A Meeting Between Father O’Malley and Bishop Brougham from Going My Way, and The Bishop's Wife movies.
_________________________
In the late hour, when even angels sleep
or wander the nave in stockinged feet,
two men walked past the altar light,
through the cloister garden dusted with snow.
Father O’Malley whistled something
half-remembered -
an Irish air, light as frost on holly.
The bishop did not sing.
He had never learned how.
They sat on a bench that remembered other men -
the kind who built walls instead of warming them.
Their breath made small clouds in the hush.
Their thoughts stretched farther.
"You know," O’Malley began,
"our boys finally hit the high notes last week.
I stopped conducting.
Just let them find it.
It’s funny what grows
when we stop trying so hard."
The bishop, buttoned high against the cold,
closed his eyes.
He had once promised a cathedral,
stone rising against the city's doubt -
a thing to point upward
when the people looked down too long.
But the drawings piled up in silence,
the choir room collected dust,
and Julia, his wife,
had taken to staring through windows
like they were escape hatches.
"I missed the choir recital,"
he said, voice like the falling snow -
unremarked, persistent.
"I told the boy I’d come.
He waited in his little robe.
But I stayed at my desk
arguing over marble."
O'Malley looked away.
He had argued too -
with Father Fitzgibbon,
with the ways of the old world,
with God, once or twice,
when the orphans cried louder than the hymns.
He thought of the parish house,
leaky and cracked,
and the small hands that mended it
with music instead of nails.
"You know," he said,
"the choir saved that parish.
Not me.
Not even God directly.
Just the sound
of children being believed in."
The bishop's hands were bare,
veined like rivers traced in ink.
"I wanted permanence," he confessed.
"Columns that could hold the sky.
But maybe...
maybe it's the temporary things
that keep the soul from freezing."
O'Malley nodded.
"Fitzgibbon was the parish -
a man who wouldn’t leave
even when the roof did.
But we gave him something.
He hadn’t seen his mother in fifty years.
She thought he was long buried.
And he wept like a boy
when she walked through the door -
wrinkled, silent, trembling with joy.
She put her hand on his cheek
and said nothing at all.
She didn’t have to."
The bishop turned his face slightly.
He, too, had forgotten how stillness could heal.
"They sang for him later that night -
the boys.
All of them in harmony,
for once."
A light flickered in the sacristy window.
Maybe a candle.
Maybe something else,
something holy
that only reveals itself
to those who are finally listening.
"I thought I had to lead," the bishop said.
"All the time.
Hold the burden higher
than anyone else could reach.
But I forgot the music."
"Music," O’Malley said,
"is what God sounds like
when He’s not talking."
He looked at the bishop.
"That boy…the one you missed -
he cried.
But he still sang.
He said,
‘Maybe the bishop heard me in his heart.’"
They were quiet then,
as men must be
when grace slips between words.
The bishop placed one hand on the bench,
and the priest’s hand met it -
not in blessing,
but in understanding.
"I don’t need a cathedral,"
the bishop said,
"but I might need a friend."
O'Malley smiled.
"You’ve got one.
And a few dozen boys
who’d be happy to sing you
into heaven."
______________
Later, when the wind dropped,
and the chapel’s bells
began to ring their slow bronze truth,
they walked together
past the nave and back again.
"Would you have done it differently?"
the bishop asked.
O’Malley paused,
watching snow gather
in the crook of the railing.
"I’d have made more time
for the ones who waited.
But I sang what I could."
"So did I," the bishop said.
And neither meant it as an apology.
They turned not toward the sound,
but toward the silence
that comes after -
where God sometimes lives.
And still,
in some pocket of time
where winter doesn’t end
and friendship doesn’t either,
they sit - two men with work behind them,
waiting for the final verse.
And the bells,
ever patient,
wait with them.
GBS
2004
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