Dedicated to the late Father Jack Kelly, whose quiet paternal presence and love of learning was a blessing to my life.

***

Cleaning out a priest’s house

Is a strange thing.

I am like a sheep

Who finds the shepherd

Gone far away,

On a journey he alone can make.

The crook is leaned up

And the hat tossed aside

In the old pen,

And the gate is open.

I wonder if he’ll ever return

To smell the fresh hay

And musty books.

But he was old,

And ill.

No,

He will not come back again.

That’s why I was called over,

To clean out his things.

If not me, then who?

They’ll just be gotten rid of,

Sold off at some parish sale.

Will the buyers know the man?

He was a priest—

Yes, they’ll know that much.

But what of the man?

I did not know him well,

But I knew him long.

We were neighbors,

Exchanging brief smiles

And distant waves.

Yet here I am,

And he is gone,

As the twilight creeps in

And the house grows cold.

I must wear a coat and hat,

Keeping hands within pockets.

Everything feels empty,

Like a dark night of the soul,

Or Holy Saturday,

When Christ lay bound unto death

And the world was mute.

No,

I did not know him well.

Yet fingering his books,

The soul-prints burn my fingertips,

Of priest, of man, of shepherd.

And here I am alone,

A sheep.

And his books are passed to me.

Yes, books…

The wisdom of the Church,

Through early suffering

And present scandal.

We wonder where it will end

As we shape a new course

Through this millennia.

We are the Church,

Shepherd and sheep alike,

Seeking and stumbling,

Fumbling,

Unfolding,

Evolving,

Repenting.

A lonely, sacred seal

On all of us, a priestly people,

All in a fusion of blood…

Lamb’s blood,

God’s blood.

The sheep are bleating

In the meadow,

Across the road.

But inside this house,

There is silence.

It feels like a shell,

Creatureless.

Is there meaning to it all,

The coming and the going?

Even consecrated hands

Must tremble and grow still.

Yet the current of decay

Seems to breed within it

Some secret life,

A cavern, a chasm,

Breath, deeper than breath,

Closer than consciousness,

That which is,

That which is not;

The seen,

The unseen.

This little house,

And the darkness outside,

And the crook in the corner,

And the ewes with their lambs,

All drawn together

In the same Mystery

Of falling and rising.

And here I am, young and untried,

With the books under my arm,

The chill air tingling in my nostrils

And turning my breath to fog.

I’m stepping out now,

Carrying him with me.

He and I—shepherd and sheep,

Bound by this running vein

Beneath the surface of space and time,

And we go forth now,

We, the Church,

Born in us, not dying in us,

To change the landscape of the World.