Page 42 of Saint
I confess to my confessor, Father Nathaniel, who listens with sympathy and then tells me what I already know—I have to tell the abbot.
Which is how I end up next to Abbot Jerome as we walk the path along the base of the hill he loves so much.
“Well,” he says after I haltingly and awkwardly explain that I made out with my ex-boyfriend in the hermitage, “I appreciate that you’ve come to me with this so soon after the fact, and that you haven’t tried to hold it inside. I can tell that it’s affecting you.”
I look over to where he’s walking, his hands tucked under his scapular and his face serene. His pectoral cross glints in the sunshine. “Affectedis a small word. The things I’m feeling are...larger.”
“Yes, I suppose they would be. But I hope they are not on account of fear. I hope you know you are safe here.”
I look back to the hill. The sun is blinding today, and I have to squint to make out the small path that snakes up the hill’s side. “I’m not upset that I kissed a man, Father Abbot. I’m upset that I kissedanyonewhen I vowed not to. And that I led him into sinning against someone else...”
Selfish. Just like I’ve always been.
And fuck, what if it’s how I’ll always be?
“Vows are not meant to be burdens, Brother Patrick,” the abbot says gently. “They are meant to clarify our lives and why we’re here. Perhaps what is causing these larger feelings is not guilt that you tested the boundaries of your conversatio morum vow, but rather an invitation from God to ask yourself what you really want before you take your solemn vows. To ask yourself if you feel called, truly, to your life here.”
Conversatio morum.Fidelity to monastic life.Meaning poverty, prayer, and, crucially, chastity. Along with a vow to stability and obedience, it composites the simple vows I made almost three years ago.
“I don’t need an invitation,” I say, panic rising in my throat.
I have to be a monk—I can’tnotbe a monk. It’s what saved my life. And if I stopped...
I don’t let my thoughts drift any further than that. I can’t think about what might happen to me and my stable but tentative okayness if I’m not a monk.
“I know what I want,” I add as quickly as I can. “I know what I’m called to do. I’m supposed to be a monk. I just messed up is all, and it won’t happen again, I’ll make sure of it.”
The abbot stops walking, and so do I. The look on his face is kind, but his warm brown eyes see so much that I don’t want him to see, and I can hardly bear to look at him.
“Brother Patrick,” he says, pressing his hand to my shoulder. “There is no shame attached to examining your heart. In fact, it’s why we’re here to begin with. It’s why our fathers sought the desert. We are here to learn how to be faithful to God, even if the faithfulness might not look how we think. Think of your brother Tyler, after all. Didn’t he learn that his call lay outside the priesthood?”
He did, but the thought doesn’t reassure me at all. In fact, it panics me even more, because Tylerprovesthere are only these two paths, and that they’re mutually exclusive. You can have either a life consecrated to God or a life out in the world. And while laypeople can be holy in their own way, they aren’t cloistered, they aren’tdedicated,and that’s what I need. I need to live every day not only alongside God, but inside him too.
“My heart is determined, Father Abbot; I know how to be faithful and how God means for me to be faithful. I just have to do better, that’s all.”
I have to do better, I have to leave—
Yes. That’s it. When I leave, it’ll be easier to be a good monk and a good man. I’ll find someplace colder and harder than Mount Sergius with its friendly faces and cheerful creek and it will burn all the selfishness right out of me.
The abbot regards me for a moment, and I can see him coming to some conclusion as he nods to himself and starts walking again. “I think it’s time we started preparing for your trip, don’t you?”
“You’re still going to let me go?” I ask, my voice cracking with relief. “I thought maybe you might—”
In my peripheral vision, I can see his bushy eyebrows slant down in a frown. “That I might punish you for a kiss by taking away something important to you? No. You are a man seeking God, not a teenager who took the family car without permission. But I am letting you go on a condition.”
“What’s that?” I ask, ready for anything. Hair shirts, fasting, a hundred rosaries a day,anything.I’ll do it.
He nods up at the sun. “That you take God’s invitation. Use your time away to ask yourself what you really want.”
25
Three weeks later
“Do you have enough socks?”Brother Connor asks. “Maybe you need more.”
“I’m sure they’ll have a way for me to do laundry,” I say, joining him to look down at my borrowed suitcase. It’s currently the most boring suitcase known to humankind—black socks, black boxer briefs, black habits and scapulars. My breviary, the copy ofSumma Theologiaethat Tyler gave me for Christmas last year. Toiletries. Head meds. Passport.
Everything is ready for me to go tomorrow. And I’ve been ready for so long that I’d start walking to the airportnowif they’d let me.
