Personal Essay

My creative nonfiction has appeared in Parnassus, War Literature & The Arts,  Divide, Literal Latte, Bucks County Writer, Nebraska Humanities, Philadelphia Inquirer, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Newark Star-Ledger, and others. The following appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

          In the fall of 1970, I left my small-town to enroll at a Catholic seminary in another state. I was fourteen years old. My mother had recently died of cancer; my father’s very private grief made him distant, moody, and sometimes mean. I did not know if I wanted to be a priest—if I had a vocation, in the idiom of the day—but I knew I had to get away.

          There was another, more vaguely understood, reason to leave. I remember, from a very early age, looking askance at the options for grown-ups in Nebraska City. Farming did not interest me. Main Street had people who spent their days standing behind counters. Fireman, mailman, milkman? No thank you. My father owned a grain elevator, and, to his credit, he discouraged his children from that career, with all its dust and dangerous machinery.

          Priests were the most interesting people I knew, because they were the most educated. And not only about religion. Father Leo was a ham radio operator. Other priests spoke of visits to Jerusalem, to Rome. The seminary held an allure that was, for me, almost entirely secular. Father Ralph showed me that Latin was not just the language of God, but also of generals. Father Mike got me to read Shakespeare. Looking back, I appreciate the patience of those priests. I was a minor terror, a precocious pain in the butt: a show-off in the classroom and an unrepentant rule-breaker outside of it. At my graduation, no one was surprised to hear that I had decided not go to the college seminary program. That I did not, after all, have a vocation.

          That same month something terrible and wonderful happened: I read Kerouac. On the Road  was the fuse for all the hot tinder inside of me, and I went off like a brush fire. I found a volunteer stint that was supposed to help migrant farmworkers, and took off for Idaho. Within a month I was smoking pot and shoplifting beer. When the ill-conceived program collapsed, I took off after Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, hitch-hiking a thousand miles across Montana and the Dakotas. When I finally washed up on my own doorstep, my father shook his head in disgust, and indentured me to a house painter for the rest of the summer. We were both relieved when it was time for me to go to college.

          Dad hoped that Jesuits would keep me in line, but I arrived at Regis College in Denver with purely pagan pursuits in mind. Alas, I was sadly unprepared for sophisticated hedonism. My long hair and fringed leather boots did not fit in on a campus where the cool kids were ski fiends from prep schools back East. I didn’t know about boat shoes and alligator shirts; I couldn’t even pronounce khaki. The boys made fun of me to my face, the girls behind my back.  

          I soured on life, and became mired in a completely inauthentic existence. At weekend parties, I was the hippie in the corner, drunk and disdainful, telling myself I had no time for frivolity. But when Monday rolled around, I was the guy in the back row who hadn’t done the reading, and was scornful of the suck-ups who had.  

          I drifted in the direction of the psychology major. I claimed to want to know the workings of the human mind, but it would have been more honest to say the human heart. My real motivation—hindsight again—was to diagnose and cure my own unhappiness. But psychology, I soon learned, was a social science. It was not about the mind or heart; it was about quantitative methods. I would stare for a while at the charts and tables that I either didn’t understand or didn’t understand the point of, shrug, and go get another beer.

          I had a better time of it in English class, which was taught by the flinty, appropriately named Father Steele. He took us on a tour of lyric poetry, from the medieval all the way to Ishmael Reed's astounding, "I Am A Cowboy in the Boat of Ra." My seminary training in this area had been pretty good; at least I was able to appreciate Father Steele's careful, lucid explanations. When he showed me how to read them, the poems came alive and danced off the page.  

          One assignment gave us the option to hand in a poem of our own. I remember the first lines of my work:  "What starts in the giggle and babble of youth/Always dies in the drivel and gravel of age." It went on like that for three quatrains, maintaining that nifty internal rhyme. Steele’s comment, penned in my margin was, "The unlived life is not worth examining?" The allusion to Plato went right over my head, but I was flattered by the note and admired its terse perfection. That's exactly it, man!   

           Father Steele did not read with stagy zest or grow rapturous over beloved  poems. He explicated each one in the same patient, analytical way. That's why what happened was so unfathomable. One day, toward the end of the semester, Steele was at the front of class reading a work from our Norton Anthology.  He stopped in mid-line, said, "Excuse me," and walked out, closing the door behind him. We sat in stunned silence. Whispers and nervous giggles sprang up around me. What happened? Is he sick? Can we leave? 

          Before anyone could be so bold, in strode our professor. "Excuse me," he said. "I will finish the poem now." And he did, in the same steady voice, providing no explanation. But perhaps there was a cough, or a tiny tremor in his throat, because I was lit up by a hundred-watt epiphany. I hardly dared to believe it: the man had left the room because he’d gotten choked up. The poem had gotten to him. He was not the kind of person to share such a moment with us philistines, but it had happened, I was sure of it.  

Dumbfounded, I went back to my room and clawed through the poem, looking for clues. I was used to his intellectual conjuration of metaphor and meaning, but this was a whole new ball game. Emotion? Tears? From a poem?  Amid all the sham and humbuggery of my life, here was a purely authentic moment. But no matter how many times I read over the poem, I couldn't feel it. The words were admirable, but nothing more. My apparent lack of depth frustrated me. But just knowing it could be there was enough for me to think that maybe literature pointed to the truths I so desperately needed.

The next English class introduced me to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I was goner.

          I find it strange that today I cannot recall which poet had such a profound effect on my teacher. Wilfred Owen, maybe, but that’s just a guess. The important thing is that I eventually did manage to discover that visceral response to poetry in myself. It almost never happens on a first read. With great poems, familiarity breeds a gradual ability to suspend multiple meanings and feelings in the air. When the symphony of nuanced articulations are apprehended together, not filed away in separate mental boxes, what begins as a tickle in the sternum can expand into the chest-heaving, soul-renewing experience of catharsis.

          After twenty-five years of teaching, certain poems can still do it to me. Auden’s elegy for Yeats, for instance, or Gerald Stern’s “There is Wind, There are Matches”—if they catch me on the wrong day. And I'm not so decorous as was Father Steele; my face reddens, my voice breaks. It's awful and embarrassing, for the students and for me, and I try not to let it happen. But yes, I do allow myself to wonder if, on some rare occasion, my spontaneous overflow of emotion will send some kid clawing through a poem, searching for whatever it was that induced an otherwise sane man to behave like that.

          When I left the seminary, I never thought I would one day discover that I had a vocation after all. It is one that I share with Father Steele, but not with most clergy. I am a teacher of literature, entrusted with keys to the mysteries of mind and heart. Each fall and each spring, it is my privilege to walk into college classrooms full of seekers. They may not realize that they are seekers, or what it is they seek. They may be trapped in cynicism and insecurity, as I once was. I come with an invitation to clarity of perception. I come with a summons to discover unknown depths in themselves. I come as a priest, bearing the holy books in my hands.