Page 3 of Saint
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?”
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Even though allI 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 shit 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 knowswhomI 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.
