When?
Occasionally as young seminarians up on the Hudson River we were given a day off to visit nearby locations like West Point or the Bear Mountain ski resort. Usually we were packed standing into the back of an open truck. (In the 1940’s Ralph Nader was unheard of.) One morning in 1947 we were transported to Ossining for a free afternoon – the location of the penitentiary known as Sing Sing, referred to by mobsters as “up the river”. So what do 25 teenagers left standing in the exhaust of a truck do? They fan out along Main Street, stroll through a park; buy a cheap lunch at a diner. Two other fellows and I decided to spend our change at the local movie theater, which advertised a British film called Odd Man Out, starring a very young James Mason. It being a weekday matinee, there were no more than ten people in the seats.
The movie was set in post-World War II Belfast. A robbery was underway with four men entering a factory to steal its payroll. They were members of the “Organization” (the IRA?). The stolen money would support its insurgent activities. Well the job was bungled. Guns went off. The group leader, Johnny, was wounded and as the getaway car sped around corners Johnny was sent flying to a pavement. Thus began his effort, handicapped by loss of blood, to evade a police cordon around Belfast’s inner city. The “Organization” tries to find him, as does a fellow named Shell whose intent was merely to reap a reward from either the insurgents or the police.
In the film we also meet a disheveled old priest named Father Tom, who had no use for this violence that had plagued Ireland for decades. Of him the original novel says: “He was reputed to have performed miracles – a singular old man who, when he telephoned or visited Authority on behalf of the poor and wayward was accorded the respect due to princes. Because he was old and gentle? Because he belonged to God? Because he had become the embodiment of wisdom, truth, goodness? This old man, when all was said and done, was merely a being who loved his fellow men.”
Father Tom also wants to bring Johnny in from the cold but Shell finds Johnny first and escorts him to the loft of a failed artist, who in doing Johnny’s portrait wants to depict the soul of a dying man. Other abstract portraits cover his walls and seem to symbolize our crazy world; how disfigured human nature has become. Indeed as Johnny – delirious – is propped up as a model, the portraits seem to gather before him like a sinister audience while standing among them appears the gently smiling image of Father Tom, moving his lips and gesturing as if he were giving a catechism lesson. Johnny strains to listen. “I can’t hear you, Father,” he says. “What are you saying? What was it you used to tell us? About: ‘when I was a boy?’ ” And then he says: “Now I remember . . . ‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child! But when I became a man, I put away childish things.’” The image of Father Tom nods affirmatively. And then Johnny rises from his chair, his eyes far reaching, and proclaims: “And though I speak with the tongues of men and angels. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have faith so as to move mountains – and HAVE NOT CHARITY! – I am NOTHING!” Thereupon he collapses into his chair, the vision fades, the artist tosses his canvas to the floor.
How thrilled I was by that scene at a mere 19 years of age. What a memorable afternoon in Ossining! The movie, of course, came to an end tragically – as life has come to an end tragically for so many in our contentious world. But its point was clear: WHEN WILL THE HUMAN RACE GROW UP? When will each of us finally recall (as Johnny did) Father Tom’s simple lesson and begin to live it? When?