design of the traditional Capuchin habit is very different from the clothes men are used to wearing in the contemporary world. It feels very odd at first to have your habit constantly flapping around your legs as you walk, so odd that when you are still very new to wearing one, you sometimes feel as if the habit is going to trip you up. It rarely does, however, and over the years I’ve witnessed friars doing all manner of things including playing basketball in their habits without mishap.
I’m so used to the habit after more than sixty years that I never even give it a second thought, but I must admit that in the first few days and weeks after being clothed I sometimes felt as if I were living my life in a very large, roomy bathrobe. And, speaking of bathrobes, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Once we were clothed in the habit we were expected to wear it at all times—even in bed at night! We actually had a special night habit, which looked almost identical to the daytime habit except that it was made of a lighter fabric. The Franciscan cord that we wore in bed was also lighter and thinner than the regular one. This tradition arose centuries ago when it was considered a great blessing (one possibly even meriting an indulgence) for a religious to die in his or her habit, and since people sometimes die in their sleep (which might be a great blessing in itself) religious took to wearing their habits to bed. To this day, cloistered Carmelite nuns wear their brown scapulars at night and many Trappists—as far as I know—still wear their entire habits.
I must say that the nighttime habit proved to be a challenge to most novices. It certainly was one to me. The problem was that, as is the case in many religious communities, the novice’s habit was somewhat different from that of the professed friar. The cowl was removable to symbolize the fact that the novice has not yet made the vows that would bind him completely to the community. It was attached to a scapular-like garment which we called a caparone. The caparone hung down the front and back of your body, extending only to your waist. This presented no great problem during the day, as the ends of the caparone were held more or less in place by the cord around your waist. At night, however, the caparone seemed absolutely expert at escaping the cord. Thus both ends of the scapular as well as the Capuchin cowl were likely to move every time you did. At times they almost seemed to take on a life of their own, and often one end or the other ended up in your face. Other times everything managed to get twisted up in a very uncomfortable way.
I can recall many nights when I felt like I was locked in mortal combat with an octopus, and there were at least one or two times when I was convinced I would end up strangled before dawn. I remember it being very difficult at times to resist the temptation to simply discard the cowl and the caparone during the night in order to get some decent sleep. I’m sure everyone felt that temptation, but I also think that few novices actually did that, at least during the early fifties. Habits in religious life have been downplayed and even denigrated in recent years, but back then we thought of our habits as being very important. They were holy symbols for us. We felt they were a necessary part of the transformation that must take place within us if we were ever to become true Capuchins. They were the outward sign that symbolized what we hoped would be a growing inward reality and, as such, we were very aware that they should be an ever-present reminder.
It has been several days, almost a week, since I have tried to dictate a new section of this manuscript. I have had quite a few visitors in the meantime and, although I enjoy seeing people very much, their presence drains me. I find that I have less and less energy as time goes on, and I remind myself regularly that it’s only natural to feel that way at my stage of life. Natural or not, it’s frustrating. I have, however, been eager to get back to work because I find I enjoy recalling and speaking about this particular part of my life very much.
Reflecting on my days in Huntington causes a clutter of images to cascade through my mind, and they all compete for my attention. These memories seem like old friends who have been ignored for too long, and each one of them seems to spark others, to resurrect recollections long buried, but never truly forgotten. Perhaps there is some logic in the way this is happening, but I cannot discern it, nor do I care to try. I am content simply to enjoy the progression of such memories, to travel where they seem intent on taking me. It is like watching a stream of water flow by or clouds traveling through the sky, propelled by strong wind.
Right now, although I am in my reclining chair, it is as if I am standing in a large room, and I must inform you that this is no ordinary room. It is the refectory in Huntington, the place in which countless Capuchins took their meals for many, many years. It is the place in which I ate every day for my entire time in the novitiate. I can see the tables. I remember the assigned seats for the novices so well that I could tell you who sat where without a second thought. I can envision my own place just a little more than halfway down one long table as if I were there only yesterday. I can even see the plain food that was our daily fare back then. Let me tell you, no five-star restaurant ever had to feel threatened by our monastery kitchen. Yet the food was good and nourishing, if not particularly inspiring. Most of it came from the things we had grown on our own land. Most of it was organic, I think, although nobody would have used that word in such a way back then. Maybe that means that we were ahead of our time—in the vanguard, so to speak.
I cannot imagine the meals in that room without also hearing a voice. As is common in most monastic houses, there was a lector at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, someone who read aloud as everyone else ate in silence. It was firmly believed that in the life of a religious, time should never be wasted, and the mind must be focused as much as possible on spiritual things. So the custom arose many centuries ago of having some spiritually edifying text read aloud during mealtime. Meal after meal we worked our way through one book after another, listening closely as we ate (most of the time, at least).
Some of those books were captivating. Others were less so. There is one book that I will never forget. It had such a deep impact on me that it literally changed my life. Saints for Sinners was the title, and it was by Archbishop Alban Goodier, SJ. In it he told in a rather lively way the stories of a good number of the saints, and not just the ones everyone is familiar with. He told of some saints whose names were not well-known at all and even of some whose names were virtually unknown.
It was during the reading of this book that I first heard of a little-known saint, a wanderer, a tramp like the tramps whom I remembered from my childhood. These were men whom life seemed to have treated with exceptional cruelty—those whom life seemed intent on crushing. As the book was being read I recalled being a small boy, hiding behind a bush and watching one such man make his way down our street. I had realized at the time that he was different from all the adults in my life, and I had understood that this difference was a disturbing one. I can remember crouching low so he wouldn’t see me, as something about him seemed frightening. Perhaps on some level I understood that he was also terribly sad; perhaps I did not.
I saw other such men as I grew older, for they were not really uncommon in the late thirties and early forties. Often their lives had been destroyed by the Great Depression; often they were the ones who could not recover, could not go back to a normal life. They carried all that they owned in a bag or two. They had no fixed abode; they were always moving on, as if condemned to travel endlessly in search of what? Acceptance? Love? Peace? My mother would never fail to give them food, as did many people in our town, and they would never fail to be greatly appreciative. Some of them—more than a few actually—turned out to be real gentlemen.
They had seemed to me to be the forgotten ones, the invisible ones, the ones whose lives no longer mattered to anyone. To the world they were no more than leaves being buffeted from place to place by cold autumn winds. As I grew older, seeing them ceased to be frightening, but it started to become troubling and eventually almost painful. Why didn’t anyone help them, I wondered. Why did no one take them in as they wandered from disappointment to disappointment? Their presence, their very existence, seemed to me to expose the truth of our world in a very stark and unpleasant way. It showed how far we really were from what Christ wants us to be.
These wanderers became for me the mirror of our failure, of our indifference to the suffering of others, of our ability to ignore the pain that is right in front of our eyes. I wanted to help—felt a compulsion to do something. Yet all I could do was to offer them the food that my mother had made or sometimes, perhaps, some money. It was something, but it