Blue Miles by Father Thomas Esposito, O. Cist
This intriguing fictional memoir of Padre Samuel, a Cistercian monk, weaves together his tumultuous life story with reflections on his life in a monastic community. The monastic vocation attracts quirky, grumpy, hilarious, and sensitive men drawn to the alluring mystery of God. As Padre Samuel’s life shows, monks strive to become saints through the rigors of community life and by conquering the “old man” inclined to selfishness. This novel unveils portraits of Presentation Abbey’s various characters, both comedic and tragic, as viewed through the eyes of the elderly Padre Samuel. It brings readers into the silence of the cloister and introduces them to a monk who has allowed his suffering to draw him closer to Christ. Blue Miles is a prayerful testimony to the fierce demands and consoling mercies of the monastic life. Thanks to Ignatius Press and publicist Susan Nutt for the review copy and the interview.
Episode Links
“Blue Miles” by Fr. Thomas Esposito, O. Cist: https://ignatius.com/blue-miles-bmip/
Rush Transcript
Announcer: Are you willing to accept Christ’s invitation to know Him more intimately, love Him more intensely, and follow Him more closely, and then go out into the world and live His good news? If you say yes, then you could be the thirteenth apostle. Join Dan Duddy and Tom Caffrey, the odd couple of Catholic Radio, as they ride the radio waves two by two to share the goodness, beauty, and truth of Jesus Christ and His Church. And now, ladies and gentlemen, the Thirteenth Apostle.
To you our hearts their music bring, to you and him our voices sing, to you our love and longing soar, and you the chastened minds adore. And when the deepening shades prevail, and night o’er day has dropped her veil, our faith may not succumb to night, but faith in darkness be our light.
Welcome and Introduction
Tom Caffrey: Welcome back, friends, to another episode of the Thirteenth Apostle. We explore the good, beautiful, and true of the Catholic faith and the Church. This is Tom Caffrey. That verse was from the Vespers hymn, Deus Creator omnium, “O God, the Maker of all things,” and it opens the book Blue Miles, a monastic novel by Father Thomas Esposito, Order of Cistercians, a priest and monk of Our Lady of Dallas Cistercian Abbey. Welcome, Father Thomas, to the Thirteenth Apostle.
Father Thomas: Thank you very much, Tom. I’m honored to be here.
Tom Caffrey: It’s an honor to have you. So we’re recording this episode a little after five PM Central Time, a time that, if I’m reading things correctly, you requested so you wouldn’t miss praying Vespers at six o’clock Central Time, six o’clock your time.
Father Thomas: That’s right.
Tom Caffrey: Does that mean you’re missing Adoration?
Father Thomas: Our Adoration starts at five thirty, so I may miss the opening portion of it, but that’s okay.
Tom Caffrey: It’s okay. All right, good. So nobody’s thinking that you’re—not that I wouldn’t suggest this or hint at this—that there’d be any competitions or ill feelings if somebody’s not doing their due diligence, or if you’re getting fame from this book and it pulls you away from various aspects of your commitment to your abbey.
Father Thomas: No, adoration is optional for the community, and I do try to make it down whenever I can. But I am what I call a mediocre monk, meaning that I’ve hit middle age, and therefore if I fail to live up to the lofty expectations every now and then of being a monk, I can only ask for the Lord’s grace to improve.
Tom Caffrey: And I’ll pray for a long life so that you have that opportunity to improve.
Father Thomas: Thank you, thank you.
About the Novel and Author Biography
Tom Caffrey: So your story is a fictional memoir of Michael Andrew O’Malley, a native Nebraskan who enters Presentation Abbey upon his ordination to the priesthood, becomes— in italics, ’cause we, the suggestion of Antos— becomes Padre, Father Samuel and is the principal of this, well, call it a saga, right now. All in, it’s all in the context of the Divine Office as the title of each chapter makes clear, and a fair amount of the Second Vatican Council. Before we explore Father or Padre Samuel and Presentation Abbey, give us a brief memoir or biography of yourself.
Father Thomas: Sure. So I grew up in a very happy Catholic family in Omaha, Nebraska. So the setting for the novel is very much borrowed from my own upbringing. I went to the University of Dallas for my undergrad, and it was there that I met the Cistercians who have a monastery just across Highway 114 from UD. Several of the monks were professors of mine at UD, and the abbot of the monastery, an old Hungarian named Father Dennis, became my spiritual director for the last few years of college. I had had the hunch for a while that the Lord was calling me to the priesthood. I avoided answering that call as long as I could, but Father Dennis helped me to see that the Cistercian life as it’s lived here in Dallas, of teaching, priestly ministry, and monastic community was tailor-made for me, and I’ve been reaping the hundredfold ever since joining in two thousand and five. I was able to study in Rome for several years. I got a doctorate in scripture, and now I’m back at the University of Dallas teaching in the theology department. And then I’m also the junior master and sub prior of the monastery. So junior master means that I’m in charge of the formation of the young men who have made their first vows, but not final vows. And then sub prior means I’m the number three superior in the community, below the abbot and prior.
Tom Caffrey: It sounds like a potentially lofty position, unless there’s only four people.
Father Thomas: I need people. It’d be less daunting if there were only four of us, yeah. There are actually thirty-four of us in the community.
Tom Caffrey: Oh, wonderful.
Father Thomas: Twelve of whom are in formation. So I have nine junior brothers under my tutelage presently.
Tom Caffrey: Wonderful.
Father Thomas: That will expand to twelve in about a month when our three novices make their first vows, and we have more novices coming in. It’s a boom time in the abbey here.
Tom Caffrey: Wow, that’s so encouraging. I mean, in and of itself, it’s a beautiful thing, but it’s encouraging with the changes we know in the West which we’ve talked about many times on this program. So these pockets of growth are really wonderful, and the fact that I wouldn’t mind if you had a shock of white hair and were approaching eighty or ninety, but the fact that you’re not close to that is a good thing. So it’s just in terms of the growth, the vibrancy, and young people actually wanting to go to answer that call. And you said that you maybe resisted or pretended you weren’t hearing that call. And it made me think, geez, I wonder how many calls that God makes that initially there’s a resistance to. Perhaps there are others, but if somebody’s called to be an athlete or called to be a musician or married, I don’t associate that with any resistance, but I often associate that call with the religious life to be initially saying, “No, it can’t be me. You’re talking to somebody else.” You think I’m way off on that?
Father Thomas: I don’t. There’s something distinctly not natural about a supernatural vocation to the priesthood or to the religious life. I would say though that fear is a thoroughly human marker, and fear can sabotage a supernatural vocation quite easily, but it can also sabotage an adventure, a sacramental adventure such as marriage and other lesser adventures. I think we’re so easily inclined to yield to our fears that you can easily become incapable of fully answering the Lord’s call for our lives.
Tom Caffrey: You had an advisor from the Hungarian priest.
Father Thomas: That’s right.
Tom Caffrey: And does that testify to the value of having a guide, a Virgil for Dante? So you don’t, you’re not going through that. It’s easy to avoid the thing that you fear. You don’t want to go into those dark woods. And I have a spiritual director, and I’ve had for years. It’s been wonderful. Wonderful. And so I think that the value of having that mentor as you obviously had and I guess you still have, right? Doesn’t everybody in an abbey have a mentor?
Father Thomas: Well, ultimately, the abbot would be the overarching mentor for any monk, but there would be spiritual directors as well or confessors who help in that process. Yeah. It’s central to the monastic life that we can’t govern ourselves by our own self-will. Right? We have to give that over to the Lord so that our heart could expand to receive the graces He wants to give us. And we need a guide who has walked more of the road than we have to help us realize dangers or to work on good things that are afoot in your life.
Tom Caffrey: Yes, let’s not forget the good.
Themes of Memory, Suffering, and Formation
Tom Caffrey: Long before he became Father Samuel, Padre Samuel Michael O’Malley began life in the context of death and suffering. Experiences that would actually endow him with pastoral gifts and eventually, yes, haunt him, but a haunting that, in my understanding of your work, of the story, a haunting that would paradoxically enrich his pastoral care. He had to get through that turbulence. So in fact, you relate early on in the book some of this to the Rosary and its sorrowful and joyful mysteries. So explore that aspect of Michael O’Malley and his eventual formation into Father Samuel in terms of his childhood and in the storied Boys Town.
Father Thomas: Yes. One of the main themes that I was working with in the course of the novel is that of memory and the way in which our experiences and then memories of them shape us and can become occasions of grace, even in the midst of death, sin, and sorrow. So the main character, as you said, has a very difficult upbringing. He’s an orphan at a very young age. He grows up with an atheist grandfather, and he receives much education at a place called Boys Town which is a real place that does wonderful work for troubled youths. As he gains experience in the monastic life and in the life of grace, he becomes aware of the guidance, sometimes subtle, sometimes more overt, of the Lord’s hand in the moments, both dark and beautiful of his life, and in the image of a rosary with beads representing specific moments in one’s life and the chain being the linkage of grace was something that hit me early on in the writing process, and I thought that was a beautiful kind of commanding metaphor for an individual life. You can see the joyful mysteries, the sorrowful, and hopefully the glorious mysteries as an integral whole within the perspective of God’s grace.
Tom Caffrey: We don’t like to have a Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher in our lives, I think. I’m certain of it. Two guiding angels in Michael O’Malley’s life, loving, in loco parentis in a way, but they are kind of like his parents. I really took to them. In the chapter Lectio Divina: If humans are created in the image and likeness of God, and God remains incomprehensible, then it follows that we remain incomprehensible, even to ourselves. So that inability to know thyself is made manifest later in Father Samuel’s life when he attempts to hide himself from himself and from his fellow confreres, as he battles his demons. So that’s not all in one section. Those are far apart in your book. But when I got to the latter part, I thought back to that early part about the image of likeness and hiding ourselves, and I said, “Well, that’s what he did, and that’s what we do.” So talk a little bit about that.
Father Thomas: I cribbed that insight from Saint Gregory of Nyssa. That’s the source for the incomprehensibility of God, man as the image of God, man must be incomprehensible mystery to himself. That’s so true, isn’t it? I mean, we like to talk about our knowledge in terms of personality traits and strengths and weaknesses, but over the course of your life it can be scary to realize how little you fully understand your own motives and what drives you to act or not act in obedience to God or in obedience to your own will. And indeed, the particular demon that Father Samuel wrestles with is alcoholism later in life, but that is, I think, the result of severe disappointments that he experiences, certain expectations that he has for his own life in the monastery that aren’t met due to circumstances in many ways beyond his control and how he responds to those with the onset of alcoholism. I think is, to your point, a reminder that we know so little about ourselves ultimately, and that of course means that we must depend on mentors and the grace of God to light the path when we are so prone to extinguish the candles that would allow us to move forward. Live in the shadows.
Tom Caffrey: Yeah, I experienced that. I’ve done that. A couple of the nineteenth annotated retreats of Saint Ignatius, and you get to those parts where you gotta be honest and again, that was the value for having a spiritual director, a guide going through that and shining the light. A little difficult. So I thought there was some brutal honesty from Padre Samuel and you, Father Thomas. “Accepting my own history as part of the tender mercy of our God is at times a trial.” And then, “A priest cannot minister to those in darkness unless he himself has known his own darkness, his own poverty of spirit, his own desperate need for mercy.” That poverty of spirit—a good lifeguard doesn’t go down with the person out of empathy. Okay? But there’s nothing like the experience. I’ve said it many times, and I’m not unique to this, obviously, there’s knowing about something, and then there’s knowing something from experience. And that’s true for—we talk about, we’re learning about God, we read books, but let’s say we’ve never had a prayer, we’ve never, as Catholics, we’ve never experienced the sacrament. So in one year, you’re building a relationship with the thing or the person, and I think that’s clear in this excerpt from your book about, “Well, I may or may not be able to identify exactly with what you’re going through, but I have suffered, so I know suffering. I’m gonna help you go through it. You gotta go through it, but I’ll help you.” So, does that seem right in terms of the under-thinking about Padre Samuel and his work as he starts to work with other people in the community?
Father Thomas: Oh, definitely, definitely. An author can only write about what he’s familiar with, and though I personally have not battled alcoholism, I’ve been a priest for almost fifteen years now, and I have a certain pastoral experience to draw on in making those insights that come forth in the book. I couldn’t have written the novel ten years ago or fifteen years ago, right? It wouldn’t have been credible, it wouldn’t have had the authenticity, right? That’s a cheap word that we bandy about today, but I think it makes sense in light of what you just said. A priest does have his own weaknesses and temptations and failings to be sure, but he can turn those into grace for others, provided that he knows how to counsel people in a similar situation. And then a priest needs to have a large heart to understand the human condition, all of the noble dignity and beautiful destiny that is ours, but also the sad reality of shocking, scandalous failures and disappointments. But to minister to someone as a priest, one’s own heart has to break open time and again to be able to share the mercy that one has experienced, receiving mercy and then sharing that, giving that mercy.
Memory and Remembrance
Tom Caffrey: Earlier you mentioned you used the word memory, and at different parts of your book, different parts of the story, there was memory, which is more of a cognitive thing, and remembrance, and you obviously wrote the word remembrance, and in the Last Supper, you didn’t write, “Do this in memory of me,” which is most of what I hear at Mass. Now, I don’t have a problem with that, but I know the difference between memory and remembrance, and in remembrance there is more of you. It’s almost as if you’re going back into that and bringing something forward. Now, it was you then, and it’s you now, as opposed to it, and that’s in totality, not, we’ll say, in the head and the heart. Whereas memory, it’s generally more of the head. You can have feelings that come about those memories, that remembrance is also honoring. I thought it was great that Padre Samuel chose that word. When you celebrate Mass, do you say “memory” or “remembrance”? And then you can talk a little bit more about that.
Father Thomas: Well, I say what the rubrics prescribe when I celebrate Mass, right? Say the black, do the red. That’s the church’s wisdom there. And frankly, Ignatius Press asked me to use the Ignatius Bible translation for those passages. And so I think that is the simple reason is present. But I agree with you that remembrance is much more active and even bodily in the sense that etymologically, you take the members of some past event and you move them, right? You return them, as it were, to the present moment, and you reassemble them with yourself in view of the Last Supper, right? I wasn’t in Jerusalem in thirty A.D. for the Last Supper, but Jesus allows me to be present when I remember the Last Supper at every Mass that I celebrate. That’s a marvelous mystery. I mean, it’s crazy to think about, and that is the driving force behind Padre Samuel’s memories. It is an intellectual exercise, yes, because only I can recall those specific memories of my life, but there is grace at work in the remembering, both sacramentally in the Eucharist, but also in the sacramental way in which I understand my life as imbued with the grace of God.
Tom Caffrey: I think of the disintegration and integration because of how you described re-membering, so the members are put back together, they’re integrated again as opposed to disintegrated. And I think that’s, for me, it’s a beautiful meditation. It gets me more—I do feel like I’m, I don’t want to say reliving, I can’t, certainly not reliving, if I’m doing, let’s say, Lectio or the spiritual exercises, that’s the contemplative prayer where it’s not just a matter of putting myself into a scene in a gospel passage or smelling the smells back then, do I smell the olives and the olive groves and whatnot? But it’s actually I become part of the scene, part of the event, part of the passage. So tell us a little bit about “donuts no bees, pachem.”
Humor in Monastic Life
Father Thomas: I’m glad you brought that up, because the novel is full of humor. In many ways, yes, it is a reflection of my own quirky, eccentric personality, and that includes a lot of meditation time and a lot of humor. The “donuts no bees” was actually a phrase that a brother came up with when we were studying years ago, and it just delighted me then, and it delights me now. So I wanted to make sure that the laughter that is central to the monastic life was communicated at different points in the novel.
Tom Caffrey: You did a good job with that. Thank you. So yep, in choir practice, it wasn’t just the sound of voices, you may clarify that. Our bodies talk, they communicate in all sorts of ways. So yes.
Father Thomas: I was just at a convent of women, and one of the nuns had read the novel, and her initial comment to me was, “You men are so different than us.” Because there’s a subtle but strong influence of the farting, the smelliness, the strange burps that come after dinner when you’re praying Compline, that makes its way into the novel as well.
Tom Caffrey: Yes, I did. Sometimes I thought I was around my own brothers during some of the scenes in your book. I never thought I was around my sisters. I have four of them and three—I was either around my friends or around my brothers, never around my sisters or the females in my life. So—
Father Thomas: Well, that makes it a credible portrayal of male monastic life then. That’s great.
The Monastic Vocation and the Cross
Tom Caffrey: I’ve talked about and other conversations about looking at the two beams of the cross, and others have written eloquently about this. The vertical beam is our relationship with God, and the horizontal beam is our relationship with each other. And thinking about the passage in your book about which, from a purely secular point of view, the monastic life is wasteful, an abdication of one’s responsibilities to others, and that made me think of, okay, yes, the monastics are great with the vertical beam, but maybe not so much in the horizontal beam. Of course, I’m speaking in ignorance ’cause I’ve never been a monk. I don’t want to give you the answer, but I want to say this next part, I will probably be part of what you would say, where monks keep vigil while the world sleeps. So talk about that part of what is it? You’re not escaping.
Father Thomas: Yeah, the secular worldview can’t account for the apparent waste of a life that is devoted only to prayer and seemingly meaningless labor, whether it’s education or farming or whatever monks might do. But I do think from the perspective of faith, the monastic life is so human in its attempt to love one’s neighbor as oneself. It’s an invitation to purify the ego, and in purifying the ego, to remember that there are others who depend on you and need you. You purify your ego so that a greater good than your own self-exaltation might come about. I think of a monastery as, in part, an oasis for monks and non-monks to find refreshment in the waters of scripture and in the liturgy, but it’s also a laboratory. It’s kind of a lifelong experiment in which we can either be refined or purified by the Lord’s grace and the school of hard knocks that we give each other, or we can become embittered, less than human shells, and that is a tragedy to be sure. But at its best, the monastic life is indeed a solo struggle, right? Monos means one or alone, but we are alone with the Lord, and what emboldens me on this half-crazed adventure of my own sacerdotal life is the awareness of brothers who dress like me and who get on my nerves day in and day out, but you don’t get on my nerves, they get on my nerves.
Tom Caffrey: Likewise, yeah, it’s a reciprocal relationship, sure. Unless anyone have doubts about that. But they nevertheless are the beam, as you said, the horizontal beam that will help me to know what to do with the suffering that comes my way so that I can give that to the Lord and give whatever other suffering is placed upon me through I preach the ministry, through prayer, experiences in prayer. You just talked a little bit about the suffering, and I don’t like saccharin Christianity is sweet, you know, that’s not how life is. And I was so glad to see in your book a reference to Psalm 88, which is the darkest of all psalms. And when I gave a eulogy for a dear friend who passed away several months ago I made a reference to that, and I said, “The best part about Psalm 88 is that it exists, that there is a Psalm 88, because the psalmist didn’t quit. He didn’t give up. So even though God, not just doesn’t answer, He’s not there, but the psalmist continued to say that. So I want you to just wrap it up for us. What do you want to say to the folks out there?
Closing Reflections
Father Thomas: Blue Miles is in some ways a commentary on Psalm 88. Just as every life can be. There are certainly moments of terrible darkness, of an apparently bleak hopelessness, and Padre Samuel, the main character, has the option of folding, of giving into the darkness, of living in shadows, of being swamped by bitterness and alcohol and loss. But he knows that Psalm 88 is recited on Fridays at Compline. The church’s wisdom again is such that everyone who prays the office recites those words of Psalm 88 ending, “My one companion is darkness,” at the time when Jesus is in the tomb, Good Friday, and the life of faith in some basic sense is all about perseverance, and I love the etymology of perseverance. It’s a Latin phrase, per severa, right, through severe things, by means of trials, the virtue exhorts us, enables us to pass through those moments of darkness, so that the Lord can reveal His light to us in ever more beautiful and radiant ways. That, I think, ultimately is what Blue Miles is about, right? It’s a testimony of one man’s darkness, but his perseverance in faith that allows him to yield a harvest.
Tom Caffrey: Outstanding. I couldn’t have asked for a better closing. You did a great job. Thank you. Father Thomas Esposito, Order of Cistercians, author of Blue Miles, a monastic novel. I want to thank Ignatius Press for the review copy and Susan Nutt for helping to coordinate this wonderful conversation. So, Father Thomas, thank you very much for joining me, joining us on the Thirteenth Apostle.
Father Thomas: Well, it’s been a joy, Tom. I’m grateful for the questions, and I’m glad I was able to join you.
Tom Caffrey: Beautiful. Stay tuned, friends, for the Angelus, followed by your prayer intentions with Peter and Jemmy, wqphradio.org. Marianne, Jean, and James, and the crew, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for your support. Father Thomas, thanks again.
Father Thomas: Thank you, Dom. God bless you.
Tom Caffrey: Thank you.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Thirteenth Apostle with Dan Duddy and Tom Caffrey. For more information on Dan, visit his website at www.danduddy.com or email dcduddy@gmail.com. Tom’s website is faithpilgrims.com or email trcaffrey@faithpilgrims.com. How about you? Will you be the thirteenth apostle?
