All Is Grace_ A Ragamuffin Memoir - Brennan Manning [30]
After that, I would call Roslyn when I was in town. She would pick me up on her lunch hour, and soon enough, our meetings became as predictable as humidity in New Orleans: Get take-out po’boy sandwiches, head to the lakefront area of Lake Pontchartrain, eat our lunch, and then play what I have always liked to call kissy-face and huggy-bear. The word halcyon denotes a period of time in the past that was idyllically happy and peaceful. I remember those Pontchartrain getaways as halcyon days.
During one of our noontime get-togethers, we said the words, yes, those words: “I love you.” Foolish words for a celibate priest? Maybe. But as Erasmus said,
The greatest part of mankind are fools … and friendship, you know, is seldom made but amongst equals.
Roslyn and I talked on the phone a great deal in those days—on rotary phones with long cords. We also saw each other as often as we could, all depending on my schedule. I was basically speaking full-time and traveling constantly, so we saw each other only about once every two to three months. Our relationship continued that way for almost seven years. And then one day when we were together, Roslyn said, “I don’t want to see you anymore.”
It would be many years later that Roslyn would tell me that in the beginning of our relationship, she had promised herself she would not ask me to choose between her and the priesthood. She kept that promise; she never asked. But seven years is a long time for anyone to live apart from the person he or she loves, playing second fiddle to God.
But what could I do? I was a Franciscan priest vowed to the celibate life. Roslyn was a single mother. We were in love. If our lives had been a movie musical accompanied by a Rodgers and Hammerstein score, it might have worked. We could have just sung about a few of our favorite things—po’boys and New Orleans—and then maybe we wouldn’t have felt so bad. But ours was the classic forbidden love story, the kind always resolved by some version of death.
We decided to have no contact for two months. After that time, we would meet and talk. Those two months were hell for me; I’m sure they gave me a taste of what Roslyn had lived with for years. When we met, I told her my decision. I would take a leave of absence from my ministry and enter into a time of discernment concerning our relationship. In a very real sense, discernment is a process of finding the “best fit.” I decided to take a year away and seek the life that fit.
So off I went, once again, to monastery walls. Although not in a formal setting like mine, Roslyn assured me she would also spend that time seeking the right thing to do. I realize that discernment stuff all sounds überspiritual; the truth is that it was the longest, most heart-wrenching year of my life.
On March 12, 1966, an article was published in the Saturday Evening Post titled “I Am a Priest, I Want to Marry” under the name Father Stephen J. Nash. The article questioned the practice of celibacy among priests and was written under a pseudonym. The public response to the article was a mix of celebration and rage, which fueled a demand for the real author to reveal his true identity. A courageous young priest by the name of James Kavanaugh stood up, and soon enough, he took the seeds of the article and wrote the book A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church.
Here’s a little bit of context. About four years earlier, as part of a speech led by Pope John XXIII, nearly three thousand bishops gathered in Rome to “open the stained-glass windows and let in some fresh air”—also known as Vatican II. The changes set in motion were revolutionary, allowing the laity the freedom to celebrate the Mass in their own language and