Page 91 of Saint
Later, as I pulled myself through those early days of my novitiate, I would listen to the end of that Corinthians reading that people love for weddings and hear what had happened to me that night.
For we know in part...but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.
Then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.
I thought I understood everything perfectly. That I was everything it whispered to me I was, and that there was no other truth that mattered. But I’d been wrong; there was so much else that mattered, so much else I hadn’t seen or known, and that night I could only barely apprehend the vastness of it, I could only sense that there was an infinity of something that wasn’t nothing, and that if I wanted, it could be my infinity too. This infinity was shared between all of us, it was webbed between all of us, and there were many doors and many gates, and I had found but one of them.
That was okay. This was my gate; it had called to me; and so it was the gate I wanted for that reason. I found my laptop and sat down at the kitchen table and Googled “Catholic Church near me” thinking that would be a nice starting point, and then let out ahuhwhen Google came back with too many results to properly parse. I guessed that the closest one would be the one I should click on, but then I saw it.
A limestone church set in front of a tall hill, the sun breaking over the hill’s crown.
Mount Sergius Abbey, the result said next to it. It was only an hour’s drive from here.
I clicked the link, which opened to a picture of monks in their black habits, heads bowed in prayer. But there they were grinning around glasses of beer...walking in pairs or trios beneath the shadow of the hill with their hands behind their backs...sitting in the cloister while the hill peeked over the roofs of the buildings around it.
They looked so serene, so steady, with the kind of steadiness that spoke of hope, love, and safety. They looked like they knew this god that didn’t sleep and watched over them, and I wanted to know this god too—more than anything, I wanted to know him.
I needed to know him.
And maybe—maybe this was the answer to everything, because I could still fix so many problems. The way I hurt Elijah and kept hurting him, the way I made money and then used it for absurd, meaningless shit, the way I was just in general a rich, selfish asshole who gave nothing to nobody and kept it all for himself.
The men in these pictures gave upeverything.And looked so happy that they’d done it.
That could be me.
I closed the laptop and went to find my shoes. And then I went upstairs to see Elijah asleep in bed.
He hadn’t formally moved in yet, but after a year together, his things had accreted in the farmhouse, and so his end-table was stacked with a half-finished crossword and the dog-eared Cortázar he was reading and another book that looked even harder to read underneath that and an eye mask and a bottle of unscented hand lotion. And I knew, somehow, that this would be the last time I would ever see his sweet, nerdy clutter. The last time I would ever see his face like this, relaxed in sleep, eyelashes long on his cheeks and his lips slightly parted and his eyebrows unfurrowed, unraised.
I pressed a last kiss to his sleeping lips, and he didn’t stir. Which felt like a sign.
“Goodbye,” I whispered to him, and then I left the farmhouse as the sun pushed up over the horizon, at last beating back the night and illuminating a world I hoped would still have me.
A world of dark asphalt and green pastures and well-ordered fields, and eventually in the distance, the grass-covered surfs of the Flint Hills, where my future would begin.
48
When I finish,Elijah has his head in his hands. I touch his shoulder, and he looks up, his face haunted. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he whispers.
I search for the right words to explain something that’s fundamentally unexplainable. “I wasn’t capable of presenting it verbally then, in some kind of logical order. I didn’t tell you because Icouldn’thave told you.”
Elijah searches my face. “But you can tell me now.”
“It’s taken a lot of therapy to get to this point,” I explain. “And meds. Those too.”
“And,” he asks carefully, “being a monk?”
“Yes,” I say, looking down through the gravestones to the stream and then the hills. We’re sitting in a place where centuries of holy men have been buried, a testament of crooked stones and round Celtic crosses, a testament to entire lives lived on one patch of land. “The work of my day and the work of my mind mirrored each other in my first years as a monk—new routines, new kinds of sleep hygiene, spending time outside, contemplation—it created a kind of positive feedback loop, I think. They fed each other. And faith—”
I stop, not sure how to say this without making it clear that God works just as much through SSRIs and therapy as he does through prayers and hymns. “It’s been the awakening of my spirit,” I finally say. “And without my spirit, I don’t think my life would be what it is now. Fully here. Fully present.”
“But then why switch orders?” Elijah asks. “Why come here looking for something more when Mount Sergius has already done so much for you?”
“It’sbecausethis life has done so much for me,” I say, turning to face him. “I owe God and my brothers so much, for the last five years, and yet I cannot finish the one task that is asked of me, which is to make my heart a heart for God and my community and those two things alone.”
I find his hand and press it to my scapular, to my chest, just like I did earlier. “The truth is that I wear two of these, Elijah, one for God, and another one that no one else can see. For you.”
We stare at each other a moment, my heart beating against his palm, his shoulders moving with heavy breaths. I don’t know what I should say next—I don’t even know what I would want him to say in return—only that I want him to know how true it is. How inconveniently, wonderfully, powerfully true.
