A Friar's Tale. John Collins
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This latter theory certainly seems to make sense in light of what was written by N. John Hall, another good friend and classmate, and someone who also began preparation for priestly ordination after high school: “Pete and I … during our senior prom week, went to the Jesuit monastery at Poughkeepsie for a private retreat. Our act of difference and defiance was plain. While everyone else was living what for many were the culminating moments of four years of high school, we were hearing once again the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, interpreted for aspirants to the priesthood.”2 Whatever the reason, the future Fr. Benedict Groeschel refrained from dancing. All accounts indicate that although he may have missed the prom, he still had fun at dances, but was usually to be found behind the tables, serving drinks and snacks, or taking tickets at the door.
Pete seemed to gravitate quite naturally to jobs such as these. He liked to be of service in any way possible. He was never afraid of work, and was willing to take on almost any task offered. One of his early jobs seems to have taken him to the sort of place that is rather difficult to imagine Fr. Benedict ever visiting: a golf course. In fact, he actually spent quite a bit of time on one, never as a player, but as a caddy. During his high school years, Pete could often be found at the Essex Fells Golf Club on weekends and during the summer, golf bags slung over his shoulder, offering clubs to members. He also worked behind the counter at a store in Caldwell, where one of his duties was to prepare parcels for shipping. “He was good at that,” said Charles Kenworthy. “I learned how to tape a box from him so that it would never come apart.”
Youths are often drawn in many directions simultaneously, fascinated by a world that is still new, still filled with wonder. And the young Pete Groeschel was no exception. The visual arts began to hold a great attraction for him during his teenage years, and true to form he was not content to be a mere bystander or onlooker. “He loved art and wanted to learn to draw and paint, maybe even to sculpt,” said his sister Marjule. “That was something of a problem, as there were no studio art courses available at his high school. But Pete was Pete, and he wouldn’t let a mere fact like that stand in his way. He spent a lot of his time after school up at Caldwell College and Mount St. Dominic. These were girls’ schools and operated by the Dominicans. Pete worked out an arrangement up there with the mother superior to take private art lessons in exchange for cleaning up the classrooms and maybe doing a few other odd jobs. This was the sort of thing that was important to him. He was always curious, and he always needed to try things himself. To this day I think there are a few of the things he did hanging in Trinity Retreat. He rarely mentioned that they were his, but they were, and they were pretty good—and it’s not just because I’m his sister that I’m saying that. They were good.”
I’ve seen them many times, and I can attest that they actually are good. Yet I suspect that despite Pete Groeschel’s clear interest and talent in studio art, he had no overpowering desire to produce works of art himself—at least not in the long run. His real interest, I believe, lay in investigating the act of creativity itself, to figure out what it was that transformed a canvas and a few tubes of paint into a picture that was in some way satisfying and even deeply meaningful to its beholder, to learn how it was possible for a lump of clay to become a figure that appears so human it almost seems to breathe.
The creative act of the artist is in some ways a pale reflection of the overwhelming creative acts of God, and this is what I imagine really drew the future Fr. Benedict Groeschel into the artist’s studio. Like his fascination with science, Pete Groeschel’s interest in art really flowed from the same source from which most things in his life did: his profound awareness of the presence of God. For him neither art nor science was really a secular dimension of life: They were dimensions of life that could reveal God a little more clearly to us. For him, perhaps there was no such thing as a secular dimension at all; he saw all things as God’s domain in one way or other, and if you listened to him carefully you would learn that.
He loved poetry and enjoyed quoting it at odd and unexpected moments. I remember sitting with him one warm fall afternoon at Trinity Retreat. We were looking out on what was called the Millpond, a small, protected inlet of Long Island Sound that was a haven for seabirds on their migratory paths. Together we counted twenty-seven perfectly white swans gliding slowly through the water, each on its own path. It was a lovely and almost breathtaking visual image, a living canvas. “Earth’s crammed with heaven. And every common bush afire with God,” Father said completely out of the blue, quoting Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It was that attitude that drew Pete Groeschel into the artist’s studio, and it was that attitude that persisted throughout his life. And by the way, on that day earth really did seem to be “crammed with heaven.”
The knowledge of the visual arts that Pete Groeschel gained during his teen years informed the rest of his life. He became a regular museum-goer during that period and continued to be one as long as he was able. Even at the very end, when he was too frail to walk more than a short distance he could still occasionally be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in his wheelchair, being pushed by Fr. John Lynch or one of the friars as he took in the newest exhibit. He often seemed revitalized by such excursions rather than drained. It was as if the art he had contemplated had somehow given him a little extra strength or perhaps a little extra joy.
Of course, religious art was the type that drew Fr. Benedict’s attention most powerfully, although at times he could define “religious art” somewhat broadly, discovering spiritual aspects of secular paintings that others would miss. The Cloisters, a museum in upper Manhattan that is a great repository of medieval art, was one of his favorite destinations, and I can’t even imagine how many times he visited it. He was apt to spend hours there, utterly absorbed in the art produced by a culture that knew no separation between the sacred and the secular.
Trips to the Cloisters became a tradition for him with each successive group of postulants and novices for the Franciscans of the Renewal. He would guide them from room to room, from corridor to corridor speaking enthusiastically about the vibrant and beautiful religious art that can be encountered there at every turn, art that he comprehended deeply because it had been inspired by a faith as profound as his own. Occasionally he would stop before a statue or painting of Our Lady, where he would fall silent for a few minutes and then, as if he were in a church, begin to sing the Salve Regina (in Latin, of course). The postulants and novices may have been a bit embarrassed by this, but they always dutifully joined in, probably leaving the other museum-goers wondering if all these gray-clad men were performing a reenactment of some long dead medieval rite. Fr. Benedict of course never thought there was anything particularly odd about singing a Latin prayer in the midst of a public museum—at least it was no more cause for embarrassment than being caught with one brown shoe and one black one.
1 Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein, with Introduction by Albert Einstein (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1948) 106.
2 N. John Hall, Belief: a Memoir (Savannah, Georgia: Frederic C. Beil, Publisher, Inc. 2007), 63
Chapter III
A Difference in Taste
The Tales Father Wasn’t Given the Time to Tell
Peter Groeschel’s future was much discussed among his friends as their high school years drew to a close. Nobody who knew him doubted for a moment that the priesthood was his eventual destination, but many people wondered about, and were even perplexed about, the route he would take to get there. Apparently, he was rather closedmouthed about it, offering few if any real clues; and so speculation at Immaculate Conception High School was rampant. Some claimed his intellectual acumen made it obvious that he would find his eventual home among the Jesuits. Others believed that his talents as a public speaker and his attachment to the Dominican Sisters of Caldwell made it a foregone conclusion that he would join the Order of Preachers. Of course, he entered neither community, but apparently he gave at least some consideration to each.
Concerning the Dominicans, N. John Hall wrote that the young Pete Groeschel was seriously considering becoming a member of the Third Order of St. Dominic while still in high school; that fact certainly can be considered a clue as to the way Pete’s mind was working at the time. Hall also wrote that Pete