Street lamps circled the city blocks like lights on a Christmas tree. The snow, silent and soft, swirled amid steeples and tenements. It was around 3 AM. Stretched out below, a Midwest metropolis had been transformed into a Victorian village. 

I was on night shift in a police cruiser with an officer named Holt. We were parked at the edge of a city park. I was a seminarian at the time and a volunteer chaplain. Earlier that night, Holt and I were called to rundown apartment. The door, decorated for Christmas, was ajar. Inside the kitchen, a man with a maniac grin and knife in hand, was slicing the muscles of his left arm. He screamed like a cat.

With a nod from Holt, I led the man’s mother out of the room. Elderly, she stumbled, then caught herself on a doorway. Behind us, her troubled son was handcuffed and dragged away.

Flashing lights, red as blood, strobed the room. I gripped my Bible. “May I pray with you?”

My words fall to the floor. Like tinsel from a tree.

***

“I grew up down there.” Holt drapes his hand across the steering wheel. “St. Cyprian Parish.” Despondent, I don’t respond. “It’s a rough part of town,” he adds. “Still want to be a priest?”

My eyes scan the winter scene: white gauze staunching a wounded earth. I shrug. “My dad’s a farmer. Guess he’d hire me back.”

“Warm enough?” Holt reaches for a nob and adjusts the heat. “My dad was a butcher. Silence. “Had his own shop.”

“He ever get hurt?”

“A cut now and then.” Holt splays his fingers. “Should have seen his hands.”

“Same with my old man.”

My thoughts shift to a different kitchen, one just as bloody: my oldest brother stands inside the screen door, my father propped against him, arm swathed in a feed sack. My mother, frantic, on her knees, peels back the burlap. The baler knife has ripped the skin off my father’s arm.

I glance at Holt. “You had a good dad?”

“The best.”

“Same here.”

The week before the accident, my dad chopped down a locust tree at the back of the farm. He brought home one of the thorns: ten-inches long; smooth and purple as Lent. He showed it to me: “Luke,” he said, “this is what they used on Jesus.”

I turn back to the steeples and tenements: Coming within sight of the city, Jesus wept. “Long have I yearned to gather your children as a hen gathers her brood.”

Swirling snow. Screaming son. Stricken mother.

I clutch the Bible. The cover is pocked and faded. Like the scarred skin on my dad’s arm, it soothes my spirit, yet stirs my soul. This night my call to priesthood is sealed. Sealed in blood. In blood outpoured.

[ For reminders of new posts, please email Fr. Luke at highplains601@gmail.com]