The Monk Downstairs
Tim Farrington
in loving memory of my mother,
BEVERLY ANNE JOHNSON FARRINGTON
November 25, 1937–December 24, 1997
And Jesus answered, and said unto her, “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is necessary: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”
Luke 10:39–42
Contents
Epigraph
Part I
Chapter One
Rebecca finally finished painting the in-law apartment on a Friday…
Chapter Two
On Saturday morning Rebecca woke from a dream that she…
Part II
Chapter Three
The offices of Utopian Images were located five blocks south…
Chapter Four
Saturday dawned unpromisingly, a low sky yielding grudging light. Rebecca…
Part III
Chapter Five
For weeks after the gathering at Stinson Beach, Rebecca didn’t…
Chapter Six
Rebecca woke earlier than usual on Saturday morning, with a…
Part IV
Chapter Seven
They made love through the afternoon, something Rebecca had not…
Chapter Eight
In the weeks after the fiasco with Michael Christopher, Rebecca…
Chapter Nine
At work on Monday morning, a dress code had been…
Part V
Chapter Ten
At the hospital, despite the genuine urgency of the attendants,…
Chapter Eleven
Friday passed uneventfully into Saturday at the hospital, and Rebecca…
Part VI
Chapter Twelve
Three days later, Rebecca and Mike drove out to Phoebe’s…
Plus: Insights, Interviews, and More
Acknowledgments
Praise
Other Books by Tim Farrington
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART I
Let us face the fact that the monastic vocation
tends to present itself to the modern world
as a problem and as a scandal.
THOMAS MERTON
Chapter One
Rebecca finally finished painting the in-law apartment on a Friday night, and on Saturday morning she rented it to some poor guy who had just left a monastery. The ad had not even appeared in the papers yet, but she had tucked a tiny Apt. for Rent sign in the front window and he just wandered by and rang the bell. His name was Michael Christopher.
He was a lanky man in his early forties, a little Lincolnesque, with rounded shoulders and a long, sad face muffled by a beard in need of trimming. His hands were too big for his arms and his feet were too big for his legs. His hair was cropped close, the merest new dark stubble on a skull that had obviously been kept shorn until recently. The in-law apartment’s ceiling was low and he kept his head ducked a little, whether from fear of smacking it or out of some deeper humility, Rebecca could not tell. It was her impression that he was in no danger if he wanted to straighten up, so maybe the hunch was meekness. He wore plain black trousers, rather rumpled, a shirt that had once been white but had yellowed remarkably, a black jacket with the shoulder seam split, and some white, high-top Converse sneakers from the era before athletic shoes made statements. After twenty years of living a monk’s life, he could fit all his other possessions into a comically small black satchel. It looked like a doctor’s bag.
“Why did you leave the monastery?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “I had a fight with my abbot. Among other things.”
“A fight?”
He smiled, a little wearily. “To put it in layman’s terms.”
Rebecca laughed. “Well, that’s not very Christian, is it?”
“It’s sort of a long story.” Christopher hesitated. “I was fed up with that place anyway, to tell you the truth. I had prayed myself into a hole.”
The evidence of hotheadedness, along with his frankness, was strangely reassuring. She liked his smile and his unguarded brown eyes. He had no credit history at all, of course. He didn’t even have a driver’s license. He had a check, some kind of severance pay—did contemplatives get severance pay?—that he hadn’t been able to get cashed. He had no job as yet. As far as she could determine he had no prospects, no plan, and no résumé. But there was something about him that she liked a lot, a gloomy depth. And there was the appeal of the quixotic. He had devoted his adult life to the contemplation of God. That was his résumé. He had done what she had always intended to do with her own life and flung it into the maw of Meaning in one grand, futile gesture, and he had nothing to show for it but the clothes on his back. He’d been sleeping in the park and he hadn’t eaten in three days, but he seemed unperturbed by that. It was all very New Testament.
The apartment showed fast. A bathroom, a minute, stoveless kitchen with a half-fridge on one counter and a hot plate on the other, and the single real room in the place, an 8 x 15 box carpeted in a brown that had not seemed so dishearteningly the color of mud in the samples. The walls, at least, were a fresh cream. Rebecca was proud of her paint job.
The room’s lone window opened into the barren backyard. Christopher went right to the glass and stood looking out at the weedy waste. Rebecca could feel his melancholy. It was not much of a prospect.
“I keep meaning to put in a garden back there,” she said. “Or something. But there’s never any time, it seems. And when there’s time, I just want to recover.”
“I’d be glad to do some work back there myself. It’s a nice space.”
“Ah, well—” Rebecca murmured, flustered, assuming he was angling to reduce the rent through work exchange. “If I could afford a gardener…”
His look was genuinely uncomprehending; it had not occurred to him to charge her. Well, that was very New Testament too, of course. But mortgages were Old Testament, and hers was about to balloon. She had been hoping to rent the apartment to a quiet spinster with an obvious income, not a down-and-out man of God.
As they stood there, she clearly heard his stomach growl. Their eyes met. His look was apologetic, with a trace of dry amusement; he had lovely warm brown eyes. Rebecca took him upstairs, gave him a bowl of Cheerios, and introduced him to her daughter. At six years old, Mary Martha was an infallible detector of bullshit. Christopher was immediately easy with the child in an unflamboyant way. So many adults just turned up the volume, as if a kid couldn’t hear. But Christopher got quietly attentive, like a shy child himself. The two of them sat at the kitchen table with their twin bowls of cereal and studied the back of the box together. Mary Martha soon was chattering away, and when she invited Christopher to see her unicorns, Rebecca took it as a sign and let him have the apartment.
She was tempted to renege the next day. The deluge of applicants responding to the newspaper ad included a number of solid citizens. But by then she had cashed his monastery check for him and accepted first and last in cash, and he was settled in. And Rebecca had to admit that Christopher’s delight in the in-law apartment was charming. She’d never seen a man so grateful for a shower, a hot plate, and a half-fridge.
To Br. James Donovan
c/o Our Lady of Bethany Monastery
Mendocino County, CA
Dear Brother James,
Thank you for your letter, and for your very touching concern. I have indeed “settled nicely” into a situation here in the city, as you hoped. The details you request are not that important. Suffice it to say that I am content. (I must ask, incidentally, that you not address me any longer as “Brother Jerome.”
I am Michael Christopher now. Again…The name seems strangely like an alias after twenty years. But that is all the more reason to insist on using it. My identity itself has become a kind of hair shirt.)
Forgive me if I say that I am not sure what purpose would be served by “continuing our conversation in faith,” as you put it. You are young, and eager, and were struck upon your arrival at Our Lady of Bethany by something in me that you took for depth. I was a seasoned monk, you thought, with an inner life rich in God. You took me for a model of sorts, and I confess that I was flattered. But surely my “depth” has revealed itself by this time as a side effect of less appealing qualities; the “richness” of my inner life is a complexity more riddled with doubt than illumined by faith.
It is true that our conversations in the past were delightful. I cherished the gift of your friendship from the moment you came to Our Lady of Bethany. Your fresh eye, your intelligence, and the purity of your commitment to the contemplative life were a joy to me, and sparked a renewal of my spirit. But paradoxically enough, it was in trying to convey to you something of my own love for the contemplative life that I came to realize how desperately little I had to show for twenty years of prayer. It became a kind of torment to me, to see your innocent eagerness. I realized that something in me was saying, was fairly shouting, Go back! Go back to the world! It is not too late for you to avoid becoming what I have become.
And what have I become? You ask what prayer is for me now. I used to have so many lovely answers. Prayer is communion, adoration, praise; it is the practice of the presence of God. Prayer is abiding in love. I had a catalogue of ready definitions through the whole of my novitiate, all substantial and high sounding, an impressive array. But all that holy busyness seems like a kind of sand-castle building to me now, and the zeal of my answers is a heap of soggy kelp left by the tide. There is a prayer that is simply seeing through yourself, seeing your own nothingness, the emptiness impervious to self-assertion. A prayer that is the end of the rope. A helplessness, fathomless and terrifying. No matter how holy or well meaning you were when you started out, no matter how many fine experiences you had along the way, by the time you reach the point of this prayer, you want only to get out of it.
And God? God is that which will not let you out of it.
Do you see my point? I am a ruined man. Your kindness at this point only pains me, and forces a fresh consciousness of my failure. Certainly there is nothing to be gained by your “following my secular career,” as you so cheerfully put it. I anticipate no secular career. More than ever, I am certain that I am in God’s hands, that my life is paper to His fire. If I am sometimes inclined to feel now, with Jeremiah, He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light, that has more to do with my own temptation to bitterness than with your religious vocation. My seemingly endless squabbles with Abbot Hackley and with the creeping staleness of monastic routine are ancient history: It is with my bitterness and my sense of failure that I must struggle now; it is to this that God has led me. That cannot possibly be edifying to you; and certainly I would prefer to endure my humiliations in private.
Forgive me if I have put this too harshly. But believe me when I say that I’m doing you a favor. I am at best a cautionary tale; I am some shattered glass and metal rimmed with flares on the road to God. Drive on quietly, Brother James, and don’t look back.
Yours in Christ (as you say),
Michael Christopher
The Friday after Rebecca rented the in-law apartment to Michael Christopher, Bob Schofield proposed. Rebecca was startled but not truly surprised. She had seen his delusion building for months, but she had been ignoring it, hoping it would go away. Bob was earnest beyond her comprehension, impervious to her slights and neglects, as uninsultable as a tank. He simply took every nonrefusal on her part, every concession to see a movie or let him buy her a meal or a drink, and worked it patiently into the scheme of their Relationship, as he had called it from the start. She knew that he was serious. She had been to his apartment, she had seen the shelf of books devoted to Relationship. The project had a paint-by-numbers quality to it, but there was no denying the way Bob laid the color on. Apparently Rebecca’s utter lack of enthusiasm was not a problem for him.
She had held out hopes, in the beginning, for a harmless friendship. For companionship, a simple muffling of the loneliness of single motherhood. She had even toyed, early in the relationship, with the unnerving inkling that she might…not come to love Bob, but perhaps in time to resign herself to him. That such a resignation might be the lost key to her deferred adulthood, some yet-unprayed penance for her misspent youth. Maybe grown-up-ness hinged upon the exhaustion of passion into affectionate benignity. Maybe that was how they did it.
Bob had taken her and Mary Martha to his church one Sunday during this unnerving phase. Despite his bright pop notions of Relationship, he was an Episcopalian, which seemed to Rebecca at once admirably substantial and safely dilute, a sort of Catholicism Lite, without the high guilt content and devotional ferocity of the Church of her childhood. The mass, which Bob called a service, echoed with eerie near precision the liturgy she had grown up on, and she couldn’t help chiming in from time to time from struck chords of memory, only to find herself a word or two off in the Anglican version or praying on when everyone else had ceased or ceasing while the rest of the congregation prayed on. She knelt instinctively at the consecration, out of old Catholic reflex, and Mary Martha, who had never been in a church before, knelt unhesitatingly beside her. Everyone else had remained standing. Perhaps it was the touching faith of Mary Martha following her example against the grain; or perhaps it was simply some deep-seated orneriness or a residual bit of Catholic team spirit, a contempt for the humanistic Protestants’ unwillingness to bend their knees; or maybe it was just the sharpness of the emptiness that the posture brought home, the piercing sense of kneeling before a mystery too alien by now for proper worship. In any case, Rebecca remained on her knees, stubbornly, even defiantly, and rose only for the Our Father, which she treated as concluded after “and deliver us from evil,” leaving the Episcopalians to finish out the longer Protestant version on their own and to say “Ah-men.”
The awkwardness culminated at communion. Bob insisted to the verge of public embarrassment that Rebecca accompany him up the aisle. He seemed to think it would be crucially good for her. She followed him up and knelt resignedly beside him at the polished cherrywood rail, feeling blatant, a fraud, and half anticipating some sudden blaring of an alarm sensitive to the presence of religious impostors. The priest approached and held up the Host, saying, “The Body of Christ—” and Rebecca said “Ay-men,” conscious of her Catholic accent, and stuck out her tongue to receive the wafer, according to the training of her childhood.
“—the bread of heaven,” the priest concluded, with a mild note of having been preempted. He wavered, host in hand, apparently baffled by her protruding tongue. There was an awkward pause. Beside her, Bob was miming broadly with cupped hands, and after a bad moment Rebecca recovered and shaped her own hands likewise to receive the blessed wafer. The priest dropped one in Bob’s palm too and hurried on, clearly eager for smoother exchanges.
Bob consumed his bit of bread with a suitably reverent air. Following his example, Rebecca moved to eat her own Host, but she caught herself with the wafer halfway to her mouth, overcome by a sudden intimation of sacrilege. How could she possibly just pop the Body of Christ into her mouth like an hors d’oeuvre at a church picnic, after all these years, these literal decades of laxity, if not actual sin? She hadn’t even prayed, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive You…” These blithe Episcopalians left that out.
A deacon was approaching with a chalice, stooping to give the woman beside Rebecca a sip of the wine, intoning, “The Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation—” Before he could move on to her, Rebecca rose abruptly, charged with a violent certainty that she was not ready, not ready at all for the cup of salvation, for the blood of the Lamb.
Bob gave her a startled glance, then actually reached for her arm. Apparently he believed that she was simply unclear on the procedure. Rebecca dodged him easily and fled, shouldering through the muddle of approaching communicants. She hurried down the central aisle, out the door at the back of the church, and into the parking lot, where she finally came to an uncertain halt. She couldn’t remember what Bob’s car looked like. There were so many silvery luxury cars in the crowded lot that it looked like a Mercedes auto fair.
She was still clutching the communion wafer in her hand. It felt weirdly hot against her palm, a point of fire like a needle or a nail. A stigmata of ambivalence, she thought ruefully. The spring morning was warm and incongruously beautiful; somehow the usual San Francisco fog would have suited her better. She was remembering the day she had ceased to believe in a God who could punish her. She had been sixteen, capable at last of driving to church herself, and she had talked her mother into letting her take the family’s second car, a dumpy Ford Pinto, the model that was later determined to be an explosion waiting to happen because of the placement of the gas tank. Instead of going to mass, though, she had bought two Krispy Kreme jelly doughnuts and a large coffee and driven out to the beach. She’d eaten the doughnuts as a condemned inmate might eat his last meal, fairly sure that the Lord would strike her down for bailing so calculatedly on church.
But nothing had happened, an awesome nothing. She had finished the doughnuts and licked her fingers and sipped her coffee. The waves had broken on the gray New Jersey sand and the gulls had careened and shreed. It had just been a lovely sunny day like this one. She’d felt, somehow, that God had let her down. The least He could have done was shown some interest in her sacrilege. A rear-ender, maybe, the Pinto smacked from behind by the hand of a vengeful Lord, square on the misplaced gas tank. A fireball. That’ll teach you to skip mass. Nothing fatal; an attention grabber merely. She could have emerged from the purgative flames scorched but chastened, seared into unassailable belief.
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