the Midwest seemed very different from us Easterners. It was almost as if they came from a different culture. Perhaps it was a gentler and less self-critical one; it was certainly a more taciturn one, for it was clear that we Easterners liked to talk a great deal more than then they did. I must say that most of the novices from the Midwest seemed very devout. They also seemed able to adapt to the rustic life at Huntington with much greater ease than we from the East did. Many of them had grown up on farms and were used to the sort of manual labor that was part of a novice’s life in those days.
And when I say “rustic life” and “manual labor,” I’m not fooling around. The novitiate was all but totally self-sufficient—a world unto itself—and the novices and friars were expected to do all the work that was required. Few repairmen were ever called in, and the idea of using an outside gardener or cleaning service would have been incomprehensible. We raised our own vegetables in gardens so large they looked like whole farms to me. We also raised and eventually slaughtered our own pigs, which is something I’ve been trying to forget for over sixty years. We had orchards with various types of fruit trees, and we had more bee hives than seemed either sensible or safe. We had a large carpentry shop and our sandals were made in our cobbler’s shop. We sewed our own habits and
