Turning thirty-five was a milestone, a watershed moment in my life. My early idealism gone—faded to black, along with the stars of my youth, so far, so high—only God could see them in his invisible sky.
I hated my life. But as Steinbeck once said, “It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.”
So, my days stretched out in an endless line, so dreary and predictable, they became a gray ennui that dulled my senses and robbed my joy.
I wanted to get out of the rut I was in—get back to the old me, but that meant visiting parts of my past that were, to say the least, turbulent.
Maybe it was the restlessness of nostalgia or the need to rediscover my roots that drove me to revisit my old haunts on campus and look up my old roommate Jack Shepherd. I was convinced back then he was too obsessed with girls to ever enter the priesthood, but he ended up taking those final vows, leaving me wondering about my future.
And now I was left pondering if I made a mistake and missed my calling.
Oh sure, there were disturbing times in that old Victorian residence on campus, but there were comforting days as well—days marked by a tangible sense of the presence of God and watched over by the house don, Father Tom McKillop, who was always trying to rope me into the seminary, and failed—or perhaps, I failed myself.
Still, Father Tom saw deeply into me and perceived something all the preference tests and psychological assessments couldn’t detect—that I was called to be a writer. The poet-priest he called me, and the nickname stuck long after I left the seminary.
But the advice that ultimately changed my life came from another priest who eventually became my mentor—Father David Breton who taught a course on Religion in Imaginative Literature.
I can still see his toothy grin as he laughed at my foibles and can still hear his Brooklyn accent echoing down my memory as he rasped, “Don’t even try living the celibate life, Stephen—you’ll end up a hoodlum priest.”
It was Breton who wrote the letter of reference that got me my first job as a cub reporter at the old Toronto Telegraph, and from there I went on to be a feature writer and eventually a novelist.
So, here I was—in my mid-thirties and still unmarried—and contrary to the Breton’s opinion, I was beginning to think that maybe the celibate life was not such an unlikely option. But one thing was certain—I was at a crossroads in my life, both literally and figuratively, and as I look back now on the events of that day, I realize that Life was preparing me for the next step.
