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Life at the Rectory

(excerpt)
I wanted to believe in something. I prayed. But all I could hear was the echoed clang of a clapper against a bell. The bell ringer was dead. The universe was empty… I was the miserable beggar on the street, my palms slashed red with the cuts from freshly minted coins… I was the bitch, the poor cur whining in the overheated parked car in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of a parking lot in the middle of the suburbs… I waited in the middle earth between paradise and suicide… I studied. I studied with Plato in the coldness of his cave, huddled around the fire as reality played out on the walls. I tried to find the sun but I could never find the entrance to the cave… I argued with Sartre in a room with no doors… I studied. Running along the streets of Copenhagen with Kierkegaard as the Danish brats pelted us with stones and laughter. I wanted to roast the little buggers over an open fire… I wept. Like hills into ditches into an empty sky… I saw a lonely man hanging from a tree and mistook him for Santa Claus. He looked down at me and smiled like a drunk in an alley. ‘Follow me,’ he entreated. ‘Or buy me another glass of wine. Or if you do not have any loose change, cut me down from this tree where I have been abandoned by the wind.’
A parish priest is dealing with several lives at crisis, the young boy becoming a hoodlum, another young boy who feels he is fated to die, the Parish pastor who wonders if he is suited for the Church, a woman who has fallen in love with him, and his own soul.