Only a few other new novices arrived with me that June, as the prospective new Capuchins showed up in Huntington every year in two distinct waves. The first was for boys like me, who had not attended the Capuchin minor seminaries. We arrived over a month before our more seasoned confreres-to-be. That head start was used to give us a crash course on the Capuchin Franciscan charism and way of life—a postulancy in the fast lane, you might say. It was a sort of Capuchin boot camp, and I remember it as a whirlwind with much to learn, and even more to do.
The second and slightly larger group showed up in late August. I must admit that I was just a little nervous at the arrival of the Capuchin-trained novices, wondering how far ahead of the rest of us they would be. They were ahead; there was no question about that, and both they and we were very aware of it. For a while this fact seemed to create two distinct subgroups among the novices. It was not unusual to hear the Capuchin-trained novices speak about the rest of us as “the outsiders.” Now, that may sound insulting, but I don’t think it was ever meant as such. It was really a simple statement of fact, especially in the beginning. In a sense they were already Capuchins and we, as yet, were not. As the months went on, however, the difference between the two groups became less and less noticeable, until by the end of the novitiate, a period that lasted one year and one day, I would say that the two groups were all but indistinguishable.
At that time, Huntington was the novitiate for the Capuchin Province of St. Joseph, which extended from the East Coast to Montana, so I found myself among novices from a great many places and a great many backgrounds. Those from the Midwest were about double the number from the Eastern Seaboard, and this was the almost unvarying pattern back then, with the East supplying one Capuchin friar for every two who came from the West. As I think back on those young Midwesterners I am again reminded of how much things have changed since those long-ago days.
Back then, before the media and increased mobility had more or less homogenized our society, people from the Midwest seemed very different from us Easterners. It was almost as if they came from a different culture. Perhaps it was a gentler and less self-critical one; it was certainly a more taciturn one, for it was clear that we Easterners liked to talk a great deal more than then they did. I must say that most of the novices from the Midwest seemed very devout. They also seemed able to adapt to the rustic life at Huntington with much greater ease than we from the East did. Many of them had grown up on farms and were used to the sort of manual labor that was part of a novice’s life in those days.
And when I say “rustic life” and “manual labor,” I’m not fooling around. The novitiate was all but totally self-sufficient—a world unto itself—and the novices and friars were expected to do all the work that was required. Few repairmen were ever called in, and the idea of using an outside gardener or cleaning service would have been incomprehensible. We raised our own vegetables in gardens so large they looked like whole farms to me. We also raised and eventually slaughtered our own pigs, which is something I’ve been trying to forget for over sixty years. We had orchards with various types of fruit trees, and we had more bee hives than seemed either sensible or safe. We had a large carpentry shop and our sandals were made in our cobbler’s shop. We sewed our own habits and produced all the hosts that were used at our Masses, as well as pretty much all the other baked things that we used in daily life.
At one point someone thought it would be beneficial if the novitiate had its own in-ground swimming pool. The next thing you knew, a large group of novices set to work, shovels in hand, to build one. All this meant that a novice in those days had to adapt himself to a type of physical labor that was more intense than we former city dwellers from the East were used to. We eventually got into the swing of things, but I must admit it took me some time to do so.
As I think back on my days in the novitiate I realize that I have become more deeply aware of the reasons for the stress that was laid on manual labor. Part of the motive, of course, was to teach us that many of the people we were destined to serve had no choice but to work long and hard hours to support themselves. It was to show us that we must never take this for granted and that we must never forget what it is like to work hard, to be very tired, and to have aching muscles. But it was also, at least in part, an effort to cultivate the entire person rather than simply one aspect of the person.
In our fractured and fragmented world we are apt to draw a sharp dividing line between the physical and the intellectual and an even sharper line between both of them and the spiritual. This has never been the Catholic way, and it is most certainly not the Franciscan way. For this reason the novitiate was not a time given entirely over to prayer, meditation, and spiritual instruction, as some people assume that it must be. It was a time when physical labor reminded us in no uncertain terms that we were not ethereal beings, that God had created us as flesh-and-blood creatures.
As we worked in the fields, the orchards, or the workshops we came to see that the physical was not so entirely distinct from the spiritual. If we were very blessed, perhaps we even came to understand that the spiritual life was not an aspect or division of our lives at all, but the grace-filled element that unites all the many disparate aspects of our being—the physical, the intellectual, the emotional—into the integrated person, the whole person, God wants us to be.
After the Second Vatican Council some religious and priests began to retreat from prayer and give themselves more and more totally to various social ministries. Often, when asked about this, they would say (usually rather indignantly), “My work is my prayer.” I always thought they were half right, but half right also means half wrong. Work can be a type of prayer, and a very good type of prayer. That is something we all learned at Huntington. However, work that is not nourished by a vibrant inner prayer life will eventually dry up and become simply effort. Sometimes it becomes a way of hiding from the deeper things of human life and of hiding even from the self or from God. It was at Huntington that I really fully learned what the sisters had begun to teach me back in Caldwell: that work and prayer must become a balanced unity. It was there that I began to see that the spiritual life is difficult to maintain if they aren’t.
The religious life is always marked by a series of very clear milestones: first vows, solemn professions, etc. These are the moments during which a person’s ever-greater commitment to living his life for Christ within a specific religious community is recognized. They are also the means by which the community itself affirms in progressive steps its acceptance of new members. In effect such ceremonies are the community’s symbolic way of saying, “Yes, we believe it is God’s will for you to become one of us.” The first such milestone is almost always the clothing of a novice with the religious habit of his or her community, and for us in Huntington this invariably took place on the last day of August. It was a day all the new novices eagerly anticipated, a day which we hoped would be transformative and for which we all yearned.
I remember kneeling in the chapel as the brown Capuchin habit was slipped over my head. I then stood, as I had been instructed to do, and the hem of the habit fell to my ankles, concealing my secular clothes completely. I looked down as the Franciscan cord was wound around my waist for the first of what would be countless times. And there I was, a new Capuchin and a new person—at least on the outside. I found this to be a very dramatic moment, nearly an overpowering one. It was one in which I became very aware of the words of St. John the Baptist as recorded in the Gospel of St. John: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (3:30).
If I was ever to become worthy of the habit in which I had just been clothed, I knew I would have to decrease in such a way that the light of Christ could shine through me unimpeded, undimmed. That was a rather tall order for someone who had just passed his eighteenth birthday, but it was something that youthful enthusiasm made me believe was within my grasp. It wasn’t, of course. I now understand very well that such things are not within anyone’s grasp; they are pure gifts of grace. They are things to which we can respond and with which we can cooperate, but they are never within our human grasp. That means I’m still hard at work trying to put myself second and God first, trying to let myself, my wants and needs and endless opinions, be hidden quietly away like my clothes were that day underneath my new habit.
I think it is safe to say that anybody who has ever worn a religious habit knows they take a little getting used to, especially