His Calling

In the 1960s, Stan was a hippy seminarian in a cassock. He zoomed around on a motorcycle and ministered to workers in the California fields. Happy, he enjoyed the easiness of prayer among endless rows of iceberg lettuce. From farm to family, he joked, never thinking he would someday abandon his calling and marry and eventually retire to Florida.

In high school in San Jose, Stan the Man, a tall boy, loved basketball, but he was not recruited for a college scholarship. A mediocre student, he didn’t see the point of staring down a drop of water under the microscope or drawing tangents with a ruler.

Oddly enough, he read about Plato’s Cave, which he enjoyed as an adventure story rather than a philosophical exercise. The ancient author was Aristocles, a Greek wrestler, a middling athlete like Stan, who acquired the name Plato, meaning flat, by default—as in splat-o, flat out on the mat.

Try as he might, Stan couldn’t picture the layout of Plato’s Cave. The place didn’t seem inviting to outsiders. The ceilings were low, the flowstone slippery, and the fauna blind. Unlike a basketball court, there were no useful guidelines painted on the floor. He imagined the flicker of the torches, and the play of shadows on the limestone walls pleased him. He recast Plato as a shadow-boxer, an affable if singular opponent. Indifferent to context, he did not find a pluralism in the many library translations of Plato’s words.

One evening, after a late basketball skirmish, shadows followed Stan home. He hastened, but they ran and overcame him. Flattened on his porch steps, he saw light pooling around him. Standing up, he changed his name from Stan to Dan, the biblical Daniel facing disembowelment in the lion’s den.

We all perish someday, he told his mother, but he now felt called to prepare.

His mother, a single mom originally from Florida, agreed. School was ending, and time for her boy to make his own way. She encouraged him to answer a Help Wanted ad, and, what with the shortage of priests, a seminary accepted Dan.

His cheerful mother didn’t know Mass from Mars, but she was happy to have her son, only a phone call away, fed and housed. She didn’t have to worry.

Dan learned Latin by rote. Why wrestle with the angel of grammar—subjects and objects and tenses? Memorize. Dan was ordained, but his superiors knew he lacked the pastoral stuffing for a parish in the sprawling California suburbs. Instead, they assigned him to the pueblos of the Upper Sonoran in Arizona.

A tall man in the tall space of Monument Valley, he felt strangely at home in the grand shadows and relentless desert light. The sandstone formations provided immense cathedrals with caves, naves and archways, eroded natural bridges connected to Genesis by geological time. And, yes, also by wind and animal sounds. The name Sonoran implied sweet acoustics, a blend of the huge and the human in an exquisite desert music.

Give thanks and offer joyful prayer, Dan told himself, reciting Deus stetit, Psalm 82. God stands in the council…of monuments. Why be ponderous and overthink like Plato? Why shake the foundations of Earth?

In Arizona, laypeople called the padre Father Dan, shortened to Drey, rhyming with grey, the coming of twilight. Dusk was deceptive in the desert. The Evening Star was sometimes the Morning Star, and the locals, veterans of hardship, raised their eyebrows and chuckled in fond recognition. They welcomed the star as the lamp of the beloved Shadow Man, a legendary bandit who stole from the rich to give to the poor.

At fiestas, the old told the young that the Bandito ventured from stony hideaways to filch. Missing a sock? Can’t find your keys? Cat got your tongue? Blame the culprit saint of mishap and sand, the Shadow Man, El Sombre, the bogeyman of the Upper Sonoran.

Was a time, Drey learned, when the Bandito was larger than life. A wandering outlaw, he plundered trains, stole mail from the Pony Express, and robbed the company store. The coming of the horseless carriage, the automobile, doomed him. Bounty hunters caught up with the miscreant and, according to witnessed report, hung him from a roadside precipice as an example for passersby.

In the desert, death did not translate as tragedy or adage. Death was ordinary. Mendicant friars on donkeys trudged by his body without so much as a rosary prayer. Government lorries didn’t stop. Carrion flies buzzed as caracaras circled on thermals. Tumbleweed rolled, snagged, rolled on.

Ashes to ash, dust to dust, but the relentless sun did not scramble the Bandito’s brains or burn out his eyes. A Pueblo sacred clown cut him down and squeezed melon juice onto his parched tongue. Despite horrid purple rope burns on his neck, the Bandito roared back to life in song and story. To everyone’s relief, there is again someone to blame for mishaps, night noises, and shortness of breath.

On occasion, the Bandito drops by in the wee hours, laughing and snitching, pinching the plump, soothing the frail. Testy, he snaps and crackles like fry bread in the pan. Sonorous, he softly snores beside cinders from the night before. 

Sometimes, the Bandito steals small change from the alms box for sodas or cigarettes sold loose. Or, for religious candles lit for the deceased. Drey smiles and makes up the difference in diocesan ledgers. He’s not taken to deep thought. His heart is not a dark cavern, and his forehead is smooth of wrinkles.

No dripstone hangs in his brain because the padre has fallen in love with pure love. Happy as a seminarian, he lets adolescent girls show him how to cinch the saddle on a horse. To engage the boys, Drey often starts a game of hoop ball. Quam delicta! How delightful. His lay-ups impress the teens and puzzle their parents. What’s with his hands? They wonder about an Anglo priest that good with a basketball.

To amuse the younger children, Drey performs simple magic tricks. He empties pockets and pulls coins and candy from their ears. He reunites cupcakes cut in half. Bonum est confiteri, Psalm 91, It is good to confess. No harm done. His sleight of hand sends an old granny home with a half-dozen eggs in her kerchief. A thin dog finds a bone.

For Drey, this psalm presents the benefits, if not the layout of Plato’s Cave: Those who dwell in the secret place of the Most High shall rest and abide under the shadow of the Almighty. Drey is satisfied. He never questions his calling, but the Upper Sonoran tests him. Shadows move by the hour, there and not there, on short legs like the wild asses of Canaan, on giant feet like the Philistine Goliath. Wherein does the Almighty dwell?

One day in the middle of nowhere, Drey looks up from the dusty two-lane and sees a lush green oasis, glistening with date palms and bright with hibiscus in flower and birds, big birds—loud macaws and exotic peacocks. Whaaat? Bandito mischief? Or, has a Saudi casino has materialized in thin air?

Mesmerized, he pulls over and rolls down the window. The flowers smell fulgent as perfume and bitter as smelling salts. He sits up with a start. Amidst the noisy birdcalls, he hears a woman singing. A gentle mist falls on his face. A dazzling fountain beckons him with long fingers from a place with no shadows. And no water.

The oasis is a mirage, but the fountain is a real woman combing her long beautiful hair. Drey, enchanted, is in bliss. Time foreshortens. Father Dan retires his cassock and changes his name back to Stan. He serenades his beloved in adoration.

An urgent courtship ensues, and the two tie the knot with the Justice of the Peace. The happy couple honeymoons at Casa Grande, the high cliff complex built by the ancient Hohokam people. What a condo! The rooms are open caves, and the view is spectacular, breath-taking. Each year, they return to renew their vows.

At home, around the house, Stan and his spouse speak bits of church Latin. Levavi oculus, she says, I lift up my eyes. De profundis, he replies, out of the depth. The call-and-response poetry of the Psalms, Stan realizes, is the lantern to his feet, lucerna pedibus.

With or without basketball high-tops, his feet are big and, clumsy, they are flat as pie pans. As a younger man in Plato’s Cave, he would have needed a flashlight. Now he has a wife, a radiant helpmate, and his marriage is his bedrock.

Confident, content, Stan retools his clergy voice as an anchorman on a local radio show. He has great pipes, as they say in the business, and he enjoys reporting on local issues. Listeners like his tone, and he moves up the ranks as a trusted television interviewer. The handsome old athlete settles in with the broadcast look—suit and tie, face powder, blow-dried hair. He feels at ease, and the show is popular morning fare.

In the occasional moments of crisis, he silently recites what he knows by heart, the Psalms of David. Leaving the priesthood, however, has proved easier than losing his priestly responsibilities. Collar or no collar, he’s still expected, no, obligated to give last rites during an emergency—a traffic fatality or a mass school shooting.

As layman, Stan wonders, can he make good on Dan’s ordination vows? He’s unsure. Dying, would he want somber unction or coins pulled from his ears? Heck, he already has a mouthful of gold, caps on his teeth. He flashes a radiant smile.

Jubilate! Rejoice! Bring on the cupcakes. He’d rather go out laughing like his dipsy mom and travel to Mars to buy new box springs, ha, ha, for her final resting place.

One June, Stan and his wife make their annual pilgrimage by car to Casa Grande to renew their vows and to observe the autumn equinox. In desert Pinal County, they pass a horrific accident, a totaled SUV.

In the noon light, time halts.

Clothing and donuts are scattered everywhere. Papers flutter. An orange ball, a basketball, bounces down the highway. Stan recognizes the sound. High above, a rare condor is but a dot in final punctuation. No shadows.

Below, in the relentless light, a boy is bleeding out on the asphalt. Stan gasps. His wife gags. Other passengers must be dead or dying.

Conserva me, thinks Stan, reciting Psalm 16: protect me from myself. I will not offer libations of blood, he continues, to false gods…vanity, hubris, or comfort, regardless of stare or prayer. Or, he adds, legendary Bandito heroics.

Stan slows down, but he does not stop, and he does not rubberneck. He changes lanes. Sirens are screaming. Help is on the way. Afferte Domino. Ascribe to the Lord. There is nothing for an ordinary man to do but to keep on going. He and his wife will witness the equinox at Casa Grande, but they no longer belong in this desiccated landscape, today, spilling blood, tonight, spilling stars.

Stan knows that, like sandstone under the Sonoran sun, he’s weathering, aging out of talk shows. Time to retire from live TV. During the weeks that follow, the couple prepare to move east to Florida. As the days shorten, tag-along shadows lengthen and tug at Stan’s sleeves. He dwells on the dying child, the test of his calling. He worries he might become Dan again, the blessing man, Drey the desert padre, and lose his beautiful spouse, her lovely voice, her touch.

Stan recalls the oasis where they first met as a personal epiphany, the grandest moment in a life of grand moments. Conserva me, he repeats, protect me from myself. He left basketball for his calling, and he left his calling for his wife. Now he’s leaving desert Arizona—the Sonoran monuments, the Bandito, and the pueblos—for coastal Florida. Farewell, grand stones. Fare thee well, El Sombre, the people’s thief, the people’s relief. Good bye, dead child. Amen.

In Florida, he and his wife look at properties near rural Hastings, his mother’s birthplace. The soil, fertile with copper dust blown over from the Sahara, sustains miles of potato fields, now owned by Frito-Lay. Stan fondly remembers the California lettuce fields of his seminary days and, for a moment, he ponders the role of prayer in commercial landscapes. Yes, let the fields be joyful, Psalm 96, but cantate Domino, sing to the Lord a new song in a new place.

Stan and his wife love the pink evening dusk with small greenish clouds. The shadows and the silvery Spanish moss are temptations, but they close on a house in gentrified Palm Coast, a split-level, 4 BR, 2 ½ B.

The former owner was a Division One wrestling coach at the University of Chicago. Stan chuckles and rethinks Plato’s Cave with an attached garage and a gate code. Why, of course—the key to the floorplan.

The house has more space than they need, but he welcomes the empty rooms. His wife’s singing voice echoes in the hollow halls like an angel choir. No need to lift up his eyes. He tells himself he can find his depth without a lamp or high-tech sneakers. Or Plato. This is the Sunshine State. Ascribe to the glory. The bright light reflected off the water onto blank walls will suffice.