In the outside world again, upon the advice of Father Felix, I had gone to twelve different eye doctors seeking their opinions about my eyesight, and sending these written opinions back to the abbot. Six doctors prognosticated that I would go blind, the other six said that I would not.

Meantime, Mother Amada of the Good Shepherd Home [in Ysleta, Texas] invited me to take up residence again in the one-room adobe hut in the middle of the cotton patch while I thought things over. Everyday I heard Mass at the convent and acted as her chauffeur in her many trips outside the walls. As the mother superior of the convent, she had many mouths to feed, and it was up to her to make ends meet. The sisters embroidered vestments and altar cloths which they sold for a pittance, and raised a calf or two for slaughter, which provided a little food. Their tiny farm was rented out for shares of the cotton, but there wasn't enough land on which to grow even one bale. With six to eight nuns and, perhaps, twenty girl boarders (nearly all coming from poor families), they had to subsist mostly on alms, or the generosity of the bishop, and it wasn't easy. Mother Amada could tell a myriad of stories on the miracles of God’s Providence and how it always intervened to keep them from starving. But, I suppose that the superior of almost any religious house could do the same.

Sometimes I had to drive her up to the Good Shepherd Home in Mesilla Park, New Mexico—fifty miles away—and while she conducted her business with Mother Divine Providence, the superior of that house, I would sit under the shade of a tree and watch the Magdalenes. These were so-called "fallen women" that the Good Shepherd Sisters had converted and who had joined the religious life. They wore the brown habit and scapular of penitents, but I wasn't allowed to talk to them.

Sometimes the assistant superior of the convent would come with us. This was Mother Pro. I suppose she had a religious name, too, but since she was the real sister of Father Miguel Pro, S.J., the Mexican martyr who had faced the firing squad for continuing to say Mass during the religious persecutions, everybody referred to her by her family name. All of these sisters, except for the young ones, had come to Ysleta as refugees from the persecutions in Mexico. Mother Amada had her own story, of which she gave me bits and pieces while I chauffeured her around; and years later, while reading about the history of the Cristero Revolt, I was able to piece together more of the story.

Elias Plutarco Calles and Alvaro Obregón both had been presidents of Mexico, as is well known, and were the architects of the persecution of the Church. Leon Toral was a devout Catholic and a member of the study group which centered around the nun, Mother Conchita, in Mexico City. One day, pretending to be a caricaturist, Toral approached General Obregón—who was then president—while he was sitting at an outdoor banquet in San Angel, a suburb. Getting close to Obregón, he proceeded to draw him, but suddenly took out a pistol and dispatched the President with a bullet to the brain. He was immediately apprehended, tortured, tried and, later, shot for his crime. Meantime, Mother Conchita’s entire group was arrested and tried, including a beautiful young lady named María Elena Manzano. During the trial, the prosecution accused the girl of planning to follow General Obregón to the city of Morelia, where certain festivities had been planned in his honor. According to the report at the time, she had planned to dance with him there and, during the dance, give him a fatal injection of poison. For one reason or another, her plans came to naught; in any case, the bullet fired later by Toral finally gave the devil his due.

Mother Conchita’s little group was accused of conspiracy to assassinate the president and sent to jail. Mother Conchita and the priest who acted as chaplain were sent to the Tres Marías Islands (the penal colony) and not released until the l970s. María Elena Manzano spent some time in jail in Mexico City, but was later released (the evidence against her must have been very thin), at which time she became a Sister of the Good Shepherd. I knew her as Mother María Amada de Jesús. At that time she was a vivacious woman in her early forties, a niece of the famous Jesuit writer, Father Heredia, and related to the Creel family of Chihuahua. In her conversations with me, she often spoke of her experiences in jail; but I, being entirely uninterested in history and not at all fluent in Spanish, never thought to inquire more deeply. Years later, while reading Casasola's Historia Gráfica de la Revolución Mexicana, I found María Elena Manzano’s photograph, and knew who she was, since she had told me her secular name thirty years previously. That was upon the occasion of suggesting to me that I visit the eye surgeon, Dr. Salvador Olmos, an old friend of hers in Mexico City, who had been a student of the famous Dr. Ramón Castroviejo in New York, the Spanish surgeon who had, along with the Conde de Arruza, developed a technique for transplanting corneas from the dead to the living—a pioneer in the field. Arriving in Mexico, that summer of l950, I found Dr. Olmos to be a very congenial person. I believe that I talked to him everyday for a week before he even got around to examining me. Then he examined me practically every day for the following two weeks before he even suggested surgery as a possible remedy. I was very impatient and didn't realize that things happen very slowly in Mexico and rarely with the rapidity and dispatch to which I was accustomed in the United States. When we had agreed that he should attempt a corneal transplant on my right eye, which was the worse, he suggested that I enter his private hospital in the suburb of Mixcoac to live until he could find a suitable donor. I thought that with a fifty-fifty chance, I could afford to risk one of my eyes to surgery. Dr. Olmos was a very kind person and always refused to take any money from me on the basis of his friendship with Mother Amada.

His small hospital was located inside a convent of nuns, or vice-versa, whom he apparently supported. It was a lovely little place with a beautiful rose garden inside a large patio, and the sisters treated me as an honored guest. Still, it was somewhat substandard to the hospitals in the United States. It was necessary for me to be close at hand so that when Dr. Olmos found a suitable deceased donor, the operation could take place immediately. I waited there a month, and then moved out of the little convent to a hotel in Colonia Guadalupe. I told the doctor that I much preferred to be operated on in the Hospital de Jesús, which had more modern facilities. It was probably an error to have left there, because it is written, "in whatsoever house ye enter, there remain," but the reason I did was because the food in the convent was by leaps and bounds about to hasten my demise, so I had to move in order to have enough strength left to endure the coming operation. The food had no visible ill effects upon the sisters there, who were no doubt accustomed to it, but on this American it was positively debilitating. I was losing more than I took in.

Finally, toward the end of August, I received a phone call from the doctor’s secretary advising me to make haste and go to the hospital because a woman had just expired, and her son had given permission for her eye to be donated for the transplant. The operation was performed on me under a local anaesthetic, and my eyes were then bandaged for the purpose of diminishing their mobility. For nine days I was forced to lie with my head cradled between pillows. At the end of that time the bandages were removed and the operation was declared a failure. The transplanted cornea had healed, but during the process had clouded over, so I was left without any vision in my right eye except the ability to distinguish night from day. I still recall the whole episode as the nadir of my career and, by comparison, all subsequent misfortunes during the ensuring years as practically events of joy. Nevertheless, it was as nothing compared to the suffering afflicting millions of people everyday throughout the world. I did gain a little necessary insight at the time, for which I am thankful. In November of that year, wearing a black patch over my eye, and a little the worse for wear, I knocked again at the monastery gate in New Mexico asking for admittance.

Dom Columban Hawkins, the abbot, received me with his usual warmth, and listened with his customary compassion to my tale of woe. He explained that since I had been out of the monastery for over thirty days, I would have to start the novitiate all over again, so donning the brown habit, I resumed my duties in the cow barn. There were new faces in the novitiate—some had come and some had left, and others had taken their vows and had gone on to the house of the professed—and I was again last in line as the newest postulant. But, it was good to be back.

Monks are, by training, patient people, full of faith, hope and charity and, therefore, positive thinkers. St. Benedict, in his Rule, cautions the abbot about admitting a would-be monk too easily. Like St. John, he advises the abbot to test the spirits, to see whether they come from God. The first two times that I had presented myself there, they had kept me waiting in the guest house for four or five days; this time I received a habit and was assigned a bed and a place in the refectory almost immediately. All the testing would take place on the inside. The attitude toward my eye and the potential blindness being over a period of time, God would reveal his plans in my regard. Even my old name, Paul, was still available, and I took this as a healthy sign. Names of popular saints are apt to be adopted quickly by newcomers, and then one risks being rechristened Paphnutius or Polycarp. When the abbot asked a newcomer for his choice of a name, he would be likely to receive it, if it wasn't already in use. But, if a brother, perhaps, scratched his head and hesitated, or wanted to discuss the matter, then the chances were that the abbot would choose the name in order to get the matter over with. And, it was not unlikely that the abbot had just put down a book telling of the lives of the ancient fathers of the Egyptian desert, and had the name of Agathon or Macarius running through his head, although the latter is a pretty good name for a monk. A name had about equal importance as your habit or robe; by the time you got it, it had already been used over and over and there was nothing new under the sun. It just meant that the old you was now dead, and a new you was coming alive. It would be interesting to know what they plan to do with all these similarly and like-named people in Heaven—somebody yells Paul or Robert and eighty million souls stand up!

My old job in the cow barn didn't last long. The Holsteins were mostly gone, having been replaced with the Angus cattle—even an Angus bull—and a few Guernseys. These last were nice cows, but the Angus lived up to the bad name that Brother Jude had given them. They were ill-tempered beasts and hard to milk and hard to control. Even the bull had a nasty temperament and a mean look about him. He was not at all playful like our Carnation bull had been. That bull, I don’t think, had never meant to kill the man. He had just been full of high spirits and loved to romp, and the poor man had just got in his way. But this new Angus had a look in his eye which plainly said don’t mess with me, and I didn't. Also, it was obvious that for some reason that I didn't understand, the monastery was getting out of the dairy business. The herd had been greatly reduced in numbers, and a new chicken house had been built to hold a great many chickens.

I know Brother Jude was glad to see me back. He met me at the barn holding a brand-new pair of leather gloves. When I had first come to the monastery, he had given me an old worn-out pair of homemade mittens and I, still full of worldly avarice and jealousy, asked him why he didn't give me some leather ones like another brother was wearing. He had shaken his head at my lack of spiritual poverty, and that had been the end of it. Now there he was with a big smile and an embrace and new gloves to make me feel welcome! I felt like I was home again.

It was November and already starting to get cold. In all the world, I don’t think any place can get as cold as a monastery. The snow would pile up two or three feet deep in those New Mexico mountains, and in spite of our heavy robes and thick underwear, I was always shivering. The church, the refectory, and the dormitory always seemed to be about 55 degrees Fahrenheit in winter, even with the furnace on. Dom Columban, the abbot, was a mortified man and probably didn't realize how cold some of us could get, especially someone who came from a climate where the annual quota of snow lasted three or four days before melting. Still, it was good for us, even though my teeth chattered all during the office in church, and I frequently found it difficult to sleep under only one paltry army blanket. The daytime was better, when one could get his blood stimulated by wrestling down bales of hay from the loft, or stand out in the snow chopping cords of wood. At milking time, before the sun came up, I often thought I would turn into a block of ice. Sometimes it would get down to twenty below zero and washing out the big milk cans first with cold water, then hot, would leave my hands cracked open, and they would rarely heal until the spring thaw. I learned a lesson about leather gloves, too. Homemade cotton mittens were not as pretty, but they were twice as warm as leather gloves when one was working outside in the snow. Silent Jude figured that experience was the best teacher, and it was. In any case, we were there for no other reason than to make reparation for our own sins and for those of the world—in a civilized way trying to keep the balance of power on the side of justice, rather than injustice.

I had not been back at my old job in the barn very long when one day Brother Jude came in and told me to pick out one of the rooms in the barn to use as a workshop. I chose the old harness shop and, after cleaning it out, began casting crucifixes and other plaster figurines of which we Catholics always seem to be so fond. The barn wasn't really suitable for such an operation, since it was always full of hay, dust and dirt. About that time the new carpentry shop was just being completed with a laundry room attached. Across the way was a small cabin where the laundry had formerly been, and I was allowed to move my art shop there. Somebody else was given my duties in the barn and I no longer had to work in the dairy. Brother Jude’s duties were changed, too; he was put in charge of the new chicken house and the egg operation and Brother John Joseph became the new submaster.

Changes like this in a monastery tend to be for the better. Jude had been a superb submaster and I will always be grateful for what he taught me. Brother John Joseph, however, was equally fine, but he brought an entirely new approach to my outlook on life. In spite of all the restrictions on personal conversations and spiritual counseling between a submaster and his novices, young monks learn nearly everything from them. First of all, they were our role models and we tended to copy them. Second, they were with us more than any other monk and it was impossible not to pick up much of their own personal philosophy. Brother Jude had been the walking embodiment of the spirit of poverty and obedience. John Joseph was equally the embodiment of spiritual joy and, with Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, of the "power of positive thinking."

I had admired him since the day I set foot in the monastery. He was a fine looking brother with a gray beard and the stubble of white hair on his close-clipped pate, and had been the assistant guestmaster when I first came to the monastery, so I had already had a chance to talk to him. Shortly after I had entered he had taken his solemn vows and, being then in his early fifties (having come to the monastery as a late vocation, as they called it), Father Master had been for some time holding him up as an example for the younger brothers to follow. Handsome, blue-eyed, and probably Irish, he spent nearly all his free time on his knees in church, and the remainder of it studying St. John of the Cross. As submaster, he excelled in diplomacy and tact, and radiated so much optimism, good humor, and charm that it was always a pleasure to be in his company. There was very little levity about him; nonetheless, laughter always seemed to be gurgling in the bottom of his throat waiting for a chance to escape when he spoke. He had a ready smile and a twinkle in his eye, and yet a rather patrician air of detachment as he went about his duties that made one feel that all the sacrifice and asceticism was worth going through, if only in the end one could turn out to be like Brother John Joseph. (Very few of us did, I’m afraid.) He had a special devotion to the Holy Ghost, and was always telling me about how God was a God of Joy.

His appointment as submaster came very providentially to me as I was beginning to have very serious doubts about whether I would be allowed to remain in the monastery because of my eyesight—or lack of it. His cheerfulness and positive outlook filled me with such hope that I tried to copy him in everything, even to the point of spending most of my free time in church and the rest of it reading St. John of the Cross. It was certainly a special inspiration by God that caused Father Abbot and Father Master to appoint him.

My little cabin art shop came just at the right time, too. St. Benedict’s idea, as set forth in his Rule, about a monk not being allowed to become a hermit until after he had spent a long probation in the monastery, seemed to have been unintentionally disregarded in my own case. There I was for most of my working day living in the perfect hermitage. I was rarely interrupted—only by an occasional visit from Brother John Joseph, or by the rest of the brothers who came knocking at my door when it was the hour to say our office in common. It was much superior to the adobe hut on the Good Shepherd farm. Solitude is worth nothing if it is not combined with the discipline of a strict rule, spiritual reading, and plenty of manual labor to keep a person busy.

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