The Fancy Dancer

spiritual life. I wanted to have one, but I didn’t, and it was my fault. What I had was a sort of hyperactive hysteria that passed for loving God, and possibly for loving people too. But hadn’t I always loved people?
    I left the cathedral and walked over to the Carroll College campus.
    Father Matt was just coming down the corridor toward his office. He stood six foot six, and walked with long springing strides that made his cassock flare out. He looked like a Jesuit Ichabod Crane. His salt-and-pepper hair was shaved close to a magnificent skull and high-bridged nose that would have done credit to one of Mother’s Roman coins. Ordinarily Jesuits scared me to death, but Father Matt was a Jesuit with some horse sense.
    “Hello, my boy,” he said. “You look happy today.”
    “Oh, it’s my mother’s birthday,” I said. “She’s fifty, and she likes it.”
    Right away I asked myself why I had lied. A little white lie, of course. Later I would look back at it, and know that it was the first and the whitest of a lot of lies.
    We sat in his office. He put his huge dusty feet up on his desk, displaying the frayed cuffs of his black trousers, and lighted his clunky briar pipe. Father Matt smoked a very sweet mixture that smelled like the prune whip Rosie sometimes baked.
    Just the sight of Father Matt made me feel more
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    comfortable about things. I put my feelings about Cottonwood in front of him. He smoked and smiled out the window.
    Finally he said, “Every young curate has that moment. He suddenly realizes that the Church is a sinking ship, and that he is the chosen rat who’s got to stay aboard and save it, instead of leaving it.”
    I had to laugh. Father Matt was famous for being a specialist in deflating first-year delusions of grandeur.
    “Seriously,” I said, “I like it in Cottonwood. I don’t believe I had any illusions about being in a small-town parish. If I stay there, Father Vance will kick the bucket one of these days, and I’ll take over. But sometimes I feel...”
    “You would like to come back here and put your feet on the yellow brick road that leads to monsignor.” “Something like that.”
    Father Matt had his lanky ankles crossed, and was bouncing one mammoth foot rhythmically, listening.
    “Sometimes I feel like I’m going to burst out of that little parish. I’ve got so much energy it’s driving me crazy. We’ve got the budget back in the black. Collections have gone up—a little. People are responding to the Friday-night adult education course—a little. There’s less emphasis on bingo. I run around like a maniac all day long. And then there comes a minute that I start feeling like I’m choking.”
    Father Matt knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
    “The funny thing is that all the busy work doesn’t distract me from the people. I get very involved with their problems. Too involved. I lie awake, worrying. Did Janie have the abortion anyway? Did Mr. Hoover really hear me when I asked him if he wanted to confess, or had he already lost too much blood... ?” “Pray,” said Father Matt.
    I felt a little crushed. Surely he’d have a more ingenious answer than that.
    “You have very little inward life,” he said. “So you have no defense against all the stresses. I’ve told you before. You’ve made very little progress.”
    “I know,” I said miserably.
    “Make the effort to start building the habit of mental prayer. A moment here, a moment there. Surely you can find moments. While you’re driving to a sick call, even while you’re eating. Build on those moments. It’s the only way. The Bishop will ask you about the mortage, but Our Lord will ask you about your heart.”
    ‘To be honest with you,” I said, “I feel very close to my parishioners, but I feel very far from Our Lord.” Father Matt shook his head in disbelief, and looked out the window for a few minutes.
    “You’re one of the casualties of the new spirituality,” he said. “Actually, I’m not sure it is a spirituality. Back in the sixties, in the name of reform and revival, we threw a lot of the old forms overboard. Litanies, novenas, rosaries ... do you say the rosary?” “No,” I said. “I’m lucky if there’s time to say the Office every day.”
    “When you were down and out,” said Father Matt, “the rosary was better than nothing. It was a start, a place to focus your thoughts. We haven’t found anything to replace that old-fashioned spirituality . .
    After we talked a