“I can’t stand it,” said the
lawyer, “that’s why. Honestly, I can’t
stand it. I’m giving up family practice.
Being a lawyer is worse than being a
priest. If I could, I’d be a priest, but
I couldn’t stand that either.”
“A
priest? That's different. But why couldn’t you be a
priest?”
“I don’t
have time to go to seminary, never
have had. And anyway it’s not being a priest per se. It’s the liturgics. I can’t stand the liturgics. You steal a hundred dollars from me, and you
go to the priest, and he tells you to do contrition, and he absolves you. What’s up with that?” The
lawyer rocked back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. “I want you to have to deal direct with me!”
“That’s the
lawyer in you.” The other man, a salesman, offered
calm to the lawyer’s bluster. Funny
thing was—the salesman had been at seminary himself, back in the day. “But you’ve got the morality all wrong. The church, too, wants you to confront the
one you harmed. What did you think?”
“But you
don’t need to, see? You’ve already been absolved. Think like a criminal, for God’s sake.”
The lawyer and the salesman sat in the lawyer’s office, in an old brick building, covered with
ivy. Now though, in January, the
covering was the bones of ivy. A cold
rain beat on the window panes.
“And it’s
not just family practice. I’m giving up
criminal, too.”
Outside,
afternoon descended into gloom. It was
winter on the Maine
The
salesman turned back to the lawyer and asked, “What’s any of this got to do
with liturgics?”
“I need
direct experience. That’s what’s wrong
with liturgics. All that stuff between you and the
experience.”
The
salesman smiled. “There’s a lawyer
friend of mine up near Bangor says the most important part of Catholicism for
him is that very stuff, the sacraments.
He used to be a Baptist, and he became a Catholic. That’s what he said to me—the
sacraments. You’ve got something to
trust, he said, in the sacraments. His
wife was a Catholic, and that was part of it, but the sacraments is what it was for
him. It’s the tradition.”
“I don’t
give a damn for tradition.”
“Course you
do. What’s lawyering?”
“How do I
know?” The lawyer barked a laugh, snapped his chair back down straight, brought his hands down onto the desk with a bang. “It’s keeping a shotgun next to my bed,” he
said.
“Against
OUIs?”
“Not
them.” Suddenly, he grinned. “Freaks my wife.”
“Yeah”
“Family
clients want me to solve problems that aren’t even related to legal. The felons just want to hurt somebody. OUIs are so relieved to get their licenses
back, they’ll pay me anything…specially third and fourth offenders.” He shook his head. He blew out a breath. “Maybe I am
going to go to seminary. Or else just
plan estates for rich people.”
Silence
crept into the room. In the salesman’s
experience, silence was unusual for his lawyer, a fast talker, a fast
thinker. He had two computer screens
always active on his desk, talked on the telephone and wore an ear-bud for a
cell phone at the same time.
Blowing out
another breath, the lawyer mused, “I wonder if there’s any point to it all.”
Only ten
minutes before, the lawyer had bought a substantial Internet-based legal
library from the salesman, which was stocked with resources for family and for
criminal practices…and which contained no resources at all for estate
planning.
The salesman raised the contract in
his hand. “Tear this up?”
The lawyer
shrugged. “Hell, no. What do I know about
tax?”
The
salesman had watched the lawyer’s career develop from the time he had appeared
as a youngster on the local scene, having just left off clerking for a federal
judge. He’d begun as an associate at an
established practice. The salesman had
been there when, years later, the lawyer had left that practice and had put out
his own shingle. Just then, the lawyer
had needed basic resources, and the salesman had been able to help him decide
to invest in more than just the most basic of resources. Now, two years later, the lawyer had decided
it was time to expand his library—he had more money now, and more complex
cases, and the salesman was happy to oblige.
Still
holding up the contract, the salesman asked, “So this is still good?”
“Until I
quit it all and go to seminary.”
The
salesman grinned. “I’m not putting that
in as a clause.”
Every profession offers places to hide. To the salesmen, back in the day, it had
seemed that seminary offered more places to hide than most. Oh, sometimes the
salesman wondered if he oughtn’t to have stayed in that cloistered world. He could have become a professor. He could
have been a seminary professor. But in
the end he had found that he was not a hider.
He had wanted to get out there into the raw world to engage face-to-face
with people on the battlefield that mattered to them the most, whatever
battlefield that was.
He could have been a minister. However,
scarcely anyone he had known well at seminary was still practicing ministry
now. Most of them—they were fed up, burned
out, had lost their faith, or gotten into trouble with a woman, or run out of
money. They were consultants now,
or they had invented a computer game, or they did development work for a
non-profit.
So, once when the salesman had
needed a job, he’d been able to convince a sales manager that, especially as a trained
theologian, he understood what a lawyer’s research was for. Here’s the case he had made to that sales
manager. Theologians and lawyers each
study bodies of established authority in order to ferret out the truth in
support of a position on some contemporary question regarding behavior or choice. The sales manager had been impressed by the
argument, but still he had wondered if this prospective book salesman could
sell. In the end, though, he’d needed a
body to cover his open territory, and he’d given the salesman a chance, and
that had been twenty-two years before.
Sitting in the office, the salesman
was conscious of how frequently theological considerations intruded into his sales
conversations with lawyers. What
theologians do and what lawyers do is not the same, in fact—the first argues
for all of mankind; the second argues for whoever will pay—but the salesman’s
early pitch had contained some truth.
In the end, the salesman thought,
lawyers do what they do because they believe in the existence of authority, but
also because they believe in their ability to manipulate it in the interest of
their clients—that’s how they get paid.
It is, then, a malleable authority which the lawyers knead.
Yet in the end—as the salesman
continued to think some more—a lawyer’s longevity in the profession does come
down to grace. God provides a lawyer
with both belief and skill—belief in fundamental rightness, and the skill to
stick to a profession during the long term. And, he smiled to himself, that is
why grace is present in the lawyers’ conversations with salesmen, or at least
with a salesman who is trained to listen for it.
The two men
stood. “Think we’ll get more snow?”
asked the lawyer.
“It’s January. Anything can still happen. We’ll get the gift.”
“I’d like
to do some skiing. Get off where it’s
quiet.”
They walked
together to the door. The salesman said,
“Maybe it’s just that, the quiet, which you need, not seminary.”
“No,” said
the lawyer positively. “If I could, I’d
go to seminary. I know a lawyer who did,
you know, after he retired.”
“So…thinking
of retiring?”
“With three
kids? No way.”
“Good. First I want to sell you that Platinum package.”
“Next
year.”
The lawyer held the door open for
the salesman. He smiled and reached out
his hand. They shook. “If I’ve gotten any skiing in—and if I
haven’t gone off to seminary—you come see me about that Platinum.”
“I’ll do
that. If there’s snow.”
“Yes. If there’s any snow.”
The
salesman stepped out the door into the rain.
He needed to walk up the street and turn the corner to where he had
parked his car. When he reached the
corner, he realized the wind blew differently.
Coming around northwesterly.
If Maine were lucky, the new wind
would chill the air for the last of the rain, and there would be snow.
A dusting of it anyway; a
hint.
