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Sweet Fifteen

When I was but a fifteen year old high school sophomore, I entered a Franciscan minor seminary, my head full of the examples of Aloysius Gonzaga, John Berchmans and Stanislas Kostka (all young Jesuit saints by the way!) and expectations that like them I would have acquired enough virtue and experienced sufficient public ecstasies to merit canonization by the age of twenty - having died in the interval in the "odor of sanctity". And so I went to work keeping all the rules, meditating, volunteering for the meanest chores and staring for long periods at the statue of the Virgin Mary in hopes that it would move and I might become a male Bernadette of Lourdes.

But by twenty and indeed for two score and ten years ever since, I seem to have been carrying the same baggage that weighed me down way back then: pride, worry, sloth, pettiness. And so here I am still stuck at fifteen, I who once imagined God saying to his heavenly council, "My, my! What have we here! A chap more Christlike than Christ himself. Let's lay out a banquet for him."

Yet in today's Gospel I seem to hear God saying (between the lines), "Why the long face? Why do you lament what you view as your lack of progress through all these years since you were fifteen? Didn't you know that spiritually you must always be fifteen and isn't that something to rejoice over - that you are destined to be forever young, every day of your life a fresh beginning - but now not without the advantage of all the experience and insight you have picked up along the way? So snap out of it. You will always be catching that train to Graymoor and pulling into Peekskill and riding up to that monastery on the mountain from which you could see the wide sweep of the Hudson down by Tappan Zee and the autumn splendor of the Catskills. You will forever be entering that quaint chapel of St. Francis. You will be forever fifteen, not as if you were sadly stuck on a treadmill, but given the eternal range of your destiny, how can you ever be anything but spiritually young?"

The poet David Whyte in his poem "What To Remember When Waking" would have us recall that: "What you can plan / is too small / for you to live." He then goes on to remind us of our interminable worth and of that ever surprising future that awaits us:

You are not / a troubled guest / on this earth, / you are not / an accident / amidst other accidents, / you were invited / from another and greater / night / than the one / from which / you have just emerged.

Now looking through / the slanting light / of the morning / window toward / the mountain / presence / of everything / that can be, / what urgency / calls you to your / one love? What shape / walks in the seed / of you to grow / and spread / its branches / against a future sky?

Is it waiting / in the fertile sea? / In the trees / beyond the house? / In the life / you can imagine / for yourself? / In the open / and lovely / white page / on the waiting desk?

Which leaves me where? Well despite my actually being more than three score and ten, it leaves me still a thin kid in the prescribed black suit with a valise waiting on a platform with excitement and trepidation for the Pennsy Express to arrive and a conductor to cry out, "All aboard!"

-- Geoff Wood