Teaching career interupted. On to theology. Crash! Near fatal accident, not of the auto kind, but the career kind, leading this young Jesuit to a chapel discussion with God.

End of one thing, heading for another. . . . June of ‘60, my regency ended, I was on a train headed back to West Baden for theology. I wanted just to finish theology, which I looked on as a necessary evil, and then get back to Loyola or another high school and pick up teaching where I'd left off. Ten years a Jesuit, at age 28, I was suffering career interruptus to be once more a full-time student.

Chapter 5: THEOLOGICAL QUESTIONS: THEOLOGY, 1960-1964

At the first it will be as welcome to thee as a prison, and their very solutions will seem knots unto thee.

- Rev. Thomas Fuller on being a divinity student in the 17th century

I returned to Baden, as I say, with my eye cast backwards on teaching. Theology was for being a priest, which had never had any great appeal for me. Rather, it was the Jesuit life that appealed: the order or orderliness of it, the academics, and now the teaching.

So it was a hard day in the life of this Jesuit when he returned from the fleshpots of regency to the halls of theology. I faced the grim alternative of life back at Baden, where I knew from experience I would have too much time to think and nobody to perform for but teachers, whom I had found a generally ungrateful lot. Nobody to do anything for and a big, faceless community to do it in.

I ended my first day with a short, quick breakdown in my room, lying abed before sleep, weeping. Then I rolled over and went to sleep. At 28 I had my life ahead of me, even if Baden was closing in.

REBELLION . . . I gritted my teeth and plunged in, making a splash. First, I locked horns with several teachers and the theology dean, who told me I was the most uncooperative theologian he had ever met. Of course. I hated it there. Pressured by him and facing some sort of dire punishment, I went to see two or three teachers and smoothed things over. But I did not see the chief complainer among them, a first-year teacher whom I'd known since I was in philosophy, he in theology.

This fellow was of a rather tense disposition. Imagine that. He also probably felt under the gun, being new at teaching theologians, though not new at teaching fellow Jesuits. We had had him as a French teacher during juniorate summers. He did well by us, but this time was another story.

He had me pegged for an intellectual in what I considered a highly abstracted mode, but I wasn't. I thought a lot but half the time was not in the infield where I belonged, fielding the sharply hit grounder with no time to think about it, but out in left field. Mine was not a scholarly temperament. He and I both absorbed a lot, but in him the absorbed tended to sort itself out. In me it went into a huge undifferentiated bushel basket from which it could be sucked up and worked over at random.

I saw connections but labored over systems. I looked for the imaginable. It had to make sense at first or second blush, or I got confused and then bored or panicked and then impatient or angry. This fellow’s lucubrations about God left me wondering. I was having my Thomas Fuller experience: this fellow's solutions seemed like knots unto me.

He misread me, and he misread my friend Pat, whose shrewd intelligence was masked by taciturnity. When books were assigned, Pat got an easy book, I got a hard one, by a philosopher who was parsing the hell out of one or two words. I could not follow him. I read about 35 pages. I wrote about the 35 pages. The teacher was not pleased.

As for the dean, who had reports about me from him and other teachers, there was more at stake here than my adjustment to the pursuit of abstract theological questions. A young star had joined his faculty, and he had to back him up. He was adamant: I had to go see this star. I was apparently bothering him, and he was clearly bothering me. Something had to give.

Here was a new kind of crisis. I’d never been in defiance of anyone or accused of it. And now I faced the kind of confrontation that could undo ten years of putting up with things and interrupt my career or end it - an inglorious finish for one who once rejected rapine on the holocaust. I went into the chapel to sort it out.

I knelt down and asked myself, with God listening in, if I were to leave the Jesuits for greener pastures, was this how to go about it? Reacting to a tempest in a pot of tea? What would happen if I sat tight, declining to make it up with this fellow? Would I be rusticated, sent back to a high school for more teaching? Or defenestrated, told to find another line of work?

It was early enough in the school year for me to be put somewhere, in some school. The disgrace of it would have been nonexistent if I didn't feel it, and I would not have felt it. Nor, beyond some harmless gossip of the sort one can count on any time, anywhere, would there be a price to pay. The authorities liked me anyway, and thought I showed promise.

Besides, we were a big enough organization for a supposed misstep to go unnoticed or shrugged off. So what if I ran into a wall at Baden? There were a half dozen or more theology shops in the U.S. at the time. I might have started over at any one of them.

That wasn’t the point anyhow. The point was commitment - the vows, for one thing, going back eight years, and what I promised in that Long Retreat, going back ten.

Whoa. One thing at a time, I decided. If I wanted to leave, commitment or not, let it not happen over this. I should clear up this matter. I should go and see the holdout teacher, eating crow. (Nothing else would do, I was convinced.) I went, and it turned out he had a number of bones to pick with me, including at least one that had nothing to do with my failing to read that damn book.

He didn’t like how I wrote for the Indianapolis Catholic newspaper, the Criterion, whose editor loved my column and ran it weekly. Unbeknownst to me, my teacher read me carefully and took this occasion - my coming to him under pressure, even threats, by the dean - to deconstruct my writing, characterizing it as inadequately respectful of data and representing in general an unseemly rush to judgment. He apparently thought it was time someone told me off, and he was the one, arrogating to himself this awesome responsibility.

As for me as student, which was properly his concern, I had been uncooperative, as in kissing off the reading assignment. He had me there. I had passively-aggressively challenged his authority and wounded him, which may be why he felt it necessary to go beyond his portfolio as teacher, negatively assessing my writing habits. I sat for it, having decided it couldn’t be avoided if I were to survive the crisis.

It was probably a bad tactic, however. I could have taken him up on any or all of it rather than just sat there. But I had written him off and was being purely pragmatic about it. Get past the crisis, I figured, and then regroup.

It worked. I ran into the dean a day or so later. He came out of his office to greet me. He was effusive: "Mr. Bowman, you're now a first-class citizen," he announced. I smelled b.s. but accepted his congratulations. All I had done was relieve the other guy of the burden of my ignoring him, and I was back in the saddle, a good theologian. Easy.

The dean’s relief was palpable. He would not have enjoyed ousting me from theology. For him it was a happy, happy day. For me it was on to the next test of my willingness to toe the line. I was overdoing the line-toeing but did not know how to stop.

. . . More to come, from the pages of Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968 . . .