Sister Clare’s Lover
A Romance
Of Catholic Tantra
By Birrell Walsh
Acknowledgement and Thanks
This book would not exist without the help of my friends. Julie Henderson and Sheila McAnanly read an early version. Ulrike Wichtmann and Mary Waters read the second version. Without their encouragement I would not have gone forward. Candice Chase created a tease that worked. Nancy Grant, Tim Lavalli, Jennifer Overbury and Matt Elmore did line-by-line edits. They made it all possible!
This is Fiction.
This book is fiction. If you think you know someone in it, there is a pretty good chance it is someone else. Even if you are right, many of the things that they do in this book they never did in life. Or someone else did them. Or no one has, yet. It is a patchwork quilt of beautiful fragments.
Published by Birrell Walsh at Smashwords
This work, including poems and those works attributed to Sister Clare, are copyright 2010 by Birrell Walsh.
All rights are reserved.
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With All Your Getting, Get Understanding
Chapter 1
To add sugar or not? Father Matthew Shalgry stared into his coffee in the cool dark of the Market Street coffeehouse. As a priest, he thought maybe not. He should take it bitter and offer it up. As a diagnosed depressive, he thought sweetness would be good – medicinal, don't you know?
As an involuntary empath, sentenced by his chemistry and his Creator to feel each passerby's emotions, he already got sweet and sour and fiercely-angry thrust at him every moment.
Dr. Aram had looked at him with a sharp psychiatric eye. You could imagine Aram's mind as a vast pachinko machine, bouncing patient Shalgry back and forth until he fell into one of the diagnostic categories. The psychiatrist found Disthymia, a long-term low grade depression -- Father Shalgry could have told him that, in fact had told him that, though without the Greek -- and prescribed the antidepressant.
Aram thought his depression arose from the “silencing,” being forbidden to preach or teach, and from having the parish taken from him.
Shalgry looked at the black and white faux-Nineteenth Century cover of Ministering Spirits which awaited him at his table. He knew when he chose to write kindly about Spiritualists that there would be an uproar. Yet having met a grieving husband who was comforted in a Spiritualist meeting in a way the Church could not offer, he felt he had no choice but to find out what they taught.
“Is there any other way to know, than to enter?” thought Shalgry. He saw in his mind a long-loved face. When he loved a woman, before his priesthood, he threw all of himself before his love and was a living offering to her auburn beauty. When he met Jesus and took up His sacraments, he gave all of himself and entered fully into his priesthood. He had a sympathy for Martin Luther sometimes, who had said, “God help me, I can do no other.” What is there to give, except everything?
He had gone to Spiritualist meetings and listened with his careful, critical mind. He read what they had written and watched while the bereaved were heartened. He wrote Ministering Spirits with respect and appreciation. Someone sent it to Rome; someone in Rome complained to the Archdiocese, and Matthew Shalgry was out of a parish. No appeal, no discussion – just no parish and a year's ban on teaching or preaching. He was silenced.
“Lost in thought, Father?” He looked up to find a young woman looking at him across the sugar-and-cream counter.
“I am, a bit. Wondering - sweetening or offering? Which path leads to heaven?”
My God, thought Father Shalgry, look at her tattoos. Down one arm ran symbols from Asia – stupas and knotwork, sitting Buddhas and dancing goddesses. Down the other arm were a rosary and an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and a crucifix. The juxtaposition might have seemed mocking, but the artistry on each arm was utterly serious and respectful. Yet he could swear she was a palimpsest, and older illuminations had been erased to make room for these.
She smiled at him, white teeth and deep blue eyes. “That is the question, isn't it? Both, perhaps? And...” she went on. Shalgry doubted he could look away from her until she let him go. “...might I use the sugar?”
“Oh, yes.” He sought for his own smile somewhere. “Yes, of course.” He handed her the sugar and waited while she poured some into her black coffee. She stirred it once, glanced at him again with her smile of many meanings, and returned to her boyfriend who was waiting by the door. Shalgry watched them go.
Bitter, Shalgry refused to be heartbroken as well. "Nice work, Lord," he said to his Friend.
"Glad you like them, Matthew. Flowers are so beautiful, full of life and desire," came back the soft and Aramaic-accented voice.
Father Shalgry regarded this beautiful couple, the God of Love at work in the world. The girl was perhaps eighteen, quite covered with tattoos. Elegant work, those tattoos. In my youth, thought the father, there was nothing like that fine line and subtle color. How do they do that? And will she be sorry in thirty years that she has them? No, I think she will be proud of them. Her companion carried himself with the self-absorbed seriousness of a young man. Perhaps he was a musician, with a day job somewhere, and this beautiful girlfriend.
He was delighted at what he did not feel. Unmedicated, he would have to experience each feeling the couple had. What would Aram make of it were he told that Wellbutrin was not an antidepressant, but an anti-empathic; not an antipsychotic, but an anti-psychic? He would take a small notation in the record, and take the insight as a symptom.
Shalgry had not told him of the empathy, just the sadness it brought. Yet in the medical lottery he had won. Shalgry traveled now in a cool cloud of not knowing the so-often-distressed feelings of others.
He knew that the dosage was low enough that he could with a slight effort step back out into the bright and buffeting world of empathy. Not every passing feeling came to him, but people's life-trails, their repeated and recurring attitudes and feelings. What a mathematician friend called their "fixed points," those parts of them that, when they changed as all things change, changed into themselves and so seemed to persist unchanged. Their habitual path. What another generation would have called their "character."
Looking at the couple in front of him, he could guess that the young woman balanced between a critique that would become criticism and then bitterness, etching lines down from the corner of her mouth; and a life of wonder at how mysteriously beautiful the world can be. The priest thought that it was an accurate perception, the empathy beginning to break through. Her sense of mysterious beauty was likely to lose the contest -- except that the fellow she was with had a kind of workman's peace about him. He might be to her a garden in which she could contemplate - if they remained together.
Shalgry turned Jesus' words over in his thoughts. Yes, beautiful. But what this young woman had said: “Both.” She had said both sweetness and offering. It stuck and would not leave his mind.
The righteousness he felt, the kinship with Galileo who had also been silenced – was that a bitter offering, or a secret sweetness? Which one had he made into this shell around himself?
In a few minutes the Archbishop wanted to see him. Unaccountably the same prelate who had silenced him without a hearing and set him listening to confessions at convents now asked him to come to the archdiocesan office.
He thought of the confessions he heard. Short of priests as they were, the archbishop was not about to have him entirely out of circulation. Instead he had been assigned to hear confessions throughout the convents of the archdiocese, sometimes in one convent a week, sometimes two a day. He had disciplined himself not to think of the contents of those confessions, but the flavor persisted. These women worked long hours for not one penny; then they came into his confessional and accused themselves of unkindnesses, and disobediences that one could find only with a magnifying glass. Where was the God of Love in that, he often wondered, while assigning penances for what so often seemed to be scruples.
He looked in the mirror across the room. The aging priest in black who looked back, grey, handsome and thickening, did seem lost in thought. That priest reached a decision. He added sugar, and cream and cinnamon as well.
He sipped his coffee, savored its bitterness and sweetness, and felt his nostrils opened by the spice. He had a bishop to see. He sighed and walked out into the bright November day.
Chapter 2
"Good Morning Father! The Archbishop will be right with you." Where did receptionists get such chirp? Did the receptionists in Hell chirp, "Please have a seat. The Prince of Darkness will be right with you." Of course, in Hell one would wait forever, sliding off one's seat and reading copies of ancient Catholic magazines like The Liguorian. "Thank you," was all he said. There is no point in being rude, ever, and especially to those who were on the front lines as this receptionist was.
She sat absorbed in her computer screen, a woman of perhaps 35 years. Tired, she seemed. Tired and determined and a little bit battered by her job. Who knew what madmen came through the door of the Archbishop of San Francisco's office. How many people felt their Church had cast them out for being themselves, or for loving the wrong sort of people? They came looking for the shepherds of Christ's flock, and found instead the receptionist of the Shepherd, and poured out all the sadness and anger of their hopes on her who was only trying to make a living (most probably with no tattoos at all) and maybe supporting a child all by herself. The Church at least had grown kinder to unwed mothers in the last fifty years. No more casting them out of every Catholic institution. The Church knew that the abortionist was always nearby, and was grateful to every woman who decided to carry her child to term. Hmmm, even the Church can learn. Slowly, though, he thought.
The walls were decorated in corporate Christian, a crucifix, a picture of Mary and of course of Saint Francis. And there, saints be praised, was the door opening and Archbishop Albert Buchanan himself. How did the man keep himself in such good shape, fighting his way up the hierarchy? Did he sneak off to Gold's Gym and work out among the buff young gay folk? But trim as he was, the Archbishop of San Francisco today was also friendly; and that was the greater mystery. "Good morning, Father," and a smile that might even be welcoming. Now this was peculiar. Father Shalgry knew that he was in Coventry, and successful Church bureaucrats were not friendly with those in exile. Perhaps they were kind, but not friendly.
"Coffee, Father?"
"No thank you, I had some a few moments ago."
"Beautiful day, isn't it? Lovely time to be here, the sunny fall days in San Francisco."
Oh now, this was stranger still. The Archbishop was showing appreciation for beauty. The man was not an aesthete, just not at all. What he was, thought Father Shalgry, was undoubtedly up to something.
And there in his office was Sister Madeleine, the Archdiocese's Director of Education. Severe, handsome, she had kept her habit when most of her order had shed theirs. The rosary that hung from her rope belt looked worn. She spent many nights in prayer, it was said.
Her orthodoxy was famous and quite uncompromising. She is the one who still forbade folk instruments at the Masses in the Catholic schools of the city. She had a powerful mind, and every bit was devoted to passing on the Church's heritage, intact and unstained by its journey through time, to the next generation. It was said that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Holy Inquisition, trembled when they received a letter from Sister Madeleine.
"Good morning, Father." She smiled at him. She knew her own reputation, and rather delighted in it.
"I hesitate to speak in front of you, Sister," Shalgry responded. He was sure that Sister Madeleine had been deeply involved in his silencing. She made a brushing gesture. "Teaching and preaching, Father. That is all that is forbidden you. And that only for a year." She shook her head, in despair perhaps at the leniency of the Church.
"Father, forgive me for coming directly to the point..." said the Archbishop.
"No, your Excellency, thank you for that."
"Something has come up in the convents of the archdiocese. I know you hear confessions in many of them. Of course I would not want you breaking the seal of the confessional. But I hoped that perhaps you might have heard about this."
The Archbishop reached into his desk and brought out what seemed to be a thick pamphlet. On it was a picture of Jesus, and the words The Love of Christ.
Father Shalgry took the proffered booklet. On the back it said simply "Texete Sorores" 'Tecks-eet Sisters?' Some order in Austin, Dallas or Houston? He looked inside. The author, it said, was "Sister Clare." But no indication of her convent, if she had one. Choosing pseudonymity, are we sister? Father Shalgry felt a moment's sympathy for her. It might be nice to avoid the direct attentions of one's superiors. He had the advantage of a bit of family money. If one had none, and nowhere else to go, then one might have one's say without using one's own name. Especially in a diocese with good Sister Madeleine making straight the way of the Lord.
"What is it, your Grace?" asked Shalgry.
"Take a look, Father."
Father Shalgry turned the page.
My Lord and my God -
I have turned to you
and given you my life.
I have made myself
your servant, willingly,
and I wear your ring.
Surely I am a bride of Christ.
But oh my Lord, even so,
I fear sometimes the power
of you in me, the power
of your life...
-- From "The Love of Christ by Sister Clare"
"It seems a devotional book," said Father Shalgry. "Written by a modern and self-examining woman. But, if I am any expert," Shalgry smiled, "orthodox enough."
The Archbishop regarded him with a cool look that gave nothing away. Not a man to play poker with. "Please look deeper in, Father. Near the end."
Father Shalgry turned the pages. They were a bit worn. Someone had turned these pages many times before him.
Oh my Prince, it is your touch
that moves me in my heart
that draws my heart to my skin
that makes me open to you.
Oh my crucified and resurrected Love
I open to you and your manhood.
With every part of my soul and body
I receive you into me, I welcome you
and your hardness into my woman's wetness.
My Beloved, I am wet for you.
My King, I want you all the day,
and Oh! all the night.
-- From "The Love of Christ by Sister Clare"
"Oh," said Father Shalgry.
The corners of the Archbishop's mouth perhaps twitched, and the corners of his eyes wrinkled into momentary smile lines. "Yes. It is surprising with such a title, isn't it? "
Father Shalgry put the pamphlet down on the Archbishop's elegantly and expensively understated desk. "Yes, it is." He thought for a long moment about the sometimes tortured sexuality that came to him in convent confessions. He put them again out of his mind. Those words, those thoughts and feelings, were blessedly private between the penitent and God. The priest was just a messenger, a courier of the word back and forth. He looked up at the Archbishop.
"Father," said that worthy, "I know we have had our differences about doctrine, and we will go on having them. But I think you are a kind man and devoted to the Church in your way. I wanted to ask a favor..."
A favor, thought Shalgry. The Archbishop did not often use such language.
"Would you help us understand what this means?"
"Means?" replied Shalgry. "I am afraid I do not understand you, Archbishop."
"This ... booklet is spread throughout the convents of the archdiocese. Scandalized nuns have brought us at least ten copies."
Sister Madeleine, he could swear, snorted. "At least," she said.
The Archbishop looked out into the fall sunshine and the falling leaves of a season passing. "The sisters are a private lot. They do not communicate that much with the male hierarchy, resenting that they are not in it." Here the Archbishop smiled at his own understatement. "If we were brought ten copies, there must be hundreds."
Shalgry nodded. The Archbishop was right. If the Archbishop’s residence were on fire, many nuns would not bring water.
"Father, I have not talked with the other bishops about this. But somehow I am sure they are facing the same matter. The Vatican will have to act, I expect. The Curia usually does," the Archbishop continued wryly. If the Archbishop was speaking ironically of the center of the Church, the Hall of Fame of the game he had played all his life, he was more upset than he was admitting.
"Father, I would like you to help me, if you will. Before we put our big Irish foot down, I would like to understand what this is about. What it means. Would you be willing to try to find out? The archdiocese would pay your expenses. And relieve you of other duties."
Shalgry sat in some shock. The Archbishop was talking a language he had never spoken before, a language of understanding before acting. Maybe even of sympathy. This was not the hierarchy that he was accustomed to.
"And Father, if you can, I would like you to find out who Sister Clare is."
Sister Madeleine caught the prelate's eye, and when he nodded almost imperceptibly, she spoke. "The Archbishop is being gentle, as he always is. This is a chancre in the Church, Father. The practice of chastity is difficult for all of us. Many fall. And this will encourage immorality throughout the sisterhood. The Devil loves to wrap sin and self-indulgence in religious costumes. This is an old, hedonistic sin. Perhaps, even likely, it is heresy. If we pluck it out now, it may die back and many good nuns will return to their work and prayer, chastened but faithful at the end."
Pluck it out. Find the chancre-nun, and pluck her out. Ah. Now that is more like it. Locate someone to punish, someone to be an example. Just as he himself had been made one. Father Shalgry felt the sympathy of his soul, which a moment before had almost gone out to the Archbishop, return to its dark roost in his heart.
The Archbishop's face was an unmoving mask, perhaps more terrifying than Sister Madeleine's open fangs. "Would you consider this, Father?"
Shalgry looked down for a moment, moved more than he thought. He looked up. "May I have a little time to pray about this, sir?"
The Archbishop looked at him and then nodded silently.
Chapter 3
Father Shalgry sat alone in the cool of the Mission Dolores Basilica, looking up at the crucified Christ above the altar. It was a place he came any time he needed to pray Catholic prayers, to be part of his tradition and deep in the culture. He closed his eyes. "I do not, I do not want to do this.”
Silence. "Do you know Sister Clare, Lord?"
"I do, Matthew. We're quite close."
Ah, when the King of the Universe was coy about things, one was supposed to work it out for oneself. What could the Archbishop and the hierarchy be up to here? He had been in their tender claws enough to know how they could be. At the same time, he had never thought of this Archbishop as untruthful. Gruff, authoritarian. He would say hard things. But what he said, Father Shalgry experienced, was true. And Buchanan said they wanted to understand, not punish. For a moment, Shalgry was glad that Sister Madeleine was not the Archbishop. She would have risen far; she would have been a cardinal by now. And the "discipline" would have been even more muscular, less self-doubting, more unrelenting.
And what was going on in the heart of this Sister Clare, and the hearts of the nuns who were passing this pamphlet from hand to hand? What would he be doing if he took part in this inquiry?
Why not a woman, why not a nun? He thought again of Sister Madeleine. Shalgry was aware the kind of women who had gained the confidence of the hierarchy. Their intention was good, surely. But they were likely to be even more zealously orthodox.
He looked at the statues around him, in the dark old Colonial Spanish style. "Please, Lord. Some wisdom, please. Do not let me do harm here." He knew that there was going to be an investigation. He knew that someone would do it. And he did not think he was vain to hope that he would be kinder than most.
Shalgry had learned to ask, and then to become very quiet. He breathed in the cool of the basilica, the adobe and plaster smell of the church, and the incense that had sunk into the walls for over a century. He became as quiet as he knew how, his eyes half closed, and waited. Waited in the cool, letting his thoughts settle like the flakes in a snow-globe, dropping to the bottom of his awareness undisturbed.
This asking and answering had been with him for years, and it was the first thing he tested when he began taking the antidepressant. Without prayer and this intuition, he knew, he would be completely at sea. It was his navigator, and he would have given up any amount of little-white-pill peace to keep it. And it had worked inside the fog as well as it had outside it. Let us give thanks.
Shalgry settled further, holding the question and little else in the cool peace. Waiting for wisdom. And then it seemed to come, a further deeper peace that joined with the idea of going forward on this odd project, joined with it without much turbulence. Just a little fizz - Shalgry assumed that the fizz stood for the various difficulties that would arise - but it was all embedded in a deeper and wider peace. It seemed to be his answer - go forward.
He opened his eyes and looked about the church. There, over there, was a bank of candles in front of good Saint Jude. Jude, the patron of impossible things. Surely it was impossible that this project would be OK; and yet so it seemed. The sense of cool and confiding peace stayed with him. Father Shalgry reached into his pocket for a dollar, and bought a candle for Jesus' friend and disciple Jude Thaddeus.
He went out through the religious articles shop, noting the richness of his religion. This is not an austere faith, not at all. The statues, the incense, the rosaries and the tiny shrines. Catholic religiosity was so like that of the Hindus and the Tibetan Buddhists. They both had places for desire in their religion. Maybe there was a place for it in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church too.
Chapter 4
Advent had come grey and cold, giving up the bright light and warmth of the season of All Saints. In his neat, bare Gough Street apartment Father Shalgry arose early. He took a slow shower, and before even a cup of coffee he went to the small altar against one wall. With or without a parish, silenced or not, he was and remained “a priest forever.”
He took out his tiny vessel of wafers, fine white disks, and removed just one. He brought out a small bottle of sacramental wine. Not good, not great, a plain wine. But it was for purposes other than drinking - it would be mixed with a great deal of water in the tiny gold-lined chalice. He brought out the Mass book and set it on the altar. From a large drawer under the altar he brought out the vestments that priests wear for the Mass. He kissed the stole and put it around his neck, hanging down in front. With a rope cincture as a belt, he bound it so that he had it crossed in front of him. Each vestment he put on had its own prayer; each represented part of the powers and commitments of the priesthood. He dressed with care, for there would be with him in a moment a very important Guest.
Shalgry took the real presence of Christ in the consecrated Host with great seriousness, with an orthodoxy that would have surprised the Archbishop. It was why he had become a priest, and why he stayed one, this Great Magic that turned simple bread and wine into the Creator of the universe. This was the great scandal, that the Holy One would take on flesh and dwell among us.
Shalgry turned to the altar and began with the words of his childhood Mass, which he had learned first in Latin: "I will go into the altar of God, to God who gives joy to my youth." The words flowed by him, familiar words that had been spoken in many languages. When he said the words of consecration "This is My body... This is My blood..." it was with a sense of holiness mixed with humor. The scandal continued - who would know that in this small apartment the King of the Universe would come visiting in the flesh.
He took the small dry Host into his mouth, and then the Wine, and felt the thrill of surprising faith. Of all the great sacramental religions, which other invited - no, commanded - the faithful to eat the body of God? His words failed him. Once again even his mind was silent.
Breakfast was on the street. In the cool of a San Francisco November, Shalgry valued the company and the beauty of a table outside of a restaurant. He greeted the cook and the waiter "Hello George, Hello Ramon," and received their "Hello Father." He always wore his collar, even with a sport shirt - it seemed only fair to declare himself truthfully for what he was. He took out the copy of The Love of Christ that the Archbishop had given him.
My Lord and my God -
I have turned to You
and given You my life.
I have made myself
Your servant, willingly,
and I wear Your ring.
Surely I am a bride of Christ.
But oh my Lord, even so,
I fear sometimes the power
of You in me, the power
of your life. Each day I do
as best I can, as best I understand,
Your will in the world.
Yet I am always with You,
and the world itself
beautiful as You made it,
pales beside You.
You are the light of the world
and the light of my life.
-- From "The Love of Christ by Sister Clare"
No one could object to this, thought Father Shalgry. This is devotion, the love of God. It is what keeps us all going. If we have not love, said Paul, we would be as sounding cymbals. Even if we do heroic things, without love we are nothing. Sister Clare loves her God, and says so.
Father Shalgry wondered what would have happened to him if he had not taken the cloth. Maybe a secular education and a life without Masses. Without Archbishops. Mmm, one good thing and one bad. How could one live without Archbishops? And he would have no doubt fallen in love with a woman, had children perhaps. He would get up each morning and go to a job that made all sorts of reasonable sense. But would he have a visit every morning with the King of the Universe incarnated? Would he have listened to the hearts of strangers and friends, and then with borrowed magic lifted the sins off their souls? Would he have sat beside the old and dying, comforting them as they prepared to go visit their Creator and their great Lover? Or would he have been present at the welcoming of children, when they went from nameless to named, members of the community of speech and names as well as of the ancient Church. Would he have been able to sit in an old Church, built by Indians under the Spanish and still in use two empires later, and ask for wisdom?
And if not, what might he have gained that would have made up for the loss of those things? What sweet thighs could make up for such a loss?
But that must be the issue. Again and again we whom the Church asks to be celibate, come up against that loneliness late in the night and wish for a warm and happy and hungry body against ours. And in that moment, all the magics of our calling seem thin. Father Shalgry was not a weeping man, but if he were one, that loneliness would have brought him to tears.
"Yes, Ramon. Please, more coffee. And please tell George that his sausage is even more wonderful today than usual. I'll get God to bring George in as a cook even if he has enough saints." Ramon smiled at the joke, even though it was old, maybe because it was old.
"Your children are well? And your wife, is she better? "
"Yes Father, thank you. She is home from the hospital, the infection has passed. Our new son is well too. Please, pray for us." Shalgry smiled at this man, who had chosen the other branching in life and had this family. "Of course I will," he said. "I pray for them at Mass every day." That was true; each day he asked God to be merciful to each person he knew, usually by name and with mention of their need and suffering. Surely God knew the names and the stories better than he did. Maybe he prayed for his own sake, or prayed out of hope as much as out of faith. But he did pray. The whole Communion prayed, and he joined in it.
"And I am glad God listened to us again," he said, laughing the laugh of a naughty child who has been indulged. Ramon laughed too, filled his coffee cup again with dark black coffee and made sure that his pitcher of cream was full, and smiled at him with the graceful smile that Latin culture seemed to teach better than any other in America. He went then to care for other customers. Shalgry stared at his coffee, and stirred it. He picked up Sister Clare's pamphlet and read again.
Is it enough
to love you in service, oh my Love?
Is it enough to kneel in front of You?
It would be, my King, if you were only God?
But you are not only God. No.
You are a man. You are the Man who walked
in the dusty Roman-occupied roads of Galilee.
You drank wine and ate bread, you whipped the
moneychangers away from Your Father's temple.
You were a Man shining with the olive oil
that woman used to clean your feet. Yes.
I understand her. Had I been there, with oil,
I would have poured it on you too, my Love.
It is so lonely, my Love. They gave me a ring,
they told me I was married to the most lovely Man
ever born of woman, a child of sinless woman and
perfect Father, and then they said that we were
never in this world to touch. But how, Love?
How could I believe that? How could I think that You,
the Master of Kindness, would not come to me
in Spirit?
But You are not just spirit, not even Holy Spirit.
You are flesh. You give us Your flesh to eat,
and command us to eat it. How could I think
that you would not come to Your bride?
-- From "The Love of Christ by Sister Clare"
"Ah, the poor woman," thought Shalgry. "The poor lonely woman in the night..."
It was with a light heart that surprised him, that Shalgry returned to the Archiepiscopal offices that afternoon for a second appointment. He was ushered in quickly, not much time at all to study the aging magazines. "Good afternoon, Father," said the Archbishop.
"Are you all right, Archbishop," asked Shalgry. And indeed it seemed he was not. The day before the Archbishop had been a model of trim middle age. Now he seemed grayish as if someone had come and taken the color out of him, leaving the same man with less life.
"I think so, Father. Just a bit peaked this morning. Not sure what it is, really." The Archbishop looked down for a moment, breaking the commanding contact. Shalgry was glad to notice that Sister Madeleine was not with them.
"Did you consider the favor I asked, Father?"
"I did, sir, I did." Shalgry paused while the receptionist brought in coffee for both of them, and then mixed milk into his own while the Archbishop took his black. "I was wondering if I might ask a few questions of my own?"
"Ask away," replied the Archbishop, almost distracted.
"Would I be part of the Church's discipline here? I have experienced it myself and it is not a pleasant thing."
"Ah, Matthew. No." The Archbishop paused to take a drink of his coffee. "At least it is not what I intend. I want to understand what is happening in my own archdiocese. I know we can be heavyhanded in the way we cut and prune the problems from the church. Sometimes we must be, or we would all be Anglicans. And sometimes we do terrible, wrong things, burning people..." The Archbishop looked for a moment out the window at the grey day. "Or sometimes just driving out people who are being an expression of God, you know? Would there have been a Reformation if the Church had examined its conscience and said 'Thank you, Father Luther, we'll fix that'?"
Father Shalgry had never heard the Archbishop, or anyone in the hierarchy, be so candid.
"But sometimes," the Archbishop went on, coming back to some of his customary force, "sometimes the Church gets it. Gets it in time. The Church accepted the Catholic charismatics singing and shouting like Holy Rollers right at Mass. It wasn't what we were used to. But it was a renewal, and the Holy Fathers since then have welcomed it. Mostly."
"And Pope Innocent," murmured Shalgry.
"Yes," the Archbishop nodded. "The Pope dreaming that the beggar who had come to him from Assisi, that troublemaker Francis, that he was all by himself holding up the great Lateran cathedral." The Archbishop looked directly at Shalgry. "It is that kind of wisdom I am hoping for.
"I cannot promise you, Father, that there won't be some kind of discipline from someone in the future. I know how our Church is. But at this point all I am trying to do is understand it all. I don't really need names..."
Shalgry sat in the unaccustomed silence. Then the Archbishop raised his head and grinned again the grin of a successful executive in the Holy Church. "I would ask though, Father, that you not be talking or writing about this to outsiders. Observe the same silence you have observed so well so far. For that I would be grateful."
The intensity of the Archbishop broke through the fog of privacy that Shalgry's little white pills brought him. He could feel a desperate, urgent desire in the Archbishop. It was a desire that his contribution be of benefit when seen from the viewpoint of eternity. It was a kind of ambition mixed with service, all the more believable for being unspoken. Shalgry felt his heart soften a little towards the man in front of him.
Shalgry nodded. "all right. I will do it that way. And may I say I am asking for you, when I ask questions?"
"You may, Matthew. And thank you."
Chapter 5
In the afternoon, sitting at a street table at before the Market Street coffee house with his clerically black laptop for cover, he thought of what path he might follow into this question. Put an ad on Craigslist, "Seeking nun who lusts for her Lord." Might work, but it would be a violation of his agreement with the Archbishop. He felt surprisingly protective of the Archbishop, as if the man had become fragile overnight and needed caring for.
What then?
Research? Go online and seek references? Where to start? Google "The Love of Christ" and "nun"? Why not?
He found:
...Peter Damian invoked similar matrimonial, even erotic, metaphors in writing on the religious life to the countess-nun Blanche ... "now united to the heavenly bridegroom," whom he advised to "make the Lord your only joy" (cf. Psalm 36:4), for 'when this — with all its prosperity was shining upon you, it was not the flattering world that drew you, but Christ, 'of all men the most handsome' [Psalm 44:3], who beckoned you by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to embrace him in marriage.' ...Peter enjoined Blanche 'constantly [to embrace] Christ in the secret recesses of the heart...(1)
So this was not a new understanding but went way back into that most Catholic of times, the Middle Ages. Such a feeling of devotion was more appropriate for women, it was thought.
And here, from the Passionist Sisters' website, quoting Psalm 45:
Listen, O daughter, give ear to my words;
forget your own people and your father’s house.
So will the king desire your beauty.
So perhaps the form of the devotion is new and extreme. But the heart of it is an old deep root in the Church.
Father Shalgry leaned back from his laptop and looked about him. Everywhere he could see people in the throes of desire. That woman, so casual in her display of her very beautiful skin - she was like a flower calling to the bee. And that man in his studied disinterest in the reactions of any around him. But how much time had he spent in finding just that T-shirt, just those jeans? How filled with hunger for being known and appreciated? Is hunger not the way we are, hungering for love or appreciation or acknowledgment or like the Archbishop, for contribution?
Shalgry wondered for a moment what it was he hungered for. What drove him to write a book the Church would surely condemn, and then to stay in the same Church? What gave him satisfaction, sitting here in clerical garb among people 40 years younger than he, yet very carefully using the latest technology just as they did. Why did he seek the past and the future at once? What was he trying to unite?
His occasional empathy broke through the chemical privacy of his medication. For a moment he felt a buzz, a flowing of all the desires around him. Freed from the individuals all around him in which they lodged, the desires moved towards their goals - lust to the one desired, ambition to the state sought, faineance - what a lovely old word for sloth - towards rest. Like bees indeed, each seeking the flower it loved best. Fulfilling the flower's business as well as its own, and bringing pollen back for the tribe.
Bringing honey back? Well, pollen really, to be made into honey. But what might the pollen be that these nuns were bringing to the Church? Always the Catholic Church remembered Jesus' reply to Martha. She "was cumbered about much serving," frequens ministerium said the Vulgate, and asked Him to remonstrate with Mary, her sister who just stayed with Jesus. Instead:
Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.
There was no doubt about it - Jesus preferred those who love Him even over those who do good deeds. That fact has led to much gnashing of teeth inside and outside the Church, that what He said would lead to self indulgence. But the Church had found that the contemplatives, those who turn always towards God, pumped nourishment to all the good deeds and the daily lives of the whole Communion.
What food was Sister Clare bringing?
What a strange thing. How did he know with such certainty that she was bringing nourishment, not temptation or failure? Shalgry did know it, without knowing how. There was something in what Sister Clare was doing that was good for the Church.
He imagined that he was with Jesus the many times that the Incarnate God had prayed, uncertain and seeking guidance in the dusty years in Roman Palestine. If Jesus could ask for wisdom, so could he. The prayer of the finite to the Infinite, he thought of it as; and what he did not notice consciously was that it was the prayer of the heart through the Heart. God is said to like such prayers.
"Please," he prayed, "show me how to move forward in this. I have allowed myself to become an intermediary between an old and cranky Church and a woman who may be bringing it something it needs. Like feeding an old Lion - one can get bit. May she not get bit. May I not get bit. May the lion get fed."
And after he prayed, as happened so often, there was a sort of silence in his mind. He rose, and folded the computer closed in front of him. He gathered the power supply and slipped it into the case. He zipped the case closed and, silent even in his heart, walked away from the coffee house into the grey day of San Francisco.
Chapter 6
Time to talk with a friend, he knew that. And the friend had to be his old good friend Marta Vasquez. Once Sister Marta, and a high school Latin teacher of some renown, she had followed her own heart and a deep love out of the convent and into the Valencia Street lesbian triangle of the city. The woman she had first fallen in love with was gone, now. Marta remained, earning her living as a bartender at a bar in that neighborhood and an unlicensed counselor to the many women who came in, to not a few gay men, and to one silenced priest.
Shalgry had known her through all her changes. He had been her confessor at the convent. He had been one of the first who sought her out in her new life. He needed all the good rowdy friends he could find and she was indeed that. If she had ever been in trouble at the convent, it was for making the other nuns laugh.
He walked down Church Street, past the school the Church ran, and then the big Mission High School that the city and county had open for the polyglot and polychrome children of the city, and on to Dolores Park. He could hear the POK of tennis balls on the tennis courts, the shouts of the young men playing soccer on the grass, and the openness of this park that was the meeting place for families and every political march in San Francisco. Across it he walked, still lost in thought, and on to far side where Valencia Street sat in its smaller and very female version of the Castro district, and down that street, then, to the Pink Triangle.
"Good morning Father," said Hilda, who was behind the bar when Marta was not. "Have you seen the error of your ways and come to be a lesbian? Sappho loves you, you know?" It was an old patter, her Ms. Interlocutrix to his Mr. Bones; but Hilda’s lugubrious face always made him wonder if she were quite serious and not joking at all.
"I fear I could not pass the physical."
"Just a wee bit of cropping and stitching, Father, We could have you ready for the exam in no time at all." Hilda looked down at the glasses she was washing. “Marta is in the office,” she went on.
Shalgry passed through door behind the bar, down a passageway full of empty beer bottles in cases awaiting the recycler, and into the small office that served the Pink Triangle. "Marta, my sweet, where in heaven did you get an actual green eyeshade?"
Marta raised it to look up at the priest. "The better to do my accounts with, fa-ther." She rhymed it with 'blather,' "And what could I do for you today?"
"Well," replied Shalgry, "I need some nunly advice. Some lascivious-sister-ly advice, so my mind turned to you." Marta was ready with a quick response, but hesitated as she saw his seriousness. "What is it, Matthew? Have you fallen in love with Mother Agnes and plan to elope?" Mother Agnes was the dean of Mothers Superior in San Francisco. She had become the principal of Saint Joseph's School that Matthew had once attended as a child, before “retiring.”
"The nun in question is named Sister Clare, and I do not know where to find her. Would you know?"
"Oh, Sister Clare! If she is the one I think, I did not know any man knew of her, not one word. Convent walls have sprung leaks, I see. What a shame, with the winter coming on." Marta removed the eyeshade and set it on the desk. She rubbed her short red hair, now a bit shot with grey, and asked, "Coffee, then? Or something stronger?"
" Perhaps some of that fine soda water you keep for your best clientele. So you know Sister Clare?"
"We are speaking of The Love of Christ here?" she asked.
"Yes. That very uplifting pamphlet. Does it really date back to your time in the convent? That long?"
"Father, it is more years than you can count with your shoes on, but it is not all that many. Yes. I first heard of Sister Clare just as I was beginning to notice the beauty of the sisters' eyes a dozen years back. But why is it in your hands?" Father Shalgry had brought the pamphlet out of his computer case.
"A mutual friend of ours has asked me to find out about it."
"Benedict the Sixteenth?"
"Close. Archbishop Buchanan."
"Good Lord," breathed Marta. "Archbishop Buchanan asked you to investigate this? I thought he was not speaking with you. And I knew he had you not speaking with anyone else."
"I was surprised myself," admitted Shalgry. "I did not expect to hear from the Chancery. Perhaps I am outré enough to gain entrance into the catacombs."
"But male enough to tell him what you found."
"There is that," answered Shalgry. "But would you want Sister Madeleine asking the questions?”
At the thought of the archdiocese's Torquemada, Marta grew quiet. "You, then" she said. "So he sent you. And you agreed to infiltrate the convents? I heard your byplay with Hildie - she has a point you know. You might be noticed."
"He was strangely liberal, Buchanan was." Shalgry recalled his moment of sympathy with the Archbishop. "He said he does not want names. Can you imagine that, an inquisitor who does not want names?" They both contemplated the idea. "He said he wants to understand."
"Understand so he can stomp down harder, you mean," said Marta. Her leaving of the convent was a very hard time for her.
"He mentioned Saint Francis holding up the Lateran basilica."
"He did, did he?" Sister and now tavernkeeper Marta was quiet for a moment. "What do you want to know, Matthew?"
Shalgry started to speak, then fell silent.
"What, Matthew?"
"There is something more, Marta. What is it?"
She shook her head impatiently. "I thought those pills they gave you kept you from feeling without a license."
"You are feeling pretty loud, Marta. Sister Madeleine could pick it up."
Marta shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned," she murmured. "I'm sorry, Matthew. I know you are a good man, but..." She looked down, then raised eyes tight with pain at what she had to say. "I just wish we could keep this among the sisters. I never expected to share it with any man. Not even you." She blinked. "I'm sorry..."
Shalgry put his hand on her arm. "I understand, I think, Marta." He grinned crookedly. "It's like letting the English drink the good whisky."
Marta laughed, and her eyes whirled with smoke. "Yes, Matthew. That it is." She stood. "I need to talk with some people before I say anything more. May I call you in a day or so?"
Father Shalgry nodded. "I await your call. Thank you."
"A drop of comfort then, Father?"
"No," said the priest. "I should leave you to your accounts. And thank you."
Father Shalgry emerged into the bright grey day, his eyes shocked by the light after the dark of the bar.
He had time, now, for the first time since the Archbishop had summoned him to the archiepiscopal grumble offices near St Mary's Cathedral, time to think on his own. Time in fact to read the pamphlet that had begun it all.
Chapter 7
He stopped for a small lunch at Ali Baba, and around a falafel - carefully, for the sauce dripped on clerical garb would never come out - he read again:
I go into the world, and
because You said it, I feed the hungry.
Because You said it, I cleanse the lepers.
Because You said it, I teach the young.
Because You said it, I sell all I have and I give it to the poor.
Because You said it, I visit the sick, and those in prison,
because You said it. Because I am always seeking You.
-- From "The Love of Christ by Sister Clare"
Beneath many a Martha working in the world was hidden a Mary seeking her Beloved. Such it seemed was Sister Clare.
Did she teach, wondered Father Shalgry. Like so many Catholics he grew up in the parochial schools, the schools the immigrant Catholics had created to bring a Catholic experience into the Protestant milieu of the United States in the nineteenth century. "Nuns" to him meant the sisters who had led them in prayers each morning. It meant the black habits gliding across the playground to their mysterious convents. It meant voices of women young and old, teaching from the catechism why God made us ("to know, love and serve Him, and to be happy with Him forever"). They were the image of teaching to him. Others might use the red apple as a symbol for primary education, but for him it was the black habit.
Perhaps Sister Clare had been in a hospital. The association between nuns and nursing was so old that in England nurses are called "sister." It was a part of the ministry of religious women that dated back to the age when they were the only professional nurses. Did their habits lie at the origin of nurses' hats and costumes, wondered the priest? Was she a woman who spent her days with bedpans and thermometers and monitors and medicines? In these days she might be a doctor as well, or a researcher.
Was she enclosed? Did she live her life in a closed community, baking bread or communion wafers, making wine or honey to support the monastery, but most of all living the liturgical cycle of prayer and chanting? Was she a Trappistine, or like Teresa of Avila a Carmelite practicing a "hidden union with God." What was her life and habit as she was inwardly always seeking Christ?
Often he talked with Jesus. But today Father Shalgry found himself moved to wordless prayer. Sometimes this mood came on him, he had learned over the years to surrender to it. An opening of his soul and heart at the same time, he felt others moving in it as if he were a warm pond and they so many small fishes. The water, no the Water, was not his, he knew. It was the kindness of God at work. He was privileged for a moment to be the hole in the earth where the Water gathered and others lived and were refreshed. It was a privilege and it always moved him deeply to feel the Communion of Saints in action, these blessings going through the body of God like so many glowing fireflies. Could fireflies swim, could they move underwater? He had learned to let thoughts and questions go. They drew him up out of his heart and torso, where this miracle seemed to take place, into the also beautiful world of thoughts. Beautiful, but separating because discerning; and this time of warm prayer was not a time of separating but of union. He let the question go, and returned to the feeling of unnamed beings moving inside of the waters that he now willingly channeled.
The falafel rested on its paper on its basketwork plate, untouched. The people here, Christian Arabs from Palestine, would think him napping or perhaps even perceive that he prayed. From the ancient respect of the Arab for the Holy, they would welcome him and let him be.
He opened his eyes and looked around. The waters of his soul retreated, the pond dried, the fish and frogs burrowed into the mud; and Father Shalgry looked out on Nineteenth Street. Oh, the sun had come out! As so often it did, the sun now shown on the lesbians and Palestinians and Guatamaltecos of Valencia Street while leaving the Archdiocesan chancery shrouded in fog.
Chapter 8
Two days later, Marta called him. "Hello, Father. Could you come hear confessions - we have so much to tell you and we can promise it's LURID." Marta could do things with her voice that sounded like the best years of radio drama. "I could," replied Shalgry dryly. "And would this be sacramental work, or do you have some information about our mutual friend."
"Strange you should mention her, Father" said Marta. "It is about her, and some of her friends, that we should talk. Can you be free at say two in the afternoon? And come in plumber's mufti, OK?"
Like most priests, Father Shalgry had disguises. He had clothing to wear when for some reason being a priest was not appropriate. To go drinking, or occasionally dancing. To visit a film where, were he to be in his blacks all the conversation would be about him being there rather than about the film. Why people thought it amazing for a priest to go to a film where sex was discussed, was in itself amazing to him. They should sit in a confessional some Saturday afternoon.
He had found over the years that a priestly costume would let him go most places, but a plumber's blue coveralls and toolbox would let him go anywhere. He suspected that he could get into the White House if he showed up with pipewrench and joint compound. Since he had, in high school, been a plumber's helper over several summers he was not entirely false in the role. He went to his closet and dug out the blue jumpsuit and stained boots of his disguise.
In a few minutes the phone rang again. He gathered his tools and his cloth cap and went down the stairs. Yes, there was Marta's Toyota. On the back seat floor she had spread newspapers. No stains on her floor.
Shalgry put his tools carefully on the paper and then climbed into the shotgun seat. "Where to, oh conspiratrix?" "Just put on the blindfold, Father, and ask no questions. Where we are going is Nun of your Business." Shalgry could hear the capitalizations in her voice, and recognized her humor. When the matter was serious, Marta punned. She would be the life of the party in an earthquake, he was sure. He was ready to take a blindfold from her until he saw her grin. Right. He settled back.
"And why am I a plumber today?"
"Because you are going where no man has gone before, Father. This particular cloister has its own plumber-sister. But the neighbors won't know that, and your arrival in blues will raise fewer eyebrows than arriving in clericals would."
Marta turned her attention to her driving as the priest considered which of the City's enclosed communities they might be visiting. There were a surprising number of them, really - the Carmelites by the Jesuit University of San Francisco, the Monastery of Perpetual Adoration on Ashbury Street. But this visit was to neither of those venerable communities. It was to a walled building set in a surprising neighborhood. For all of Father Shalgry's experience as a visiting priest in San Francisco's archdiocese, he had never seen nor heard of this order. If order it was.