My Decade as a Monk

For ten years, I was Brother Deece. I made the three vows, lived in community, and worked in church ministries. That was a long time ago, but those ten years profoundly shaped who I am today.

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Thursday, August 15, 2024

         Fifty years ago today, I took my first “promises” as a religious brother. Two years later, I took first vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Eight years later, I let those vows lapse and resumed life as a layperson. But those ten years profoundly shaped who I am today.

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         I was raised as a Catholic, and it was a big part of my boyhood. My parents were both seriously Catholic. We went to Mass every Sunday and celebrated all the Catholic High Holy Days – Christmas, Ash Wednesday, Easter, etc.

         Once or twice a year, the parish hosted “missions” in which some itinerant priest would come for several night to talk about repentance, or forgiveness, or building the church in the Third World. The sessions ran in the evenings for a week or so, forcing us kids to forego TV and after-dinner play. This was serious stuff, for serious Catholics. My mom took pride in our presence in the front pew each evening.

         Our parish was staffed by Irish priests – Boyle, Flanagan, O’Brien, McKenna, McNamara and so on. This suited my mother wonderfully, as she was Irish Catholic. Every couple months, she’d invite one of the priests over for dinner. This was a big deal, and us kids were expected to be on our best behavior. Their visits were always memorable; they enjoyed her cooking, and my dad kept the drinks coming. It was a perfect “getaway” evening for them.

         My sisters and I all “took the sacraments.” We’d been baptized as infants, but our First Holy Communions and Confirmations (by a bishop!) were huge family celebrations, with an occasional relative flying into town for the event.

         At the age of eight, I became an altar boy. (This was back when it was unthinkable that my sisters could do that.) An oddity of timing: I learned all the parts of the Mass in Latin, but following the Vatican II reforms the next year I had to relearn them all in English.

         In those days, my parish had a 6:00 a.m. Mass every weekday morning. From time to time, it was my turn to “serve” at those Masses. I often rode my bike to the church and back, but if the weather was nasty my dad drove me, then attended the Mass before bringing me home. I also served Mass on Sundays and holydays. Eventually I reached the peak of my profession – being excused from classes so I could serve at the weekday funeral of a deceased parishioner.

         Long story short, we were big-time Catholics and the church was the center of my family’s social life.

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         My sisters and I also attended eight years of parochial grade school, a strain upon the family budget but something in which my parents deeply believed. We all attended St. Peter’s grade school, where we each prematurely aged the Irish nuns in our own ways.

         After grade school, we kids were left to our own devices if we wanted to continue a Catholic education; I was lucky enough to get scholarships that took me all the way through college in Catholic schools.       

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Central Catholic High School, San Antonio

         I attended Central Catholic high school operated by the priests and brothers of the Marianist religious order. It was a college prep school that drew students from all over San Antonio. Over four years, more than half my classes were taught by either priests or brothers, many of whom I got to know well. I got an excellent education and then went on to a Catholic university.

         [SIDEBAR: Neither of my parents had attended college. My mother was Irish Catholic from New York City and had been raised as a subway alumna. As far as she was concerned, there was only one college in the whole world – Notre Dame. By the time I was eight I knew I was going to college; by the time I was ten I knew it would be Notre Dame.]

         I was very smart, a good student and a bit of a teacher’s pet. I was also an insufferable smartass, a point my sisters were happy to make to me later in life. My parents were content to grant me a little leeway about this but imparted to me a sense of responsibility for the larger world: “Of those to whom much is given, much is required.” The sentiment was much in vogue during the early days of the Kennedy Administration (See above: Irish Catholic mother)

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         When I graduated high school, I was not interested in becoming a priest or brother. I’d been recruited a little – a weekend visit to the local minor seminary, some dinner invitations to the Marianists’ residence at Central Catholic. But I did not see religious life as a future for myself. Over the next couple years, two things changed my level of interest.

The Notre Dame campus

         My freshman year at Notre Dame, I took an AP English class that explored the idea of the self and its development in modern literature. We read Siddhartha, A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man, and other classic novels. In discussions and essays, we traced the journey from youthful inculcation of social roles and norms to individuation, the shaping of a unique personality independent of those earlier influences.

         The class was profoundly influential to me. I began to question whether I really believed in all the Catholic doctrine I’d memorized over twelve years. I resolved to rediscover the faith of my childhood and adopt it – or not – as an adult.

         The other thing that happened was that I got a summer job as a camp counselor. It was arranged through a friend of my father’s. When I arrived at the camp, I discovered that it was operated by the same priests and brothers who’d taught me in high school. (Small world, I know …)

The Tecaboca property near Montain Home, Texas

         Working with these men allowed me to experience them as colleagues, and to participate in their life of prayer and community. This was very appealing to me, as I was both re-evaluating my boyhood Catholicism and wondering what I would do in my life. I began to think that one way to make a difference – “of those to whom much is given” – would be in religious life and started talking with some priests and brothers about it.

         The conversation continued into my second year of college. I was invited to become an “aspirant,” someone who lived in or near a community and shared in its life of prayer and service, but without formal vows. The only requirement would be that I would live by the house rules and rhythms. Unfortunately, to do so I would have to leave Notre Dame and transfer to St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, also operated by the Marianists.

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The sigil of the Marianists.

         And so, on August 15, 1974, I formally promised to explore life as a brother by living in a community and submitting myself to its norms. At the end of that period, I committed to become a novice, with a more structured set of promises and a daily life of prayer, work and religious instruction. The novitiate was outside of St. Louis.

         At the end of my novitiate year I made my first vows as a Marianist Brother. The vows I took were more solemn versions of the promises by which I’d been living for the prior two years – poverty, chastity, and obedience.

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In all the conversations I’ve ever had with laypersons about my religious life, the most confounding topic has always been my vows, and the most confounding vow has always been chastity.

         “What’s the deal with having to take vows?”

         “You mean you promise to NEVER have sex?”

         (When I taught in Chicago, I had a young student who was dumbfounded by my vows. Although he was still a boy, 13 years old and less than 90 pounds, he assured me that, “Brother Deece, I gots to have it every day! How can you live without it?”)

         Suffice it to say there is a long and noble history, stretching all the way past the Desert Fathers of the early church, behind the institutions of religious life and the vows that sustain it. At the heart of the vows is surrender to God and His will for you, as mediated by the religious order you have joined. A priest, brother or nun foreswears the joys and sorrows of intimate relationships, financial independence, and freedom to chart one’s own destiny that provide some of the richest meaning to our lives, all in service to a greater calling from God.

I willingly committed to follow that path although, as a young man in my early 20s, the vows were a source of suffering as often as of sublime peace and insight. Especially chastity.

         In the eight years I was “Brother Deece,” I finished my schooling, taught high school in Chicago and Fort Worth, did parish ministry in Fort Worth, and spent a year as a community organizer in San Antonio. By then, the symmetry between my personal sense of calling and the institutional priorities of my order had changed to the point where, on August 15, 1984, I elected not to renew my vows and left the Marianist order.

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         I am a very different person from the young man who took first vows in August 1974, and even from the still-young-but-slightly-wiser man who left the order in August 1984. I am no longer a practicing Catholic. I am now agnostic in most matters of faith. Even as a brother I had decided that my faith in the Church did not require me to believe literally all its claims – Virgin Birth, walking on water, the Resurrection, papal infallibility, etc. By the turn of this century, my lack of belief had turned into a lack of faith, and I consider myself “lapsed,” whatever that means.

         Still, the ten years I spent in religious life changed my life in remarkable ways. I learned the discipline of a daily rhythm to life (a discipline that’s come somewhat unhinged in retirement). I seek quiet moments of contemplation and enjoy solitude. I believe that a person’s life should stand for something more than their own self-satisfaction. I still believe in working to make the world more just (in which I take guidance from the marvelous social teachings of the Catholic Church), and hope that much of my professional career reflected that. I still try to cultivate and experience wonder in my own life, whether via a star-strewn night sky or in a conversation with friends old or new.

        I treasure those years. They were an important time in my life, and they continue to shape who I am, even with all the changes since then.