Page 26 of Saint
And now in that weakness, I’ve found strength.
I decide not to bother Elijah. I have no right to him anymore, no right to knock on his door when he’s made it clear he’s pissed at me. And honestly, I’m still feeling a hundred different things from his words, and all those feelings are stabbing around in my chest like shards of broken glass, and I don’t trust myself with those shards inside me.
A waste of a life, he said.
I hope God was worth it.
* * *
The bells for compline ring,and I leave my cell, hoping the familiar songs and prayers will clear the glass out of my chest and bleed the anger from my blood.
Elijah isn’t at compline either, and I feel so full of all my own feelings, not at all empty like I so want to be, and my hands shake a little as I turn the pages of my breviary.
Do not hide your face from me, we sing.And later:Lord, make haste and answer, for my spirit fails within me.
Make me know the way I should walk. To you, I lift up my soul.
The sun is sliding down the sky when I leave the church with my brothers, and the heat of the day has finally started to die off. The mood is high and easy, and several brothers decide on a pre-sleep pint in the picnic area, and several others go for a walk up to the barn to see the new loft Brother Amos built. There’s talk of getting chickens and goats to add to our three dairy cows, and I can hear Brother Titus and Brother Thomas already making a case for why we’d need an abbey dog (or four) if we have more farm animals.
I don’t go with any of them. Instead, I go to the south cloister, which is completely empty, and I find my favorite bench. I sit and I wait.
The fountain trickles gently, and a breeze finds its way through the covered walkways to tug at the flowers. The sky slowly changes overhead, from a bright blue to a pale blue to streaks of orange and pink and lavender. I can just see the first star now, winking in the sky.
My first year here, when I was nothing but a dirty sock hamper of feelings, Brother Connor told me about a book he’d read by a Gethsemani monk, who’d written about how the abbey eventually became not only the container for his thoughts, but the shapes of them too.
“One day you will wake up and realize that your thoughts are the same shape as your favorite oak tree,” Brother Connor had explained. “Or that they follow the winding edges of the creek. They will echo to the tolling of the bell. They will flutter in the prairie wind.”
“And this has happened to you?” I asked, a little dubiously.
“You mean, are my thoughts part of my places and are my places part of my thoughts? Do they shape each other, remember each other—recognize each other? Yes, as strange as it might sound, but that’s what comes from living in a place instead of merely on it.”
It had sounded like medicine for an illness I’d only just realized I’d had. “How long?” I’d asked him. “How long does that take?”
He’d smiled at me, eyes crinkling. “It’s not like a 3D printer, Aiden. It’s organic, and the process of existing in a place is as important as the end.” Seeing the expression on my face, he took some pity. “Perhaps it will happen sooner than I think. Perhaps you only need to find your first place to beininstead of on.”
And I did find it—entirely by accident one night, when I’d sat out in the cloister because going to bed felt impossible but walking also felt impossible and reading also felt impossible and justeverything herefelt so damn impossible. I wanted to leave. I wanted to go back to Kansas City—not to my house, because my house had been sold—but maybe to Sean’s place and sayI made a mistake.
I wanted to find Elijah and sayI’m sorry I’m sorry, I fucked up and I’m back and I’m sorry.
And in that moment of lowness, that brink-of-tears lostness, a small light winked into the twilight from the fountain. I’d looked up in time to see another, and then another.
Fireflies.
So many of them that it almost felt impossible, like a scene in a movie. Like something from a dream.
And I’d begun to understand what Brother Connor meant about a place becoming my thoughts, and I began to see how that could be as holy as any plainchant or sacrament. Because it felt like God was using that cloister, that warm summer night, to brush his fingers across my face. As if God himself was giving me awhat if.
What if I showed you something beautiful, what if I showed you a glimpse of my love for you?
And every summer since, in peak lightning bug season, I try to give myself a few nights here in this place. A few nights of God in the cloister, putting on a show under the stars just for me.
As the sky darkens even further, I close my eyes for a moment and pray. I’ve heard sometimes that it’s greedy to go to God with demands and requests, like God is some kind of cosmic customer service manager, but after five years of singing the psalms day in and day out, I can say with authority that complaining to God is a very ancient tradition. Berating and wheedling and lamenting too.
And right now, I don’t even know what I want from God. Comfort? A message? For the fireflies to spell outit’s okay, you didn’t make a mistake coming herewith their little glowing bodies? For Elijah to leave and for July to get here sooner, so I can find some bleaker place to retreat to?
My own desert, finally?
But I don’t keep my eyes closed for long. Prayer still unformed, I open my eyes so I can be sure to see the first firefly beckon, and that’s when I hear the footsteps. Slow, hesitant. They pause at the entrance to the cloister just behind me, and then resume.
