Page 4 of Saint
Abbot Jerome is already sitting behind his desk when we get to his office, the ubiquitous breeze blowing through the room and an audiobook playing from some unknown source. It’s in French, and Brother Connor asks, “Proust again?” as we sit down in the sturdy wooden chairs set across from the abbatial desk. Brother Andrew made them years ago, and I’m grateful for them now, because the arms are set back far enough that I can sit with my thighs apart, which is more comfortable with the cage. Funny how I’ve forgotten how to move and sit with it on when it was a near-constant companion for me in my early days at the monastery. But in the last two years, I’ve needed it less and less.
Well, until last night, that is.
“I’m on to Camus now,” the abbot says, looking up from the papers on his desk to us. “Vivre, c'est faire vivre l'absurde, and so forth. Hello, Brother Patrick.”
The abbot looks like no one more than he looks like Friar Tuck from the cartoonRobin Hood, except he doesn’t have a tonsure. And he isn’t a badger, obviously. He’s short and round, with fair skin, bushy eyebrows, and silver hair. His nose is as prodigious as his chin isn’t, and his scoldings are as common as his smiles. He spends most of his free time writing about a very, very dead person named Gregory of Nyssa.
We sell his books in the gift shop. They have a lot of footnotes.
I nod my hello at the abbot, and he pushes something across his desk—scattering pens and what looks suspiciously like spilled Tic Tacs to the side as he does.
“I’m aware that you’re silent today,” the abbot says as I reach forward to take the packet of papers he’s offering. “So I’m not expecting you to respond immediately to what you’re about to look at. But I wanted you to have the chance to think about it while you’re alone at the hermitage tonight. This, I believe, will require much discernment.”
Paper-clipped to the top of the packet are three glossy pictures. In them, rocky cliffs jut against a dark and cold-looking sea; a simple medieval church sits among austere hills with a crop of weathered gravestones around it; a small stone structure—cottageseems a generous term, perhapshutis better—perches at the edge of the cliff, missing its doors and windows and roof. The sky is dark and coffered with clouds, and sea mist hangs in the air. The grass around the cottage seems nearly flattened with wind.
It looks like the end of the world. The absolute end of the world, and someone’s built a monastery there.
My soul gives a sharp and silent cry at the sight of it.
“St. Columba’s Monastery,” the abbot says softly. When I look up, he’s watching me closely. “A Trappist monastery on the west coast of Ireland.”
Trappist.
Mount Sergius is a Benedictine abbey, meaning we follow the Rule of St. Benedict, who was the first person to lay out an actual plan for how clumps of people could live and work and pray in the same place without descending into spiritual chaos or unredeemable smelliness. But five hundred years after St. Benedict wrote out his plan, a group of monks decided nobody was following the plan hard enough and moved to a swamp and spent the rest of their lives in a sort of austerity-off with each other. Until eventually they turned the marsh into viable farmland and everyone remembered that it was nice to eat and rest and wear shoes once in a while, and by a few hundred years later, the Cistercians weren’t much more austere than the Benedictines they’d broken off from. So then, another group of monks broke off fromthemand went hardcore austerity. Barely any food, constant work, silence, penitence, isolation—the whole thing. For a while, they even lived without a roof over their heads. Literally.
They are called Trappists. And aside from the Carthusians—who are like the antisocial Silent Bobs of Christian monasticism—the Trappists are the most dedicated to a life of prayer and contemplation of all the monastic orders.
I look back down at the desolate landscape in the pictures.
“You’ll see some information about St. Columba’s below the pictures, and underneath the St. Columba pile, there are more monasteries. All Trappist.”
I flip through the papers quietly, quickly. Even though I used to be the definition of a hard-partying business bro, I was actually pretty good at my job, and part of that job was being able to accurately skim and metabolize information while people stared at you from across a table. And so I see that indeed, all the monasteries are Trappist. Two are here in America—the famous Mepkin and the even more famous Gethsemani—and the rest are scattered between France, Belgium, and Italy. They all have pictures as well, and I glimpse sun-soaked stone arches, cheerful gardens, and a fairy-tale forest before I stack all the papers as they were.
From the top of the stack, the lonely cliffs of St. Columba’s stare up at me, beckoning me. I can practically smell the sea and hear the gusting wind. I can imagine my muscles aching, and my soul singing. Cleansed of everything but love for my eternal bridegroom, because in a place like that, there would be nothing left. There would be only sea and sky and God.
The breeze is tousling the abbot’s eyebrows as he studies me.
“I know you have been craving more, Brother Patrick. More silence, more solitude, more work. More prayer. And I have deliberated some time about the papers you have in your hands, because I have seen this passion in young men before. They crave more, they desire to be burned down to the bone with devotion, and more often than not, it leads to an irrecoverable consumption. They don’t burn down, they burn out. And they either leave or they become listless and untethered, and struggle to find peace in a community again.”
I look down at my hands, rough and calloused with amateur forestry. To beburned to the bone with devotionis my entire dream right now, my sole vision for my future.
I want to be holy and whole. I want my heart and body to be God’s in total, all of it burned up on his altar.
I look down at the picture of St. Columba’s again.
“On the other hand,” the abbot continues, “there are other men I see come through here, with your drive and your relentless seeking. They go on to do great things, and to lead lives that I can only call saintlike. But they must find a place that fits them. This is the trouble with the monastic life, you see—you must be able to find an entire life in a single place. You must be able to find the deepest corners of your own soul in one chosen fold of the world, and I sometimes wonder if eastern Kansas is that chosen fold for you. I sometimes wonder if the Benedictines are the right order for you. And so to that point…”
Next to me, Brother Connor adjusts his hands in his lap. From any other person, the gesture would mean nothing. But from Brother Connor, it means he’s roiling with excitement.
The abbot smiles at Brother Connor and then at me. “And so I have permissionandthe funds to send you to three of these monastic houses to see if one of them might be a good fit.”
Brother Connor jumps in. “Officially, this would be a research trip on behalf of our brewery, so you would tour the breweries at each monastery and engage in some mild corporate espionage while you were there.”
“Ethical corporate espionage,” the abbot says. “You know,Christiancorporate espionage. Be holy about it and stuff.”
“But the research is only the justification for sending you, not the real reason,” Brother Connor says. “You are the real reason. Your future is the real reason. And our hope is that you’ll find the answers you’re seeking on this trip.”
Even if I weren’t silent today, I still wouldn’t know what to say. These kinds of trips are extremely rare for mere brothers like me, especially trips outside the order and outside thecountry. Do I want to spend a trip drinking beer and seeking holy ground? Yes, of course, but I also feel a profound uncertainty. An unworthiness and a cutting doubt.
