A novel about a young man who follows his grandfathers and father into the ministry only to find out he made a big mistake…
Excerpt
1
The collar was waiting for me at birth. My father was the rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Dalton, Connecticut, my mother was the daughter of the Bishop of Connecticut, and my other grandfather–my father’s father–was the Dean of the Cambridge Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. Born after thirteen years of my parents’ childless marriage, I began my life as the heir apparent to our family clerical dynasty. I never really entered the ministry. I didn’t have to; I grew up inside it.
On the third Sunday after my birth, my father baptized me in his church at the eleven o’clock service, which my bishop grandfather came over from Hartford to attend. I was the answer to my parents’ prayers literally. In the sermon my father delivered to his congregation that Sunday he openly and unabashedly attributed my birth to Divine Providence.
I did not submit meekly, however. Once the Morning Prayer part of the service was over and the proceedings moved to the baptismal font at the back of the church, I protested so loudly I almost brought the roof down. Later my mother told me, “Tommy, you put on quite a show. You squirmed, kicked, and screamed so loudly we thought your veins were going to burst.” She and my father liked to tell the story because of its happy ending. Just when my father splashed water on my forehead and pronounced the baptismal formula “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” I promptly stopped crying and fell asleep. They all thought my sudden capitulation wonderfully auspicious.
I was christened “Thomas” after my father and his father and given their middle name of “Aaron.” Since Aaron, the brother of Moses, was the father of all the future priests of Israel, my full name–”Thomas Aaron Reed III”–was a permanent reminder of who I was and what was expected of me. Certainly there could be no doubt in anybody’s mind, least of all my own, what I was going to be when I grew up. The Almighty had not gone to all this trouble to make me an accountant or stockbroker.
My introduction to the Bible began with my mother reading me stories from a special children’s edition that had wonderful attention getting illustrations–Daniel in the den surrounded by ferocious lions, the Tower of Babel cracking, crumbling, and tumbling down on terrified people with bulging eyes, Deborah dressed in a flowing purple robe with her lustrous black hair, looking defiant with her fierce warrior eyes, and young David taking aim at Goliath, a giant so mean looking he used to give me nightmares.
When my mother read me the stories on the couch in the downstairs sitting room, I liked to lean against her and smell the scent of her bath soap. Sometimes when I was feeling especially cozy, I might rest my arm on her lap or shoulder, but she didn’t encourage that sort of thing. Once when she was reading me the Sermon on the Mount, I lay down and put my head on her lap, but she didn’t let me stay in that position. She told me to sit up and pay attention.
A few years later my father began reading me passages from the grown-up Bible. Since he had a Masters of Sacred Theology in New Testament Studies from the General Theological Seminary in New York, he was more of a biblical scholar than most clergymen. In fact, before he became a parish minister, he wanted to teach biblical studies at one of the seminaries, as his father had done before him.
Later my father assigned me passages to read and then invited me to his study to discuss what I had read. When I began reading more than he assigned to win his approval, he gave me longer passages until I was reading whole chapters at a time. While other children in Sunday school were reading simplified versions of stories like Noah’s Ark, I was reading through the entire Bible.
My father also gave me short passages to memorize–the Ten Commandments, the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel, and the Parable of the Prodigal Son–but I didn’t limit myself there either. On my own I went ahead and memorized the Beatitudes, the first chapter of Genesis, the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, and the entire Sermon on the Mount. When my bishop grandfather came to dinner, I would recite the passages I had memorized since his last visit. He was so impressed by my knowledge of the Bible that he recommended that my parents enter me in the children’s division of the annual International Bible Quiz in Jerusalem. I was willing, but my parents never followed through on his suggestion.
Both my grandfathers were leaders of the national church. Although I rarely saw my father’s father–The Very Reverend Thomas Aaron Reed, Dean of the Cambridge Theological Seminary in Massachusetts–I was constantly aware of his laser beam eyes looking down at me from his portrait that hung over the fireplace in the living room. Every year he sent me a birthday card with a picture of the seminary on the front. I thought my grandfather must be a very rich man to live in such a big house.
I saw my bishop grandfather–my mother’s father–more often. Since he was the Bishop of Connecticut, he came to my father’s church every spring to confirm the confirmation class, and after my grandmother died, he also came to the rectory for dinner every Thanksgiving and Christmas. I looked forward to his visits because he always came in his limousine that got lots of attention and brought me fun presents, like stuffed animals and racing cars, instead of the religious presents other people gave me.
While my grandfather wore the full regalia of his episcopal office–purple vest, cope and miter, staff, and ring–with dignity, I liked that he was not puffed up with self-importance. Although he had some of my mother’s reserve, it was leavened with a dry, mordant wit. I loved the stories he told about his days in the parish ministry and the funny things that happened. My favorite was the one about the time the funeral home delivered the wrong casket to the church and he didn’t find out about it until he was halfway through the service. Every time he told one of his stories he added a new twist. Even my parents, who had heard the stories many times before, found them amusing. He was the only person I ever knew who could make my mother laugh.
As the wunderkind of my father’s church, I would often overhear his parishioners talking about me, saying things like “Did you hear what little Tommy said on Sunday?” “He talks just like his father.” “I just love it every time he opens his mouth.” With my father’s flock hanging on my every word, I felt I was expected to say something clever or wise, as if I were some sort of junior oracle.
Everybody in town knew me as “the minister’s son,” and even at school with my playmates I felt set apart. Sometimes they asked me why things died or why things were the way they were, as if I had an inside track to the mysteries of the universe. “Why do animals kill each other?” Johnny Kelly asked me one day. “Why doesn’t God make enough food so they don’t have to do that?”
I didn’t know the answer, so that night I asked my father. “God’s ways are not our ways,” he said. “His mysteries are beyond human understanding.” His answer was evasive as usual, but I passed it on to Johnny anyway.
Other kids would sometimes ask me which swear words were OK and which weren’t. I would give them more leeway than I gave myself since I knew more was expected of me. After all, they were mere laymen–and junior ones at that–while I was the crown prince of the parish, one of specially chosen ones, or so I was led to believe. Once when my friends and I found a dead sparrow behind the parish house, we dug a hole and had a funeral with me naturally doing the officiating.
I loved animals and even prayed for them since they were as real to me as people–birds, squirrels, horses, cows, sheep, goats, chickens, geese, crows, raccoons, elephants, hippopotamuses, dinosaurs, and any other creature I read about or showed up on the grounds of the rectory. I even prayed for rats, lizards, snakes, and the cockroaches my mother and the housekeeper killed in the laundry room. And I always concluded the animal section of my intercessions with a special prayer for our family cat, Constantine. I thought that if I didn’t become a minister like my father, I wanted to be a veterinarian since I thought of them as sort of ministers to the animal kingdom.
The only time I ever considered being something else other than a minister or veterinarian was when I was about six. Emily Hodge, who lived a few houses away and was two years older, lured me into the large closet in the church basement off the Sunday school room and showed me how to play “doctor.” Since taking turns examining our respective anatomies was more interesting than what went on in the Sunday school room, I thought that exploring other people’s bodies might make for a fascinating career. So for awhile I thought I wanted to be a doctor, but that phase didn’t last long.
Read more about Last Rites and Charles Patterson HERE.
Copyright 2008 Charles Patterson. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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