Page 98 of Saint
Please don’t make me try.
And there it is. If I find him the minute my plane lands—if I wait a week, if I wait a year—it will always be the same problem, won’t it? He’ll always feel like my ex-boyfriend is there too, and when an ex-boyfriend is God, that’s a problem. There has never been a more captivating mistress than the carpenter from Galilee.
Elijah will always worry about measuring up to what I left behind, because I’ll have left it behind forhim, and he’ll worry about me regretting the choice I made, and maybe he’ll even worry that I’ll go back. He’ll fear that the loop of history between us is too strong, too pre-ordained even, and that I’ll once again seek the silence of the cloister.
This is the beating heart of the problem: if I leave, then I’m asking him to trust that I won’t make him compete with literal infinity, to trust that I’m leaving because Iwantto leave.
But...if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t leave at all.
And that’s the undeniable truth.
* * *
“You don’t haveto tell me about it if you don’t want to,” Brother Connor says, bowing at the beginning of a kata before moving into its salutation. The shade of the graveyard’s oak tree spreads over us both, but the evening is hot, and I’m restless and sweaty under my robes. “But it’s been a week and you haven’t spoken to anyone. I’ve been formally asked to informally poke you about it. No pressure.”
I make a noise of acknowledgment, watching him sink effortlessly into his stances, his steps sure, his strikes clean. He told me once that he started karate as a young man in his twenties, which means he’s been doing these same forms for over forty years now, and it’s incredible to watch. Soothing. There is no wasted movement, no struggle. Even missteps or mistakes are immediately folded into the flow, swallowed back into the motion. I know this from what he’s told me—I’d never be able to spot a mistake in his katas even if I knew how they were supposed to go, because I suspect the mistakes are as graceful as the accuracy.
“When I went to Europe,” I hear myself say, “I wanted a place where my past could be burned away. And I feel like I’m the one who caught on fire instead.”
Brother Connor doesn’t stop moving, but he tilts his head toward me as he strikes to show that he’s listening.
“I felt so sure,” I go on, finding that it feels good to talk about it, in an air-out-the-wound kind of way. “I felt so sure that I would prove the abbot wrong, that God wasn’t asking me to reconsider my vocation as a monk. I knew exactly what I wanted, and it was this life, but more of it. Harder, stricter, quieter. Because more of those things would equal more of God, right? The more I emptied myself, the more of him I could hold.”
I look down at my lap. I’m sitting cross-legged and my scapular has rucked up into a pool of fabric. I think of the careful way Elijah folded it in the Irish cottage after undressing me.
“But it didn’t happen like that,” I finally say.
I haven’t confessed the particulars of the trip to anyone yet—not because I am trying to hide my sins, but because I miss them too much to speak them aloud. But I think the abbot and Brother Connor have already guessed.
“What happened was that I loved God and I loved Elijah at the same time, and I felt more full of each the more I loved them. In France, I—” I close my eyes and think of how it felt to move from prayer to sex and then back again. From worship to worship. “I had both. God and him. And it felt better than anything.”
I open my eyes to see that Brother Connor is watching me with kindness as he begins another kata.
“I would have left for him,” I say slowly, the words coming out softer than I mean them to. “I offered to leave for him. He refused.”
“But not because he doesn’t love you,” Brother Connor says.
“Worse. Because he does love me. And he knows I love this life.”
“Do you, though?”
I glance sharply at the older monk, and he gives me a smile before dipping into a low stance with a series of hand strikes. “I’m not doubting you, Brother Patrick, nor your devotion to God. But is it possible that you love this life because it is the closest one you’ve found to the one you truly need?”
“I don’t...” I shake my head. “I’m not looking for some unique path. I’m looking for the right one.”
Brother Connor finishes and then walks over to me, lowering himself with grace to the ground and beginning to stretch. He’s not winded in the least. “It’s difficult to see it now, because it is so well-trod, but this?” Brother Connor gestures to the abbey campus, which at this hour is crawling with robed monks and agricultural students and visitors. “This was once unheard of. Strange. The roots of our story are radical ones, ones sought by people continually searching out the right way, the best way. Why else did the Cistercians feel the need to reform, and then the Trappists after them? Why are there active orders, contemplative orders, ruins of monasteries flaking off bits of damp plaster while foundations for new ones are being poured? And if it’s that way just inside of our one sphere, can you imagine how many ways there must be outside of it?”
“Many gates,” I murmur. It’s what I said to Elijah when I was telling him the story of that night. That there are many gates, but this was the one I chose.
“Many gates,” Brother Connor echoes. He makes a fist with his right hand and then brings it against his left palm. One of the opening gestures of his salutations. He looks down at his hands. “I often think that if I’d kept my school, if I’d kept my life the life of a martial artist, that I would probably be the same soul I am today. Practice is practice, whether it’s psalms or stances. There are many gates, as you say. Many ways to the well.”
Done stretching, he stands up and finds his habit to pull on over the T-shirt and old gi pants he’s wearing.
“Do you regret it?” I ask after a minute. “Leaving the school behind? Leaving the person you loved behind?”
Brother Connor gives me a kind look. “If I didn’t miss my old life, then the choice to come here would hardly have any meaning, would it? But regret is only part of the equation—an equation so long and so complicated that it will never stop being written as long as you’re alive. It is fruitless to reduce everything into a category of regret or un-regret—sometimes the best and most creative decisions we make will forever hold seeds of regret inside. Sometimes our deepest happinesses start with regret, growing over it the way a pearl grows over grit.”
I think about this for a minute, trapped between two regrets, as it were.
