I. The Practice of Not Knowing (Full Manuscript)

I. Waiting for Godot

I thought a trip to Ireland could cure my depression: Long walks through foggy old-world fishing towns and late evenings where I stood in pubs sipping pints of midnight black beer as I listened to sad folk songs about colonial English oppression…should do the trick I thought. I decided to call around and see if any friends wanted or could join. I found Freidrich, my cousin and good friend whose search engine optimization work allowed him to up and travel. Freidrich and I then found Duggan, our friend who traveled and wrote during much of his young adult life agreed to set sail.

I was a priest, a Roman Catholic priest. The real McCoy. Only ordained but one year and drinking my way through a vocational crisis. I wasn’t only drinking to cope, I knew I had a problem. I prayed a lot. In the house where I lived — only 30 yards from the church where I said mass — the head priest of our household turned one small downstairs room into a chapel. In my state of existential loneliness and loss of life meaning, I would carry a bundle of blankets from my room and spread them on the chapel floor and sleep the night there. My way of saying, God you feel far away, I wish to live 36 feet closer to you. Even while sleeping at the foot of the golden tabernacle I felt the cold of cosmic silence.

I sought help at the six month mark into my official priesthood. I phoned our bishop, a kind and pastoral man, and told him that I lived with this new and terrible feeling that I think professionals and lay people alike call depression. He asked if we could talk more in his office. After a warm and congenial chat in person, he connected me to a counsellor who would midwife me through a dark fog for the months and years to follow.

But Ireland, after a full year a priest, I went to Ireland. I met Freidrich and Duggan in Dublin, Ireland. There I would seek the answer to some deep down question I’d yet to formulate.

In Ireland, Freidrich, Duggan and I soon discovered a pattern to our travel. We woke up late because we stayed up late, because we talked to people and sipped pints in the pubs late. We sang along to pub bands late. In whatever town we woke up, we emerged from our hostel or B&B into the late morning, where one of us would initiate the question: Where should we get coffee? Then with coffees in our hands, and having drunk down the occasional aspirin speaking for myself, we walked foreign but strangely familiar ancient streets and always caught sight of a book store. One of us would say, “What do you say we poke our heads in?”

It’s a phrase that if I use with great repetition, takes on a meaning I don’t intend.

One only needed to say it once to enjoy its practicality. The question only asked for a slight commitment. If we didn’t like the place, our whole bodies didn’t have to go inside.

We would spend anywhere from one to two hours in each bookstore…we meandered and leaned against our own discovered corners, lost in another world while lost in another world. We often committed with a cannon ball splash.

Then we would get more coffee. Then we would find another bookstore, and poke our faces into great smell of dust and pages. We did eat during the day. I don’t remember what. Perhaps not remembering what we ate reflects the unfortunate theme of famine in Irish history. By 5pm it was time to enter our first pub to see all the friends we’d yet to meet.

One afternoon I stood next to Duggan in a book store before a shelf labeled Irish Authors. He flipped through an open paperback as he shared his knowledge of the life and work of Brendan Behan, then I saw a title that I knew but did not know.

“Waiting For Godot” by Samuel Beckett

I had heard this title spoken fifty times. During my last year of seminary, I took a required pastoral counseling class taught by a renowned psychologist who spent most of his weeks traveling on lecture circuits. Because of his sparse availability, he could only offer to teach our class twice a month for six hour sessions.

Before the semester started I saw my schedule and the six hour class and wondered how I could sit through such a thing, easily bored narcoleptic that I am.

It turned out I lost track of time during his lectures. He strung together stories and studies that left me still looking forward to the next anecdotal narrative at the close of hour six.

He kept our class laughing…sometimes tearing up…and he often used this phrase as our laughter settled or as we dried our eyes: “It’s like waiting for Godot…am I right?”

He was a blunt speaking fellow, older, maybe in his sixties, with a raspy voice, and he often used that phrase: “It’s like waiting for Godot.”

Every time he said that, my classmates and I would all nod our heads in agreement like, yea, totally, it’s just like that.

Over and over again I ignored the faint error firing deep in my brain that said, Who is Godot?

What does he have to do with the point of the story?

I thought back on that class as I stood there in the Dublin Literary Museum Bookstore. I held the slim green volume and read the cover, then said to Duggan, “I had no idea this was a play. I thought it was a novel.” Then I told him about the class I took and never knowing who Godot was but always nodding in agreement to Dr. Wallace’s use of the simile. For the rest of the trip we continued to use the phrase.

We stood on the Cliffs of Moher looking out at the vast sea, and I would say, That’s one wild drop off, and Duggan would say… It’s like waiting for Godot. And I would agree. Freidrich used it often as well. Placing moments against Godot brought meaning to most every aspect of our lives.

We sometimes used the phrase with people we met. One of us might tell a story then say… it’s like waiting for Godot. People nodded in agreement.

I bought the book that day. I’ve yet to read it. I’m only looking up the synopsis now to tell you that I followed up like a responsible thinking person. After just now reading a Britannica article on the play, however, I’m thinking it’s not important to the point of my story. We can wait and see if I’ll talk about the play later. It will be like waiting for…

…more information.

We made a rough half circle road trip around the island driving a small manual shift rental car, often stopping for a passing flock of sheep or yielding for incoming cars at baffling rural roundabouts. We returned the car in Belfast relieved that we got our deposit back after almost wrecking it more times than we cared to recall. From Belfast we flew to Edinburgh where we continued a semblance of our coffee, book, frothy stout routine. Edinburgh pubs hosted more dance floors and we had all sorts of fun, but something weighed on my world and reminded me that I would return to my lonely nights of sleeping on the house chapel floor…and look on at the empty beer bottles, hollowed soldiers, on my cluttered bedroom desk in shame… and stand void of life before my open closet where all my black clerical shirts hung but wish only to wear the old flannel shirt hanging at the closet’s end, then disappear into the night on a fishing vessel towards a distant true land.

And I thought about Godot a lot. He symbolized a heavy daunting thought for such a light book. Godot — the play — stood for all the questions I never asked over the years — perhaps out of fear of not gaining full acceptance in my Catholic world. But more fundamental, too many questions meant too great of doubt, and with too great of doubt loomed the fear of a dark eternity. I feared I would slip away from God in doubting too greatly. I might lose paradise forever if I asked too many questions with naked boldness. For this reason I kept my thinking well clothed, even bundled in layers.

I wondered if not asking questions, big bold questions, played some role in my now choking unhappiness.

Freidrich and Duggan flew out from Edinburgh after we toured the castle city for three days. I would stay one more day on my own. I’d come to admire Duggan and the freedom with which he lived — his ability to take up and travel and to write and live like a vagabond. He seemed open to what truth might appear before him around every corner. I admired Freidrich and the contentment and honesty he showed in his work as he took an hour or two each day to sit in a cafe and correspond with clients. Never once did he complain or express some wish to have done something different in life. As he worked he displayed an inner smile. I felt I lived with neither of these characteristics, but I wanted to be these things.

The next day I woke up alone in our hostel room and started out on a walk. I walked through the 200 year old streets of the ironically named “New Town”, then into a green park valley below a dark mad castle stacked high on the cliff above. The rain started to fall as tears collected in my eyes. Deep questions and deep doubts gurgled upward from the once sealed well of my subconscious. Is God real at all? What value is there in my religion? Questions like these. I even asked, did I make some big mistake in becoming a Catholic priest? And did I become a priest because I didn’t ask enough questions? But now I asked lots of questions.

II. How Trying to Look Cool Got Me Punched in The Face

The fight started long before the fight started. In eight grade, with high school approaching, my friends started to sign up for high school football.

I loved tennis. I grew up in a small mountain town and every summer as a kid I took tennis lessons at the local rec center. The rec center served as a gathering place for families in our town. It had a lake for swimming. There were large lawns where we ran and shot each other with water guns. There was a frisbee golf course where we’d throw disks through a wilderness of pine and oak. And barbecue pits lined the sandy lake shore and we gathered on picnic tables here for so many hamburger hot dog meals. The small hallmark Christmas movie town spralled out from this center point and intermingled with forests and the granite feet of mountains. As kids we moved from one game to the next. I returned often to the tennis courts.

I opted out of many activities in order to play tennis. I loved to see the forward spin on the fuzzy neon ball as it exploded from the strings of my racket. I longed to see that ball land in the back corner of the opposing square. And I longed to see my desperate opponent friend in a full sprint, who would have rather played volleyball, swing and miss.

A tennis match made combat, in all its bloody muddy conquest, a safe and inspiring pursuit. And the court, with its clean geometry — its squareness and stillness — represented a cosmos that remained myserious but understandable. Writghwood was like that too. It was safe…and beautiful.

Near the end of eighth grade, my peers talked about what sports they would play in high school. We dreamed together of who we would become in the world ahead. My first and natural thought was that I would play tennis.

Wrightwood could only support space for an elementary school. After elementary, we rode school busses into the nearby high desert, where we would attend middle school and then to the neighboring high school. These schools served the many remote communities of the wider landscape. We left elementary to integrate into crowds of new kids from other places, some lower income, sometimes wealthier, some kids came from homes that trafficked drugs, some from homes where parents beat them. Some wore rags to school. Some rode horses in English style competitions. I recall not wanting my world to expand in this unpredictable way.

I made a few new friends in middle school. But I now looked up the road at the high school, a campus far more khaki in color, far more dotted with old cooked chewing gum burning in the desert sun, far more barricaded with chain link, in which dwelled far more giant and strange humans, fully capable in my mind, of murder.

Rumors had it gangs roamed within the student population.

Each day I looked out of the school bus window as we stopped to pick up high schoolers going to our neighborhood, and I’d watch these and other older teens emerge from the fortress campus. I saw goths robed in black baggy pants and trench coats, their necks and wrists strapped with leather and spiked silver jewelry. I saw jocks made all the larger by husky letterman jackets. I saw stoners draped in tie dye shirts and torn jeans, and those of them that boarded our bus smelled of a sorcerers substance that likely came from zip lock bags. I wondered how to live in the world ahead.

One spring day in the eight grade I walked home from our bus stop. I walked with my friend Max and his older brother Jackson, a tall powerful man among boys who could command our bus full of kids who shouted that threw objects to shut up if he felt he needed a calm ride.

As the oldest child in my family, having no forerunner siblings to bring news of the world ahead, I looked to Jackson as my window into high school. I looked to him for advice. As we walked through a field of high golden grass towards our homes, I told him, with a light in my eye, that I planned to play tennis in high school.

He laughed.

He said that tennis is the nerdiest sport I could play in highschool. I asked him what sports were cool. He said football most of all. Then basketball and baseball. The girls are always going for the football guys. But with tennis, he kept laughing, dude I can’t be there to help when you’re picked on.

I received similar feedback from other sources. Friends and fathers of friends. In my varsity blues world, tennis stood out as a sport for effeminate men who lived in Monaco. And the effeminate man in Monaco just wasn’t an acceptable archetype to embody in John Wayne America.

Many of my friends played football through most of their youth. They would sign up for football.

I would sign up for football.

And so I played on the second string practice squad of our seven time CIA championship team. I served the Diamondbacks as a 145 pound outside linebacker, and to the coaching staff it seemed, a practice bag that could move.

I felt like a fraud celebrating after games with the team in my clean uniform. Although they had me to thank for hitting practice.

I would sit with the team in the cafeteria as they talked about Friday night’s win. But sometimes they liked to retell the story of that one time when the coaches let me play and I tackled the running back after he stopped running and stood ten yards out of bounds.

Sometimes the coaches played the film clip in the locker room and the guys could relive the hilarity.

The humiliation of trying to play football left me looking for new modes of proving my worth in this confusing society.

I quit football after my sophomore year. Around the same time, I discovered an environment where they cheered for me…the parties.

The crowd cheered when I took down a beer from a clear hose connected to a large red funnel held by a friend who ballanced high above me on a stool. I started to spend more time with a different group of friends. We did not play sports after school. We did not spend a moment at school beyond what the state asked of us. We didn’t even spend the state-mandated time.

These friends pat me on the shoulder in fraternal equality as I blew clouds of marijuana smoke into a car already full of marijuana smoke.

We were heroes here, all of us. We celebrated with each other. We weren’t always sure what we celebrated. We chugged bottles of Mickie’s purchased by strangers and danced around a living room to the psychedelic notes of the Doors, and we threw our arms around each others’s necks and pressed our foreheads together and cracked up and fell to the ground.

We smoked weed on rooftops and watched the stars and sillouettes of the forests. We went snowboarding instead of sitting through social studies.

I don’t recall ever talking about college or academics with these friends who I still love to this day, although we reclined on front poarches and talked of sociology and extraterrestrials. We lived outside of a system that we felt gave us no clear place. We blasted punk rock by Bad Religion and NOFX while driving slow with the sunroof and windows open. We breathed the air that smelled of sap and ponderosa. We believed we would live forever, and we waged covert wars against deans and principles sneaking contraband through enemy lines. We often scoffed at the widom of our elders.

And back among the social ranks in school, we believed ourselves to now be cool.

We wore jeans and brown and black button up shirts that looked like they came from Johnny Cash’s closet. We wore dark sunglasses that we removed only after several sentences into the teachers’ lecture, as if to say, we have more important things going on elsewhere.

Our peers seemed to respect us, or so we believed, because we did not care…and we cared.

I lied a lot to maintain this way of life. I lied to my parents who thought I attended a lot of sleepovers. I told them my eyes were red because I just hadn’t been sleeping well. As they saw more of the truth, I spun more elaborate lies and started to believe them.

One afternoon near the end of my senior year I pulled the sunglasses from my face and stepped into my first period peer leading class. Through some terrible administrative oversight, I earned the title of “Peer Leader” each and every year of high school. It was a role that supposedly asked me to lead in some way. Most of my party friends gained the same title and we sat on desks in this meeting hour talking about the weekend and snowboarding and the girls we liked until the bell rang for our next class during which we would also do nothing.

I saw Mitch Corbell each day in this class and we talked crap to each other. He was a junior and so an underclassman, but I saw him as an equal. I liked him. I thought he was cool. I don’t recall what we said to each other on the daily. But this morning whatever I said caused him to stand up and slap me across the face. Everyone in the room sitting on desks talking fell silent and looked at us. Mitch then took a seat on the other side of the room.

After class people approached me and asked me what I planned to do about Mitch’s open display of disrespect. I didn’t feel strongly about it one way or the other, but they kept asking me. I thought about the socially respectable response, and so I said, “I will fight him.”

I had fought only once before. My friend cheated in flag football in third grade and he teased me on the field as I argued with him and I lost my cool and punched him and he looked at me in shock, then later we both sat in the principles office and cried and we became good friends after that.

At home, I sometimes asked my dad to put me in boxing or martial arts, but he always said that fighting would never be my way to solve problems.

Nobody told me that Mitch Corbell practiced boxing with his father and brother, and to come home after losing a fight meant bringing shame upon his family and ancestors.

I remember calling out to Mitch from across the outdoor quad, “Mitch, I’m going to fight you!” And I punched my left fist to my open right hand, the universal sign for I’m going to fight you.

He didn’t look scared.

I looked cool at this time. At a party a week before, I let a girl who I thought was cute shave my hair into a mohalk. It looked great. A big flowing blonde mohalk. And I tied a bandana around my head which completed the look.

It was a Friday and I looked forward to the weekend. My friends and I would drive to Ventura, my favorite place in the world, and go surfing and fish for perch and corbina. I forgot all about my spoken public obligation to fight Mitch Corbell.

As I walked with a crowd to the parking lot after school, someone said to me, “Nate, there’s Mitch down there by his suburban. Now’s your chance!”

I didn’t think. With my prefrontal lobe disengaged for reasons evolutionists will continue to study, I walked fast ahead of the crowd towards Mitch, and I could hear everyone’s excited whispers and something that made me feel good.

Mitch closed his heavy steel pasanger door and stood tall in stoic and athletic preparation.

I said, “Mitch, this is for this morning.” And with kind gentleness I fulfilled the needed theatrics by throwing a right hook that grazed his cheekbone.

Mitch, if it were my overhand backspin serve, with you on the other side of the court, you’d have something coming, bro.

He returned with a punch, I didn’t even see it, that caused me to stumble backwards and I woke up while still on my feet somehow, and I felt warm liquid on my face. Then I remembered that I started a fight.

He charged at me. I grabbed his shirt. He shoved me. A concrete curb caught my ankle and I went tumbling down a dirt hill beside the main highway, backed up with cars in after school traffic.

Mitch used his legs to run down the hill, and he stood over me about to clobber me unconscious. All of a sudden I felt something real in me. I dodged the first punch. And a second. Something in me said I’m going to defeat him or go out on a stretcher.

But Mitch disappeared from my sight and I jumped to my feet. I wondered why so much blood was speckled across my white t-shirt and why Mitch held his nose as it bled. He then picked up my white bandana and held it to his nose.

No way I did that, I thought. In fact I didn’t. My friend Peter did. Peter had the arm of a quarter back but couldn’t secure first string on the football team and so we often hung out in our party-like haze. Peter later told me that he didn’t give the moment any thought. He just saw his homie in trouble, exact words, and jumped in to help him.

He’s a loyal friend, but that did not go well.

I rode away from the scene in a friend’s van to urgent care where I had my split open eye brow stiched up. I went to the beach but couldn’t go in the water. News spread fast that Peter and I premeditated an attack on a vulnerable underclassman. But Mitch faught nobly, doing significant damage to one of his agressors.

I knew I would be sitting in the dean’s office so my mom made me shave my mohalk. When I looked in the mirror I did not look cool. I looked like convict with a purple swollen shut eye.

When Peter and I sat before the Dean, Mr. Tupelo, we took turns telling our stories and he took down notes and let out the occasional laugh of disbelief…and disgust. I was suspended. During that time at home I received phone calls from Mitch’s older thug friends telling me that I was dead.

They were right. They never came around and offed me like they said, but I felt dead. I no longer felt a heart inside my chest. I gave it over to the crowd and I wanted them to love me. But the crowd soon graduated. They left for colleges and trade schools. Some stayed in town but their lives no longer looked the same. They spread like ashes in the wind, and my heart was there, among the ashes as they blew away.

III. A Low

Despite my low grades, record of truancy, and recent suspension, the high school administration let me graduate.

I then followed three friends to rent a house in the city in a suburb of LA county. Here strangers lived in track houses as far as my eye could see and I would commute to a community college and sometimes attend classes and fail three classes. Here we threw parties in our 1970’s track house and brought home acquaintances who we met on campus or at the grocery store and they brought their friends. Many nights I hid in my room and tried to sleep on my bed (only a thin mattress pushed against a corner) to the roudy shouts of strangers drinking in our kitchen.

Before my three friends and I moved in we helped clean and repair the house. The previous tenants lived in the house as if it were an indoor campsite. They let their who knows how many cats take lots of leaks in the carpet. When we met the neighbors, they tolds us that the previous tenants were a mother and her grown up daughter who got lost in drug use and emerged into the light of day less and less often.

The landlord, my friend Killian’s dad, received rent each month from the mother and daughter and never heard a complaint, but was shocked along with us to discover the dilapidated state of the house. We worked with him to tear out carpet that smelled of urine and roll fresh paint on the haunted walls. And when Killian’s dad left for the day we’d sit in an empty half painted room and smoke a jay, the haze of smoke making it even harder to make sense of our new surroundings.

I never fully moved into that house. I too only camped. I too wondered how to find my way to the light of day. Even in the light of day, I struggled to see the light of day. The warmth of the sun warmed only my skin. My heart, or what I knew of it, felt something like a black hole, a vacuum, a chilly thing that drew in heat but seemed to retain none of it.

I landed a job. Both my roommate Creighton and I landed a job at a sporting goods store where we worked in the ski and snowboard section. Creighton worked on the sales floor and I worked in the dimly lit rental and repair shop. There I often listened to music and day dreamed, all frustrated attempts to think lovely thoughts. I waxed snow boards and skis with disinterest and the quality of my work often fell under the scrutiny of my managers.

I often took breaks and visited Creighton and the other sales people who talked with customers among the racks of new snowboard jackets and clothing from the sexiest of surf brands, beautiful merchandise I could no longer afford.

For weeks I admired a button up shirt. Back at the house, my portion of kitchen cabinet remained dark and empty as I ate one meal a day at the Green Burrito, too proud to ask my parents who said I wasn’t ready to move out for any financial aid. And that shirt conjured visions I’d seen in the surf magazines I read growing up. The handsome adventurer pro-surfer taking an evening out to dinner with other good looking men and women, they cheers around a teakwood table in a dim Balinese lodge after a day packed with watching each other get buried shirtless in pristine turquoise barrels.

I snuck the shirt out of the store when I left that day.

I hung it up with pride above my bedroom door and showed it to Creighton when he got home. Creighton knew I liked the shirt. I talked to him on the sales floor about wanting the shirt. He looked at it with a disappointed but congratulatory expression. “That’s smooth, Nate,” he said. I can’t believe you pulled it off.

This was the second thing I’d ever stolen. The first thing was a tube of Neosporin from a drugstore one day after my fight to prevent the scaring and infection of my stitched eye brow. Either I didn’t have any money then. Or I didn’t want to spend it. But now a much more expensive item hung in my room. And I beheld the shirt that I thought could bring my life to life and make me more like the guys I saw in the surf magazines. But as the evening turned to night, the sight left me with a deep sense of emptiness.

The emptiness turned to what had become the familiar feeling of shame. I’ve heard that guilt is the feeling of, “I’ve done something wrong” where as shame is the feeling of “I am something wrong.” I felt guilt in what I’d done. But a feeling of shame came to prevade my everyday.

I’d become something strange in a now strange world of strangers and asphalt beneath a cold dim summer sun and within a pitch black inner night.

The next day, I conducted the more complex and risky operation of sneaking the shirt back into the store and returning it to the rack.

Every weekend I made the hour long drive back to Wrightwood in an ongoing attempt to save what I now saw as a disappearing culture of friends. Many of my friends could only return to Wrightwood sometimes, on breaks and holidays. And when they did return, they brought their bright eyed interesting group of college freinds. And together they told stories of new adventrues with new inside jokes.

One day I played a game of frisbee golf with my friend Tanner. Tanner visited from college and I figured a time to hang out with him after many phone calls. We walked through a grass field towards our disks that landed somewhere in the distant woods and we tried to have a normal conversation. Tanner never had any fear to say critical and true things. He noticed something off in our conversation. He noticed something off about me. He said, “Nate, you seem…” he searched for the right word, “detached.”

That word, “detached”, it scared me. It scared me because it was true. I did feel detached. That was the vocab word. My mind no longer seemed to exist in a natural way. It did not seem to work on my behalf. My mind seemed like a birds nest, but the birds had flown South or North or I’m not sure where. And Nick wasn’t the only one to say it.

Creighton would say it. He’d say, Nate, when I talk to you you nod like you heard me, but I can tell you didn’t hear me.

Or my instructors would say things. I started training on a course to be a firefighter. It’s what the cool kids from my upbringing were doing. I didn’t know what I wanted to be so I went along with it. I took an EMT course as part of the plan. At the end of a major test, my EMT instructor told me that at moments during the test I showed that dear in the headlights look.

Until now nobody told me such things. A friend’s mom during a board game I played with them one evening said, Nate, I don’t remember you this checked out. You’ve always been so quick. That’s what I remembered too. I remember jokes lighting up in my brain. Easy solutions coming to mind. Vast and effortless dreams taking me away before I drifted off to sleep at night.

It was shock.

Shock had shocked my mind, like a bolt of lightning that set fire to a tree and set the forest ablaze, and ashes blew in the wind.

I felt shock at what life was now and how little it resembled what life used to be — shocked that my urban room with a mattress on the floor and strangers in the kitchen felt like a prison cell inside of another prison a cell called everywhere. The freeway signs and community college classrooms appeared as holograms in a not real world. I looked around at a prison of not real.

I didn’t know the people who visited my house. I didn’t know my home town. I didn’t know my family. My family likely did not know me. And nobody told me that this was life.

In no way did life resemble the life I recalled as a boy. I recalled a world where light poured in through the interstices of pine needles. The air warmed my soul then. The shadows of the woods spoke of mysticism the and a realm beyond. The mountain peaks shown themselves as a horizon to somewhere good then, to a realm that promised more adventure and more life. But now I lived on the other side of those mountains and the world appeared dull and dead.

I searched. I saw a book by a Buddhist monk called the Dalai Lama on Tanner’s mom’s coffee table one day and I asked him if I could borrow it. Later I sat cross legged in my room in imitation of the monk and shut my eyes and emerged five minutes later wondering what I was doing.

I listened to music, The Beatles Sergeant Peppers, Jack Johnson, all my favorites, with such care and attention in hopes to learn where beautiful things came from.

I watched the tree in our city front yard from the living room, or I would lay beneath it on our patchy dead lawn.

All of it said, we are illusions and there is nothing here.

I didn’t want to live anymore.

Every weekend I worked at a pizza place in Wrightwood, a second job, and it made no financial sense as I burned gas money driving back and forth from the city. I worked there as part of my attempt to recover the world I once knew.

One afternoon I worked in the pizza kitchen and rolled out a slab of dough using a wooden pin, and what looked like light walked through the door, and it was Jonah our delivery guy.

I never hung out with Jonah. I knew he liked some of the same things that I did. He played paintball and soccer and he snowboarded. But he never came to our parties. He always came to work on time. He talked about his girlfriend as if she were a good friend. They liked doing things together like hiking. He seemed to enjoy doing good work. He spent time with his family. He didn’t use as many swear words as the rest of us did.

Jonah annoyed me because he was not like me. In high school he associated with a group of people who I knew as the Christians. They were different than the Mormons who hung out in choir and theatre. They were different than Catholics. Catholics made up the more interesting population in my view. We drank and smoked and used swear words. Our religion seemed way darker and more mysterious, having altars and incense, leaders in robes and bleeding saints. Catholic Jesus was way more bloody in our religion. Their Jesus played acoustic guitar and ice breakers at Bible camp.

But I saw a glimmer of light in that goodie tooshu, Jonah, as he returned from his pizza delivery run. So I asked him, “Jonah, can I go to church with you some time?”

He looked surprised and as he seemed to think back to what his Bible camp leaders advised him to do when something like this happened. With a look of serenity he then said, “Of course. It’d be great to have you.” And my heart felt at home.

In the hierarchy of places where I expected to find answers to my disillusion, Christianity occupied the lowest place. But I had arrived at my lowest place.

IV: A Change

I attended church with Jonah. We sat on folding chairs in a carpeted auditorium where through a big window you could see the desert hills stuck in with yucca and sage. Jonah pointed at features around the room — the band tuning instruments to our right. He said the pastor is the one who plays the bass guitar. A cool guy, he said, he’ll speak in a bit. And Jonah showed me through the paper worship aid.

The band played and we all stood, maybe 55 of us. Some people clapped and others raised their hands and shut their eyes. I felt that even if I didn’t know what was going on, I’d made a positive decision compared to others I’d made during the past few years. Then the band stopped and we all sat.

Pastor Bill (Bill was his name and he had a mustache) set down his bass and stepped onto the open floor and held a book. He looked comfortable standing there and pleased to be able to talk with all of us.

And he started to speak in a simple way. I understood each sentence he spoke for he spoke as if he just spoke to me. I felt that he spoke only to me. I was alone in the room and he spoke like some dad — kind, casual, mustachey, and coherent.

Growing up my mom often complained that she could never understand our priest’s homilies. I guess I didn’t either. So many big words. I understood the space — the candles, the altar, the stained glass, the smoke of incense, the white garbs…all those things said, we are here to acknowledge higher things.

But I did not understand when the priest spoke of Eucharist or Catechism, or liturgical seasons, or diocesan appeal, or rectory, or Vatican Two. Perhaps the obscurity of his speech made the ceremony all the more mystical.

But now I had a dad talking to me. Why are you just talking to me, I thought. It took a lot of courage to come here. Why do we have to talk here alone?

What he said felt like kindness. And what he said said we would be alright.

And he said one thing that stayed in my ears for days and years ahead. He said, “Most of us forget that God wants to speak to us. So we don’t get quiet. If you want to listen to God and talk to God, here’s a question you can ask him, ask, God, who am I in light of you?”

And I said okay. And soon I started to notice people in the seats around me.

That evening I went to a town party. They’d become dismal scenes, visited by strangers, people in their 30’s who sat on couches in open garages and appeared entranced by some stupefying set of pills. I drove home after one such party, and instead of making the turn to my parents’ house, I pulled into a parking spot in front of the church I attended as a boy.

I sat in my driver’s seat with the ignition off and the silence of the haunted forest pregnant with presence. There is a cliche that floats in our air waves: “Listen to your heart”. The line can be heard in songs I hate. Cliches may be the distillation of our shared lessons, the stuff we all remember together after we’ve forgotten.

My heart was what it was. I did not know what it was because I lived far from it. I did not know that I was afraid to go near to it. It was a fortress with a narrow open door. Part of me knew that lies lived inside, and truth lived inside. So it was an icy thing from which I stayed clear.

But the currents of the moment nudged my interest towards this center…this center of what is. The night and forest inhaled in quietude.

And I pressed my hearing to my heart, and I inhabited my heart in all the darkness that I now saw there. And I spoke some wordless prayer. Prayer was not something I did. I believe I did so as a boy, but what memory of this spiritual activity was the light of an extinguished star.

I said something to a something or someone that I wanted to know now. I was open to something. I wanted to know what was true.

After years of lies to everyone and myself, I was ready to be honest. I even said what Pastor Bill said to say. I said, “God, who am I in light of you?” And with that I felt so in the dark and alone. But only for a moment.

All at once — and this is where I’d do best to not over explain — words don’t work well here — a light, a love, a spirit pure and kind, a life that I loved and loved me in return overflowed my being, making my cold core a bright mystical monastery where I wished to spend the rest of my days.

That’s the best I can do.

And later I would use the word God, although this term comes with shortcomings. God remained with me there and through the night and into the morning where I awoke to an empty house.

My parents were gone at work and my younger brother and sister gone at school. I stepped downstairs into the sun filled living room and I loved all.

What does one do when his eyes are suddenly filled with light. I found an old Bible in a stack of books beneath an end table. I opened the book to an arbitrary place and began to read.

The Book of Proverbs…sounded cool… for gaining wisdom and instruction; for understanding words of insight; for receiving instruction in prudent behavior; doing what is right and just and fair…things I suddenly wanted.

As I sat and read the Bible, with the light from the loft skylight warming me, I thought, I ought to do something to show my appreciation of this light, this holy presence.

I went to my dresser and pulled out a brown zip-up hooded sweatshirt, put it on, and placed the hood neatly and ceremonially over my head, then I went and made oatmeal.

I never liked oatmeal, but now the oats looked simple and beautiful as I stirred them in their pot. I only dropped a pinch of brown sugar in the oats. I didn’t want the delight of sweetness to distract me from what I now felt. As I ate my oatmeal, I looked out the window at the hummingbird sipping from the red hanging feeder.

I talked to the light — thank you for love. What would you have me do?

The light responded in silence, and sparked within me an idea

I would make my brother’s bed, some symbolic reparation for making myself too cool for him, calling him names and beating up on him even though he was five years my junior.

I would do the yard work my parents asked me to do so long ago.

I cleared the leaves from beneath the neighbors deck, their dogs growling at me the whole time.

The whole time I stood in something new. Something that was love wanted me to know love and be better.

That evening I helped my mom do the dishes after dinner. She noted that my willingness to help was unusual.

I told her, “I think I found God.”

She said, “Hm, well you have been nice to everyone this evening.”

And things for me were different after that. Some things stayed the same — I still lacked a good amount of education and I believed still that I knew a lot. But now I had a reason to do well. I had a reason that I didn’t before, a reason to tell the truth, or to work hard at my job, or to help those around me, or to start reading books, or to spend my days and nights hoping to catch a sense of that original illuminating bliss.

There would come times in the years to follow, as I entered deep into a religious life, where I’d wonder if I’d imagined things that night. I’d wonder if I over did it in giving over so much of my life and livelihood to religion and spirituality in hopes of knowing glory. I’d wonder why I couldn’t just be happy pursuing a career in accounting or nursing, or any honest work that equaled honest pay.

What I knew was that I looked back to that night as the turning point that made me “the religious guy who you might not want to cuss in front of” among plenty of circles of people. In other circles it made me a religous leader of sorts. It made me a relentless theological searcher. It made me take to the mystifying task of discerning God’s ways and arriving at all sorts of baffling confusions. I still wonder about that night.

V. Seeds

After my conversion, I ate oatmeal often — and stone monastery arches filled my imagination. And I resolved to do life differently. I still did not foresee the Catholic priesthood on the horizon.

I turned down drinks at parties. I stopped going to parties. Not that there’s anything wrong with parties. But I thought there might be something wrong with parties. When I reconnected with old friends, and they invited me to have beers, and I’d sip at my Coors Light with slow hesitency, and refrain from laughing at the dirty joke, they would tell me I’d changed.

In my evenings I read my worn brown leather bound bible and listened to a light within my soul.

I left Wrightwood and it broke my heart…only modestly. My dad took a job in San Diego and my family moved to a suburb in Oceanside. And I was out of money and ideas so I moved with them, and I trusted new and interesting things would come to light in this coastal palm tree land of surf and beach.

Things did.

I enrolled in classes at the junior college, and started doing something that I rarely did in high school…study. I suddenly wanted to learn as much as I could, about everything. My grades improved…a lot. The bible I read came to look like a weathered baseball mitt. I attended bible studies with good looking young people who I hoped would like me and that would be my friends. At night I studied geometry or Leviticus at my desk. I lit candles and cared for houseplants. I sought to somehow pray without ceasing. I read a lot: Books by Mark Twain, plays by Shakespeare, hagiographies of Saint Francis of Assisi, diary entries by Mother Teresa, the backs of cereal boxes, just because I saw that reading was good.

I decided Catholicism made the most sense among the Christian traditions. I didn’t give Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism or the others, much thought. I figured that because I experienced a significant religious moment in a Christian setting, and because the words of the Bible suddenly made so much sense, I would be a Christian. And I would be a Catholic Christian. It was the oldest form of Christianity and with its history of art and stained glass windows it felt like coming home, like a family gathering, like the shelter of the woods, like a truth that nobody could say with words, whispered by Druids and Celts, and hinted at in the contemplative lives of Buddhist monks and nuns.

I would go to confession every week. Every Friday I would stand in the confession line against the back wall of Saint Francis of Assisi Church — an old shoe of a church with khaki walls and brown institutional carpet, a beige altar built upon beige tiles, colored to life only by the flowers ladies carried in for the morning’s funeral. The church was dressed in brown like the saint himself. I believed I stood on favored grounds to hear whatever it was God wished to say in the silence of light pouring through the windows. Plus it was the closest church to my house.

One morning it came my turn to confess and I stepped into the dim cozy confessional room prepared to disclose the most embarrassing corners of my life. However with each passing week, I had less and less embarrassing stuff to confess. I cleared out the things I found so frightening to say, and now I talked about the smaller shortcomings of the week. But even these felt terrible and I wanted to get them out of my soul. I wanted a pure soul. I wanted an inner life as clear as a….well… something that’s clear. I set out to be perfect as I believed God to be perfect. I’d confessed my past enough times over. Now I confessed grumpiness or moments of forgetting God or moments of emotional darkness.

I took my seat across from the priest, a latino man in his forties. He was a handsome guy. I note this detail because back then I barely knew any Catholic priests, and before meeting priests, I envisioned priests having hunched backs or something and living in dim church towers and eating sad soup every day. But he and the other priests at the parish appeared happy and well adjusted.

We exchanged the Catholic ritual sentences: Let us begin in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Bless me Father for I have sinned. And I told him everything I had. Maybe he noticed how mundane my confessions had become with each passing week that I saw him. When I concluded, he told me to keep my practice of prayer and some other things that struck me as his routine advice. Then he paused, and asked…

Have you thought about becoming a priest?

I felt honored. I heard it as an affirmation that my spiritual house had fallen into order.

Had I thought about becoming a priest? I don’t know. Maybe?

I went through a phase from about age ten to fourteen when I loved altar serving in the mass at our small church a few blocks from our home in the mountains. Aside from the time that we all had to stand for a long time during a solemnity mass, and I stood with my knees locked to maintain excellent decorum, and then passed out, and woke up to what looked like every face in the village staring down at me with concern…I thought altar serving was cool. There came a ceremonial reverence in the burning candles and floating incense smoke. The ritual had a quality of not fully existing in time. It seemed like a space where eternity and the ordinary spilled over into a new sort of space.

One afternoon I rode in the back seat of our family car. My mom drove and talked with her friend in the passenger seat. My friend Mikey sat next to me and we talked about Ninja Turtles. My mom said, What do you want to be when you grow up, Mikey?

I want to be a paramedic, he said.

What about you, Nate?

I want to be the pope.

That’s nice. He wants to be the pope, she said to her friend.

You want to be the pope…? Her friend said back to me.

It occurred to me that I had said something strange. It also occurred to me that there was only one pope which made the odds of becoming pope low. How embarrassing. I revised and selected a more realistic and socially conforming life goal.

No…not the pope.

Yea?

More like..a bishop.

Maybe I was trying to say that I wanted to be a priest, and I lacked the vocabulary. But maybe what I wanted to be wasn’t a thing…it wasn’t a title or a carved out job. Maybe it was a state of life. I wanted to live within the in the sense of mystery that washed over me during the mass. This sense of mystery happened in other places too — when hiking in the mountain backcountry — when the humming birds landed on the red feeder that hung on the front deck — when the summer rains came and you could smell the thirsty grass and dust of the fields… But the mystery happened in mass too…especially in mass.

I thought about the priest’s question. I told him that I had thought about becoming a priest.

A seed of an idea, a calling, a something, had been planted into the soil, and the rains came, and the sun shone upon young, and seemingly ancient, sprouts.

Back in these college days I worked at a restaurant — an Outback Steakhouse. I sought a job in a restaurant after I read a book called The Practice of the Presence of God which is the transcribed wisdom of a 17th Century French monk named Brother Lawrence. As the legend goes — and this might be a legend — but the legend stuck with me — Brother Lawrence, a simple kitchen aide, discovered a harmony between prayer and work to the extent that the sight of Lawrence washing dishes attracted the gaze of his fellow monks. First the monks gathered to watch Lawence work, then the people from the town, then as word spread, people throughout the whole country of France.

To be like Brother Lawrence. I too loved washing dishes and sweeping floors. It was contemplative work. And I needed a job. I carried my completed application into an Outback steakhouse one summer afternoon. I had applied to three restaurants prior and never heard back for an interview. It was early before the crowds filled the polished wooden booths and high top bar tables. The dining room reminded me of some medieval European tavern where townspeople could gather to know the joys of communal life.

A tall attractive woman, who I soon learned was the manager, greeted me. She read my application and then asked me to take a seat across from her in an empty booth. She asked me what my hobbies were, and I said surfing, and she complained that surfboards cost so much, and I agreed, and we laughed, but mainly I laughed because she laughed and I didn’t want her to be the only one laughing. She looked surprised that I requested a dishwashing job. She said she didn’t have an opening for a dishwasher. But she could give me a job hosting, and from there she said, I could learn to wait tables.

I said okay. Hosting and waiting tables here seemed close enough to sweeping stone floors in a European monastery to the tune of a single blue bird chirping divine mysteries into the sun lit corridors.

I was wrong.

I walked through the front doors my first night, and beheld the dining room packed with people. An NSync song played loudly from the overhead speakers. I nudged my way through the bar crowd and walked into the even more noisy kitchen where flames tore upward from the hot stove burners and cooks shouted at each other in Spanish and servers shouted at cooks and and cooks were shouting back at servers, and I saw one guy, a server, bump into one of the women servers, and he slapped her butt, and she laughed and gave him a look of playful endearment. The manager who once spoke to me with such comradery shouted at the cooks, where the hell are my camerones dammit!? When she finished her demands, she looked at the plates of food in front of her. I said…hi. And I regret saying that. She shot a glance back at me, as if to say, Have you lost your mind?

I realized then that I’d not taken a job in the same sort of kitchen as Brother Lawrence.

After their shifts, servers drank. They would gather around the bar until it closed. Looking back I can see why. Great pressures accrue in the psyche after a mere five hours of remembering what customers ask you to bring them. You never feel like you’re getting things fast enough. And it returns to you in your dreams. Everyone said they had dreams. I had dreams. I would walk out to the patio and see people seated around each of my eight tables, way more tables than I would ever have to wait on. None of them have place settings or water or bread and butter. It’s my job to take care of them. I can feel their frustration with me. Everyone is mad at me. And I’m alone. Except for my boss. She’s yelling at me, Where the hell are my camerones dammit!

I would have those years after resigning.

After their shifts, servers gathered around the bar. You’d watch two servers, in that sinking submarine of a kitchen, yell and cuss at each other over a missed order, then an hour later you’d see them having a drink at the bar with each other.

When the restaurant bar closed at 10pm, all the servers closed their bar tabs and drove to the next late night dive. They invited me to come out a lot. Aside from a few hungover episodes, I usually said no, but thanks. I’d hear murmurings the next day. Complaints of hangovers peppered with words like cocaine and phrases like getting laid.

I did make a couple friends who lived more at my pace. Bethany and Regan. After our shift we might buy a few tall cans of cheap beer and sit on the Carlsbad sea wall watching the waves crash. We talked about what we hoped for in the years to come. Out of the three of us, Bethany could always say best what it was she wanted. She wanted to finish her degree in business, then earn an MBA, get married, she could name with precision what qualities she wanted and didn’t want in her future husband. She could name what she didn’t like in her last boyfriend. And she wanted to have kids, two, but maybe three, and she wanted to travel.

In contrast, I couldn’t say what I wanted with the same simplicity. I had told that priest that I had thought about being a priest. But did I want that? What I wanted didn’t seem to exist in the world in the form of an established profession.

Did I want to be married? I had dated in high school and shortly after, and I always felt a heavy weight on my shoulders that came with a relationship. It was always as if a part of who I was disappeared into the other person, and neither of us fully existed.

Also…did it matter what I wanted? How did what I wanted to do play into what I ought to do?

I poured over the spiritual writings of saints and mystics who always spoke of doing God’s will. Their own desires ranked lower than a higher value…a more mysterious value to discern…God’s will.

Maybe what I wanted didn’t matter so much. Maybe God called me to put aside what I wanted to make some great heroic sacrifice.

I contemplated the lives of Old Testament prophets. God called Ezekiel to lay on his left side for 390 days to show the people of Israel how many years they lived in a state of sin. Then Ezekiel needed to lay on his right side for 40 days. And during all these days, he had to bake bread for his food using human excrement for fuel. Back then I took the words of the Bible more seriously. In reading a story like this one, the frightening question arises, to what embarassing and awful lengths might God call someone? I don’t suspect that Ezekiel wanted to do these things.

And what happens when someone hears a calling and refuses it? God called Jonah to preach to the people of Nineveh. Jonah did not want to do this. And so he boards a ship to sail as far as possible from this voice of God, and a storm comes, and the crew recognizes Jonah is the problem, and they throw him overboard, and he gets swallowed by the whale, and I knew to take a story like this figuratively…but a frightening idea remained. When you run from the voice of God, you fall into a state of existential misery.

I couldn’t just look inside myself, detect the things I wanted and then go after them. I needed to hear the calling of God. So I listened. I sought the restaurant tasks like filling a bucket full of ice and carrying it to the bar, or I signed up every week to “run food”. This meant you didn’t interact much with customers. You just carried trays of food to tables to help the serving staff.

Then one evening I worked up the courage to ask my boss for time off to take a retreat with my university catholic group. I found her in the back office looking over an open binder and marking notes. Her assistant sat in the room turning the pages of a PEOPLE magazine on her break. After stuttering some, I completed the sentences needed to make my request clear. She looked up from her binder as if to say, Do you want me to kick your ass? Then in a sweet tone, she said, Of course. You can take some time off.

Then when I turned to leave, her assistant said, So what’s the deal with you…are you going to be a priest?

I hadn’t told anyone that I sometimes thought about becoming a priest. I don’t think I even told anyone that I was Catholic. Also, people ask all sorts of things. Why did I care so much about the assistant’s comment? When I was asked at drive throughs if I wanted fries with the thing I ordered, I didn’t always say, yea, I need fries.

Sometimes I got fries.

A priest was something in the world I could be. It was a thing. It existed. I thought about doing other things: I could be a teacher or a psychologist. We daydream about our futures. I started to daydream about becoming a priest. That daydream brought about more joy than the other things.

I drove home one evening after work. These days people will text you a link to a podcast or song they want you to listen to. But in the olden days in which I lived, people illegally pirated CD’s and labeled them with sharpies. A friend from my university Catholic group had given me a CD, a talk, to listen to. It was a talk by a nationally prominent priest who spoke with a booming voice and haunting cadence. He told the story of how he came to the priesthood. I always wanted to be a somebody, I recall him saying, so I played football, he said, and excelled into college football. Then I joined the army, and became an army ranger…

After injuring himself he left the Rangers and entered the Real Estate profession in Los Angeles. He excelled there. He said he owned several homes and a yacht and attended parties with famous people. It was at one of these parties where an actress, he didn’t say who, introduced him to cocaine.

He became an addict and he soon lost everything and slept on park benches. He moved home to live with his mom where he continued to use. But his mom encouraged him to say one Hail Mary a day. That’s all. The Hail Mary turned into three Hail Mary’s a day, then a whole rosary every day. And he got sober. And he became a priest. In football, or the Army, or in Real Estate, he said, I never felt like a somebody…when ordained a priest, I finally knew I’d become something.

Then he said, For you young men who feel a call to the priesthood…answer the call! Answer the call!

I felt like I was one of those young men. By the end of his talk I dried my eyes with my sleeve.

I remember climbing into bed that night and looking to the dark ceiling. In my prayer I said…Sure, God, I’ll go. Take me. I’ll be a priest if it’s your will. And I remember closing my eyes and seeing the stars… the cosmos, and I belonged to it all. I belonged to the truth of things. My life, after that, whether I liked it or not, would be tied up with the Roman Catholic priesthood.

VI. To Be a Monk

Iwould be a monk. That’s what I thought. I would live in a stone cell and sleep on a mattress of straw and make my prayers to the crackling sound of wood burning in my fireplace, a fire fueled by logs I split outside my cell door at the edge of snowy woods. In my sufferings, prayers, and solitary days, I would do the work that the world did not know it needed.

There are varied ways to be a priest in Catholicism. A monk is but one. I heard an older priest describe it in this way: In medicine we find general practitioners and specialists. The priesthood too has general practitioners and specialists. If you find Catholicism complicated, you’re in good company. I struggle now to map out the taxonomy of the clerical wing of Catholic Christianity. Using this medical analogy, “diocesan” priests are usually the generalists. They are your garden variety priests who work under the jurisdiction of a local bishop, a bishop who oversees a diocese, that is, a geographical area that roughly aligns, in the U.S., with the given county. Along the West coast, from south to north, we have the Diocese of San Diego, then Orange, then Los Angeles…and so forth. Most priests stationed in churches throughout these lands are diocesan priests. They often live in houses on, or close to, the church campus where they’re assigned to serve. They often own a car. I’ve known some to even own a motorcycle. They make a promise of “simplicity” on the day of their ordination, not “poverty”. So they have stuff: Skis, hiking boots, a closet with clothes in it, not unlike the given population they serve. Sometimes they’re called ‘secular’ priests, after the Latin noun seculum which roughly means world. They operate in the world whereas the next category of priests I’ll mention…also operate in the world. We all live in the world. But the word secular perhaps implies the idea that diocesan priests live a way of life that more closely reflects the population they serve. When formally attired, diocesan priests wear the familiar and iconic black suit with white square collar.

I knew a priest who had a chihuahua.

Then Catholicism has specialists. Small organizations characterized by a collective personality and way of life. These groups are often called “orders” and they consist of men ordained to the priesthood and other men who are called “brothers” and make similar vows but do not get ordained to the priesthood. They often live in community in a house, friary, or monastery. And often lay men and women will visit these groups and participate in their way of life. There are also orders of women who similarly live in communities and focus on certain ways of life. They’re called nuns, sisters, and sometimes mothers. These women are not ordained to the priesthood, nor can they be ordained to the priesthood. And this is controversial.

Often these orders will seek to take on the spirit or personality of a saint. For example the Franciscans follow the way of Saint Francis of Assissi (1181 or 82–1226). They often wear brown robes, or “habits”, take vows of poverty, and observe a certain care for the poor. There are the Dominicans who follow the way of Saint Dominic (1170–1221) and attend closely to academic pursuits and skilled preaching. There are the Jesuits who live out a vision set forth by Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556). These specialists have the reputation of taking the most liberal and experimental stances within Catholicism. Many of them take posts in academia and college administration. Some write poetry or specialize in astrophysics.

There is a common anecdote among Catholics in describing religious orders: A man purchased a new BMW Beamer and wished to have it blessed. He first knocked on the door of the Franscican house. A priest in a brown habit answered the door.

“Father, I just got a new Beamer. Could you give it a blessing?”
With a look of confusion, the priest said, “What’s a Beamer?”
The man felt embarrassed. “Never mind,” he said. “It’s a silly request. I should get going.”

The man then knocked on the door of the Dominican house. A priest in a white habit answered the door. “Hi Father,” the man said, “would you be so kind as to give my new Beamer a blessing?”
But the Dominican said, “I’m sorry, what’s a Beamer?”
Embarrassed again, the man dismissed himself.

Finally he knocked on the door of the Jesuit house. A man in a flannel shirt answered the door.
“Are you a priest?”
“I am.”
“Great. I just got a new Beamer. Can you give it a blessing?”
“A Beamer! What model? Don’t tell me you got one of the 3 Series Sedans. Did you read the article about those in the last issue of Car and Driver? Wait…” the Jesuit paused, “…what’s a blessing?”

I’ve done my best above to provide a taxonomy of Catholic priesthood, and I’ve oversimplified. If you were to visit all these orders and meet the priests, you would gain a more true and complex picture. I knew little about the paths of priesthood when I first considered the vocation. I was enamored, however, by the image of the monk. A monk falls under the orders category. But there are many orders of monks. To find my place, I wasn’t sure where to start and where to look. But around this time I met a mentor…sort of.

It was afternoon in summer, and my friend Max, one of the line cooks from the restaurant, called me and asked if I wanted to get lunch at an Italian place that had gotten good reviews. Max was a big guy from Tennessee who could stand calm and stoic in the face of managers yelling at him over an order gone wrong. It seemed people in our restaurant world wanted to go to other restaurants often to enjoy the peaceful side of the business, where one can be waited on. I told Max, sure, I’ll go with you.

I sat at our table working on a second basket of Italian bread. Italian bread in olive oil that had been dusted with salt and pepper might be the best thing in the world. Max started a conversation with the elderly people next to us. Back then I was painfully shy, too shy to go around chatting with people whom I did not know.

“What do you all do?” Max asked.
“We’re retired.”
Great question Max, I said to myself, can we go back to not talking to strangers?
“Jim here was a doctor,” a single old man who seemed to be the spokesperson of the table said, “and Jane raised money for charities. And I was a professor at Oxford, and before that I was a pilot in the Air Force. I flew bomber planes.”

I was suddenly interested.
“What did you teach at Oxford?” I asked
“Medieval Monasticism.”
“I’m a Catholic. I’m interested in monasticism.”
“I know many things. A cool guy like you, I’d be happy to tell you more.”
I thought, Now that I think of it, I am a pretty cool guy.

They started to stand. The old man who did the majority of the talking gave me a business card and said his name was Arthur LaClerc. Printed on the card was just his name, email, and phone. No profession or list of services.
“You can come to my home here in,” and he named one of the nearby affluent neighborhoods, “and we can talk. I’ll cook tikka masala. Have you had tikka masala?”
“No,” I said.

I could tell Max waited for an invitation and I could tell Arthur offered, only reluctantly, “And I suppose your friend can come too.”

They left, and I looked at the card. I understood the whole occasion to be a matter of divine ordinance. I needed a guide, and behold, a guide.

Meanwhile, for months I started to take up what I believed to be monastic practices. Several nights a week I slept on the floor. I mingled my breakfast shredded wheat with apple cider vinegar to ruin its taste. I took cold showers. I thought of Saint Paul who said, “I punish my body and make it my slave, so that after preaching to others I myself will not be disqualified.” (1 Cor 9:27)

Or I thought of the first exercise spelled out by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a meditation on hell in which one imagines “the great fires, and the souls as in bodies of fire” and many other imaginings of hell that are meant to turn one’s heart radically away from sin. I thought I could make myself pure, and so escape hell, and with that, escape the prison house of the impure body. I thought I could unify my life to God through self destruction.

A week passed after meeting Arthur. Having taken the time to muster the courage, I dialed the number on the card. He picked up.
“Hi, is this Arthur LaClerc?”
“It is! Hello there. I’m glad you called.”
The way he said what he said left one feeling significant in the world.
“When are you coming over?” he asked.
I didn’t know when, or if such a thing was a normal thing.
He said, “Come over tomorrow. For lunch. I’ll make chutney. Here’s my address.”
I wrote it down along with the gate code.

The next day it rained and I drove to the front gate of the neighborhood and punched in the code. The houses were all white, and styled after Mediterranean villas. He answered the door and welcomed me in through the hall and living room were artifacts from seemingly around the world. He showed me the library, a sunlit room with high ceilings, books arranged neatly from floor to ceiling.
“Have you read all of these?” I asked.
“At one point or another,” he said. He changed the subject, “For lunch we’re having chutney.” He showed me to a table beside the kitchen. “Have you had chutney?”
I said, no.
He shook his head in disappointed disbelief. “I have so much to teach you.”

I wanted to know what he knew. I believed there must indeed be secret knowledge held and disseminated only by the rare sage. Had I met such a knower?

At lunch I don’t recall what we talked about. I just recall that talking seemed difficult. Back then, I was a shy conversationalist. Upon leaving a small town, where I felt that I belonged, for the far more vast world, my personality retreated into hidden places. I struggled then to coax my confidence and sense of humor back into the open. I didn’t know what to say to this person.

“This chutney is good,” I said. It was good. “Have you been to India?” I asked.
“I’ve been to India many times. I met Mother Teresa in Calcutta.”
“Amazing! What was that like?” I had been enamored by the writings of Mother Teresa. They transported me into a world where the soul could be free of worldly concern. And I thought, what an amazing thing here, someone who met her, who can give first hand insight!
Arthur just responded, “Like I said, I can teach you many things.” Then with what seemed like a forceful redirection, he said, “Eat!”

It was an odd response, but I went on eating. The thought occurred to me that I really didn’t know this guy, and I could soon enough ingest poison or worse. For what they were worth, I trusted my instincts, sort of. For having just shut down what would normally be an interesting conversation, Arthur seemed to be a good person. His dog, Darby, sat looking at us from the tile kitchen floor, like a mop, but one with seemingly a kind human soul. Maybe dogs reflect their masters in some way, I thought. I had no good reason for trusting this guy. I ate my chutney and thought of my next question.

He never taught me the mysteries of the universe during that lunch, or during the next one, or the one after that. Like in our conversation about Mother Teresa, he had a way of offering a fascinating piece of information about himself, and then closing the conversation when I asked about it further.

At times he could offer seemingly revelatory things about you. He would often say, “Somewhere along the way in your life, someone told you you weren’t good enough and you believed them.” It was as if he saw such things through prophetic vision. In my case he was right, but maybe he was right, because the statement remained general enough to function against any life.

He asked a lot about my finances — what sort of debt I had accrued, how I spent my money, what sort of income I earned. He would often say that he wanted to see that I found myself in the same situation financially as he himself enjoyed. I wasn’t thinking about finances. I wasn’t particularly interested in money at the time.

I wasn’t sure how he made his money. I’m still not sure.

He always seemed to offer a glimmer of the knowledge that I sought, but the full revelation would always have to happen sometime later.

In the meantime, we started to take day trips. I’d show up, he’d say we’re taking a trip. I’d ask, to where? He’d say, you’ll see! And I’d say okay, because I was a pushover. But the trips were interesting. We visited the Benedictine monastery built on a hill above Oceanside, the Self Realization Temple Gardens on the Encinitas bluffs, we caught an indie film in Kensington about the highly austere Carthusian monks of the Monastery of the Grande Chartreuse in France. After the film (I thought was captivating, even though it had almost no dialogue) he asked me, “Are you ready to go!?” I didn’t feel like I was ready. On one trip, we took the whole day, we left early in the morning and drove to the California high desert to a monastery called Saint Andrew’s Abbey where, on that day, the abbey hosted a festival, one full of art vendors and live musicians. Arthur introduced me to the Abbot himself. In a way I was learning a great deal about monasticism, not because of anything Arthur said in particular, but because of these trips.

Along these trips we often stopped at excellent restaurants. In a way I started to see the world, through food at least. We stopped at Michelin star Indian, Italian, and Chinese cuisine. And of course during these meals, Arthur offered but glimpses into his travels: Meeting the Dalai Lama in New York or Bertrand Russel at Oxford, eating world renound mole in Mexico city, and avoiding stepping in elephant shit in the jungles of Thailand. Sometimes he’d say that he’d pay for me to see India or Mexico City.

But I was baffled by the sort of advice and direction he gave. One moment he would offer a seemingly profound insight he envisioned from your past. “Someone told you that you were no good when you were young.” A few minutes later, as you’re struggling to parallel park, he’d say, “you’re dumber than a bucket of rocks.” And of course he’d say, “I can teach you so much.” And I’d say, “Like what?” And he’d say, “Eat!”

For a while I thought I was presented with a Mr. Miyagi and Daniel-Son situation (see the original Karate Kid. Note, I was born in the 80’s). Before I could learn martial arts, I needed to learn discipline through some seemingly unrelated task like waxing classic cars. But really, waxing classic cars correlated exactly to blocking punches. In my case, my version of waxing cars was putting up with the confusing and exhausting work of trying to talk to Arthur.

He did help me get out of debt. I owed money on a truck I’d purchased two years earlier, and I was beginning to collect school debt. I’d hoped he would just write me a check, but instead he let me work in his yard. I’d work my shifts at the restaurant, attend classes at the state university, and twice a week restore his landscaping. I’ll admit the work could be cathartic. These were prayerful times slaving from one job to the next. It was ora et labora. I soon paid off my truck and built savings.

I also, without telling Arthur, made a three day retreat to Saint Andrew’s Abbey to discern if my call might be there. Little known fact, monasteries make for great alternatives to hotels and hostels when traveling. Most Catholic monasteries have retreat housing that you book through the phone or internet. I’ve known friends who have traveled through Europe, Turkey, and Israel, staying entirely at monastic guest houses for the modest cost of suggested donations.

This is what I did, I booked a guest room. I also asked the receptionist while booking if I could meet with a monk while I was there, ideally one who could help me understand what my life might look like if I were to join. The receptionist said she’d connect me with a monk during my stay, likely the monk who oversees new candidates.

When I arrived, no monk was available, so I took walks through the desert abbey grounds. You might imagine scenes of old European monasteries — stone gothic arches and courtyards. This abbey looked as if it were built on a tighter budget, and with a more practical architectural vision. Not much stone to speak of. The simple one story buildings blened in with the khaki soil and dry desert shrubbery. Here I did not feel solitude but loneliness. In between walks I attended the monks’ prayer services called the Liturgy of the Hours, mostly a chanting of the psalms punctuated by readings from scripture and writings of the saints. From my place near the back of the church, I observed the dozen or so, mostly elderly, monks at their seats, all in black habits, gathered around the altar. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be one of them. It felt as if I would be throwing my life off a cliff, and God might not be there to catch me.

I attended the meals for guests on retreat where I sat the long dining hall table where guests chatted about holy books read and holy places visited, and I ate my oatmeal in silence, trying to be especially hardcore about my visit. I did meet an older man who wore glasses and an argyle sweater vest, who struck up conversation with me, despite my attempts to appear solemn and serious. He said his name was Pat. Near the end of that first breakfast, I told him that I was on retreat discerning a call to the priesthood and maybe even monastic priesthood, and he nodded as if he already knew so much. And we would chat at meals and even on walks after meals. He shared that he was a diocesan priest in New York. He even said that he served on a council of top clerics to decide how their diocese would handle the unearthed cases of priests who sexually abused minors. He said that he was a dissenter on the council when he advocated for transparency. I knew this was a problem in the church, it all just seemed so far away and unreal at the time.

He also said that he had helped a lot of people discern their calling. He said he was a spiritual director, a counselor of sorts. On the second evening of my stay, after dinner, I talked with him in the retreat lobby across from the dining hall. He raised questions to help me think about what sort of priest I wanted to be, if a priest at all. One question stood out, he asked, “Do you picture yourself the father of a small family, or a big family?” I thought about that small group of elderly monks gathered each day in the abbey chapel, and I said, “A big family.” At least a bigger one than I had just observed. He said, “In that case, if it’s a priest you want to be, the diocesan priesthood might be a better fit. You’ll be interacting with a lot more people.”

The next morning, after breakfast in the dining hall, Pat gave me his card and he left to catch a flight out of Los Angeles. I spent the rest of the day taking long walks through a lonely sort of solitude. That night after dinner, I walked back to my room wishing I were chatting with friends in the kitchen of a house party. Each time I had checked in with the receptionists about meeting a monk to talk with, she said that she hadn’t been able to find anyone who was free. While I walked, I passed an open door where three younger looking monks washed dishes. I thought, holy shit, just like Brother Lawrence! I knocked on the doorframe, said hi, I’m on retreat here. Can I help you with the dishes?

They looked at me and then each other like, I don’t see why not. And one monk said, sure. I rolled up my sleeves and took a spot drying. While we worked, I brought up that I was discerning my vocation and hoping to chat with the vocation director at the monastery.

They looked at each other again, “I think he’s on vacation,” said the guy rinsing dishes beside me.

A silence passed. Then I asked that same monk working beside me — he was a very thin guy, with small dark features and dark hair — “How did you find yourself deciding to enter the monastery here?” He let out a sigh and a laugh. The other two guys also chuckled.

“That’s a long story,” he said. Then he went on to say that he had been an animator for Disney, and unfulfilled with his life and work, and so he entered Saint John’s Seminary in North Los Angeles to train for the diocesan priesthood. But he said it was a very busy and active life at the seminary, and he wanted something slower and more contemplative. He then pointed at the other guys and said he met both of them at Saint John’s as well.

I directed the next question to all of them: With all the types of orders, how did you settle with one? One of the young monks, he had a buzzed head and looked like he could’ve been a firefighter or soldier once before, said the diocesan seminary allowed him to meet a lot of people and explore many places within Catholicism, and even the world, he added. From there he said he was able to find a life that fit for him.

I would leave the Abbey the next morning. The whole experience made me no longer look to the Carthusian Monks in France, or the Benedictines in the desert, but to the sort of priesthood that I had often thought to be rather boring and pedestrian, the diocesan sort. What once looked so ordinary was beginning to look all the more extraordinary.

I stopped by Arthur’s house less and less, and pretty soon, not at all.