Page 102 of Saint
Looking back, maybe I hadn’t listened well enough. Seems to be a theme with me.
“Before that,” I say heavily. “Much, much before that.”
“Okay then,” Tyler says, and so I begin.
I tell him about meetingitafter Lizzy died, about living with it for all those years. I tell him about That Night as gently as I can, because I know it’s hard stuff to hear, and I tell him about the text message and how it led me to the abbey. And then I tell him about the trip, about Elijah, about how certain I was that I needed a more ascetic life, and how I ended up having an interlude instead.
After I finish, I hear Tyler take in a long breath. For a moment, he doesn’t say anything at all, but then he says, softly, “I had no idea. You always seemed the happiest out of all of us. The readiest for fun. I would never have guessed...”
No, most people don’t guess, do they? That sometimes the people who laugh the loudest and reach for life the hardest are the ones closest to darkness.
“I’m okay now,” I reassure him. “I’ll have the brain I have my entire life, but I also have so many tools I didn’t have before, and also Dr. Rosie, God bless her.”
“Does Elijah know you’re okay?” Tyler asks.
I think back to the conversation about Lectio Lexapro, about our talk in the Irish graveyard. “I’m pretty sure, yeah.”
“Even without the monastic life? Because if I were him, and you told me about how integral being at Mount Sergius was to you rebuilding yourself, I don’t know that I’d be willing to risk you leaving.”
I look out the window of my office. I see a vegetable garden, and beyond it, my hill.
It’s taken a lot of therapy to get to this point. And meds. Those too.
And...being a monk?
Yes.
“Do you think that’s why he didn’t want me to leave?”
“I think that’s part of the reason. Along with what he explicitly told you—no one can compete with God, Aiden. You know that’s not fair.”
“I am so tired,” I say, looking at the hill, “of everything being defined in opposition. GodorElijah. Monkornot monk.”
“You sound like Jordan,” Tyler says, sounding faintly amused. “It’s all he ever talks about these days. The rigidity of a holy life, when it should be anything but rigid. Jordan thinks that if we forget that our tradition is a living thing—if it ossifies—it will slowly die. Maybe it already has.”
“I feel likeI’mdying,” I say, and it’s only half an exaggeration, because the grinding, pressing, crushing feeling certainly feels like a kind of death. “And I keep getting stuck in this loop—if I leave, Elijah won’t have me. If I stay, I can’t have Elijah.”
“When I was thinking about leaving the priesthood,” Tyler says, “Jordan asked me if I would still want to leave, even if I wasn’t going to be with Poppy. I had to know if I wanted to leave for her or for myself.”
I can see where he’s going with this, and I sigh with impatient understanding. “That’s the problem, Tyler. Saying I’mnotleaving for him is disingenuous to the point of being an outright lie. If it weren’t for him, I would stay. I wouldn’t give up my communion with God.”
“You’re the one who was just railing against oppositional thinking,” Tyler says. “Don’t you think it’s possible to have communion with God outside of a monastery?”
“Ugh,” I groan, slumping in my chair. “On paper, yes. But the liturgy is communal. If I leave, I leave that behind.”
But even as I say the words, I hear Brother Connor’s from earlier.
Many ways to the well, and here you’ve named only two.
I’m not a creative person; I’m not a visionary. It’s never occurred to me to try to forge a new way forward, to build something where before there was nothing. But as I look up at my hill, I have to wonder if that’s what’s being asked of me. If like the desert fathers, I’m being asked to plant my heart into unfamiliar soil and trust the harvest will come.
To have patience, like Elijah said in his article.
“It’s fortunate that you weren’t caught,” Tyler is saying as I’m thinking all this. “With as much as you were sneaking off, it wouldn’t have been surprising.”
I know he’s not saying it judgmentally, since his relationship with Poppy had gone catastrophically public back in the day. “No,” I say, “it wouldn’t have been surprising at all.” But it makes sense to me, with a kind of God-logic. If we’d been caught, my hand would have been forced in many ways—it would have been easy to default into choosing what to do next.
I think God wants me to make this decision myself. And I think it’s the only way Elijah would know for certain that this was what I really wanted.
