Saint

Chapter 3

3

Even though all I want to do is to go swing an ax until I can’t move anymore, I nod and fall into step next to him as he begins walking.

Brother Connor could ask me to scrub the cow s**t off the barn walls and I’d agree, because I trust him completely. He’s a short, slender white man with a snowy mustache and bright blue eyes, well into his sixties but with the energy and strength of a man half that age. Before he came to Mount Sergius in the eighties, he owned a karate school, and most days, he can be spotted under the large oak tree near the graveyard, practicing his old forms under its shady branches.

“I know you are silent today, so there’s no need to respond to my rambling,” Brother Connor tells me.

It’s a courtesy, because there isn’t a “you broke your vow of silence” jail at the abbey or anything. In fact, there are no vows of silence at Catholic monasteries at all, at least not in the permanent sense. There are periods of silence throughout the day, and brothers and visitors often take temporary vows of silence to induce greater introspection and contemplation—as I have been doing for the last two weeks—but there is no total surrender of words.

The only silences that are enforced—mainly by frowning and mild scolding (for severe infractions)—are the Grand Silence between compline and breakfast, silence at meals, and in the chapels where monks and visitors alike go for prayer. Still, though, I appreciate Brother Connor’s courtesy. It’s important for me to honor my promises to myself—even if they only matter to myself.

Especially if they only matter to myself.

Like, for example, the promise to have God and God alone as the sole object of my devotion.

“The abbot would like to see you,” Brother Connor says as we walk from the refectory under a covered walkway toward the building that houses our various offices and the welcome center. Visitors are already beginning to mill about the cloister, sitting on the green, grassy garth or on the many wooden benches. “And I hope you don’t mind, but I asked for the privilege of being with you while he speaks to you. I think you’ll be very excited by what he has to say, and I wanted to see my Brother Lumberjack smile for once.”

He says the last part in a teasing voice. All the brothers here are assigned work according to their strengths, and with my background in finance, my work has been primarily of a QuickBooks and Excel nature. But my other strengths are quite literally strengths, and so the abbot has designated me the official grunt of Mount Sergius. I heave plastic tubs of hops in the brewhouse, I lug around reams of paper in the printing house, and when I’m at the hermitage, which is less frequently than I would like, I’m tasked with chopping up the deadfall and bringing it to Brother Andrew, who is our resident carpenter. And the years of labor have left their imprint. While I’ve always been tall and wide-shouldered, there’d never been any doubt that my muscles came from solely a gym, but now . . .

Well, now I’m built like a lumberjack. And given that I haven’t shaved in a week, I probably look like one too.

“And if you don’t mind me saying so,” Brother Connor says as I rub self-consciously at the thick stubble on my jaw, “you seem like you could use a smile today.”

I’m grateful for my shield of silence right now, because I worry if I start talking, the old version of myself will take over and I’ll never stop. I’m worried that I’ll trap my friend in this walkway and make him listen to me describe the precise arch of Elijah’s eyebrows and the low, rough notes of his voice.

So instead of speaking, I give a slow nod of assent.

Yes.

Maybe I could use a smile. God knows I don’t get to see Elijah’s anymore.

But I do feel better as we walk through the spaces of the abbey. The windows are open in every building we walk through, letting in the humid spring air and a stiff breeze intent on ruffling every paper in the building. It smells like coffee, grass, and something unique to Mount Sergius. Like incense and old paper and name-brand clothing starch.

It smells like life, like living. Like being alive.

And as it does every day when I remember why I’m here, the gratitude comes. I’m grateful that I’m here; I’m grateful to God and this place and even to the version of myself who came here.

I’m grateful and I’m content. And contentment is enough, despite the occasional wet dream.

“Memories aren’t meant to be torments, Brother Patrick,” Brother Connor says in a too-casual voice, the one that means he’s guessed what I’m thinking about. “They are gifts.”

Gifts, my ass, I want to say. But I don’t. Brother Connor knows what I left behind when I came here. He knows whom I left behind. Everyone does, because I didn’t want it to be a secret that I was bisexual. No more a secret than the late wives of the widowed brothers, no more a secret than the fondly remembered girlfriends and teenage sweethearts. I wasn’t coming back into the Catholic fold because I felt shame about whom I liked to take to bed or whom I let into my heart.

I came here for God. I came here to stay alive.

Anyway, looking back, I can’t help but think God led me to Mount Sergius for a reason, because the abbot understood me completely when I explained my stance to him, and then introduced me to Brother Connor, who eventually told me about the man he’d left behind to come here almost forty years ago, and who listened with the understanding of the fellow broken-hearted when I told him about Elijah.

Only Father Harry has been what I’d braced for: cold stares, pointed Leviticus readings at mealtimes, et cetera. I could’ve guarded against it better if he hadn’t also been my novice master, but after the fifth meeting with him silkily suggesting that my soul was in mortal danger if I didn’t repent of my lust for men, I went to the abbot and asked for help. That was when my spiritual development was given over to Brother Connor instead. It was an unusual arrangement, but monasteries are their own little worlds, somewhat removed from the ultramontane politics that stifles parishes and dioceses, and so Abbot Jerome was able to do as he saw fit. And then when the year was up, the post of novice master was given over to Father Matteo and Father Harry was put in charge of ordering giant rolls of toilet paper and industrial-sized bags of coffee and other such supplies.

Brother Connor seems to sense my inner disagreement with his words of wisdom, and his eyes twinkle as he pats me on the shoulder. “Gifts, Brother Patrick,” he says again. “Because of what they can teach us.”

My memories aren’t teaching me anything other than how to hide stained sheets like a teenager, but I don’t say that, of course, because I don’t say anything at all. Temporary vow of silence and all that.

Abbot Jerome is already sitting behind his desk when we get to his office, the ubiquitous breeze blowing through the room and an audiobook playing from some unknown source. It’s in French, and Brother Connor asks, “Proust again?” as we sit down in the sturdy wooden chairs set across from the abbatial desk. Brother Andrew made them years ago, and I’m grateful for them now, because the arms are set back far enough that I can sit with my thighs apart, which is more comfortable with the cage. Funny how I’ve forgotten how to move and sit with it on when it was a near-constant companion for me in my early days at the monastery. But in the last two years, I’ve needed it less and less.

Well, until last night, that is.

“I’m on to Camus now,” the abbot says, looking up from the papers on his desk to us. “Vivre, c'est faire vivre l'absurde, and so forth. Hello, Brother Patrick.”

The abbot looks like no one more than he looks like Friar Tuck from the cartoon Robin Hood, except he doesn’t have a tonsure. And he isn’t a badger, obviously. He’s short and round, with fair skin, bushy eyebrows, and silver hair. His nose is as prodigious as his chin isn’t, and his scoldings are as common as his smiles. He spends most of his free time writing about a very, very dead person named Gregory of Nyssa.

We sell his books in the gift shop. They have a lot of footnotes.

I nod my hello at the abbot, and he pushes something across his desk—scattering pens and what looks suspiciously like spilled Tic Tacs to the side as he does.

“I’m aware that you’re silent today,” the abbot says as I reach forward to take the packet of papers he’s offering. “So I’m not expecting you to respond immediately to what you’re about to look at. But I wanted you to have the chance to think about it while you’re alone at the hermitage tonight. This, I believe, will require much discernment.”

Paper-clipped to the top of the packet are three glossy pictures. In them, rocky cliffs jut against a dark and cold-looking sea; a simple medieval church sits among austere hills with a crop of weathered gravestones around it; a small stone structure—cottage seems a generous term, perhaps hut is better—perches at the edge of the cliff, missing its doors and windows and roof. The sky is dark and coffered with clouds, and sea mist hangs in the air. The grass around the cottage seems nearly flattened with wind.

It looks like the end of the world. The absolute end of the world, and someone’s built a monastery there.

My soul gives a sharp and silent cry at the sight of it.

“St. Columba’s Monastery,” the abbot says softly. When I look up, he’s watching me closely. “A Trappist monastery on the west coast of Ireland.”

Trappist.

Mount Sergius is a Benedictine abbey, meaning we follow the Rule of St. Benedict, who was the first person to lay out an actual plan for how clumps of people could live and work and pray in the same place without descending into spiritual chaos or unredeemable smelliness. But five hundred years after St. Benedict wrote out his plan, a group of monks decided nobody was following the plan hard enough and moved to a swamp and spent the rest of their lives in a sort of austerity-off with each other. Until eventually they turned the marsh into viable farmland and everyone remembered that it was nice to eat and rest and wear shoes once in a while, and by a few hundred years later, the Cistercians weren’t much more austere than the Benedictines they’d broken off from. So then, another group of monks broke off from them and went hardcore austerity. Barely any food, constant work, silence, penitence, isolation—the whole thing. For a while, they even lived without a roof over their heads. Literally.

They are called Trappists. And aside from the Carthusians—who are like the antisocial Silent Bobs of Christian monasticism—the Trappists are the most dedicated to a life of prayer and contemplation of all the monastic orders.

I look back down at the desolate landscape in the pictures.

“You’ll see some information about St. Columba’s below the pictures, and underneath the St. Columba pile, there are more monasteries. All Trappist.”

I flip through the papers quietly, quickly. Even though I used to be the definition of a hard-partying business bro, I was actually pretty good at my job, and part of that job was being able to accurately skim and metabolize information while people stared at you from across a table. And so I see that indeed, all the monasteries are Trappist. Two are here in America—the famous Mepkin and the even more famous Gethsemani—and the rest are scattered between France, Belgium, and Italy. They all have pictures as well, and I glimpse sun-soaked stone arches, cheerful gardens, and a fairy-tale forest before I stack all the papers as they were.

From the top of the stack, the lonely cliffs of St. Columba’s stare up at me, beckoning me. I can practically smell the sea and hear the gusting wind. I can imagine my muscles aching, and my soul singing. Cleansed of everything but love for my eternal bridegroom, because in a place like that, there would be nothing left. There would be only sea and sky and God.

The breeze is tousling the abbot’s eyebrows as he studies me.

“I know you have been craving more, Brother Patrick. More silence, more solitude, more work. More prayer. And I have deliberated some time about the papers you have in your hands, because I have seen this passion in young men before. They crave more, they desire to be burned down to the bone with devotion, and more often than not, it leads to an irrecoverable consumption. They don’t burn down, they burn out. And they either leave or they become listless and untethered, and struggle to find peace in a community again.”

I look down at my hands, rough and calloused with amateur forestry. To be burned to the bone with devotion is my entire dream right now, my sole vision for my future.

I want to be holy and whole. I want my heart and body to be God’s in total, all of it burned up on his altar.

I look down at the picture of St. Columba’s again.

“On the other hand,” the abbot continues, “there are other men I see come through here, with your drive and your relentless seeking. They go on to do great things, and to lead lives that I can only call saintlike. But they must find a place that fits them. This is the trouble with the monastic life, you see—you must be able to find an entire life in a single place. You must be able to find the deepest corners of your own soul in one chosen fold of the world, and I sometimes wonder if eastern Kansas is that chosen fold for you. I sometimes wonder if the Benedictines are the right order for you. And so to that point…”

Next to me, Brother Connor adjusts his hands in his lap. From any other person, the gesture would mean nothing. But from Brother Connor, it means he’s roiling with excitement.

The abbot smiles at Brother Connor and then at me. “And so I have permission and the funds to send you to three of these monastic houses to see if one of them might be a good fit.”

Brother Connor jumps in. “Officially, this would be a research trip on behalf of our brewery, so you would tour the breweries at each monastery and engage in some mild corporate espionage while you were there.”

“Ethical corporate espionage,” the abbot says. “You know, Christian corporate espionage. Be holy about it and stuff.”

“But the research is only the justification for sending you, not the real reason,” Brother Connor says. “You are the real reason. Your future is the real reason. And our hope is that you’ll find the answers you’re seeking on this trip.”

Even if I weren’t silent today, I still wouldn’t know what to say. These kinds of trips are extremely rare for mere brothers like me, especially trips outside the order and outside the country. Do I want to spend a trip drinking beer and seeking holy ground? Yes, of course, but I also feel a profound uncertainty. An unworthiness and a cutting doubt.

I don’t deserve this gift.

“I am so excited for you,” Brother Connor says, touching my hand where it rests on the St. Columba paperwork. “But I also know what we’re discussing. If you take this trip and ultimately decide to join a new order . . . ”

The flinch at the realization is instinctive. If I join a new order, then I will never see Brother Connor again after I leave. Or Abbot Jerome or Brothers Thomas, Titus, and Andrew. I will never see my woods again or my troublesome creek.

We will write emails to each other, I’m sure of it, but we will no longer sing together or pray together or walk together under the trees. These men have become my family, and I would have to leave them behind. And for what? For some formless need I can barely express even to myself?

“Now, St. Columba’s in particular is a hard life,” the abbot begins, leaning back in his chair. “But their prior is looking for—well, he used the word sturdy—and there’s no one sturdier than my Brother Lumberjack. Ah, yes, Brother Thomas, what is it?”

I turn to see Brother Thomas and Brother Titus crowding at the door, their shoulders heaving like they sprinted into the building.

“Brother Patrick has a visitor,” Brother Titus pants. “In the south cloister. Waiting.”

“I see the Lord is using his favorite tool to teach today—interruptions,” says the abbot dryly. “Very well, then. I assume you informed this visitor that Brother Patrick will be silent today?”

“We did,” Brother Thomas pipes up. “He said that’s okay.”

He.

I stand, my interest piqued. There’s only four hes who would visit me at present—my three brothers and my father. I wonder if Sean has brought a baby from his growing baby pile for me to hold while he updates me on the family gossip. My ordinary, human heart warms at the thought.

“Brother Patrick,” the abbot says before I leave, “you have time to decide about the trip and which monasteries you’d like to visit. Three weeks before we’d have to finalize arrangements. And Brother Connor and I will be here any time you’d like to talk about it.”

I give both men a grateful nod, hoping they can see my humble thanks in my body since I cannot express it in words. And holding the information about the Trappist monasteries tight, I follow Brother Titus and Brother Thomas out of the office building and through the warren of covered walkways that leads to the south cloister, where my visitor awaits.

The young monks hover at the entryway into the cloistered garden, curious, and I can’t blame them. Not much happens here that’s worthy of remarking upon, and sometimes visitors turn out to be fairly interesting people—prominent Catholics or artists or visitors from other countries. But they’re going to be disappointed when they realize it’s just an asshole named Sean.

Except I finally see who is waiting for me on the other side of the fountain, and it’s not Sean. It’s not any of my brothers, and it’s not my father.

It’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, with his arm slung along the back of the bench, and his long legs sprawled everywhere, like a bored king on his throne. His eyebrow is lifted ever so slightly, as if I’m the riddle here, as if I’m the anomaly in an otherwise seamlessly ordered world.

I forget how to breathe.

I forget how to think.

“Hello, Aiden,” says Elijah.