Free Providence by Daniel Quinn

hands was to put myself in the hands of God.
    His enthusiasm for Freudianism was rather like a convert’s. He thought I should immediately go into psychoanalysis whether I was a borderline psychotic or just a kid who needed to do some growing up.
    I moved over to the retreat house, a miserable, depressed exile. The days dragged past. Father Louis was bent on shuttling me directly to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka. As I say, what did I know? I was in a daze, grieving, stunned.
    I remember one day he dropped by my room in the retreat house with the air of someone making an obligatory visit to death row. I was no longer fully among the living. One day the abbot stopped me in the hall, and Ithought he was going to wish me well or to tell me he was sorry things hadn’t worked out for me, but no, he just wanted to make sure I understood I couldn’t use the monastery to hide from the draft; I had to get in touch with the Selective Service as soon as I got home. I told him I understood that, and he turned and walked away without another word.
    When the next retreat broke up on Palm Sunday, I got a ride with one of the retreatants back to the airport. He was clearly eaten up with curiosity about me, about life inside the monastery, and of course especially about why I was leaving. I was not forthcoming. He said he guessed it must be a very tough life. I said, “Yeah.”
    That night I checked into a hotel in Topeka, Kansas. In the morning I reported to the clinic for a battery of tests, which I’m sure laid bare in new and wonderful ways everything I’ve told you and more. The high point came a couple days later, when one of the staff arrived with a clipboard to gouge out the sort of specifics that the tests couldn’t provide. He knew the weak points and sore spots, knew where to probe for the terrors and doubts that I’d hidden from everyone.
    I could have told him to get lost, but I didn’t realize that. In my simpleminded fashion, I still imagined I was traveling under orders from God, and if God wanted this psychiatrist to invade my inner space, all I could do was submit. I submitted. He spent some two days tearing me apart to see what was festering inside.
    Meanwhile my father was driving down from Omaha to collect me, and he was scheduled to arrive late in the afternoon of the second day. Naturally he was paying forall this, which made him the client. It was understood that the psychiatrist would make his report and his recommendations to Bert, then it would be over.
    “But you’re not going to tell my father all this stuff, all this stuff we’ve been talking about.”
    The psychiatrist assured me that he wasn’t going to do that.
    Well, of course he did. That almost goes without saying, doesn’t it? He didn’t hold back anything. The doctor knows best, after all, and, as I say, Dad was the client, not me. I just sat there like a drooling moron, my ears crimson, while he pumped it all out.
    I can’t imagine what we talked about in the car going home. Maybe we didn’t talk at all. I thankfully have no memory at all of what happened next or of the weeks that followed.

E IGHT
             
Yes, that’s certainly
the question. How could I reconcile the hour of sight that I’d been given at Gethsemani with what followed? I couldn’t. It simply didn’t make any sense. Here’s the way I was thinking about it: God wanted me to say yes to the monastic life, and then he kicked me out. It made no sense in those terms and still makes no sense in those terms. It took me thirty years of searching to find the terms in which it does make sense, and we’ll get to that in its proper place in the story.…
    No, I’d rather not give you any hints at this point. Well, I’ll give you this one hint. I’ve avoided the word
vision
to describe what happened, because what I experienced was not “a vision” in the sense of … This was not a
Christian
vision. I didn’t have a glimpse of heaven or ofthrongs of angels or