From Route 9 below, it looks like the shrine of St. Howard Johnson. Institutional, rectangular, with a huge tetrapod water tower: the ultimate baptismal font. My car engine misses up the steep hill, anticlerical and unwilling. The Friars’ Gift Shop yet; arrows pointing to it. I think of indulgences, relics—ten thousand sacred big toe bones of Saint Sebastian the Bullseye. Shelved here on display, crucifixes in several calibers: slim .22s, neck-bowing howitzers. A going-out-of-business sale on St. Christopher medals, six for a dollar. Plastic Jesuses with magnets on their footsoles to bless your rear-view mirror. And a regiment of black Sts. Martin de Porres, who broke the hagi-archic color line. Bayberry candles, scented soap, Trappist jellies: the hardware of every holy place from Santa’s Workshop to the Baseball Museum. I am somewhat put off. Graymoor seems about as otherworldly as Colonel Sanders’ Fried Chicken franchise.
But as you penetrate, get into the brushwork of Graymoor, a good peacefulness winds along crazy paths around you. I am here because of an ad in the Daily News, on a page whose obverse promotes Deep Throat and Glorified Strip Tease!! It’s in free-verse form: “Are you interested/In the possibility of being more you?/Our Mountain isn’t all that steep/And allows you to move out/In different directions./We’re ecumenists, missionaries,/Innkeepers of a sort, too—Vocation Director, Franciscan Friars of the Atonement.” The “innkeeper” tag line pleases me; also the fine gall of a monastic order recruiting like the New Army. I get out, lock the car door: and notice my keys dangling in the ignition. I kick fenders. The Lord works in strange ways, but this does seem just a bit beneath Him. I am wheel-less on the Holy Mountain: a retreatant by default. Damn Buckley has been praying for my conversion again.
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