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The Capuchin Priest Padre Pio received the stigmata on September 20, 1918 after administering a two-hour Eucharist. He was thirty-one years old. Pio remains to this day the best known of all stigmatists.
-Rev. Herbert DeWitt
On Monday, April 3, 2000, at 12:45 p.m., my students slumped in their desks slackmouthed and drunk on their own stupidity. Only my teaching assistant took notes. He wrote vigorously, rocking back and forth in an impassioned crouch as if he were a Muslim and I Mecca. And then there was Blythe, bedazzled, upright, lips frozen in a lower case o. Her hand toyed with a gold cross hanging at her neck, and her buoyant breasts in a red halter top toyed with me.
At thirty-three, the youngest tenured professor of English at Old Conquered University, I was teaching Freshmen Composition for the sixth consecutive semester because The Chair of the English Department seemed to have gone suddenly and inexplicably blind to the need for courses in post-structuralism. That is, he was trying to get rid of me. Undoubtedly it was because of a bold, controversial text I'd begun three years prior called Revisions on the City of God-a text so demanding that after all that time I had only an introduction and several piles of notebooks. The text, like myself, wasn't so much maturing as fattening, sagging beneath the weight of argument, of all those theories I had to disprove just to get at a truth I already knew, a truth I'd envisioned bursting out of me and ascending to the heavens on its own airy virtue.
Brother Pio, imagine me that day, fat and frustrated in an academic gown to which The Chair objected on the grounds that it was outmoded and potentially intimidating. I concluded the lecture, cast a glance at Blythe's youthful, forbidden, gravity-defying breasts, and drew a stack of papers from my briefcase. I noticed the sheer mass of red ink I'd spilled on them and thought for a moment of the similarity between this act of mine and the Eucharist-that I too administered tasteless, insubstantial sheets claiming some relationship to the body of a sacred tradition. It was at that very instant-Monday, April 3, 2000 at 12:49 p.m.-that I began to...