The Reunion... Minto 66 Revisited

Minto 66 Revisited
Arrival
Where to start? At the beginning I suppose. In early 2006 I received an email about a proposed reunion of the Christian Brothers 1966 Novitiate Group. I immediately bought an air ticket expecting that the proposal would become an arrangement. It didn’t, but I went to Sydney anyway and did what one does when one goes to Sydney – Art Galleries, Opera House, you know, all that. Efforts to get the reunion up and running continued – and continued to be frustrated – until it finally occurred in January 2009. As it happened, I had other business in Sydney and beyond at that time, so I incorporated the reunion into a larger Journey to Everywhere, accounts of some aspects of which precede this post.

On the first day of the reunion, Saturday 17th January, I arrived at Mulgoa at about 11:30 am. Most of the others had already arrived. I saw faces I hadn't seen for 42 years, yet every one of them was instantly recognisable. Later I was to see photographs of those faces when we were all just starting out on our adventure. That was interesting - in the Chinese sense of the word. I can't say what I felt because I haven't been able to name the feeling. It wasn't sadness, but it wasn't joy either. But I am getting ahead of myself. The greetings on my arrival were warm and cheerful. We all knew that we'd be telling everyone in a session that afternoon what we'd been doing for the past forty years, so none of us wasted time talking about that. I can't actually remember what we talked about as we waited for lunch. I guess it was what anyone talks about when meting others casually. If I were to really exercise my memory it was probably nostalgia – the footy team that other schools thought was “a bunch of poofters” but which set the record straight by winning every game but one that year. You can imagine how deeply I got in that conversation ... well, actually, it was me who asked, But didn't we win every game we played? WE!! Well, in the sense that most of us say "we" when we're talking about the exploits of our national sports teams. I don't recall any conversations about the eisteddfod that one of our blokes starred in, or the art show that the students of the year behind mine put on. But never mind. It was a long time ago, and of course we were going to remember the most memorable things that occurred. And had I really thought it was important to remember those things I could easily have mentioned them myself. But I felt very comfortable riding the nostalgia rollercoaster just as it was. Most of us were sixty-something or very near yet felt like the late teens that were all were when we first got together. I can't imagine another circumstance in which that would happen - not even in a reunion of training platoons from my days in the Army.

Story time
After lunch we gathered in a large hall and sat in a circle. Quite a few blokes were accompanied by their wives. After some preliminary discussion about what we would do later in the afternoon we began to tell our individual stories about the past forty years. Even though there were nearly thirty of us, there was never a sense that we'd heard something before - even if we had. There was an incredible diversity of detail. All had enjoyed the Juniorate - 4th and 5th year of High School - and most seemed to have had no problem with the Novitiate - the first year of formation in the religious life - but there was near unanimity of view about the second year, at Mulgoa, where we were gathered for the reunion. Most found it trying - which was the point of the exercise - but a few said they really liked it “because it was such a nothing year”. The anecdote that summed it up was of one of the trainees telling one of the elders he'd worked out a way of saving time (on some activity) and being told that the point of being there was not to save time but to waste time. That would not have been meant to be taken literally, but it would have made the point. Mulgoa was a very cold place - and I'm not just talking about the weather. But the third year of formation was universally appreciated. Trainees were treated as responsible human beings and flourished in the academic and practical preparation for teaching. At the end of which came the first appointments to schools. This is where the stories, in some cases, became surreal.

Seats of their pants
One bloke was to go to a large boarding school in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. But the community was on holidays, so was he sent to join them? No. He remained behind in the exalted company of the Provincial Council. This would be like a soldier who's just finished all of his preparation for active service having to hang around with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ever ready with a salute and standing to attention all day as the masters of the universe went about their business, ever ready to point out that a badge was one millimetre too low or that his already closely cropped hair was too long. When this bloke did get to his appointed school, he diligently prepared lessons for his allotted classes, only to be told minutes before he was about to begin that he was going to another school. When he arrived there, it was straight to assembly without any indication of what classes he'd be teaching, and then into his first class without any time to prepare. The rest of his teaching life seemed to follow a similar pattern. Nor was this at all unusual. Many people told horror stories about the size of their first classes. 50-60 and more!! Some told of clashes with their Superiors (sic - that was the word for the man in charge in those days.) All had been prepared for such a possibility. It's what the Vow of Obedience is all about. In this respect there's not a lot of difference between monastic life and the military.

Survival through Resistance
As the overwhelming majority of those present left monastic life either during training or anything from one to thirty years after they started teaching, it would seem clear that Vow of Obedience, laudable as it may be from a theological point of view, was not well managed by many Superiors. And yet, I hasten to add, there was never a sense of bitterness or regret in any account of anyone's experiences. And there was much humour in many tales. People remembered being thrown out of every dining room in the houses of formation and given humiliating penances to draw attention to acts of what the Pooh Bahs thought carelessness or just plain stupidity. Vow of Obedience or not there were many accounts of little acts of resistance which must have been the slender threads by which some people maintained some sense of dignity. I put it this way, because every time someone gave an account of such activity, everyone whooped and cheered. Had any of the Pooh Bahs been there I would hope that they too would have felt good about their minions' naughty and sometimes sneaky little rebellions. Surely they can't have been so full of their own authority that they would hear such things without amusement, even at the time, let alone forty years later. And forty years later one would hope that they would recognise that such acts of resistance were actually necessary for the maintenance of one’s integrity and sanity.

Community in Adversity
There were also some very poignant stories, not least from the bloke who had occupied some of those Pooh Bah positions, and had to deal with the tragedies of drastically declining numbers in the Congregation, and the aftermath of child abuse. You may be amazed to hear that the latter topic came up at all. It was mentioned only once in the circle, but I was present when the topic was discussed in some detail later in the afternoon. There is an unflinching determination to come to grips with why such a tragedy occurred. In spite of that dark shadow the overall sense of people's experience in the Congregation was positively joyful. There was a sense of community among those present that could hardly have been surpassed in the Congregation itself.

One of many remarkable achievers
There were many people who’d done remarkably well in their careers. Principals, Directors of Education, University Professorships, Business Entrepreneurs Extraordinaire, Artists, at least one of them a senior leader in the Congregation, and so on. The jaw-dropper story, however, was the very matter of fact account by one bloke of his career pulling the levers of power in the Australian Government. He’d been a public servant working on policy development. His area of expertise was tax policy. And then he got a real job in the corporate world with a salary package of – well, I don’t think he told us. It wouldn’t have been modest. Nor would the package. I remember him as a novice. He had a somewhat sceptical disposition. Not that he ever put himself up as any kind of critic. It was rather that whenever anyone said anything, particularly if they were a little too enthusiastic, he would ask the question that no one had an answer for. He was never going to be any good at the Vow of Obedience, and I can imagine people at every level of the public service recommending his promotion so that they didn’t have to be reminded, every time they opened their mouths in his presence, that they didn’t know what they were talking about. Not that he was thereby promoted to his level of incompetence, which is the cynical line that describes getting ahead in the public service. Clearly that couldn’t have been the case, otherwise he would not have got the plumb job in the private sector where performance is the measure of …. well, whatever it is that is measured in the private sector. It’s true that the more things change the more they stay the same. I spoke to him for only a few minutes, but in that time I noticed that he was still the same self-effacing bloke with the searching questions – humble yet wide eyed.

Struggling (successfully) with a changing world
There were several mature age blokes who endured the regime designed for much less mature minds. One of them felt it necessary to remind us from time to time that he found us all a bit trying because of his mature outlook. We used to send him up mercilessly. Imagine that – sarcasm, even in the cloistered life! He endeared himself to all present at the reunion, however, by admitting that his story included “a struggle with women”. Not with women as such, of course, but their encroaching on his territory. He laughed at his own inability to describe in “politically correct” terms what he’d been through. We laughed along with him as he fumbled and stumbled, trying to find the right way to put it. But it was clear to everyone that he’d made the transition from the medieval mindset in which men – especially men in clerical drag - rule to full partnership with women in the work environment without having had time to acquire the language to describe the journey he’d been on. I wondered how many men were struggling with being misunderstood in the same way.

Attitudes have changed for the better
The moment that summed up the distance we’d all come since those early days was when we remembered those who had died. There were only two, which is probably quite remarkable. One of them, Tim, was actually in the year behind us and still in the Juniorate, but he died while on vacation when we were at the very beginning of our Novitiate year. He was given the Habit and Professed on his deathbed and is therefore one of our group. More recently, about a decade and a half ago, one of the blokes who’d been through the Juniorate and the Novitiate with us, committed suicide. I heard about it only few weeks before the reunion and was still reeling from the news. He’d been a very good friend to me in both the Juniorate and the Novitiate, and the two years after we both left, which is no big claim because he was everybody’s friend – one of those blokes with an infectious sense of humour who could bring a room full of high minded people engaged in terribly serious business to peals of laughter by raising an eyebrow at just the right moment. Back in those days leaving the Novitiate was as close as one could come to death without actually dying. No one was allowed to speak your name. In the wider world the same applied to suicide. It was the unspeakable act. As a society, we’ve come a long way since then. And so had we as former colleagues. The Congregation itself had long got over the business of excluding those who’d “let the side down” and encouraged us all back into one another’s memories by calling us together at a reunion. Those who did not come were as enthusiastically remembered as the faces before us. Jim, who could not come, was remembered with great affection. His presence was invoked from our collective memory of him and felt as palpably all who were living.

Personal conversations
As well as the public sharing of our stories there was a lot of personal conversation between people in pairs and small groups, and at meal times we seemed to achieve, unprompted, what managers of such gatherings often try, usually unsuccessfully, to organise – never sitting with the same people twice. There was an extraordinary synergy that resulted in people finding the words to say what needed to be said and no more. Decades of experience telescoped into a few sentences; strategic decisions identified and their consequences enumerated; the future imagined in a few Zen like word strokes. I had conversations with blokes I barely spoke to in the Novitiate yet felt as though we’d known each other for the whole of the intervening forty years.

Supplementary tours
Minto, Strathfield, The Hermitage
During the two days of the reunion there were a number of forays to other significant sites – sacred sites – secret men’s business sites – whatever ; the former Novitiate at Minto, now a drug rehabilitation centre; the former Provincialate / Scholasticate / Juniorate at Strathfield, now the headquarters of the Australian Catholic University; and the Hermitage at Mulgoa.

The Hermitage is an interesting new development in the Congregation’s activities. In the early days of the Christian Church, many people went into the wilderness, to live as hermits. It was the precursor or monastic life. It is undergoing something of a revival around the world. One member of the Congregation in NSW has set up a Hermitage near Sydney. Like Hermits of all ages, he serves by living alone but receiving guests who want to learn the way of life or who need someone to listen and, maybe, sometimes, to advise; and going into the wider society, to participate, not as a missionary but as one who responds to other people’s needs with critical compassion. Some of the people who attended the reunion visited the Hermitage to see at first hand this new aspect of the Congregation’s life. There was only one visit to so I didn’t get there because it coincided with a trip to the old novitiate at Minto. I chose the latter.

In contrast to everyone else’s comment about how small Minto seemed, compared with when it was our temporary home, I couldn’t believe how much bigger it was than I remembered. I had forgotten most of what was there and remembered only the building that one sees – used to see – from the road in, which, itself, was completely unrecognisable, being now part of a suburban landscape. I have to confess to dark forebodings as I and the rest of the party were conducted around the property by one of the residents. I couldn’t shake the thought that he was a “coloniser” and that we were the dispossessed – that this was really our domain. All the same, I was immensely impressed with the “presence” of our guide. It was his second time in the rehab program, and something about him said that he wouldn’t be back for a third go. He’d made it and was more or less marking time as he waited out the program. I was glad to have gone to see the place where I became who I am today, and to say an irretrievable farewell to it – something I hadn’t really done in the forty years since I was driven out the front gate as a former-novice. I was glad that it was still a house of formation – in one sense.

I didn’t get to Strathfield. It’s somewhere that I can go at any time because it is now a university rather than a cloister. One day I will go back and see the ‘big’ chapel that has the first barrel vault built in NSW – or was it Australia… possibly the southern hemisphere… surely not the world… (it’s OK, you don’t have to genuflect, it’s only a church ceiling after all, and it didn’t even have any pictures on it) It was where the highest dramas of my time in the Congregation took place. It was 1965. The Second Vatican Council was in full flower. Its fragrance was reaching us through the grape vine – geez, I love mixing metaphors – and the ‘big’ chapel was the winepress where the vintages were blended. And, of course, as liturgy is the one thing without which Catholicism would not be Catholicism, what went on in our chapel reflected what was going on in the ‘biggest’ barrel vault of all – the Vatican! A new liturgy was evolving reflecting a re-new-ed vision of church. We felt that we were at the cutting edge of a new age of faith and reconciliation. The music we sang was astounding compared with the sentimental pap that we’d all endured as kids, in a religion that ‘taught’ stuff like it was a sin to eat meat on Friday, blah, blah, blah. Seeing that whole mindset evaporate before our eyes; seeing the priest celebrating Mass facing the congregation and holding aloft the Sacred Species to us rather than to… you know, YHWH (shhhhhhhh, don’t say it out aloud or you’ll get thunderstruck, or stoned at the very least) was like seeing the resurrection before our very eyes – the resurrection of the church.

The ‘big’ chapel was joined by a covered walkway to the classrooms of the Juniorate (where boys aspiring to join the congregation did the final two years of high school)on one side and the Scholasticate (the Congregation’s teachers college where brothers in their third year of formation learned the teaching trade – or should that be profession) on the other. Running at a right angle to the other buildings was a grand palace that housed the dining rooms, kitchen and the Holy of Holies – the Provincialate, where aged patriarchs affecting the gravitas of six-winged Seraphim oversaw the operations of a far flung province of the empire of Edmund Rice. Yes, by then ER had been rehabilitated as the Founder whose cause was daily prayed for.

Remembering Strathfield 1965
I should not leave this description of Strathfield without saying something about what I did there – apart from imagine the lay out of the throne room of heaven [just kidding]. I went there to do my final year of high school at the Juniorate (which subsequently was rebadged as the Juvenate). Seventy something boys from schools all over Queensland, NSW and PNG were divided into two classes; the Leaving Certificate and Fourth year. What an eye-opener for a farm boy from the sticks (I’ve wondered recently if that’s supposed to be the Styx.) There were boys from GPS schools in Brisbane and Sydney, and boys from country and parish schools, and every kind of school between. There were extremely bright boys, and plodders - like me. In 1964 I failed all but two of my Sub-Senior subjects at Mt Carmel in Charters Towers. The two I passed – scored 100% for both – were Religion and Geometrical drawing – the latter done by correspondence. At St Enda’s (that’s what the Juniorate was called) I undertook the impossible – to do two years work in one, in six subjects, three of which I had never done before. It worked. I scored 3 As and 3Bs. That tells you something about the resourcefulness of the institution. Verily, it was a special school.

Having already been five years at boarding school I readily fitted into the routine of the place. Other aspects of life in the big smoke, however, were more difficult. In my five years at Mt Carmel I was one of two Paul Smiths. If I was looking forward to escaping that situation, it wasn’t to be. My namesake in Charters Towers was very bright, very good at sport and very popular. I was the other Paul Smith. My namesake in Strathfield was very bright, very good at sport and very popular. He became known as The Real Paul Smith. I lived in the full blaze of the nick-name The Unreal Paul Smith – Unreal for short. (In a recent conversation with the real Paul Smith we both had a chuckle about the way the word unreal came to mean, well, you know, like, fabulous ... dear god!)

Had he been at St Enda’s in his fourth year The Real Paul Smith would certainly have been a Prefect, if not No 1 in the formal hierarchy of the school. But, like me, he was a newcomer and held no institutional position. But he very quickly moved to the pinnacle of the informal (the real) structure of the school and shared "top dog" status with another very bright, very sporty and very popular boy from Canberra. They were both sports professionals in every sense but the pay cheque. And like all Christian Brothers schools, the social sacrament of the Juniorate was sport. Paul and Bill were not just High priests. They were gods! And they performed miracles. The Firsts (not sure whether League or Union) won every game but one that year. You can imagine the morale of the place? Even I, who can’t catch or hit a ball, and knocked on the only try I ever almost scored, was swept along by the exhilarating triumphalism of it all.

When I remember the Juniorate, my own appalling incompetence is not the first thing that comes to mind. To start with, though I was hopeless at just about everything that mattered to my peers, I maintained my position of 8th overall in a class of thirty plus boys. And I did top my class in something. In every term exam I scored the highest mark in religion. What I remember now is the spirited community of boys, from incredibly diverse backgrounds, who answered a mysterious call, lived, played and prayed together – oh yeah, and studied – for a school year, preparing for a life in “black robes” practising the alchemy of instructing many unto justice. I put it this way to make the point that we really were at the threshold of a ‘magical’ world in which ‘miracles’, while not taken for granted, were not unexpected – not that anyone ever expected to heal the sick or turn water into wine, much less raise the dead. But ours was a world that required powerful metaphors to envisage, and highly symbolic actions, such as liturgy and paraliturgy, to embrace.

There’s a comparison that might drive the point home for anyone familiar with the imagined world of Harry Potter. The Juniorate was a bit like Hogwarts – not in any parallel that might be drawn between magic and miracles, but in that you didn’t get to go there unless you already ‘had the magic in you’ (a vocation); having gone there one experienced the ‘magical’/'miraculous’ at every turn – in sport, certainly; but also in the skills of seeing the sacred and mediating it to others: biblical studies – critical appreciation of texts in context rather than what is piously known as Bible Study; liturgical practice – celebration as communal consciousness rather than as rubric and ritual; theological reflection – theology as a way of thinking rather than a body of content; ecumenical thinking – seeking just relationships through partnership with others rather than regarding them as sectarian rivals; and above all the nature of conscience – the critical engagement with justice rather than the avoidance of guilt. Not that any of us in those days would have described what we were doing in those terms. Nor were we educated explicitly in those ways. But looking back, that’s what was being nurtured by the synergy between high school studies and formation in the theory and practice of living in sacred space-time. It was the way out teachers did and said things that enabled more profound issues to be absorbed by something like osmosis.

Oh yeah, and there’s one other detail – for students going to the Juniorate from Queensland – that adds to the parallel with Hogwarts. It started with a train journey! We gathered at South Brisbane Station from all over Queensland and boarded what was then called the Brisbane Limited, and late in the afternoon headed for the future. When we arrived at Strathfield next morning our world had changed. Well, mine had, anyway. The state of culture shock in which I existed for the rest of the school year had set in. There was no one, on the train or awaiting us in Strathfield, called Draco Malfoy, but there was a boy from Brisbane who fitted the bill. By the time we arrived at Strathfield, I was playing Ron Weasley. Quiditch anyone? No? Well how about a good dog-fight in the rarified heights of Applied Biblical Criticism? Or a seriously risky field trip into the furiously contested labyrinth of Social Justice Theory and Practice? Once again, nothing like that was explicitly taught. But no such interests would have insinuated themselves into my consciousness had I done the same six school subjects in any other school.

Remembering Minto 1966
My time in the Novitiate at Minto was not as “memorable” – not as romanticise-able? – as my time in the Juniorate at Strathfield. Like everyone going to their first job, we who had been boys in the Juniorate went to the Novitiate as young men, where we were joined by others who where coming to a house of formation for the first time. There were also blokes from Papua New Guinea and New Zealand who joined us, most of whom had been in Juniorates in their own country. All of us were aware of the threshold we’d crossed. The rough edges we were permitted as high school students, even in the Juniorate, were now to be covered over and, in due course, ground smooth. High seriousness replaced high jinks. Sport ceased to be sport and became the classroom in which uncoordinated physical “illiterates” like me learned enough about a game to sit the exam for referee’s ticket. This was the first issue that undermined my sense of “being called”. How could someone who loathed sport possibly put themselves through this? Well, as I would be told, that was a question only someone from my generation could ask. No generation before us had the privilege of choice. And giving up one’s choice to do what one is called to do is what having a vocation is all about. I would fail my God-given call if I chose another way of life just because I didn’t like what I would have to do as a Brother. That was one view that was put, every bit as bluntly as that. The vow of Obedience was not going to be fun.

Nor would it get any better when it came to the things that I liked to do. Art, for example. I used to do blackboard “post cards” for people’s birthdays and feast days, and that was OK. But when I chose to stay indoors and draw instead of getting out and flogging myself around the paddock with balls – you know, of the foot, basket or cricket variety – that was being self indulgent, and though it did not relate to the vow of obedience – how could it, we actually had a choice – it somehow related to the vow of Poverty. The good Christian Brother doesn’t have stuff for himself. Nor does he use his time for himself. He devotes his life to the service of his community and his charges – a quaint word for the kids who would one day be in one’s care. The phrase “The Good Christian Brother” would become the touch stone for my personal “Satanic Rebellion”. I wasn’t game to say it then, indeed, it wasn’t until sometime after I had “ripped up my God-given vocation” that I actually said, Stuff being a Good Christian Brother. A good Human Being will do me! The irony is that it was the influence of the bloke in charge who enabled me to make that distinction. There was another view of what we were about.

The Novitiate wasn’t all nose to the grind stone stuff. Perhaps the best way to draw a word picture of the Master of Novices is to relate an incident that occurred just a few days before I left. The word “psychology” had been used from time to time and hovered out there in front of us like a an aspiration to be inhaled – yes, inhaled, in the Bill Clinton sense of the word. It was the mid-sixties, after all. The Boss – that was his nick name, though none of us dared say it in his hearing – came into the lecture room one morning and said that, after all the hours of instruction on vows, the documents of the Second Vatican Council and much, MUCH more, it was time we told him what we’d like to learn something about. One of us said, Can you teach us some psychology? The Boss smiled, folded his arms and said, Sure. He then drew attention to something that had happened recently and made a comment that immediately drew a response from one of the other novices. A short verbal exchange occurred. A point was made. Lives were changed ever sp minutely, but we all got the point. One of the more accomplished novices said, It’s what you’ve been doing all along. You’ve been teaching us psychology without ever using the word.

Had I the wit to do so at the time I would have given the Novice Master a new nick name: Merlin. For yea, verily, this man was a Wizard! It wasn’t just psychology that he’d contrived to show us. Perhaps it wasn’t psychology at all that we’d learned. Perhaps it was the development of our critical capacity that he’d nurtured, to which we’d given the then trendy name, psychology. And he’d done this not merely by lecturing to us but by the very way that our lives were structured. Nothing was ever done that was not an opportunity for personal reflection and growth/change. And I mean nothing. For example, at breakfast one morning there was no bread. The delivery came about half way through the meal. We expected to finish the meal without bread, but to our amazement, it was put out for us to have. There was a trickle of people to the bread table at first – we’d mostly made do with what we had – but that trickle suddenly turned into scrum. The bread was FRESH!! And HOT!! And we were behaving like little boys. The Boss said nothing. His face and body language did the talking. We became aware of his silent censure when he didn’t give the signal to start talking. One by one we looked in his direction, wondering when he’d let us speak. What we saw was thunder. And we learned how easy it was to “give in” to one of the many human appetites in a moment of uncritical response to an enticing stimulus. It was only fresh bread, but it became for that moment a symbol of everything after which the human heart might lust. Interesting, given that, for us – and everyone in the church – bread was also the symbol of everything to which the human heart might aspire in its quest for whole(i)ness. The Boss never ever said a word about it. He didn’t need to. We did the talking, amongst ourselves. We even wondered, momentarily, if he’d actually organised the late delivery of bread so that events would unfold as they did. But we pretty quickly concluded that there were so many variables in the situation that could have resulted in different outcomes that no one would bother. He responded spontaneously, without words, and we learned.

He applied the same teaching technique several times a day, and not only to routine aspects of community life. When he could see that we were not getting the point of the discipline embodied in the vows we were preparing to take, he’d do something that contradicted our expectations. I, for example, was given a photography magazine to read. When I stuttered in amazement… but, but, we’re not supposed to have stuff like this… he said, Well, have the magazine anyway. And when you’re ready, come and talk to me about it. My face brightened and I said, Oh, are you interested in photography too? His face darkened and he said, No. I’m interested in … just read the magazine. We’ll talk about it some time. We never did get to talk about it but I did work out what he was on about. He wanted me to know that the Vow of Poverty is not about not having things. We didn’t get to talk about it because I wasn’t around long enough.

I was struggling in all sorts of ways. I was mortally embarrassed about the fact that I couldn’t read out aloud – to this day when reading silently I still can’t read any faster than I can speak. How was I going to stand in front of a class and read stuff to them? We also did crafty things that I couldn’t get the hang of, and I was going to have to do this with kids too. People who know me forty plus years later and have seen the houses I have renovated with my partner http://www.flickr.com/photos/twogreytoes/sets/72157608767595248/ may fall about in shock to hear me say I was no good with my hands. I wasn’t then. The Boss saw this sense of incompetence in almost everything I did and quietly tried to help me to deal with it. On one occasion I had written a meditation on the ninth station of the cross, Jesus falls the third time, in which I pondered the fact that every time he fall he got back up. I connected that with the story about how many times one should forgive others – and oneself – seventy times seven times – that is, times without number. What I wrote had a distinctly poetic ring and rhythm to it that attracted comment later from several people, including The Boss. He asked, What are you reading at the moment? (Apart from the set texts we were expected to read other stuff – we’d call it elective reading these days.)I can’t remember the title of the book now, but it was by a Dominican called Gerald Vann about whom everyone spoke in hushed tones. When I told him his eyebrows lifted as he asked me how I was getting on with it. Not very good, I said. By the time I finish reading one sentence I can’t remember what the previous sentence was about. He handed me a volume of Gerard Manley Hopkins and said, Try this. Don’t try to understand it. Just read and enjoy. Enjoy? Enjoy? But… but…

Forty years on I am very able with tools. I am a voracious, if tediously slow reader, and I can even read out aloud – if I practice in advance. Who knows how I might have survived in class rooms had I stayed? Twenty years later I did OK. I wasn’t even embarrassed about the fact that I still couldn’t spell when I did get in front of a class and had to write stuff on the board. I couldn’t spell but I knew how to keep kids safe on the end of a roap (see what I mean?) as they abseiled over the side of a cliff – which mattered a lot more than my spelling skills. Things might have worked out. They usually do for most people. By the time I finished the Scholasticate I might have been mature enough and capable enough. But there was an event that put an end to my life in the Congregation as certainly as if someone had put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger.

One day when I was playing basketball I deliberately put myself in a position where a particular bloke could not avoid colliding with me. He was the kind of bloke that, had it been an accident, would have laughed and got on with the game. But what I did was so obviously a stupid thing to do that he was visibly annoyed, but didn’t say anything. I did it again, and this time he yelled at me. You may not believe this but (on the other hand, you might – you should) I did it a third time and all hell broke loose. I can’t remember what he said, but it included the word homosexual. No one else said a word, of course. The game continued. I kept out of everyone’s way, and when it was over, everyone else went to what ever we were doing next. I went to The Boss. I have to leave, I told him. It was the second time I’d announced my intention to leave, and no one ever got the opportunity to say it a third time. Nevertheless, he tried to get me to explain. He hadn’t seen the incident and I was too ashamed to tell him about it. No doubt he found about it out soon after.

It was quite some time before I actually left and I had begun to settle into the thought that I might stay. In that time The Boss called me in twice to talk to me about why I was leaving – not to get me to stay, but to deal with what was driving me. It’s the vow of obedience, I lied. And poverty. I just can’t see myself being a good Christian Brother if I can’t accept those vows willingly. He was silent for what seemed far too long. And the vow of Chastity? he asked. Oh, no problem there, I gushed, that’s the jewel in the crown. The most precious gift … Which it is, of course, but I has just become explicitly aware of the very real danger of my sexual attraction to other men and I was scared shitless, and wasn’t going to be induced to talk about it. Not that I had never been aware of my feelings, but that I’d never had to confront the consequences of them before, and as incompetent as I was in all life skills, I was on the way to not understanding my sexuality, let alone doing anything constructive about it.

Remembering the long Letting-Go 1967 - 1970
Unfortunately, that was not the end of my hankering for the religious life. It was fully two years before I was over it. In the mean time I made many people unhappy. I visited one of the blokes who had come from New Zealand and left a couple of months before me. I stayed with his family for far too long (for them) revealing but not discovering just how pathetic I was. One of these days I’ll write a best seller about that period. It will be a best seller because no one will believe anyone could really be that thick, and they’ll buy it to marvel at what the imagination can conjure – only it won’t be made up. I returned from new Zealand to attend the Alexander Mackie Teachers College to become an Art Teacher. Part of my course was to be at East Sydney Tech – you know, only the most important art school in the country at the time. I lasted three, maybe four weeks. I really enjoyed the art stuff, but I had a run in with the Principal of AMTC. Again, it was the lack of social skills that got me into the situation and resulted in my not dealing with it properly. I resigned and found myself walking around the city looking for a job. I was in Martin Place and saw a building I recognised. It was the head office of the Commonwealth Bank. I’d never actually seen it before, but do you remember the metal money boxes? They were “replicas” of that building. I had this instant warm feeling about how it was reaching out to embrace me. I applied for and got a job, but not in that building. I can’t begin to tell you how soul destroying it was to be the Repurchasing Clerk in the Bank’s Stores Department at Taylor’s Square. Don’t ask what the Repurchasing Clerk repurchases. You really don’t want to know. But I was as bad at adding up numbers as I was at reading aloud. Needless to say, many people did their best to help, and a few of them even befriended me, and were curious when I said I wanted to go back to the religious life. You know, why would anyone want to live on another planet - that sort of curious.

Outside of the Bank two people provided my with genuine friendship. One of them was Jim, the bloke I mentioned earlier – everyone’s friend. His generosity towards me was inexhaustible. His family welcomed me into their home and took me along when they went weekending on the Nepean River. Jim took me to his friends homes and got me drunk for the first time – on Crème de Menthe no less. I was a slow learner, but he had the patience of Job, and kept looking after me until I no longer wanted to remember what we’d been through together. The other bloke who befriended me had also been in the Juniorate when I was there, but did not go on to the Novitiate. Let’s call him Terry. By the time he came back to Sydney (from Townsville) I was reasonably at home in Waverly and treading water in my bank job. I became Terry’s mentor for about five minutes. You can’t know what it is like to go from a place like Townsville, as it was in the mid sixties, to a place like Sydney unless you’ve done it yourself. As I had made the leap and landed on my feet, I was able to ease Terry into the big smoke in small ways. He felt, for example, that he owed me an eternal debt of gratitude for warning him not to gesticulate when standing at a bus stop, as the driver might mistakenly think we wanted the bus to stop and pick us up – that sort of thing. The reason I mention this is that there had to be a point at which I stopped feeling like a complete idiot and started to feel at home in the world. With Jim I was always the charity case – though probably not, I hasten to add, in his eyes. With Terry the mentor role lasted only a very short time. We very quickly became peers – which is saying something, because in reality, Terry was/is actually supremely competent – a classic case of what I later learned about when I finally got around to getting a teacher education – a person so damaged by the Means of Reproduction of the Industrial Mode of Production (the schooling system that misshapes us as cogs in a machine) that he might easily have never known just how smart he is, unless he defied all expectations and had a go at what his school record would have denied him. When Terry went to university, years after he failed the Leaving Certificate, he never scored less than a distinction in every assignment and exam he did. He went on to work as a consultant in eighty countries, mostly second and third world – Romania and Nigeria for example. And those whose only experience of him was the Juniorate, will be amazed to know that despite this extraordinary success, Terry is of as humble a disposition as anyone I know.

In 1968 Jim became a Qantas steward and I went part time to the University of Sydney and by then Terry was the Assistant Manager of a very busy hotel in Sydney. I really loved going to lectures, especially English. There were about six hundred students in the lecture hall and we’d all laugh at the witty things the lecturer said about the books on the reading list. A few days before the first term exam I wondered out aloud when he was going to start teaching us anything. People didn’t know which way to look as they put their hands to their mouths attempting to conceal their contemptuous mirth – or was it mirthful contempt. It must be the former, as I don’t think mirthful is a real word. The other thing that I became infamous for was my support of the Vietnam War. Failing the first term exams – one of the Psychology lecturers actually asked me why I was at university at all – served to focus my mind in the second term. There was no way I could pass the year unless I did exceptionally well in the second and third terms, and that was exceptionally unlikely. I knew that if I went to university full time I would have a chance of passing. And as it happened, there was a way I could do that, but it meant killing two birds with the one stone – if I can use that horrific banality to describe what I did next. It just so happened that in my vigorous defence of the Vietnam War and National service to prosecute the war, I had informed myself about all sorts of things, as a result of which I knew that if I put my money where my mouth was and went to Vietnam to save the world for democracy as a National Serviceman, I would be able to go to university full time for one year on the same rate of pay that I was on when discharged. If I did well enough I would get a Commonwealth University Scholarship and Bob’d be yeruncle. (As it turned out I did get a CUS and the along came Gough – and you know the rest when it comes to access to higher education in that golden age.) So that’s what I did. I didn’t wait to be called up. I volunteered for National Service. My parents had to agree, however, so I marked time while they came to terms with my insanity. I became a soldier on the second anniversary of my departure from Minto. And by then I was over trying to be holy.

The Army was the turning point. I did exceptionally well, yet fell victim to the same incompetence that marked my life then and still. And it may have saved my life. In recruit training I didn’t learn a thing. That is to say, my three years in the school cadets had better than prepared me for Rookies. We had different weapons of course, but having grown up on a farm, I was already a competent weapons handler. I was ahead of the pack in every aspect of training and was universally respected for my ability to keep my platoon on time, and in time. I was the unofficial time keeper and the official Right Marker of 9 Platoon B Company. Had I not injured my heel a week before the Passing Out Parade I would have been awarded best recruit of the platoon. But as I couldn’t march the gong went to someone else. In Corps Training I was not as up there as I was in recruit training. My school cadet experience had been modelled on the Infantry, where as I went to the Core of Engineers. However, when I trained as a specialist I tied for the top position in my class.

In the whole time that was in training before going to Vietnam a remarkable coincidence took place. I was absent on every occasion on which my platoon or troop trained on the M60 machine gun. And paradoxically, that may have saved my life. A month after I was posted to my unit in Nui Dat I was on guard duty – the last watch of the night, which meant that I would have to make the weapon (an M60) safe to return to the lines. When the time came I disengaged the ammunition belt but was unaware of the fact that there was a round in the chamber. When I released the action the gun, of course, went off. Just one round, but one too many. The usual penalty for an unauthorised discharge of a weapon, whether accidental or deliberate, was time in the brig. Instead, I was sent out of the operational area to the Logistical Support Group in the Special Zone of Vung Tau for the remainder of my tour of duty. Who knows what might have happened had I stayed in Nui Dat? Despite this indiscretion my second CO called me in one day to talk about going to the Officer Training Unit at Portsea. Flattered though I was I firmly resisted the suggestion. I was on a mission to get to university. I wasn’t changing course.

If you’ve seen the movie Good Morning Vietnam you’ll know it wasn’t about me. But let me tell you some of the things I did while I was there – apart from my job. I was a radio announcer on the Australian Forces Radio Station; I taught English to adults in a Vietnamese high school in after school hours; and as the pay rep for the unit, I paid the civilian workforce in my Unit and, as a result, often had close contact with people, on the base and in their homes as a guest. Get what I mean about the film not being about me? It was about someone who did many of the same things I did. As a radio announcer I was like Adrian Cronauer’s boss. Same with the teaching job. I was like the bloke (that should be guy, I guess) the AC shoved out of the way. Fortunately, I was never remotely involved in anything like ACs brush with the Viet Cong – not that I know of anyhow. And I was given a nickname by the civilians: Cuh Tam. You don’t want to know why. My most embarrassing memory is of an incident caused by my then assumed cultural superiority. One day I met a Buddhist Monk who was remarkably fluent in English. We had a fairly long conversation that morphed into an attempt to convert him to Christianity. He was incredibly forbearing and thanked me for my efforts. We departed as friends and I prayed for his conversion every Sunday. Looking back, I can’t believe I did that. Well, yes I can. YES I CA… oops, that’s not the phrase for the situation, is it?

Oh yes, and I did get to university, and graduated with Honours in History before taking post graduate diplomas Education and Outdoor Education.

Remembering in unexpected ways 2007-2009
A couple of years ago I revived the thing I was good at in the Juniorate and the Novitiate. I joined a choir and took singing lessons. Within eighteen months I had a solo part in a piece written by the choir director/singing teacher. I mention it only to illustrate the point that something like the sense of ‘congenital’ incompetence for which I was so well known in the Juniorate in particular, but also in the Novitiate, never goes away. I recently started feeling anxious at choir practice and resigned despite the assurances of the choir director that I was doing fine and that I’d be missed. Though I took that on board, I could not deny the anxiety and could not face any more of it. Looking back at my experience in the Juniorate, I wonder if I really was incompetent or just so out of my depth that I lost all sense of identity and reverted to the traumatised state of a ten year old going to boarding school for the first time. I don’t know – yet. But I have a piece of advice for all you normal people. Don’t take your sanity for granted. Be grateful. Be very grateful.

The recruitment DVD
There was a moment at the reunion that almost brought me undone. It came towards the end of the second day. We were “treated” to a blast from the past in the form of a recruiting film – now on DVD, of course. It was made in the year that I went to the Juniorate. Every face in it was memorable. What was excruciatingly awful was the voice over, delivered by a mature aged male impersonating a youthful aspirant to the religious life. What really spooked me about it was that it portrayed exactly the vision of vocation that I had at the age of 16. Forty plus years later it sounded so patronising and sickeningly pious that I shrivelled with embarrassment. Not that I regret going to the Juniorate and then to the Novitiate. What I do regret was how unreal my expectations were as a result of concept I had then of vocation. Having said that I must say that the film was made in the spirit of an age that was already drawing its last gasp. And of course, one’s last gasp is going to be one’s most importunate – ever. Eh?