The Striker Lost in Waterfront Park
Please note: this fiction story deals with issues that may trigger some people who may have been traumatized by Christian arguments especially against the LGBT community. Reader discretion is advised. This story is not an apologia for those arguments.
Father Thomas Jackson was just enjoying the scent of the chicken baking. Figuring he would have to remove it from the oven in about five minutes, he reached into the drawer to the left of the gas range and removed the meat thermometer laying it on the counter between the sink and the stove.
If there was one thing his six years of Navy enlisted life taught him, it was safety first, especially since he was cooking for two — himself and his young, newly ordained parochial vicar rumored to be the smartest now priest in the seminary class of 1994. In the Navy, they called them strikers — young apprentices who thought they knew everything but actually knew nothing.
The door to the kitchen from the outside flung open and Father Stephen O’Brien entered with two other men who were overflowing with excitement.
“Father Tom, you should have seen Father Stephen at work, he really gave it to them.” Jim Dirsch spoke, like he just finished a mountain conquest. A college senior in the parish, he was an active member of the young adult group.
“Yah, he really showed those gay activist clowns.” Andy Carlisle a high school classmate of Jim’s now working at Jake’s Auto Center at the Jaxxson Mall, he was in the young adult group as well. “One of them even threw his soda on him, that is how mad Father Stephen got them.” He gave a thumbs up to the priest who, as yet, had not spoken. “He’s a hero.”
“Oh??” Father Tom said taking the cover off the pot with the rice just about ready. He moved it to an unused burner.
“Yeah, you should have seen how mad that guy was. He was ready to throw more soda on him again when we grabbed Father Stephen and pulled him away. He would have stayed, I am sure, if it was not for us protecting him.” He patted the young priest on the back as congratulations.
It was hard to determine if Father Stephen was no longer as enthusiastic and stood so stoic and silent because he did not like the praise or that anxiety set in over what his pastor, Father Tom, was going to say to him when the men left.
Father Tom took the pot of butternut squash off the burner and brought it over to the sink. He was not looking at the men’s excitement; actually, not even acknowledging it. Taking a plate, he placed there just before the men came in, he laid it over the top of the pot and turned the whole thing sideways, holding the plate firmly in place to let the water drain out the bottom crack between the two vessels. He called it his cowboy strainer.
Father Tom’s silence over their mission hung heavy in Father Stephen’s mind. The priest felt it like it came through his skin; the left side of his chest seemed caught in an invisible clamp.
“Hey, Fathers,” Jim said, “We will let you two eat, but thanks for taking us along.” He nodded to Andy and the two walked to the door, saying good-bye and stepping out.
“You take care, guys.” Father Tom continued at the stove.
Father Stephen stood quiet getting ready to head upstairs, oblivious to some of the soda staining his cassock.
“Supper will be ready in fifteen minutes, Steve.” Father Tom started, still with his back to the young priest and working over the stove and sink. “Why don’t you wash up and get ready. You better change your cassock; it has soda on it.”
“You are not happy about what I did, are you?” His voice was heavy and almost a whisper.
“We’ll talk at dinner.” Father Tom put the drained pot of butternut squash on an unused burner. Turning to the oven door, he let it fall flat, perpendicular to the floor. Donning two mitts, he reached in, grabbed the hot pan with the chicken and pulled it off the rack and onto the wooden counter-top on the island in the middle of the kitchen. He reached back for the thermometer and turned and jammed it into the bird.
The parochial vicar disappeared upstairs in silence.
“Fifteen minutes.” He called again to his striker.
Father Stephen approached the dining table in a clean cassock, he also combed his hair. More stoic than usual, he was intentional in every move as he poured water from the white pitcher on the middle of the table into his own glass and then grabbed the pastor’s and poured into his.
Removing his chef’s apron as he walked through the swinging doors to the dining room, revealing his suspenders over his clerical shirt, Father Tom dropped it on a small table against the wall. His collar was open with the tab in his left pocket. He took the lids off the various dishes and showcased his work. “We have chicken, rice, squash, with butter and gravy.” Steam rose over the butternut squash as the younger priest, silent, put the serving spoons in all but the gravy boat. The chicken, sliced, was displayed out on a platter.
“Steve, can you say grace?”
“Yes, Father.” He began the traditional Catholic sign of the cross by touching his forehead and then the rest of the movement. He finished by putting his hands together. “Bless us, oh Lord, for these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty through Christ our Lord, Amen.” His voice cracked.
“Amen!” chimed the pastor as he sat down putting a napkin on his lap, as if he was not going to address the elephant in the room.
Father Stephen did the same.
Father Tom noticed the young priest’s left hand was shaking a bit. “Why don’t you go first . . . oh and tell me what you did, today.”
He began almost trying to mumble his words, “I-I went down to Waterfront Park to preach against those people handing out condoms.” He picked up the bowl of butternut squash bringing it over to his plate. He was trying to calm his nerves.
“I take it they were none too happy with your presence.” Father Tom picked up the rice and began to spoon it onto his plate.
“One of them threw soda on me and was going to do it again, if I did not leave.” He spooned out the orange vegetable while speaking with more force as he and the pastor exchanged the rice and the squash.
“I hope you are not surprised.” Father Tom took the squash and began to spoon it on his plate.
“Well, I knew they were going to be angry, Father, but I never expected to have soda thrown on me.” He began to spoon the rice onto his plate next to the squash.
“Welcome to the real world,” the pastor smiled and looked up to his parochial vicar as he put the squash down. He then picked up the fork to serve himself chicken.
“They are really evil.” He said as he took the rice from his pastor.
“Are they?” The pastor said, looking over his glasses at his striker.
“They threw soda on me!” he burst out. “On a priest! That is evil.” His face began to turn red.
“Well, first off,” Father Tom put down his fork. He did not escalate his parochial vicar’s angry tone. “You were the one who went to Waterfront Park to tell them to . . .actually what did you tell them?”
“I told them that they were engaged in sin and they must stop this immediately if they were not to experience eternal damnation.” He raised his right hand and shook his finger in the air.
“Then one threw soda on you? I am shocked.” The pastor smiled as he reached for his glass of water.
“Must you always be sarcastic?” He looked right into his pastor’s eyes.
“The day you come into the parish and tell a story like that and the response is not sarcasm is the day you will realize you live in an alternative universe.” He sipped water from the glass, tipped it like a toast and then put it down. “Why did you go down there?” He leaned his head on his folded right hand, using it as a support. He wanted to appear as casual as possible. It was a technique to keep emotions in the room low.
“We must teach these people that they are sinners or when they die they will go to Hell and it will be our fault if we do not warn them.” Father Stephen’s brow furrowed, his eyes focused as he picked-up his fork and forced it into the platter of chicken. The fork cast through the meat made a thud as it hit the glass platter.
“Oh?”
“Now God cannot hold me responsible for saying nothing.”
“No, but he can hold you responsible for misrepresenting Him. Where do your marching orders say that you are to go to Waterfront Park and scream out about sin or for that matter that you are the new Jeremiah?”
“God will hold us responsible for our sins of omission, that is what Father Deodato taught us.” The young priest sounded like he was repeating word for word a lesson from the seminary, like a Navy recruit repeating the rules of boot camp. “What if one of those men got hit by a bus, he would be in Hell right now, but I would not be held responsible.”
“Indeed,” Father Tom remained casual. “You do realize those priests in the seminary never worked in a parish. They never said a funeral, they never celebrated a wedding, they just teach.” He said teach, almost with contempt. His face was still on his right hand. “Now, what is the first rule they are supposed to teach you in the seminary?”
“They did not teach it to us, you taught it to me.”
“Yes, that is why I said that they are supposed to teach you. It was the first thing I learned in the seminary, but that was way back before Vatican II.” he smiled.
“Why do you always bring that up?” He said as he gathered more chicken onto his plate. He appeared agitated.
“Because if you do not remember that rule, you will do stupid things or should I say, you will continue to do stupid things.”
“What I did was not stupid.” He sounded exasperated.
The pastor smiled, “What is the rule?”
“You really want me to say it don’t you.”
The pastor just stared into the parochial vicar’s eyes.
Father Stephen let out a sigh as he looked up to the ceiling in defeat. “Your grandmother knows more theology than you will ever learn in the seminary.” He spoke it fast and turned his head down returning to his meal.
“Yup! They never taught us why. We had to figure that out on our own.”
Father Stephen pretended to be interested in his meal, as he focused on the chicken and moved his fork through the squash.
“Your grandmother prays. She understands the love, mercy and yes even judgement of God more than you because she prays maybe more than you.”
Fr. Stephen was silent.
Father Tom put his right hand down and looked directly at the young priest as if he was teaching an important lesson to a well meaning student. “One of the men gets hit by a bus and dies. The mother comes here for the funeral by some strange coincidence.
“She is filled with tears at the shock of losing her son just outside of Waterfront Park and you tell her that her son is in Hell. The mother says nothing because she is in so much shock. Maybe you can add the pièce de résistance, that since God was too tired to conjure up a cloud with lightning in it, He chartered a city bus instead to kill her son as judgement against him for not joining you in your mission against an anti-AIDS activist. Then that grandmother who, unlike her daughter, is not completely incapacitated with grief, will be up one side of you and down the other. Every word she screams at you will be dead on right, albeit expressed imperfectly theologically and then she will storm into my office screaming ‘What is wrong with him?’ meaning you.” He pointed at the priest.
“But I am not wrong.” the priest looked up and spoke more sternly his hand were shaking.
“Actually, you are, unless you can show me a receipt from Hell that that man’s soul has been personally received by the devil, you have no right to say anything but what the Church teaches which is we leave it all to the mercy of God. Period.”
“But the Church teaches . . .”
“You have been to seminary and you are now a priest for, what, six minutes . . .?”
“Eight months!”
“Oh, right and there is so much Church teaching that you do not know that counters what you said and backs what I said.”
“Yes, Father.” He admitted his defeat and sat back in his chair.
“Our job is not to condemn sinners, our job is to help them know the loving Christ and let Him transform them.”
“But Leviticus calls what they are doing an abomination! St. Paul says . . .”
“Stephen, I have spent more time reading the Bible than you have been alive, You need to look at the bigger picture.”
“And that is?” he smirked.
“Look, you know my rule about reading the saints, right?”
“Yes, do not read words about the saints, read words by the saints.”
“Right, the saints made it clear that there is no way they could do anything without fostering a daily prayer life. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“What did I teach you when you came here?”
“Do a holy hour every day, even days off.”
“Right, because I know you cannot be a good priest without it and that comes from Fulton Sheen.”
“Ok?”
“You are trying to get them to do what even the Church does not demand of you, live a celibate life out of their own willpower alone without prayer. ‘Prayer is an indispensable condition for being able to obey God’s commandments.’ That is right out of the new Catechism of the Catholic Church. Look it up number 2098.”
Fr. Stephen remained silent.
“So you went down there to teach them of sin, but you needed to be Jesus for them.”
“Well, I was . . .”
“You were being obnoxious doing exactly what the pharisees did and Jesus said that they were laying heavy loads on them they would not carry themselves. You are demanding of those people at Waterfront Park to do the same. They cannot live a chaste life without prayer and friendship and that is exactly what the saints and the catechism teach.” He tried to speak calmly without a scolding tone.
“But . . .”
“But what? Stephen, you are what is known as dead right. You are right on paper but it does not work in the real world. All the saints knew God and preached for people to come to know him. They worked hard to show people the Jesus they knew first by living loving and holy lives. Jesus Himself came to embody what was on paper as the Word of God. That is not what you did.”
“But the Bible and the Catechism say that what they are doing is evil. I had every right to stop evil.”
“Ok, Stephen.” Father Tom’s tone changed to be more stern. “What did St. John Vianney say was the source of all evil in the world in his day?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, that is the wisest thing you said so far.”
“Did your professors teach you to be sarcastic all the time?”
“No, the Navy did,” the pastor smiled and held up his closed left hand. “St. John Vianney said that the source of evil in the world was lukewarm Catholics,” he said as he raised his index finger. “St. John Chrysostom said the source of evil in the world was lukewarm Catholics,” he raised his middle finger. “Pope Pius V said that the source of evil in the world was lukewarm Catholics.” He raised his ring finger. “Do you see a pattern here?” he put down his hand.
“Yes, Father.”
“That man is doing everything we disagree with, that is true. But he is putting everything on the line to do it because he believes in what he is doing. Many of your parishioners claim to believe the Eucharist is the Body of Christ, but they have not darkened the door of the Church since they received First Communion during the Ford administration. He believes in what he is doing for others. The saints would say, your focus rather needs to be on those from our own faith who claim to believe but do not live the faith. Understand?”
Father Stephen took a deep breath. “Yes, Father.” He sounded completely subdued.
“If you go back to Waterfront Park, you just walk through and keep on going. Leave the activist alone.”
“Ok, I understand.”
“But just your presence may open the door for some teen who is homeless, who got literally kicked out of his house by his Catholic father who last received communion the day the anti-Goldwater ad of the girl picking flowers aired in 1964. The father screamed at the teen telling him he would rather a dead son than a gay son and that kid needs to hear from you that God still loves him even though he is abandoned by his parents. When he asks you how God can possibly still love him, you explain it to him as Jesus would and then you point him to one of those street vans that do outreach to teens like him, understand? That action will be a greater seed of grace and bear more fruit than anything you said to the activist today. ”
“Yes, Father.”
“Good, now pass more of the butternut squash and eat up.” The pastor smiled as he picked up his fork.
His parochial vicar continued his meal subdued and sheepish. “I guess I have to educate Andrew and Jim to stop thinking what we did was heroic.”
“Yup.”
This is a work of fiction, any similarity between the characters and any persons living or dead is pure coincidental.
