Page 97 of Saint
—Elijah
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I’ve somehow foundmy way up to the cliffs, his letter clutched in my hand and my breviary left back in my cell. His letter is my breviary now, my little hours. And in between reading the words again and again, I remember with clawing unhappiness the way he dodged my questions yesterday with such dexterity that I didn’t even notice.
Is this okay with you?
I love you like everything.
Elijah was wrong about one thing. I’m not such a good listener after all.
The wind is strong today, and heavy clouds bring with them spatterings of drizzle, but I don’t care. I sit hunched on the grass, staring out at the point where the gray sky meets the gray sea, Elijah’s letter flapping in my hand, my mind as open and rough as the landscape around me. Funny how I wanted an abbey that would empty me out, a geography that would carve out everything that wasn’t my love for God, and here I am. Completely empty. Hollow—a chalice without wine. A monstrance without a host.
Even my tears feel empty, pushed out of my eyes by biology and little else, because what I’m feeling is so beyond the scope of tears, so beyond what my body can hold for me.
Only God can hold it.
I lift my eyes to the hills.
But there are no hills in front of me now. From this direction, I can only see the sea.
51
My last twodays at St. Columba’s are filled with rain and a wordlessness that feels like it’s sunk into my bone marrow and made a home there.
I can’t speak, even when silence isn’t required, and I have no desire to. There is no word I can produce, no sound I can utter, that will give adequate shape to what I feel inside. Which is elemental, which is tectonic. I have the feeling that if I speak, I will scream, and if I scream, I will never stop screaming.
I’ve practiced listening and silence for so long—long enough that it’s become easy and natural and pleasant. But this is the first time it’s ever feltnecessary.
Icanpray though. I don’t feel soothed or elucidated by it or anything like that, but I still do it anyway. The liturgy—the psalms, the hymns, the Eucharist in the morning before breakfast—is the container that can hold anything, the real holy grail. Into it, I can pour fury and despair and a loneliness so sharp it slices through bone with no effort whatsoever, and the liturgy holds it all. It holds it all effortlessly.
It doesn’t ask me to contextualize or extrapolate or analyze. It doesn’t ask me to locatepreciselymy feelings and locatepreciselymy boundaries and what boundaries other people are allowed to have with me.
All liturgy asks is that I stand and sit and kneel. That I sing the words already printed out for me to read. All liturgy asks, essentially, is that I show up and breathe.
And right now, that’s all I can do.
Part 5
Kansas Again
52
There arebenefits to traveling in monk robes, and one of them is that no one is put off by my silence as I return the rental car and check in for my flight. I have a little left in my travel budget, and I wander to the airport bookstore, where I make an unnecessary splurge on the two issues ofModethey have in the magazine stand. I go to the airport bar, where I see not one, but two priests, and then the bartender gives me my Smithwick’s on the house with a smile and a nod.
I muster a smile back and then thankfully the good man leaves me to stalk my ex-boyfriend’s work in peace.
Both issues have articles by Elijah—one about a former boy band star who’s been cast in a Hallmark-esque Christmas movie, one about an MIT scientist exposing bias in computer algorithms—both are so insightful and so dryly funny that I can hear his voice in both of them. It’s the kind of hurt that I could keep hurting myself with for the rest of my life.
The rest of the magazines show me a world that was once familiar and now utterly alien—the Egypt where I came from, as the Old Testament says. Expensive clothes, shoes, watches. Music retrospectives and movie reviews. A world of style and sophistication, and if I’d ever felt too intellectually clumsy or shallow for Elijah’s world before I became a monk, I definitely feel that way now. I wear robes instead of mock turtlenecks and the newest song at the abbey is “Here I Am, Lord” and I don’t even know what the men’s jewelry renaissanceis, much less whether or not it’s a good fit for most casual events or not.
A slow doubt creeps in with the voiceless pain, and it grows like weeds around my feet as I board the plane, theModeissues on my lap instead of my bible orSumma Theologiae.
Maybe...maybe it was never meant to be, me and him. Maybe he knew that. Maybe he knew I’d never fit into his life because I barely fit into it before. Not like Jamie probably did. Shit.
Over the ocean, I reread his letter again. I reread it so many times that I have it memorized. And as perversely good as it feels to pretend this is about me being unsophisticated or not fitting into his life, I can’t ignore what he so plainly told me. A plea that can’t be bypassed no matter what strategies or contingencies I think of.
I can’t compete with fireflies in the cloister.
