The seminarian brother's spiritual collapse; the Challenge is set

pivotal · ~Y.T.M.P.-Y.T.S.D.B. (Barry a Training major at B.C.)

• When: UNDATED within Barry's B.C. Training-major years; the brother's decline strikes "at age twenty-five"
• What: Barry's older brother — near ordination as a Jesuit, "a pious and contemplative and big-hearted kid" — abruptly loses his faith in human goodness ("a kind of degenerative Lou Gehrig's Disease of the spirit"), soured by the ingratitude and misery of the downtown Boston flocks he served in his practicum. He sits in his St. John's Seminary room pitching playing cards into a wastebasket, threatening to quit the vocation, which would leave it "nearly irresistibly incumbent" on Barry — the last Loach — to enter seminary himself to spare their mother. Out of his depth on the theology but not on the anatomy, Barry stations himself across the wastebasket for a series of interviews and — mid-crisis — relieves a slight hitch in the brother's toss that was stressing his card-throwing arm's flexor carpi ulnaris, significantly upping the brother's "card-in-wastebasket percentage". To keep his own training-career and preserve his mother's dream, and disbelieving the brother's despair, Barry challenges him to let Barry prove human character is not as empty of compassion as the brother thinks. They settle on an "experimental challenge."