Weddings

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 21, 2003 by Donna Pucciani

   Try as I might
   I cannot remember his face,
   this Jesuit, a scholar
   more at ease with manuscripts than marriages,
   nervous as we on that overcast November day.

   The Bronx, twenty-five years ago,
   the sacristy of Fordham University chapel:
   he vested and, cigarette shaking,
   rehearsed in his head the vows
   scrawled on a wrinkled paper
   to be trembled into a sacrament.

   Years later in England,
   the three of us met for pub food and a pint.
   His research on Newman shuttled him
   between Birmingham and Freiburg,
   riding the train of bureaucracy
   from "Blessed" to "Saint,"
   awaiting the necessary miracles.

   Did a dead Cardinal work this small miracle,
   gathering together in the yoke of years
   a professor-priest and two students
   from a New York ghetto
   "amid the encircling gloom"?

   Last January, a gentle German Jesuit
   took time to answer
   our unopened Christmas card.
   "Lead, kindly light,"
   as Blehl himself had led us
   into the unknown two decades ago.

   His face was thin, as I recall,
   above his Roman collar,
   his shoulders narrow.
   The night is dark,
   and he is now at home.

--Donna Pucciani
Wheaton, Ill.