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behaved like a saint. I trusted him, took a great risk with him, opened myself up to him, and he dismissed me as a fake. He gave me the kind of reply I would have expected from my father, not the kind of reply I expected from my spiritual director. It hurt me.
    But it didn’t matter as deeply that day as it would have the day before. I had said my yes. I was at Gethsemani to stay.
    This marked the beginning of a new phase of life at Gethsemani, though it lasted only a very short time—a few days at most. I now went out every day with the novices. One day, as I mentioned earlier, we went out to weed a field of tomatoes. Another day, we went to the woodshed to split logs for firewood.
    There I was in my Brooks Brothers sport coat and gray flannel trousers, swinging a mallet. After an hour or so, Iwas literally staggering with exhaustion and my hands were masses of broken blisters. I was completely out of shape, of course. The monk in charge of the operation—not Father Louis—came over and told me it was time for me to quit. I, the little saint, said, “No, no, I’m all right. I can go on.” Two minutes later, I took a clumsy swing and broke the shaft of the mallet I was using.
    I carried the pieces over to where the monk was standing and said, “I’m sorry. I broke my mallet.”
    “It isn’t
your
mallet,” he snapped. “It belongs to the
community.”
    I tell this story to make the point that I was
learning
how to make enemies at the monastery. I had no idea how irksome I was being, playing the little saint, courageously and stupidly insisting on working when I was no longer competent to work, when I might easily have injured myself or someone else.
    The monk was perfectly right to rebuke me. I was thinking of the mallet as mine. I was thinking of nothing but myself and how much I was suffering and how noble and heroic I was being, but I was completely unaware that this
showed.
I was in fact beginning to reveal my true colors; once people began giving me things to
do
I began to implement my fundamental psychological strategy:
If I’m perfect, people will love me.
I knew God wanted me to be perfect; Jesus himself had said so: “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” I was certain that nothing is more lovable than perfection and had no inkling that nothing is more irritating.
    It didn’t matter.
    A couple days after this episode, Father Louis called meinto the little cubbyhole he used as an office and told me he had decided I should leave the monastery.
    In an earlier conversation, Father Louis had revealed the fact that he had only recently “discovered” Sigmund Freud. He knew this was an oddity for someone who had moved in sophisticated circles before entering the monastery, but he was perfectly open about it. He had missed out on Freudian thought and was now making up for it.
    One result of his newfound enthusiasm for Freud was that he had instituted a rudimentary sort of psychological screening of monastic candidates: Before admission, they were to take a Rorschach test. He had just now, he told me on this day, received the results of my test, which I’d taken in Omaha a week before leaving for Kentucky.…
    Why do I call it rudimentary? I don’t mean the test is rudimentary. I mean that using it as the sole measure of someone’s psychological status is rudimentary. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not suggesting it was inadequate. In my case, I’m sure it was more than adequate. Father Louis didn’t describe the results in detail, but it’s not hard to imagine what they were. I was a very insecure and immature young man, terrified of sex, incompetent in personal relations of almost every kind, full of self-doubts, and desperately low in self-esteem, and the Rorschach could hardly have missed all that.
    What the Rorschach indicated, Father Louis said, keeping it simple, was that I had some growing up to do. I said this struck me as unfair—everyone has some growing up to do at age nineteen!