“Sometimes.”
“This…peace. This hush. I would sit there by Phoebe’s bed and promise myself I wouldn’t forget it. That I wouldn’t let myself just fall back into the same old busy sleepwalking.”
“Mommy, come walk the maze with me!” Mary Martha called.
“In a minute, sweetheart.” She met Mike’s eyes again. “I know that you know what I’m talking about.”
Mike was silent for a moment. Then he said, almost reluctantly, “There was a print in the monastery library, a copy of Filippo Lippi’s painting of St. Augustine beholding the Trinity, from the Uffizi museum in Florence. Augustine is sitting there with a scroll on his knee and a pen and ink pot in his hands, gazing up at this three-faced sun shining down on him from above his desk. And he’s got three arrows sticking out of his heart.”
“Ouch.”
“Exactly. I used to look at that picture all the time. I thought that was it, you see: the vision, the light, the ecstasy and the rapture. I thought that after a moment like that there was nothing left to do on earth. All I wanted was to be that guy gazing raptly at the sun, and I figured that the arrows were just part of the price of vision—an occupational hazard, if you will.”
“And now?”
He shrugged. “And now I know that the moments of vision come and go—‘no man shall see My face and live.’ We’re not equipped to live in that light all the time. The vision fades and life goes on and all we’re left with is the arrows.”
“A cheerful thought,” Rebecca murmured glumly.
“In a way, I think it is,” Mike said. “I think the arrows are so that we don’t forget.”
Mary Martha, her patience exhausted, walked over and seized Rebecca’s hand. “Mom! Come on—”
“Okay, okay,” Rebecca laughed, surrendering and allowing her daughter to haul her to her feet. She gave Mike a mockrueful glance. “You coming?”
“I think I’ll sit this one out,” he said.
She could appreciate the subtle point of parental negotiation: he’d been dancing with Mary Martha all afternoon. She blew him a kiss and let Mary Martha lead her to the labyrinth’s entrance. Her daughter ran on ahead immediately, but Rebecca took it slowly. The terrazzo path was comforting somehow, simple and finite, one step after another.
The first curve looped disconcertingly close to the labyrinth’s center and she wondered briefly whether she had somehow done something wrong, but then the path turned outward again. Mary Martha whizzed by, a full spiral ahead of her already; at her next turn Rebecca caught a glimpse of Mike sitting contentedly on the bench. He had lit a cigarette and looked wonderfully placid. Rebecca gave him a smile and made her next turn, and her next, and for a moment she was filled with a sudden quiet joy. There was nothing ahead of her but the cathedral, its upper reaches drenched in sunset gold, and the plum trees in the evening hush, waiting for spring. There was nothing ahead of her but all the steps to be taken.
Plus: Insights, Interviews, and More
* * *
The Monk Downstairs
A Reader’s Guide to
The Monk Downstairs
Preview: Chapter One from Tim
Farrington’s new book
The Monk Upstairs
* * *
A Reader’s Guide to The Monk Downstairs
by Tim Farrington
Plot Summary:
“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
Rebecca Martin is a single mother with an apartment to rent and a sense that she has used up her illusions. “I had the romantic thing with my first husband, thank you very much,” she tells a hapless suitor. “I’m thirty-eight years old, and I’ve got a daughter learning to read and a job I don’t quite like. I’ve got a mortgage. I’m making my middle-aged peace with network television and tomorrow is just another day I’ve got to get through. I don’t need the violin music.” But when the new tenant in her in-law apartment turns out to be Michael Christopher, a warm, funny, sneakily attractive man on the lam after twenty years in a monastery and smack dab in the middle of a dark night of the soul, Rebecca begins to suspect that she is not as thoroughly disillusioned as she had thought.
Her six-year-old daughter, Mary Martha, is unambiguously delighted with the new arrival, as is Rebecca’s mother, Phoebe, a rollicking widow making a new life for herself among the spiritual eccentrics of Bolinas. Even Rebecca’s best friend, Bonnie, once a confirmed cynic in matters of the heart, seems to have lost her sensible imperviousness to romance, and urges Rebecca on. But none of them, Rebecca feels, understand how complicated and dangerous love actually is.
As her unlikely friendship with the ex-monk downstairs grows by fits and starts toward something deeper, and Christopher wrestles with his despair while adjusting to a second career flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s, Rebecca struggles with her own temptation to hope. But it is not until her mother suffers an unanticipated crisis and Rebecca is brought up short by the realities of life and death, that she begins to glimpse the real mystery of love, and the unfathomable depths of faith.
At once a romantic comedy and a tale of spiritual renewal, The Monk Downstairs is a love story in every sense of the word, a tender exploration of the unforeseeable ways in which individual journeys interweave, and of the ways we are changed by the opening of the heart.
Tim Farrington on The Monk Downstairs:
“I suppose it was natural that I would eventually write a story about a slightly oversexed monk. I entered an ashram (an eastern monastery, in Oakland, no less) myself at the age of twenty-five, bent on shedding the world and finding God, and spent two years absorbed in meditation, before eventually running off with the ashram cook, with subsequent complications. The two of us lived in a rickety shack in the mountains of northern California, ostensibly in prayerful retreat from the hectic world, but eventually it became all too clear that my notion of prayerful retreat inclined toward sitting on a stump contemplating the serene flow of the Eel River below and the majestic sawtooth sweep of the mountains against the sky, while hers seemed to involve a lot of uprooting blackberries and clearing old trails of poison oak. She thought I was lazy and I thought she was driven. Eventually she went to India to work with Mother Teresa and I got a job in a lumber mill in Willits, which seemed like a prayerful retreat itself by then. So the theme of what Thomas Merton called ‘contemplation in a world of action,’ the difficulty of reconciling a vigorous life of service in the world, the vita activa, with the vita contemplativa, the life of quiet prayer, is one that has absorbed me throughout my own spiritual journey.
“For many years, the working title for The Monk Downstairs was That Good Part, a phrase from the New Testament story of Martha and Mary, in Luke 10, which serves as the novel’s epigraph: ‘But Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.’ The two sisters in the Bible story, one busy to the verge of distraction serving her Lord, the other sitting at His feet, languidly devotional, are classic examples of the contrasting spiritual types I experienced so vividly in the mountains of Mendocino County, with Martha representing the vita activa and Mary representing the contemplative approach to God. In the novel, it was my intention to bring an overloaded single mother, a de facto Martha-type with a frenetic modern life, together with a disheartened monk, a sort of wounded Mary, fresh from twenty years of apparently fruitless prayer. I wanted to explore in the relationship between the two the complex dynamics of worldly activity and contemplative perspective, and hopefully to find some balance of the apparently conflicting approaches in the reconciling depths of a love story. Through the novel’s unfolding action, Michael Christopher, the lifelong Mary, moves by often-unwilling degrees toward a transforming involvement with the realities of life and love in the world, while the Martha-type Rebecca is brought inexorably to an unanticipated immersion in the peace at the root of all action, and a revelatory taste of the si
lence of God.”
Topics for Discussion:
Michael Christopher initially tells Rebecca that he left the monastery because he “had a fight with his abbot.” Why do you feel he really left the monastery? What was he looking for? What did he find?
When the story opens, Rebecca has reached a point in her relationship with Bob Schofield where he feels emboldened to propose marriage. In refusing him, she realizes that she has been tempted to “settle,” to compromise her longing for deep love and intimacy, for the sake of security and simple companionship. Her friend Bonnie suggests that she might be holding out for “the fairy tale thing,” while her mother, who has known a fulfilling marriage, tells her briskly that “there’s no need to settle for mediocrity.” What do you think? What is the balance between realistic compromise in intimacy and the longing for “a marriage of true minds”?
In his first letter to Brother James, Michael Christopher says, “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.” Is this an aspect of spirituality you can relate to? What is the difference, if any, between a dark night of the soul and mere depression or despair?
What is Rebecca’s view of God at the beginning of the novel? What is her view of love? How do these evolve through the course of the story?
Mother-daughter relationships are central to the novel. Compare and contrast Rebecca’s relationship with Phoebe, her mother, and with her own daughter Mary Martha. What sides of her does each relationship bring out? What kinds of love does each bring into play? What kinds of frustration?
What are the crucial points at which Rebecca and Michael Christopher are able to move closer? At what points do they fail to move toward intimacy, and instead move away? Why?
Michael Christopher’s troubled relationship to his former abbot, Fr. Hackley, has obviously been central to his religious life, and his struggle to come to terms with it continues to be so even after he leaves the monastery. What is your sense of what the real issues were between the two men? How does the evolution of Christopher’s understanding of his former abbot reflect his own spiritual development throughout the book?
Similar to Michael Christopher’s need to make some peace with Abbot Hackley and what he represents, is Rebecca’s challenge in coming to terms with her ex-husband, Rory. What is your understanding of the history between the two? How has the relationship affected Rebecca’s view of love? How do the changes in Rebecca’s attitude toward her ex-husband reflect her own development throughout the book?
Rebecca is ambivalent about her job throughout much of the novel. Like her longing for true intimacy, her craving for a fulfilling career is in delicate and conflicted balance with her sense of what is realistic. In what ways does her work at Utopian Images fulfill her and exercise her real gifts? In what ways does it stifle her? How realistic is it to hope for a career that is more than a tedious way to pay the rent?
St. Augustine defined a sacrament as “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” There are at least two examples in the novel of un-orthodox “sacraments”: the baptism of Sherilous’s baby at Stinson Beach, and Michael Christopher’s administration of last rites to Phoebe in the hospital. What is your sense of the spiritual “validity” of these impromptu rituals? What is a true sacrament?
Michael Christopher says, “We don’t hear much of the danger of prayer, but it is the deepest sea and I believe there are many who are lost en route.” What is your sense of the sea of prayer and its hazards? Is it really possible to be lost?
In their conversation in the kitchen in Chapter Five, Michael Christopher tells Rebecca the story of the failed love that propelled him into the monastery. How much of his commitment to the religious life do you think was a positive longing for God, and how much was simple flight from the challenges of intimacy and work in the real world? Is a true monastic vocation possible?
On the morning after their first night together, Rebecca and Michael Christopher run aground on his reluctance to let their relationship pass into a more public knowledge. What is your reading of the situation, and of Christopher’s conflictedness? Do you think Rebecca overreacts?
In one of his letters to brother James, Michael Christopher describes God as “an unfathomable darkness,” and the peace of God’s presence as a perfect silence and “a kind of nowhere.” How does a radical unknowing like this differ from atheism? In theological terms, Christopher’s spirituality could be characterized as a via negativa or “apophatic” approach to God, a focus on God’s ultimate unknowability, in contrast to the more familiar kataphatic path in which God is known and loved through an emphasis on divine attributes such as love, mercy, and justice. What is the place of a dark night spirituality such as Christopher’s? Is it compatible with life in “the world”? Wouldn’t it be better if he just, like, lightened up a little?
How does her mother’s crisis affect Rebecca? How does it affect Mike? How does it change their relationship?
Do you think Rory is really ready to change, after the judge lets him off the hook? Does his relationship with Chelsea have a chance to succeed?
How about Bob Schofield and Bonnie? Will their marriage work out? And what about Rebecca and Mike?
One of the book’s central themes is stated in the contrast between the active Martha and the devotional Mary in the book epigraph from Luke 10. Discuss your own sense of the balance between the life of busy service and the contemplative life, and how the theme plays out in the novel.
Chapter One from Tim Farrington’s new book The Monk Upstairs
Station I: Jesus is condemned to death
Thy vows are upon me, O God: I will render praises unto Thee.
Thou hast delivered my soul from death:
wilt Thou not deliver my feet from falling,
that I may walk before God in the land of the living?
PSALM 56
It was seven minutes past the appointed hour and the bridegroom was nowhere to be found. Everyone was trying to put a good face on it, but a certain tension was inevitable. The organist, an ancient monk with a round pink face like a dried pomegranate, was muscling through another round of “On Eagle’s Wings.” Apparently his repertoire was limited; but the music took on an unsettlingly dirge-like quality the second time through. The guests sat quietly, their small talk long since expended, glancing discreetly at their watches, reading through their programs again as if they might have missed something. Chelsea Burke’s baby had begun to cry, in one of the back pews, and the noise was approaching crisis proportions. Abbot Hackley, who was to perform the ceremony, stood at the front of the chapel with his hands folded in front of him, his heavy white chasuble trimmed with dazzling gold, a benediction waiting to happen. The look on his face was determinedly serene and seemed to suggest that this was all in God’s plan, but from time to time he would sway a little, as if in a wind. The poor man was in the middle of the third course of some particularly savage clinical trial treatment for colon cancer and the wedding had been scheduled to avoid the worst of his debilitation post-chemotherapy.
…Rebecca reviewed the major decisions of her life and decided that it had been a bizarre lapse of judgment to get married at all, much less at Mike’s old monastery.
Peering through the crack in the door at the back of the chapel, Rebecca reviewed the major decisions of her life and decided that it had been a bizarre lapse of judgment to get married at all, much less at Mike’s old monastery. They should have just eloped, if they were going to take this mad leap. She had actually, seriously, truly in her heart wanted to do that, to jump in a car and drive up to Lake Tahoe. They could have gotten the damned thing done in some roadside chapel, had a few margaritas and some Mexican food, and been home before anyone was the wiser. But she’d made the mistake of mentioning the plan to her mother, and Phoebe had swung into panicked action and taken charge of constru
cting a more or less traditional fiasco.
Which was now duly unfolding. Rebecca turned to her mother and said, “I told you—”
“Don’t even start,” Phoebe said. She sat placidly on a folding chair someone had dug up for her, with the walker she’d been using during her recovery from the stroke she’d had the year before parked beside her. When the time came to process into the church, Phoebe had insisted, she was going to do it without the prop. Rebecca wasn’t sure her mother could walk that far unsupported yet, and the image of Phoebe sprawled halfway up the aisle like a beached fish was not helping her stress level. But there had never been any stopping Phoebe.
Mike was often enough several hundred years, if not millennia, out of sync with the rest of the world, and he was perfectly capable of losing the stray hour here or there, like a pair of socks kicked under the bed of eternity.
“He’ll show,” Bonnie Schofield said. As the maid of honor, it was her duty to be up-beat. And Bonnie could afford to be generous: her own wedding at Grace Cathedral the previous autumn had gone like extravagant clockwork. “His watch is probably off. Did you make sure he’d reset it at the switch from Daylight Savings Time?”
“That was weeks ago. Surely we’d have known by now if he was running an hour behind the rest of the world.” But even as she said it, Rebecca realized that it might not be so. Mike was often enough several hundred years, if not millennia, out of sync with the rest of the world, and he was perfectly capable of losing the stray hour here or there, like a pair of socks kicked under the bed of eternity.
“He’s out there praying, or whatever it is he does,” Bonnie insisted. “Or having a drink for the road.”
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