O blízkosti dvou pólů

Od mladického aktivismu k depresím a alkoholismu jen o pár desítek let později. Aneb jak se otec Hugh Kennedy stal z nadšeného novokněze osamělým pijákem.

Úryvek z výborného, Pulitzerovu cenu získavšího, leč jisté čtenářské úsílí vyžadujícího románu Edwina O´Connora The Edge of Sadness.

[Pokud tyto stránky čte i nějaký externí zpátečník, který nerozumí a chtěl by, nechť se ozve. Text je možno přeložit.]

            And what I thought about was of course myself: as I was now, nearing fifty, the respected pastor of his parish who was in fact a solitary drinker in his room, dazed most of the time, indifferent to his people, irresponsible in his duties, a spiritually arid priest for whom the wellsprings had dried up, for whom life had been reduced to a problem of concealment and routine. And then the inevitable contrast: the young priest of not too many years ago, zealous, devoted, with fresh a unimpended hopes, whose parish was his life, whose days were active and bus and full of joy. How had the one become the other? The distance between them was the distance between the poles, yet it had been eclipsed, and in no time at all. How? Why?

            Lying there on my bed in the black and silent morning, in this moment of queer lucidity, I found an answer. It was an answer which began back in those early active years, back with the new parish hall, the improved church grounds, the spick-and-span school band, the bridge evenings for the women, the weekly gatherings of men, the outings, the school plays – all those things of which I´d always been so proud, and to which I´d given so much time. And, suddenly, there was the clue before me: the “so much time”. So much time that there had been no time for anything else, and I saw now, in a flash of long postponed revelation, and with a sense of shock and dismay, how little by little the unimportant had become important for me, how those things which belonged properly on the edges of my life had in fact become the center. The young priest, without realizing it, had become little more than a recreation director: a cheerleader in a Roman collar.

            And it had been so easy, so innocent. There are, after all, certain social duties which a priest has towards his parishioners, and if that priest is as I was – energetic and gregarious, with an aptitude for such occasions – these duties and occasions have a way of multiplying. There´s a great attraction to this: he´s doing what he likes to do, and he can tell himself that it´s all for the honor and glory of God. He believes this, quite sincerely, and he finds ample support for such belief: on all sides he´s assured that he is doing the much-needed job of “waking up the parish.” Which is not a hard thing for a young priest to hear; he may even see himself as stampeding souls to their salvation. What he may not see is that he stands in some danger of losing himself in the strangely engrossing business of simply “being busy”; gradually he may find that he is rather uncomfortable whenever he is not “being busy.” And, gradually too, he may find fewer and fewer moments in which he can absent himself from activity, in which he can be alone, can be silent, can be still – in which he can reflect and pray. And since these are precisely the moments which are necessary for all of us, in which spiritually we grow, in which, so to speak, we maintain and enrich the connection with God, then the loss of such moments is grave and perilous. Particularly so for a priest – particularly for a priest who suddenly finds that he can talk more easily to a parish committee than he can to God. Something within him will have atrophied from disuse; something precious, something vital. It will have gone almost without his knowing it, but one day, in a great crisis, say, he will not reach for it – and it will not be there. And then… then he may find that the distance between the poles is not so great a distance after all…