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4. Clothing Bodies/Making Priests: The Sacramental Vision of J. F. Powers, Alfred Alcorn, and Louise Erdrich There is a scene in J. F. Powers’ 1988 novel, Wheat That Springeth Green, in which the protagonist, Father Joe Hackett, is watching television in one of his favorite positions: reclined in a Barcalounger with drink in hand. His attention is evenly divided between what he sees on the screen and what he is hearing from his new curate, Father Bill Schmidt, who is trying to hold a conversation with him about fundraising. When the sudden appearance of a commercial for breakfast cereal captures Father Hackett’s eye, he sits up and studies the action in the ad. He then remarks to his curate: ‘‘sack race.’’ Father Schmidt turns to notice the action on the screen and answers, ‘‘Yeah, I can see,’’ perturbed that his pastor is more interested in the figures jumping around trying to sell cereal than in the conversation they are supposed to be having. ‘‘Not a hundred yard dash. Not a mile run,’’ Father Hackett continues. ‘‘Joe, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’’ ‘‘It’s a sack race, Bill,’’ Father Hackett announces. ‘‘The priesthood.’’1 The importance of this scene for the novel is noted by Powers’ daughter, Katherine A. Powers, in her introduction to the 2000 paperback edition. ‘‘The original title given by my father to [the book] . . . was The Sack Race.’’ It was, she says, the title that appeared on the original contract with Knopf and on twenty-five years’ worth of correspondence between J. F. Powers and his editor, Robert Gottlieb. Her father, Katherine Powers says, kept those letters neatly clipped together in his desk drawer ‘‘as a scourge’’ to remind him of the book he promised to write, a text that, she adds, seemed forever mired in ‘‘tinkering and procrastination.’’2 Undoubtedly the title held an attraction for Powers as time passed and the challenge of finishing the book became itself something like a sack race. Katherine Powers’ introduction even makes reference to Ecclesiastes 9:11, suggesting that, after twenty-five years, the race to write certainly was not won by the swift. But the metaphor of the sack race held a much deeper 92 Clothing Bodies/Making Priests 93 significance for Powers than any allusion it might have made to his own mounting struggles with an incomplete manuscript. In fact, the metaphor provides an extremely good description of Father Joe Hackett’s career in this novel. As a priest, Father Hackett is neither a sprinter nor a distance runner. His movements are too clumsy, too awkward. Like someone running a sack race, Powers’ protagonist falls down, gets up, and only with much effort manages to bounce toward the finish line. There is hardly a better description of Joe Hackett’s trajectory throughout the plot. We meet Joe Hackett as a child growing up innocent in the less-thaninnocent world of the 1920s. As a Catholic schoolboy, he worries about committing a ‘‘sin against the Holy Ghost,’’ and his earliest impressions of the priesthood come from the nuns who are his teachers and who tell him in no uncertain terms that ‘‘Priests were in a class by themselves. To them alone,’’ the nuns insist, ‘‘had Our Lord given the power to turn water and wine into his body and blood, and to forgive sins.’’3 From the innocence of childhood, Joe encounters the ‘‘sins’’ of adolescence : he moves from telling the older girl next door about ‘‘the power of the priesthood’’ to having sex with both her and her friend and, eventually, to catching the clap from one or both. He enters the seminary as one of the more ‘‘worldly’’ candidates but gradually becomes ostracized for being zealous in his faith—wearing a hair shirt and spending all of his spare time praying in the chapel. He takes this extremely devout attitude with him into his first assignment at Holy Faith Parish, where he is pulled more deeply into the affairs of those around him. By the time the Archbishop transfers him to the position of Assistant Director of Catholic Charities, Father Joe has become not only less reclusive but also quite outgoing, and with his newfound gregariousness he is showing the early signs of the disease that will dog him for the rest of the novel: alcoholism. When he gains his first pastorate at Saints Francis and Clare, he is drinking heavily. The reference to the priesthood as a ‘‘sack...

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