Page 84 of Saint
Outside the Tate,there’d been two young men kissing against a wall, and I remember thinking,where did our time go?Not the time of this trip, but the time ofus—maybe even the time before us. I don’t feel any different from those young people inside, I don’t wake up thinkingact like you’re in your forties now, but I am different, aren’t I? Every kiss, every arm around a waist, every brush of our pinkies, I checked around us. Even in London, even in the Tate, I checked.
It’s habit, necessary habit. Look, glance, turn. Check, check, safe.
Is that generational? Or is it age?
Experience?
Will those two men do the same in twenty years?
I hope not. I hope they have the kairos of a kiss on a summer night without real time, without bitter, biting reality scraping its claws over their skin.
* * *
It’s notthat I wish I were young again; it’s not innocence I crave, and it’s not the months and years they have stretching out before them.
No, it’s those moments of fullness that I want, always those moments.
And these moments with Aiden are slipping away faster than I can hold on to them. Because as he pointed out in Semois, his vocation is there, in that world of kairos and God, and my vocation is here.
It would be easy to say that I’m only a visitor in his life, but truly, this patient, petulant, vulnerable man is only a visitor in mine.
Part 4
Ireland
44
The first thingElijah does when we step outside the terminal at the Dublin airport is heave a giant sigh.
The next thing he does is take the sunglasses he’d pulled out of his satchel and put them back inside his satchel. And then he hunts for a cardigan he’d shoved in there during the flight instead. I look up at the gray sky and then around at all the slick, gray concrete. A wind blows chilly and wet in front of the terminal. It’s hard to think of a place more different than the sunny, herb-scented valley where we’ve spent the last week.
“Shall we?” Elijah sighs, and we step out into the gray drizzle and start rolling our way to the rental car place.
Thirty minutes later, and we are on the road. Traveling on a monastery’s dime means that funds are hugely limited, and we’re taking the cheapest car they have, which is a tiny, tiny stick.
I have to drive, because Elijah doesn’t know how to drive a manual, which means I’m currently sitting with my knees around the steering wheel, my habit pulled up to my thighs because the hem keeps snagging on my boot when I work the clutch, trying to figure out how to shift with my left hand while a very stressed-out Elijah tries to navigate.
It gets easier as we emerge from the cluster of Dublin and get onto the M4 and then onto the M6, which will take us right across the middle of the island to the west coast, where the poetic-slash-depressing sea cliffs await us. The sky doesn’t get any less gray, but soon there are pretty fields lining the highway, dotted with clumps of trees and then cows and the occasional tractor. If not for the vibrant green grass and low stone walls, we could be in Kansas.
“Okay,” Elijah says, somewhere after Athlone. We’ve both relaxed a little now that I’ve taught my left hand how to shift and we’re on a highway I can’t drive down the wrong side of because there’s a dividing rail. He pulls out his notebook and rests it on the dash while he digs for his pen and his iPad. “I have a list of questions for the article—can I ask them while we drive?”
“Fire away,” I tell him.
Most of the questions are perfunctory—what’s the difference between a leather belt or a cloth one; where do the monks too old or infirm to live at the abbey stay; how are abbots appointed and is there some kind of Church HR process for a bad abbot?
Some of them are slightly more complicated, as I discover when we’re sitting in a parking lot with Supermac’s balanced on our laps and he asks me about the priesthood.
“Why are some monks priests and others aren’t?” he asks, eating a French fry. There’s a lingering grain of salt on his lower lip, and I want to lunge across the car and lick it off. “Is it a choice? Is it decided by the abbot? Some kind of priest vetting committee?”
“It’s a personal choice,” I say, reluctantly tearing my eyes from his mouth. “When you join a monastic community, you’re a monk first, and any other calling is secondary. There used to be a sort of class system about it—monks who would go on to be priests were called choir monks, and they were more educated, their days revolved around liturgy and contemplation, et cetera. And then there were the monks called brothers, who were often less educated and whose days revolved around the material needs of the abbey. The work and the manual labor and stuff. I think that’s changing, at least at Mount Sergius, because there’s not a division of abbey work along choir-monk-slash-brother lines, and there’s definitely not any weird, classist talk about how the brothers’ natural aptitude for cleaning toilets frees up the educated, more sensitive souls for contemplation.” I think for a minute, chewing a fry. “Okay, well, I’ve heard some talk like that, I suppose, but mainly from the olds. And the random people who want to be Carthusians.”
Elijah looks over at me. “And you didn’t have this calling?” he asks. “You wanted to be a brother?”
My entire body prickles with how much I don’t want to be a priest. “I know it’s surprising maybe, given that Tyler went into the priesthood, but it’s never been something I wanted. Religious priests—that is, priests in a monastic order—don’t have the same breadth of pastoral care that secular or diocesan priests do, but they are still supposed to pastor their monastic communities. They still need to shepherd a flock, even if it’s a well-behaved monastic flock with lots of shepherds already. They still need to hear confessions and perform sacraments.”
“And you didn’t want to do that?” Elijah gives me a rueful smile. “I thought every Catholic kid grew up wanting to change wine into blood.”
“I think even as a kid I knew that wasn’t for me. I wasn’t good enough for it.” I huff out a laugh. “And I’m definitely not good enough for it now.”
