Page 62 of Saint
“How do you manage with so few people?” I ask the abbot as I accept the bottle of beer Brother Luc is handing me. “Without letting work take over everything?”
Abbé Bernard thinks for a moment. He is a short, clean-shaven man with deep brown skin and faint smile lines around his eyes. He is often smiling, I notice, especially when he’s looking at his little family of monks—the majority of whom are around my age or slightly above, which is shockingly young for an abbey.
“It is a challenge, I suppose,” the abbot says in a deep French accent. “We are mandated to be self-sufficient, and yet our true purpose is knowing Christ through contemplation and prayer. St. Benedict says himself in the Rule that he wants nothing too harsh or too rigorous for a monastic life, but in order to earn our abbey’s keep, we must work hard. But how to do this without losing sight of why we are here to begin with?” He shakes his head, as if this is a question he puzzles over often.
I think of what Brother Luc had told Elijah and me earlier, about keeping the small hours. “But you are flexible too—stopping to pray where you are in the lavender fields, for example. Surely that’s a good compromise between theoraand thelaboraparts of our creed?”
“I hope so,” he replies, and he’s still smiling, but there’s a certain thoughtful distance to his gaze as he surveys the cloister full of monks. “But deciding which adaptations keep our prayers at the center of our lives and which are edging us toward becoming something we are not requires discernment. Discernment which I’m concerned is overshadowed by worldly concerns.”
“Adaptations are good, though, aren’t they?” Elijah asks, leaning his shoulder against a wide stone column lining the edge of the cloister. “If monasteries didn’t adapt, you’d still be selling wool and brewing beer in wooden tubs. And if the Church didn’t adapt, women would still be covering their hair in church while they listened to a Latin Mass.”
The abbot nods, but his eyes are on the monks lounging and drinking beer. “In nearly every other environment, a word likecompromiseis a very good word indeed. And truthfully, there is much that I wish Rome was willing to change about itself today—my English is not so good that I can speak of the subtle differences between words likecompromiseandadaptwithout changing to French—but I can say that I see changes meant to open the arms of the Church very differently from changes which open our time with God to concerns like money and capital improvement schemes.
“To paraphrase—what will it profit us to repair the bell tower or invest in a new fermenting tank, if the real cost is our communion with God? Because it is so very easy to let that communion be nibbled away at, bit by bit. A prayer here, a period of lectio divina there, all to get a little further in our work, all to finish one last task. But tasks must make time for our souls, I think. Not the other way around. Even when your tasks are bound very tightly to your soul.” Abbé Bernard’s smile deepens a little as he turns to look at Elijah. “You are a journalist, n’est-ce pas? I think you must understand this too.”
Elijah nods, and even though his demeanor is all polite sophistication, I can see that the abbot has made him consider something. Maybe something about me, because his eyes slide over to my face as he answers. “I’m beginning to.”
“Now,” the abbot says, straightening up and clapping once like a party host who’s realized they’ve neglected something. “Abbot Jerome told me you’re here to write an article. You can see how bad we are at staying silent like good Trappists—you must go interview my brothers and then their idle words will still serve some good in this lifetime!”
Elijah, who has been carrying his little leather notebook with him, drains the last of his beer and nods. “Yes, yes, definitely. Thank you.”
I extend my hand for his empty bottle—a habit left over from the year of being his date to every arty and pretentious event in the city—and the abbot seems to notice, his eyes dipping to where our fingers brush as Elijah hands me the bottle and then starts searching out monks to talk with.
A zing of defiant panic fries up my nervous system to my brain and then back out to my nerves again, and I have to remind myself that I didn’t do anything too telling. We just passed a bottle between us, we just accidentally brushed fingers, nothing more. And I’d checked my jaw and neck for love bites after the chapel, and I’m certain no one else had been up there with us...
But the abbot merely deepens his smile and nods over at the cart. “You may put it there if you like. We’ll send it out for sanitizing and then reuse it.”
I do as he asks, and he’s waiting where I left him when I return. There’s nothing in his face to make me think that he’s cataloguing the way Elijah and I had touched, and I clamp down on the urge to say something about it. Something likehe’s familyorwe’ve known each other since I was bornorI was really worried he wouldn’t recycle that bottle.Even though the last thing would one hundred percent be a lie—Elijah always recycles, even the really annoying-to-recycle things like plastic bubble mailers and printer cartridges—and the other two options feel too shitty to even think about saying, even if they’re technically true. It feels too close to denying Elijah, and even though we aren’t together and can never be together again, I can’t bring myself to do it.
“Brother Luc tells me you’ve offered to help with the harvest tomorrow,” the abbot says, and I relax infinitesimally. Maybe he didn’t think anything was too familiar or habitual about that bottle hand-off at all. Maybe I’m overthinking this.
“Yes,” I reply, trying very hard not to look over at Elijah now, even though I can hear him speaking flawless French to a monk sitting on the edge of the fountain. At least, I assume it’s flawless French—aside from this trip, my experience with French was mostly limited to Lumiere fromBeauty and the Beastand the weird guy from the Matrix sequels.
“This is very good,” the abbot says. “I know you are here to get a sense of our abbey life and what it’s like to live here, and the harvest is our life in a microcosm, I suppose. Hard work, and yet also striving for intimacy with God.”
“That’s what I want,” I respond, although when I speak the words, my mind doesn’t conjure up images of flickering candles and stained glass. Instead, I think of Elijah’s hand under my habit. I think of kissing him in the Semois ruins, kissing him so hard it hurt. I exhale quickly, trying to clear my mind. “It’s what I want more than anything else.”
“Abbot Jerome said as much. That you were looking for a life more austere than what you had at Mount Sergius. I have to warn you that while we keep our prayers and silences, there is too much of God’s joy here for true asceticism. For the kind of stark austerity that so many people seek.”
I’d guessed as much, hadn’t I, when I’d leafed through the information about the abbeys I was visiting? That only St. Columba’s could awaken me entirely, that it had to be that bleak and rocky place where I lost the last of myself?
But what if I was wrong? What if I’m better suited to lavender and olive trees and sunshine?
I think of the chapel and of Elijah’s hands on the forbidden places of my body.
What if I’m not suited for this at all?
* * *
Elijah doesn’t cometo my room that night and I don’t go to his, although it’s all I can think about, all I can imagine and dream of. Brother Luc tells us that the other guest—an American priest—has been coming and going all week, sometimes sleeping outside under the stars, the way Brother Connor likes to do.
“A mystic,” Brother Luc had confided as he showed us the communal bathrooms and where our towels would be. “You know the type. Seeing angels, hearing God. Il est dans la lune. I suppose he’ll wander back to the abbey once he gets hungry, although I wouldn’t be surprised if he was living off locusts and wild honey like Saint-Jean-Baptiste.”
But despite how restlessly I sleep, morning comes fast, and with it come vigils and breakfast. Elijah is there for both, looking as composed as ever, and not at all like we spent yesterday afternoon making out and talking about him fucking me. Not at all like one of ourwhat ifgames is hanging in the air like a summer storm.
We’ll have time to talk later today, I tell myself. Although I know the reason I’m already tightening my thighs in anticipation is not because I’m thinking of talking. It’s because I want more. I want kisses and touches and sex.
Sex.
