Page 80 of Saint
“Hello, Brother Patrick,” he says. The evening sun burnishes his pale gold skin and dark gold hair and shimmers from the depths of his dark, dark eyes. Far from looking like he’s been eating locusts and honey, he’s in a crisply pressed black shirt and stark white clerical collar. His square jaw is cleanly shaven, and his black shoes gleam against the medieval stones. He looks like he just came from a runway show where all the models are priests.
“We all thought you were doing Anthony the Great cosplay in the hills or something,” I say, faintly.
“Not quite,” Father Jordan says. “I was in Avignon meeting with a group of ISM leaders.”
“ISM?” Elijah asks, coming up to us and handing the priest the beer I’d been too surprised to fork over. “And it’s good to see you, Father.”
I look at Elijah. “You know him?”
Elijah lifts a brow. “I go to all the baptisms too, Aiden. Now, what’s an ISM again?”
“Independent Sacramental Movement,” Father Jordan says. “Churches who’ve broken off from Rome or Constantinople—or even Canterbury—and seek to preserve traditional liturgy while they follow their conscience on theology.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Are we just ignoring the fact that you’re here at the same time as us?Here? At this tiny abbey in this tiny valley so boring even the Romans didn’t bother colonizing it?”
“Idon’t think the valley is boring,” Elijah says, in a voice that sounds like he’s apologizing for me.
“Like what are the odds?” I ask Father Jordan. “To run into an American here is already nuts, and then for it to be an American from our city! And then for it to be you!”
“It’s a remarkable coincidence,” the priest agrees mildly.
I feel like no one is reacting to this as much as they should be. “I wasjusttalking about you with Sean! And now you’re here! You’ve been here this whole time!”
“Do they have a bottle opener?” Father Jordan asks Elijah.
“No, but I know a trick,” Elijah starts but Father Jordan is already lifting the bottle to his sculpted mouth and opening the beer with his teeth. And then he flips the cap with his tongue and drops it expertly onto his waiting palm.
“I think that’s bad for your enamel,” Elijah says after a minute.
“But why are youhere?” I ask as Father Jordan takes a swallow of beer and then looks around the cloister of cheerful, sun-burned monks. “If the ISM thing was in Avignon, or whatever?”
“I’ve been following Abbé Bernard’s writings on the future of monasticism for a while, and when I decided to take a sabbatical, I thought I’d come stay here. The ISM meeting was a fortunate coincidence.”
“That seems to happen a lot with you,” I say suspiciously. “Coincidences, I mean.”
“Mm,” is his noncommittal reply.
“Has it been a good sabbatical?” Elijah asks politely, redirecting the conversation. “The abbey here is lovely.”
“It is,” Father Jordan agrees. “And it has been a very good sabbatical, I think. I came here to look for clarity, and so of course, all I’ve found are more questions. Which I find encouraging.”
I feel my brow furrow. “You do?”
It seems like it should be the opposite. I came to Mount Sergius because I felt like I was choking on questions, and all I wanted was clarity. All I wanted was one simple answer that would cut through my life like an icy wind and blow all the indecision away.
Father Jordan gives me a small smile. On such an eerily beautiful face, the tiny expression is staggering.
“I find that fixed and unambiguous thinking is the mother of many sins,” he explains. “We forget that Christ was heterodox and radical. He was not safe, in his ideas or his passions or his presence, and he demanded everything of his followers, not the least their certainty that they knew all the shapes of right and wrong in their world. And so when I’m searching for my way forward, naively hunting for certainty, I’ve found that God nudges me back to where God wants me. Which is in the middle of questions that feel unanswerable. I believe it is there—in the fire and friction of things I’ve been told don’t belong together, of things that I’ve been taught can’t be done—that the true answers lie.”
“What were you searching for when you came here?” I ask.
“If you don’t mind sharing,” my etiquette-minded journalist adds politely.
“I never mind sharing,” Father Jordan replies, and he does give that impression, I think. That all you have to do is ask and he’d crack open his chest to show you his beating heart, his ruby red lungs. As if to him there’s no meaningful difference between sharing what he thought of his eggs at breakfast and the most intimate and tangled question he asks his god.
“Once upon a time,” Father Jordan says, “there were as many ways to be holy as there were people, and the space between secular and monastic, between laity and clergy, was filled with all sorts of strange nooks and crannies. You could have visions, dream dreams, you could be a monastic from the four walls of your own house or you could wander the country barefoot and begging. But we’ve lost much of that over the centuries. The path to God has become binary: you find God as a monastic or as clergy, or you find God as a layperson. There is precious little in between. Oblation comes close but is still only one thread when there used to be an entire tapestry.” He frowns a little at the stones he’s standing on. “This rigid dichotomy of holy and profane, of vowed and unvowed...it sterilizes us. Not everyone fits into those boxes to begin with, almost no one fits entirely into them, and then there are those of us who experience God so differently from what is sanctioned and prescribed that even the mere idea of boxes is...” He looks like he’s searching for the right word here. “Limiting.”
And there’s something in the way he says the last part which makes me think that he’s no longer talking in the abstract. That he’s talking about himself.
