Charlie was 12, and while his father waited at the top of the stoop, outside the large, dark door of St. Martins, Charles was content to stand in the grass. The church sat in the middle of downtown. On either side of it were four lanes of traffic, four headed north and four headed south. Together the church campus and the streets served to create an opening among the downtown buildings, allowing the young Charles a view north to an unobstructed sky.

It was a hot July day, and while the sky directly north of him was blue and cloudless, a large line of storms were beginning to fire. He could see thunderheads quickly billowing on either side of the clear patch ahead of him, poking out from the tall buildings of the downtown skyline which framed his view. Down the backside of the west thunderhead glimmered a shimmering silver sprung from the sun behind it, as though a lightning bolt had got caught and hung along its edge. The upper reaches of the east cloud were in full sunlight.

The boy stood fascinated by the scene before him and took it all in, the expansion, the juxtaposition of the light and dark, and the absence of all in the clear blue expanse at the center. In the seconds before the door opened, his father, Francis, turned to look at him, saw where his son’s gaze was, and had his eyes join in. As they did, they were drawn further and further in, until they became focused solely on the mad billowing of the clouds.

How unearthly, he thought. It hardly looks real.

Yet he knew it was real, and that the realness of it had been present many times.  And many times had he neglected to take the time to look.

“Hello, Red,” said the aged priest as the door swung open and Francis turned back to where it used to be. “I see you’ve brought someone along with you. Hello, Charles.”

The boy was small for his age. He wore glasses, and though they were wire rimmed, it still looked like his ears would fail under their pressure and send them slipping down the long, slender slope of his nose. The priest may have called him Charles, but his father still called him Charlie. His mother called him seldom, though frequently, when she did, she had been drinking.

His mother had drank for as long as he could remember, and he knew if he could remember back farther she be drinking even then.

“Well come on in, Charles. I just got done with Wednesday evening mass. I’m about talked out by now, perhaps you could do some of it for me. How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

“I should think a young man of twelve would have all kinds of things to talk about. We will be just fine, Red. I’ll see you in an hour.”

Along one end of the sacristy ran an old church pew and drawn up next to it was an old dining room chair with a cane seat. Tom chose the pew, and the priest chose the other.

“Did your father tell you why he wanted us to talk, Charlie?”

“Yes. He wants me to talk to you about my mother.”

“Do you want to talk about your mother?”

The boy shrugged his shoulders and looked at his shoes. “Yes. We could, I suppose.”

“Yes, well if you want to talk to me about your mother, then you should think of talking to me as talking to a friend, Charlie. Someday I might be that to you, if you wanted. Of course there are people who think all priests ought to be their friends. They forget we are just like everyone else.” Then, after pausing and looking over his shoulder, he dryly added with a wink, “There’s even one or two I can’t stand myself.”

Charles smiled. So did the old man.

“I might give you my thoughts as we go along, but they are only my thoughts, Charles. You’ll find it’s the tendency of the old to give their thoughts to the young. I don’t know what we do it for. I figure at my age I’ve wore them all out, and what good are old, worn out thoughts? Perhaps they will fit together with yours, or perhaps they’ll just fall straight out of my mouth to the floor. It’s of no matter.  The latter has happened many times, quite a few of them have been right back here.  I suspect the floor is used to it by now.

As we go along, I want you to remember one thing. If things seem particularly overwhelming, or difficult for you to make sense of, there are others you can talk to who might be better able to relate to a young man of your age, than this old man, who’s never been married and has no children of his own.”

At that remark Charles looked back up at the slate blue eyes across from him and dropped down to the square jaw sitting just above the white collar. The mouth above it, which had been parallel to this jaw, broke into a slight smile. Charles smiled a second time.

“If you decided you want to talk to someone like a therapist, someone who has training in these matters, I can help you with that. There is no shame in it, and I know some good ones.”

“Okay.”

“Well then, Charlie, tell me, why did your father feel you and I should speak?”

“It’s not much of a story really. Last Monday I was supposed to spend the afternoon with Mom. Dad was there when she came for me, and he thought he could smell that she had been drinking. He apologized, but told her that I couldn’t go with her. She asked why not, and Dad told her and said it wouldn’t be safe for me to get in the car.”

“Was your father angry?”

“No. He said it all in his very matter of fact way.”

“How did your mother respond?”

“She’s the one that got angry. She said it was her time to see me, and Dad was just making an excuse so she couldn’t. Dad invited her to spend the time at our house, and she said he had lost his mind if he thought she was ever going to step back in there again. Dad said he wasn’t denying her the opportunity to see me, but he wasn’t going to let me to get into a car with her. Anyway it ended with Mom saying if he didn’t let me go she was going to call the police.”

“Did she?”

“Yes.”

“What happened next?”

“They wound up arresting her in the driveway for drunk driving.”

“Not exactly how your mother envisioned things, I suppose.”

Again he saw the corner of his mouth lift into a slight smile, but Charlie didn’t return it.

“No.”

“Have you spoke with your mother since?”

“Yes.”

“Did the two of you talk about what happened?” Charles nodded. “What did she tell you?”

“She told me the cops didn’t know what they were doing and how they had just taken Dad’s word for everything. She said she had hired a lawyer, and somebody was going to have to pay for all of this.”

“I see. Well, what do you think of all of that?”

“I guess I wouldn’t expect her to say anything different, Father.”

“And the rest of it? How do you feel about that?”

“I didn’t want to go anyway, Father.  As far as the rest of it, I wish a lot of things were different.”

“Well there is no problem with that, Charles. Do you think your mother might feel the same way?”

“No. It’s what she wants.”

“Are you sure about that, Charles?”

“Yes. It’s been like this forever.”

“Hmm. Sometime I need to tell you about all the horrible parts about me that have been that way forever too.”

“But you are a priest.”

“There you go, Charlie, thinking we are different than everyone else. Do you know who the first drinker in the Bible was?”

“No.”

“Noah.”

“Noah?”

“Noah. He gathers everyone and everything up, gets them on the boat, and sails and sails until he hits dry land, never once questioning God. The boat must have smelled like a zoo, and why that never drove him to drink is beyond me,” said the priest with a twinkle in his eye.

“What drove him to drink then?”

“The Bible doesn’t exactly say. Some speculate he was wondering whether or not he was any different than all of those men, women, and children who drowned. Personally, I think that is a compliment to old Noah. Usually we reassure ourselves of our own righteousness, don’t you think?

As I said, the Bible doesn’t mention Noah’s thoughts on this, but it does mention another story right before his drinking.”

“What story is that, Father?”

“Well the author tells us that God had already decided in His heart never to destroy the world again, but our man Noah doesn’t know that. All God tells Noah is that He won’t do it by a flood again, and then He adds that as a sign He will place His war bow in the sky to serve as a reminder.

It had to have been unsettling to Noah to think God would need a reminder. More unsettling was that the reminder, a rainbow, only comes once the rain is over. And more unsettling still is the fact that some translations seem to have God saying to Noah, ‘Oops.’ God seems to be having a little fun at Noah’s expense. Noah fails to see the humor in it.

What do you think Noah wanted?”

“What we all want, I suppose.  A better promise and perhaps a better justification for what had happened.”

“A promise about what?”

“About what the future will be like and that what had happened in the past won’t happen again. We all want that, Charles, and more often than not, we are all denied it. As near as I can tell, that can drive good people to drink.”

“Well it’s wrong, Father.”

“Charlie, I’ve heard a lot of confessions back here in my time, an untold number. Many confess the same things over and over again all the time I’ve been here.”

“Well they need to quit doing whatever it is that they are doing, Father.”

“You’ll find out it’s harder than it looks. But you are right, they haven’t, but they know it. It bugs the hell out of them.  God bless them, Charlie. They’ve taken the terms “right and wrong” and instead of applying them to others, they applied them to themselves.

Do you know what ‘relativism’ is Charles?  They say it is the thought that there is no right and a wrong anymore. I wonder if that is any less relative than all the time we have spent using the actions of others to define those terms for us? We’ve been doing that for years, I think, and the Pharisees for years before us.

Now you think you know what’s in your mother’s heart, and that this gives you license to judge her. I’ve never spoken with your mother, but my experience, back here in this room, is that rarely do we know what lies locked up in the heart of another. In that light, perhaps we ought to have some compassion for old Noah, ‘the only righteous man of his time,’ the Bible tell us, and perhaps we could find some for your mother.”

“But there is wrong, Father.”

“Oh most assuredly, Charles. There is wrong.  Sometimes I think that’s what the other great sea story of the Bible is about. You may think your mother is hell on wheels, Charles, but she’s got nothing on the old Assyrians.”