The house we lived in. A further look at being a Jesuit novice 72 years ago.

"Tactus," girls butt out, our spartan life, mealtime.

From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:

TWO SIDES OF THE HOUSE   We lived in a house divided, novices on one side, juniors [full-time students of Classics] on the other.  We met only on “fusion” days, when both sides of the house gathered for meeting and greeting and softball or touch football.  The latter honored the rule of “tactus” (never touch another, “even in jest”) by requiring that you come no closer than a few inches of the opponent to down him.  We called it passball.   

In a few years we dispensed with that requirement, which was aimed primarily, I see now, at other touching than bowling over one’s opponent on field or court, such as sliding and upending a third baseman. Indeed, I suffered such an indignity a few years later when a future Scripture scholar took me out at third.  I flew, somersaulting on to my back but hanging on to the ball. 

It was good clean fun, and believe me, for those who played, these games were a major, major recreational factor.  Where some of us would have been without athletics can only be imagined.  Indeed, my biggest distractions during novitiate meditation were not the girls I had left behind but the hits I made or double plays I pulled off or passes I caught—the stuff of consolation, to use a term from our lives of prayer—or strikeouts or balls dropped or double plays hit into—the stuff of desolation.  

NO GIRLS ALLOWED   As for the girls left behind, I found it was mostly an out-of-sight-out-of-mind experience as long as we were sequestered in southern Ohio.  A few years later, parachuted into Chicago for summer school at Loyola University only blocks from a beach, it was another story. 

The lovelies would walk by our dorm in their swim suits, their legs and rear ends sharp reminders of what we were passing up.  I confided my feelings to the provincial in an annual conference.  “They look pretty good, don’t they?” said he, from which I rightly concluded that it wasn’t going to get easy.  

What I did not conclude was that, as I see it now, there was no middle way: stifle the impulse or die, or if not die, then at least have a deadly time of it trying to be a Jesuit, not to mention a nuisance to others, if not worse. 

Rodriguez with his tales of hermits in the desert attacked by devils in the shape of beautiful women was not far off the mark.  To make this celibacy thing work, you had to close your eyes and grit your teeth, I have since concluded.   

The novice master recommended angelic purity, and pretty much let it go at that, though “modesty of the eyes” (controlling what we looked at) was highly recommended and remains a worthwhile tactic, celibate or not.  “A studied nonchalance,” the master said.  We were to resist temptation in thought and deed.  No Jimmy Carter-like lusting in our hearts for us.  It was a strategy that was to work for fewer and fewer of us as the years went by.  

A TOUGH ROW TO HOE   In some ways the novitiate was a debilitating experience.  An ex-Marine left, we heard, saying he’d never tried anything so hard.  During the war, a non-citizen novice, probably a German or Italian national, was of at least nominal concern to the Feds, who asked that superiors keep an eye on him.  Told he’d be checked on morning, noon, and night, as were we all to make sure each was at his desk meditating or examining his conscience, the agents protested: “Hey, we don’t want you to hound the guy.”  

The life had its Spartan aspects.  We washed and shaved in our cubicles, with cold water if we had filled our basins the night before, with hot if in the morning; it meant we had donned cassock for the trip down the hall.  There was no padding down in a t-shirt.  It was always the cassock except during manualia (chores) and games—gray jacket for the one, black for the other, almost a prison uniform, and out walking, where we dressed casually.  Always wearing a shirt with collar, however, never a tee shirt.  

First visit to the community chapel on the first floor was considered essential, as providing focus for our Blessed Sacrament-centered prayer lives.  This “domestic” chapel was a beige-walled, businesslike place.  The novice chapel, on an upper floor, was smaller, darker, more intimate.  Both had altars, of course.  In each a mass was said at 5:30, another at 6:00, another at 6:30, and there were other altars throughout the house, some stuck in an alcove at the end of a hall.  Such was the overflow of priests—faculty, administration, retired, visiting. 

Each said mass alone, with single server, silently except for murmured responses.  This was years before celebration of mass by two or more priests—“concelebration”—now taken for granted when two or more are gathered.

FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD   The 6:30 community mass in the domestic chapel was attended by all novices but those who served mass elsewhere.  The longest 15 minutes of the day were those between the end of mass and breakfast at 7:15.  The time was devoted to post-mass “thanksgiving,” each kneeling, wrapping up the morning’s prayer, trying to strike motivational and/or consolatory paydirt after his hour of meditation and half hour of mass, but alas, too often straining for effect and trying not to think about breakfast.  

Breakfast—more ample than probably any of us had experienced before our arrival at Milford—was a huge relief.  Even in Lent, when menus were diversified so that you could eat less of a greater variety, it was up to you to hold back.  One classmate of mine, determined and athletic, a bear for hard physical work when it offered itself, lost many pounds during his first Lent. 

But many of us gained weight in or out of Lent.  We weren’t eating on the fly or going out late and were leading good clean lives.   Breakfast was silent.  So were lunch and dinner most of the time, except for reading from the pulpit, as from a life of 19th-century Archbishop John Ireland or G.K. Chesterton. 

Dinner was at noon, farmer-style, when we arrived, but a few years later was moved to night.  Reading was to supply food for the mind while eating, but also practice for juniors, the full-time students in their third and fourth years at Milford.   They read from a pulpit at one end of the dining room, without a microphone: the reader was learning to project and be heard.  If he pronounced a word wrong, the speech teacher at the faculty table at the other end of the long room hollered, “Repetat!”—Latin for “Say it again!”  The reader never knew when a “repetat” was coming. 

We novices sat and ate and listened, knowing that if we persevered, we too would one day stand in that pulpit trying to be heard by 200-plus eaters, never knowing when we’d be so peremptorily interrupted.  

Not every meal was silent.  On special days that averaged out to once a week or so, after a minute or so of reading, the rector at the faculty table would say “Tu autem, Domine, miserere nobis” (“Lord have mercy on us”) and we would reply, “Deo gratias” (“Thanks be to God”); and the entire 200 of us would burst out talking.  At meal’s end, he would say “Satis” (enough), and we’d go immediately silent for the prayer of thanksgiving after meal.

Coming up: THE DIRTY WORK, STRATEGIC RETREAT, BIG NOT-EASY COMING and more . . .