Page 12 of Saint
Not so here at the abbey.
(With the phones, I mean. But the strippers too.)
A small handful of brothers have phones if their abbey jobs require it, like our marketing director and the brothers who work with retreatants, but most of us don’t own a phone and take turns using the library computers for email. So there are no screens at the table right now, no smart watches beeping with messages or alarms. There is no one fussing over the work to be done, because we will all wash the glasses together before we go to prayer, and there is no one considering sneaking back to answer one last email, because when the time for work is over, it’s really, actually over.
There is only beer now and prayer later, and I think the first monks to figure out that this was the way to run a monastery were geniuses.
I also think God must love us all very much to give us Kansas sunsets and beer.
For the first time since Elijah visited, I know I’m doing okay. Right now and in this life and in whichever place I find next to deepen my relationship with God.
There was a time in my life when my favorite two words werewhat if, and as I drink deep of my cold beer and watch the sun sink behind the hill, I ask myself a question I already know the answer to.
What if this is a good life?
What if this is a very good life?
* * *
That night,after half a month of near-constant use, I take off the chastity device for good. I take it off every day, of course, to wash myself and it, but I haven’t spent much functional time without it since Elijah’s visit, which is how it used to be when I first came here.
Before I was a monk, I fucked nearly every day, sometimes more than once—and that’s not even attempting to account for all the jerking off—and so I was terrified of getting a hard-on in my habit.
As I’m sure you know, there’s only so much a flat-fronted robe can conceal.
But I’m no longer a newbie at this celibacy thing, like I was then—and also I can’t deny that one of the reasons I’ve been wearing the cage has nothing to do with actual chastity and everything to do with feeling close to Elijah.
Feeling close to the time when denial was a game instead of a mandate.
But it’s a mandate I’m content enough to obey—even though it chafes a little knowing that by official Church doctrine, queer Catholics are only considered fully Catholic if they’re celibate. I’m participating in that doctrine, even if it’s only incidentally, and I’m not entirely sure what to do about that. I’ve chosen celibacy because it’s part of consecrating my entire self to the god who brought me back to life, but the idea that this is the only way a queer person can know God in this life, and after this life too, seems more about post-Reformation politics than divine inspiration to me.
But I’m not a theologian like my brother Tyler—who was a priest before he left his collar behind for his now-wife, Poppy—and I’m not a spiritual activist like my sister-in-law Zenny, who was almost a nun. I don’t know how to reconcile my choices with a doctrine I know is fundamentally broken, because at the end of the day I still choose celibacy, and I still choose being a monk.
I still choose this life.
Anyway, I can stop wearing the cage again. I’m back to being okay after Elijah’s visit, and also I’m almost thirty-seven. I’m past getting public boners, I think? Even though I wasn’t when I was thirty-two and chasing Elijah into every empty room I could find.
A cheerless swell moves through me as I remember that someone else is chasing Elijah around right now; someone else gets to press their face into his neck and inhale the sage and saltwater smell of his skin. I’ve spent the last four years aching with physical need for him, and he’s found someone else to kiss and watchThe Repair Shopwith.
Jamie. Jamie who probably teaches eighth-grade orchestra and volunteers in a community garden and has never been fist-bumped by a strip club security guard, not even once.
I stare at the metal cage on the ledge of my small shower stall and then make my decision. If Elijah can move on, then so can I.
God, give me strength. Make all my desire for you and no one else.
Empty me. Empty me. Empty me.
There’s no ejaculate on the sheets the next morning.
Or the morning after that.
8
from the notebook of Elijah Iverson
I can’t stop thinkingabout ice cream.
There was a night with him at some pretentious pop-up gallery I’d dragged him to, where despite being the pro-sports-watching, millionaire fish out of water, he’d managed to charm all of my arty friends into falling in love with him. It was something about his smile, I think, which was slightly too wide and punctuated with dimples pressed into his cheeks by a surely smitten god. Or maybe it was those eyes—a bright bottle-green, perpetually alight with playfulness or intensity or both.
