Free Providence by Daniel Quinn Page A

of Jesus or Mary. There was simply nothing Christian about it. It was irrelevant to Christianity. Christ said, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and for two thousand years everybody knew that he meant exactly what he said. What I saw that day was not His kingdom. Not, not, not, not, not. What I saw that day was the
world,
and Christ never made anything clearer than the fact that he was not of
this
world, he belonged to the world
above.
    At Menninger’s they’d given me a choice of therapists from their list of Menninger-trained psychoanalysts all over the country, and I chose one in Chicago, because I had friends there—Jerry Long and Bob Cahill, who, like me, had given up on the Writers’ Institute and were now at Loyola. I’d missed a semester by going to Gethsemani, and I decided to try to make up as much as I could at summer school, so, after a few weeks in Omaha, I headed to Chicago to find an apartment.
    By this time I’d achieved some psychological distance from the ordeal. I’d had to stand off from the religious life, for safety’s sake, because I no longer knew where I stood with God. It no longer made sense to invest too much of myself in His cause. Now, in order to rebuild my shattered self-esteem, I had to invest myself in something else, which was writing. I’d failed as a saint, but—
    Yes, that’s a good point. I said a few minutes ago that I’d imagined becoming a saint was simply a matter of choice, something you could either choose to do or not,because if you loved God, God had to love you back. This had proved to be not the case. But writing was different—presumably. Unlike becoming a saint, becoming a writer is something that’s entirely in your hands. If you have the talent and the determination, you can do it. You don’t need to be loved, you don’t need to take a Rorschach test, you don’t need anyone’s permission. So this was how I planned to rebuild my self-esteem. Once again, I don’t mean I figured this all out consciously. I mean that I had by now ceased to think of my future exclusively in terms of sanctity and had instead begun to think of it in terms of writing, and this is why.
    Oh, you don’t have to remind me, I’m not going to neglect that. I was supposed to be in Chicago because a certain psychoanalyst was there. This was Dr. Zirpoli—Robert, if my memory is correct. My relationship to him was false from the start. I couldn’t have known it, but I’m surprised he didn’t—or perhaps he did and considered it simply as a clinical problem to be solved. With the possible exception of something like behavior modification (which is more a matter of retraining than of therapy in the classical sense), psychotherapy is useless for someone who thinks he’s not in need of it. If I’d been honest, I would have said, “Look, Dr. Zirpoli, this is all a waste of time. There’s nothing wrong with me, so it’s stupid for me to sit here with you hour after hour, week after week.” Now that I think about it, the chances are good that I actually
did
say something like this to him. Doubtless hereplied by asking me why I didn’t just walk out if I felt this way. See if you can guess how I would have answered him.…
    No? I think you could if you tried.
    I would have answered him this way: “The reason I don’t walk out is that my spiritual director thought this is what I should do. I don’t necessarily agree with his judgment, but it’s not my place to gainsay it.” This is what Dr. Zirpoli would have called (quite correctly) a rationalization. I couldn’t confront the fact that I didn’t have the self-assurance to walk out, so I blamed it on God—indirectly, through Father Louis.
    Zirpoli was a fairly strict adherent to the Freudian tradition. I mean he was totally nondirective and nonreactive. For example, if I had told him (as I probably did) that my father thought I was a queer, he would simply have sat there, or he might have said, “Oh yes?” It was up to