—
Spurlock had met Father Babbet when Spurlock was still in divinity school, serving as seminarian at St. Dunstan’s, an Anglo-Catholic parish in Boston. In that church’s sacristy, a small room smelling of mothballs and incense, there was a special basin called a sacrarium, installed when the church had been built, its sole purpose the disposal of the consecrated remains of communion elements: the crumbs of the host, the dregs of the wine. Some altar jockey had practically tackled him when he made to pour his coffee into it and had declared to him that the sacrarium drained directly into the earth, so that the body and blood of Christ should not be made to suffer the indignity of the common sewer. But wasn’t mortality itself the common sewer, Spurlock wanted to ask, into which God had already lowered Himself? He checked the impulse; it was his first day at St. Dunstan’s.
The parish’s ornate observances disturbed Spurlock’s idealism, but he loved the music programming (on which the church spent an extravagant portion of its budget) and even came to appreciate something frail and not quite absurd in the high-wire theatricality of Sunday’s “Solemn Mass.” When he put away the vestments after the service, he marveled at the fragility of the fabrics, each cope and chasuble lovingly preserved since the church’s establishment in the heyday of nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholicism. The lace and brocade had by now grown brittle and beneath his fingers seemed more like museum pieces from a lost civilization, like ceremonial costumes made from moth’s wings or from the feathers of birds long extinct.
Father Babbet, Spurlock’s spiritual director and the rector of that parish, was a dried-out alcoholic whose translucent hands still shook when he lifted the chalice during the consecration. He bypassed the customary off-quaffing of any undrunk communion wine and instead waited until after the service, when he would tip the chalice into the porcelain bowl of the sacrarium.
“The ecstasy of protocol,” Spurlock said out loud, observing him, because the phrase was one that Babbet himself liked to use.
“Protocol, Child Spurlock?” said Babbet, who also liked to call Nelson “Child Spurlock.” “This is not a display of protocol. This sink is the ground conductor of the church.”
Spurlock admitted that he did not know what Father Babbet was talking about.
“The ground conductor, Child Spurlock, the lightning rod. Keeps us from getting electrocuted!”
“Please tell me that’s not another thing I have to believe.”
“Why not? But if you’re having a heretical day, think how the Greeks poured out their libations on the earth. Why buck tradition?”
“Well, if the tradition is crazy…”
“Crazier than you or I?” said Babbet, his eyebrow arching again like a cat’s back. “It’s better off down the drain than down my gullet, I can tell you that. And who am I to begrudge it, a little sop for the bloodthirsty earth?”
—
Maybe that’s what his confessor’s ear was: a sacrarium, a ground conductor, a pipe driven into the ground, through which something dangerous and unregulated could be discharged. A part of him revolted against the thought that something had been poured into or routed through him, as though he were nothing but an outfall pipe. Surely that wasn’t what he’d signed up for at ordination.
Or had it been? Perhaps he had signed up to turn the other cheek, to walk the extra mile—but even so, Abend was wrong, he thought, culpably wrong to have put Spurlock in this position. Abend was wrong to have encumbered him with this stack of pages, this confession, unable to do anything except what he had been instructed, to hold on to them, to keep them on his desk, his attention a conduit obliged to take what it was offered. It was then that Spurlock remembered how Abend had described his own role in the same way, as a kind of prostitute, his ear open to all comers. Strange kinship, thought Spurlock, picking up the pages, this brotherhood of strangers.
TWENTY-TWO
The monastic order Miriam intended to join had been founded fewer than thirty years ago and described itself as a “new expression of monastic commitments.” At the time I had been surprised to learn that the monks and nuns lived together in the same community; the average age, unlike that of most other orders Miriam knew of, was under forty. New vocations were plentiful enough to allow for the seeding of new houses in provincial cities. Members of the community dwelled and worshipped together in a traditional monastic setting; their work involved them in the outside world, aiding the homeless, immigrants, refugees, and street prostitutes. All this I have learned in the intervening years, having received from the order ever since my return to New York a quarterly newsletter and an annual appeal for money, to which I respond with a donation of five hundred dollars. Every few years, in one or another of the newsletter’s photographs, I find the face of a nun taller than the others, her face round and smooth, the eyes a weatherless blue. The face is the face of Sœur Béatrice, who though English by birth has lately been elected the prioress of her monastic house, the house attached to the church of St. Julien in the medieval hill town of Leuvray. Sometimes Sœur Béatrice includes in the newsletter brief notices about the goings-on in the community. I read these notices with care, wondering if this time she will mention a small organic farm in a neighboring village, established twenty years ago. She does not. I learn instead that Sœur Thérèse has taken up stone carving, Frère Loïc will return to Rwanda in May, two new postulants have joined the community, or Bisou
