Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

‘Luckily I never gave up trying to fight against these sins and I’m happy to say that now for a long time I’ve led a normal life in the state of grace. I’ve thought a lot lately about the life of a priest, and I’ll certainly be praying about it before it’s time to make up my mind next year about entering the seminary. But I sometimes wonder if my past sins would mean that I couldn’t possibly have a vocation.’

Adrian was surprised at how calmly the priest heard him out. Father Parris said, ‘Take my advice and forget all about whatever you might have done years ago. You know your sins have all been forgiven in the sacrament of penance. What counts now is the sort of fellow you are now. Keep on praying to God and Our Lady and you’ll soon find out what’s expected of you.

‘Now, let’s have your name and address and I’ll send you a booklet about the life our young fellows lead in the diocesan seminary. Have a good look at it and just go on quietly with your studies and have a chat to your parish priest from time to time. And next year, if you’re still interested, we can talk about your applying to enter the seminary.’

The priest looked at his watch and consulted a list of names in front of him. He said, ‘Now would you ask John Toohey to see me when you get back to your room?’

When Adrian left school that afternoon he knew he could catch Denise McNamara’s train if he strolled down Swindon Road to the station. But he walked into the Swindon church and knelt in one of the back seats.

He saw how the last few troubled years of his life were really part of a wonderful pattern that could only have been worked out by God Himself.

First came the year of his American nonsense — it revolted him now, but its purpose had been to show him that sinners were never happy. Then came Denise’s year. God had arranged for him to meet Denise because at that time the influence of a pure young woman was the only thing that could have rescued him. Now, Denise had served her purpose. The terrible scene in her lounge-room only a few nights before had proved that she no longer had the power to keep his lust in check. It was God’s way of warning him not to rely on a mere woman to save his soul.

Now, after a year without sin, Adrian was the equal of those average Catholic boys of good moral character that the priest had talked about. The next part of the pattern was becoming clear. He was almost certain he had a vocation to the priesthood. Like the young man on the dance floor he had sampled the joys of mixing with the opposite sex and found them shallow and unsatisfying.

He still had a year to wait before he could enter the seminary. He would devise a scheme of meditations on his future as a priest to sustain him through his year of waiting.

Adrian knelt and prayed until he knew he had missed Denise’s train. Then he left the church and hurried to the station. He decided to visit the church each afternoon until the end of the year to spare himself and Denise the embarrassment of meeting again after it was all over between them. She would be puzzled for a while, but a girl so beautiful would soon attract other admirers. And one day, eight years later, she would open the Advocate and see pages of pictures of the newly ordained priests and realise what had been on his mind when he stopped seeing her on the Coroke train years before, and forgive him.

In the last weeks of the school year Adrian had to spend most of his time preparing for his Leaving Certificate exams. But every night before he began his studies he allowed himself to consider his future as a priest.

A booklet called The Priest came in the post to Adrian from Father Parris. It was made up of articles written by young priests of the Melbourne Archdiocese. Adrian was especially interested in the articles describing life at the diocesan seminary. This was the life he himself would lead for seven years after he had left school.

The seminary was surrounded by quiet farmland a few miles beyond the western suburbs of Melbourne. The students were safe from all the distractions of the city. Instead of reading about the Cold War and the bodgie gangs in the Argus , they got up before six each morning and went to mass. They had hours of lectures each day. They called their teachers ‘professors’. It was like a university except that the seminary courses were longer and harder. And instead of the descriptive sciences such as physics and chemistry, the seminarians studied the Queen of Sciences — theology. Adrian wondered how he could wait a whole year before he threw himself into the life of the seminary.

Several articles in the booklet were written by young priests describing their experiences in their first parishes. They could hardly express in words the joy and excitement of their first masses and the satisfaction they got from preaching sermons and administering the sacraments.

Father Sherd stepped into the pulpit. He kept his voice deceptively mild while he introduced himself. His congregation edged forward in their seats and hoped their new curate would not be overcome by nervousness during his first sermon. Then he let them have it.

He was sorry to have to speak so sternly on the occasion of his first sermon, but they were lax. While the Catholics of Russia and China were risking their lives to practise their religion, the Faith was growing steadily weaker in the suburbs of Melbourne. Too many of that very congregation were neglecting the sacraments. They sat back in their seats at communion time each Sunday, unable to visit the altar rails because their souls were marked by sin.

He delivered a short sharp attack against the more common sins. He went through the Commandments in order. He tried not to place too much emphasis on the Sixth and Ninth, but he knew from a certain tension among his listeners that impurity was their weakness.

He ended by stressing the value of confession. He was ready, he said, to wear himself out in the confessional if the lukewarm of the parish would only come regularly to have their sins forgiven. He hoped to see double the usual crowds at confession next Saturday.

On the following Saturday Father Sherd settled himself in the dark confessional. A fellow confessed impure thoughts about the young women he worked with and occasional impure actions by himself. Father Sherd advised him to keep his eyes on his own desk at work and to take up a hobby to occupy himself in his spare time at home.

The fellow said, ‘What hobby did you take up to cure yourself of the habit, Sherd?’ It was O’Mullane grinning through the grille of the confessional.

What could the young priest do? Make O’Mullane confess the additional sin of sacrilege for showing such disrespect to a priest? Tell him the true story of how a good Catholic girl had once rescued Sherd from impurity, and then bind O’Mullane under pain of mortal sin never to mention it outside the confessional? The best course was probably to slam the wooden screen in O’Mullane’s face and turn to the penitent on the other side, and later that evening apply to the Archbishop of Melbourne for a transfer on urgent compassionate grounds to some obscure parish far from Swindon and Accrington and anyone who might have known him as a misguided young man.

The Archbishop was reasonable. He did not ask what were the ‘circumstances of a very personal nature’ that Father Sherd referred to in his application. Sherd was sent to a distant outer suburb where the parishioners were nearly all young marrieds.

His first sermon in his new church was on the sacrament of matrimony. He knew he was peculiarly well qualified to extol the blessings of a pure Catholic marriage after his affair with Denise McNamara before he entered the seminary. He preached so frankly about the spiritual and moral problems of the bedroom that many of the upturned faces registered amazement at a celibate priest’s knowing such things.