A Season on Earth by Gerald Murnane

Author:Gerald Murnane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2018-12-06T05:00:00+00:00

It was hard for Adrian to convince his parents that he had to leave for the Charleroi Fathers’ junior seminary in the new year. His mother asked why he hadn’t mentioned his vocation in all his years at secondary school. His father said no boy could observe the rules of a religious order if he couldn’t even obey a few simple rules in his own house. And he reminded Adrian of all the fights he had with his brothers and the smart answers he gave his parents.

Adrian worked on them for days. He had two main arguments. First he made them recall the Sunday afternoons when he was only seven or eight and they all lived in the western suburbs. As soon as the Sunday dinner was over he used to spread a tea towel over the dressing table in his bedroom and celebrate mass. He wore a towel for a chasuble. His chalice was a two-handled sugar basin half-full of cold tea. The hosts were Life Saver lollies. He read aloud the Latin prayers from his Sunday missal while his parents peeped around the door at him. Sometimes they knelt in front of him at communion time and received a Life Saver each on their tongues and went away with their heads bowed.

While his parents were thinking this over, he made them read a paragraph he had found in a story about Blessed Peter Julian Eymard, the founder of the Blessed Sacrament Fathers.

‘The man who was to give his life to spreading devotion to the Blessed Eucharist showed at a tender age unmistakable signs of his future vocation. As a small child he would dress himself like a priest and reverently imitate the ceremonies he had witnessed at mass, even piping the Latin in his boyish voice.’

Adrian’s mother was impressed, but his father said if you took a monkey to mass often enough it would start to imitate the priest when you put it back in its cage.

Adrian’s second argument was to remind them of the quiet thoughtful life he had led for the past few years. While other boys of his age were at the pictures or at dances, he was always reading in his room or meditating in the back shed. He knew he was deceiving them. Most of his time alone he had been thinking of journeys across America or his marriage to Denise. But the circumstances of his vocation were so unusual that no one would have believed the true story.

Once again his mother became thoughtful. But his father said that was just the point, that Adrian had led a sheltered life and some priest had got at him and persuaded him to leave the world before he even knew what he was giving up.

Adrian was ready for this objection. He took the vocations pamphlet of the Charleroi Fathers out of his pocket and read a paragraph aloud.

Satan’s trump card, if you let him play it, is that you should first have a taste of life.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.