RELIGIOUS THINKING

A few months ago I got out of my morning class at the Catholic university where I used to teach and, as was my custom, walked to my office on the first floor. As I was coming down the dingy adjunct hallway I encountered an old man in a windbreaker, exiting an office across the hall. He introduced himself—kind, warm, “a pleasure,” etc. He was a Christian brother, though I don’t remember his name, unfortunately. He really looked ancient. I asked him what he taught (only later did I feel affection toward my naïve question). He laughed genially and said that he hadn’t taught in over 15 years, but that when he did teach, he taught poetry. Oof! That made me swoon. I felt I could share something secret with him. What? I don’t know. Poetry! Ha. Did he teach it all of his life? I didn’t ask.

We parted soon after our introductions, and he expressed sympathy for my onerous teaching load as an adjunct instructor. He added, paternally, that I could do it because I was a young man. I guess? I entered my office to work on a lesson plan for my next class at a different school—a public university, which means that God had graciously forgotten about it. My office was permanently voided of human objects—simply a desk, a computer, two chairs. I’ve never brought personal effects to any temporary office in which I’ve been stationed. Don’t give yourself the burden of leaving personhood around like that, especially not at work. I pointed at things on the internet; discovered a song I now like; had a few lazy epiphanies about topics I’ve convinced myself are important.

About an hour later I was walking by the campus cafeteria—always emitting its vaguely depressing high school echo—and encountered the old guy for a second time. Hello again, I said, meek and fluttering. We were crossing paths on the little, feudalish campus road. I lost my iPhone, he said, tossing his hands in the air while scuttling along. I can’t find it, he said. Oh no, I said, laughing. I laugh at everything. I expressed my condolences in a tone of voice I can’t really describe, though it carried something within it that tended toward care, empathy, and a loving irony directed at the world that’s purely a matter of accepting its daily, unflattering dumbness. Everyone having to care about their iPhone, not making seedy bets with the local mafia by accident, perennially forgiving the infractions of the dead. Things of that nature.

I went into the cafeteria’s single-stall bathroom and it looked like a student had purposefully urinated over every available surface. Depending on my mood, this would either incense me or transmit a silly, conspiratorial grin. Once, at yet another school, I went into a bathroom stall and someone had deposited two, large, sealed bags of gummy bears in the toilet bowl. People are always capable of things that seem unimaginable until you’ve witnessed them directly. Two bags of gummy bears resting gently in piss, like a plastic, lawn baby Jesus on Christmas morning, and I, its feeble supplicant. And then I recall: the only time I committed an act of vandalism was when I transcribed a 100-year-old Wallace Stevens poem next to a toilet. You can probably still find it in the men’s bathroom on the 10 th floor of Anderson Hall. It goes like this:

          I am what is around me.

          Women understand this.
          One is not duchess
          A hundred yards from a carriage.
          These, then are portraits:
          A black vestibule;
          A high bed sheltered by curtains.

          These are merely instances.

A country priest in a French movie says, Priests don’t have opinions, and I’d have to agree. To which I would add: it’s the good thoughts that don’t make conclusions.