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it’s done.
    By the third year of high school, I was not only a queer, I was something much worse: I was a
pious
queer.
    I was of course responding to needs much deeper (and far more human) than I knew about. I was of no importance to my mother, despised by my father, and loathed by my peers—and knew of no way to change this. What I did know was how to make God love me; I was assured of this; this was guaranteed. Being God, you see, he really doesn’t have any choice in the matter; if you love him, then he jolly well has to love you back, no matter how personally repellent you might be. This is all right there in the contract.
    You’re probably thinking this can’t possibly have anything to do with
Ishmael,
but it does. Consider this. Although I didn’t know the biblical story of Ishmael at this time—probably had never even heard the name—he hadalready become the model for my life. Abraham’s son by Hagar, a serving girl, Ishmael, along with his mother, was driven out into the desert when Abraham’s wife gave birth to Isaac in her old age. When my mother gave birth to another son in
her
old age, when I was thirteen, I too felt myself driven out into the desert. Hagar left her son to die under a bush, but he didn’t perish there. The cries of the forsaken infant fell on deaf human ears, but they were heard by God, who intervened to save him, and this is the meaning of the name he was given:
God heard.
    At the age of sixteen, I was already Ishmael, howling in the desert, yearning to be heard by the One Who Hears.
    At the age of sixteen, I was already Ishmael, howling in the desert, yearning to be heard by the One Who Hears.
    It was at this age that I came across
The Man Who Hated God,
not a typical piece of literature for a boy reading Latin and Greek in a Jesuit prep school. It’s the biography of an American roughneck who grew up (if my memory is right) in the late decades of the nineteenth century, became converted to Roman Catholicism in his thirties, and then (doubtless much to the horror of his family) entered a Trappist monastery. Self-willed, impulsive, and stubborn, he seemed (and proved to be) an unlikely candidate for the contemplative life. Nonetheless, after sufferings I frankly no longer recall, he subdued his unruly nature, made his profession as a lay brother, and in a long lifeattained great holiness, on at least one occasion performing what appeared to many witnesses to be an undoubted miracle. (By rule or custom, I’m not sure which, the Cistercians never seek canonization for their members.)
    If you know anything about the Trappist life, you’ll understand why I was drawn to it. It represents no sort of compromise between the monastic ideal of a thousand years ago and the realities of contemporary life. It makes utterly no concessions to modern religious fashions. These are things I could understand and admire.
    The notion of penance (which is certainly central to the Trappist life) has virtually disappeared from modern Christianity, except when trivialized as the little packets of Hail Marys and Our Fathers that priests dole out in the confessional. The notion of living a
life
of penance makes persons of a modern sensibility squirm, because they’re almost entirely ignorant of the worldview to which it belonged. They imagine that the penitential life was basically about people beating themselves up for their sins—and that wasn’t it at all.
    Medieval Christianity embodied a fundamentally heroic vision of the universe, with the earth the prize contested by cosmic forces of good and evil. They knew the earth was only a speck—that didn’t matter. It was the speck that God and Satan had chosen at the beginning of time to be their battlefield. This was no metaphor. A very real war was engaged everywhere, at every level of being. Devils and angels struggled unseen to win the human race into the service of one army or the other. Heretics were not merely purveyors of mistaken ideas; they were