Saint

Chapter 2

2

Silence, if you didn’t already know, is a lie.

For example, I am currently in a hermitage in the woods, on the last day of a two-week silent retreat. My monastic brothers are two miles away, and there is nothing and nobody anywhere near me. It should be the definition of silence. It should be a vacuum of sound, a bubble of pure, undisturbed stillness.

And yet.

My breath is sawing in and out of my body. A storm-laden wind is yanking impatiently at the trees. Beyond them, just past the edge of my vision, a creek is rushing, glutted with recent rain. And from two miles away, I hear the faint toll of the bells from the church.

No, there is no silence here. Not in the truest sense of the word. And yet, it’s somehow the utter opposite of noise.

I came from a world of noise. Of phones ringing, laptops humming, fingers tapping on iPad screens. Of cars and planes and clinking glasses of airport beer. Of voices—arguing, negotiating, cajoling. Of myself—loud and giddy and wild.

But there is only one common phone here, shared by all of us, and only a handful of computers and cell phones, used specifically for abbey business. There is beer, but it’s drunk with pleasure, not desperation, and there is no negotiation, no wheeling and dealing, no hustling.

The silence here is birdsong and creeksong and wind in the trees. It’s singing, praying, chanting, the ringing of bells and the drone of the organ. The whirr of tractors going up to the barley fields, the chirr and ruffle of the printing machines. The clink of rosary beads and the whisper of Bible pages and the echoes of music from places unseen.

It’s the sound of Brother Patrick’s life, not Aiden Bell’s.

I drop my ax and wipe my forehead with my forearm, listening to the bells tolling for lauds. Normally, I would do what I’ve done every day for the past two weeks and say my daily office on my own, and then resume clearing the deadfall around the hermitage and turning the fallen trees into usable lumber to be hauled off to Brother Andrew’s woodshed. But I’m still shaken from my dream, and I feel at loose ends with myself.

I’m worried that if I stay here alone, my thoughts will go back to him.

I lift my eyes to the hills.

I have just enough time to wash up and trot the two miles to the church before lauds begin, and I make it to the sanctuary just in time to bow towards the altar and slip into my choir stall before the first prayer is sung. The smell of incense is heavy in the air, but I still catch the scent of fresh wood and damp dirt on myself, even though I’d stopped by my cell to shuck my clothes and pull on a fresh habit to wear.

I hope I’ll escape notice, but I know it’s impossible. While the pews for lay visitors face the altar, the choir stalls in the chancel face each other instead. So when I look up, the first thing I see is not the altar or the crucifix behind it, but my former novice master Father Harry glaring at me. Glaring because I am unexpected or late, I’m not sure. It could be merely that he’s never liked me. Not when I was a postulant, not now when I’m less than a year away from making my solemn vows.

But when I look across the aisle at my mentor, Brother Connor, and at Abbot Jerome, they both look like they’re trying not to smile. And then I see Brother Titus and Brother Thomas giving me twin grins, and I relax a little. I haven’t been late to lauds since I was a novitiate, and I’ve worked hard to scrub away all traces of Aiden Bell. Aiden Bell who was always late, always scrambling, always putting out his own fires.

Brother Patrick does none of that.

Brother Patrick is on time for everything. Brother Patrick rarely speaks and even more rarely laughs. He is responsible and hardworking and serious. He oversees the monastery’s accounting, he helps wherever he’s needed, and he’s never a burden on anybody.

Brother Patrick isn’t late for lauds, and he certainly doesn’t come in his sheets dreaming of his ex-boyfriend.

My fingers tighten briefly around my breviary as I remember nipping at Dream-Elijah’s fingers. My body tightens too, pressure coming from the cage I’d hurriedly locked around myself before I came here.

How will I make it through another year of missing him? Through forty more?

But Mount Sergius provides the answer, as it always does. My fellow brothers move into the first psalm, and the singing forces my breath to keep moving in and out. Forces my eyes across the page, forces my mouth to move, my lungs to expand and contract. Song fills the air just as the morning sunlight does, consoling in its timelessness. The sun has always been here, and so it seems, has the song. It’s the Divine Office which grounds me: the prayer with our breath and muscle and bone.

After some more psalms, canticles, and prayers to St. Catherine of Siena—it’s her feast today—lauds ends, and I close the breviary feeling better, feeling less restless and tight. Less itchy inside myself.

But I’m still a little unsettled. I came here to leave my past life behind, I came here to live entirely for God, but Elijah keeps blooming in me, and I can’t seem to stop him.

I can’t stop the tender shoots and slender, seeking roots of him, and I am his garden, his soil, his place, and it would be wonderful if I wasn’t supposed to be the garden of my god instead.

Since I’m already here at the abbey, I eat breakfast with the others. We observe the Grand Silence until after our morning meal, and so the refectory is filled only with the slow clank of coffee mugs and the rustling of habits on the floor. No talking at all.

I’ve grown to like the sound of my voice less and less over the years—and I used to be the asshole who dragged friends and clients to karaoke bars at the end of a long night without a shred of contrition. I used to fill up entire meetings with bullshit, jokes, gossip, proposals, pitches, apologies, promises. I used to talk so much that Sean would hang up on me sometimes, so much that my mother started wearing headphones when she drove me to basketball practice because I wouldn’t shut up about why Kansas City deserved a pro team.

One of the things I craved when I came here was to learn how to be quiet, so that I could listen to the same voice that brought me here. I wanted to be purified and refined like metal, all my dross burned away, and I wanted to burn it away by any means possible. Prayer, routine, labor, isolation, anything—anything at all, just burn the old Aiden away.

I finish breakfast before everyone else and take care of my dishes as quickly as I can. As suddenly as I decided I needed the company of my brothers, I decide I can’t bear anything but solitude right now.

Those tendrils of Elijah are still twisting around my ankles and twining up my throat, and I don’t know whether I need to pray or chop wood about it, but whatever I need to do, it’s not here, it’s not with other people around. This is between me and God.

But when I leave the refectory, I see Brother Connor waiting for me, his hands folded together and his lips creased in a kind smile. “Brother Patrick,” he says warmly. “Will you walk with me?”