The Holly King

by Chris Martin

From Peter’s photo on the wall, we slide down and across to the fourth photo, the right arm of Humphrey’s four portrait cross. It is of an older, firmly unperturbed, shiny-headed man with thick eyelashes above bulging corrective lenses that reduce but do not hide the directness of his stare.

  “It happened to be at Peter’s funeral where Humphrey first met Father Archibald Solano, the force behind Mashipan. Father Archibald and Peter knew each other from Peter’s work in South America, and Father Archibald had just assumed the role of abbot at what was then called the Mashipan Mountain Monastery of Saint Luke the Younger.”

  The grounds and details of Mashipan, its buildings, its stillness, its windy oblique stake on the mountain.

  “It was a monastery for roughly a eighty years. Then the church gave up on it, leasing it as a sanitarium. By the 1950s, it was abandoned. Available to the first disenfranchised, heretical man of God who wanted it.”

  Video footage of Solano on a Swedish talk show in the still mod, but also slightly hungover, counterrevolutionary, early 1980s. Solano is stately, dressed in a white and gold clerical gown while the host, longhaired and bearded in a blue suit with wide lapels, is achingly serious.

  “Mashipan,” Solano tells his interviewer, “is not the first and it will not be the last instance of a community of human beings formed because its members share a supernaturally held belief. In this case, a belief that it is their own humanity which is responsible for the suffering of the world, but is, also, the relief of that suffering. Many souls, acting as one, to help many souls.

  “Where we are different, at Mashipan, is our seeking for refuge. We are eager for the monasticism of the earliest apostles. But a monasticism which does not require any allegiance to or patronage from an organizing, authoritarian institution, the church. A church which is an example of the order of things that needs overthrowing.”

  The host can’t help poking: “What is the difference then between your order and, for example, the Red Brigade?”

  Solano is dignified. Pleased to answer. “Mashipan is devoted to two things: aiding and alleviating the poor and oppressed of their earthly burdens. And two, Christian-style fellowship. Fellowship under the name of Jesus Christ. Involving Christian faith, though not allied to a given church or essential belief. Other than its own fellowship under Christ.”

  Images and footage of sumptuous St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope John XXIII, and the gathering of thousands of pounds of cotton and muslin robes, rochets, albs, mitres and zuchettos worn by dignified, deliberatively moving and mutually blessing bishops and Curia. Because some of them don the severe black frame glasses of mid-century company men, daddies and generals, this can only be Vatican II, 1963ish.

  “Historically,” Carson says, "Archibald Solano was in the right place at the right time to be a questioning, near heretical monk. The social justice wing of Catholicism was all the rage, especially in the poorest countries, where bishops and their priests took to heart the Church’s renewed interest in helping the poor and afflicted, regardless even of their own religion.

  A leather bound book, written in gold leaf: Gaudium et Spes. And the resurrected footage of a priest reading aloud, I assume, parts of it in English:

  “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ....

  “Hence this Second Vatican Council ... now addresses itself without hesitation, not only to the sons of the Church and to all who invoke the name of Christ, but to the whole of humanity. For the council yearns to explain to everyone how it conceives of the presence and activity of the Church in the world of today....”

  And here, as the priest continues, Carson throws in for good measure not only more photos of Father Solano – at work in the fields and huts of farmworkers, arrested by police in Mexico City during the student riots – but other liberation theologists: Rev. Gustavo Guttierez in a library, Daniel Berrigan led away at a Vietnam protest, the Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke in Central America, Desmond Tutu – who I thought was Anglican, and so maybe added for ecumenicism’s sake? – preaching at a Soweto rally. And Archbishop Oscar Romero, alive and slain in his church.

  “Therefore, the council focuses its attention on the world of men, the whole human family along with the sum of those realities in the midst of which it lives; that world which is the theater of man's history, and the heir of his energies, his tragedies and his triumphs; that world which the Christian sees as created and sustained by its Maker's love ....”

  Back to Swedish TV and Father Solano. The voluptuously haired, fat-tied host says, “I have an article here, written by one of your critics, allow me to read it. Which states ‘contentious desires for progress, modernity, and clerical reform advanced by Father Solano and others cannot be achieved while simultaneously yearning for the decentralized splintering into factions and cells resorted to by the earliest Christian groups and today’s Marxist revolutionaries.’

  “Professor Ratzinger, goes on to add, ‘The persecution and elimination of autonomous sects, made vulnerable by their contradictions and mortal idiosyncrasies, compelled the early church away from heterodoxy toward universality, so that it may secure and deliver Christ’s message for the world. It thus rescued the holiness of God’s word from untethered sects whose endless debating sent them further into hallucinations and heresy and away from Christ. This is not the direction Archibald Solano and his minion are determined to emulate.’ “

  Solano smiles. “We are today blessedly rich in the knowledge and awareness of the grace of Jesus Christ. There is no poverty in the world for that. That is not the poverty we wish to cure. It is up to us, men and women, not to spread the words of Christ again and again until they mean nothing. It is up to us to act with it in our hearts, as a sword and a plow in preference to the economically poor and afflicted. The church’s hierarchy is simply too large to fit into the fields or the homes where the poor dwell.”

  “Still,” Carson resumes, holding a while on Solano’s tenderly direct and articulate televised likeness, “someone in the church hierarchy, under the freewheeling sway of Vatican II granted Solano permission to re-access Mashipan and steer it accordingly. It may have also been a way to grant him his own mountaintop banishment.

  “Which after awhile attracted people like my brother.”

  Back to Humphrey, in his cell, speaking to Carson.

  “Father Solano attended Peter’s funeral and I had a chance to meet him. His presence there was striking. Gentle and cultivated. I’d heard about Mashipan from Peter. Some of the revolutionary priests, revolutionary at the time, we were friends with them and some had chosen to go there rather than continuing with direct action.

  “I started correspondence with him. And at first all I could tell him was how empty I was. Bereft. And soon I began to push very hard on him to let me in. To Mashipan.

  “ ‘What do you hope out of a monastic life?’ he’d ask. Am I clear on the idea of it as a journey rather than an escape? As a service to others rather than a retreat from them? And I’d answer yes. Yes to all that. And he, Father Archibald, I won’t say patiently – he doggedly – called me on every one of my answers: what are you agreeing to? Tell me what you are agreeing to.’ ”

  Carson asks: “Did you know yourself?”

  Humphrey equivocates. “Yes and no. Which later on was a problem. But after several rebuffs from Solano, getting him to allow me to join Mashipan took on the form of an intellectual test. A game. Originally I started asking him for permission to join because of my grief. For Peter, for my loneliness. But then I decided: if this man really wants to know why I want to join, why I, a willfully destitute, overly educated – ” he twirls his fingers up past his head like smoke “ – fucked in the head son of the upper class is bothering him, is alternately begging for and intellectually playing with the limits to his theology, I would lay it on him. If h
e chickens out, the whole thing was wrong to begin with.”

  “So,” Carson narrates, “my brother wrote him another letter.”

  Cut to a series of shots of Humphrey wearing glasses and standing, with one foot forward reading his letter. He rocks on his heels as he reads, with more animation than he’s shown sitting down. Here is the boy on the hood of the car throwing stones at the police.

  “...Even the most ascetic hermit, the most naked, hungry, unwashed man in a crevice in the desert – in fact he especially! – has an ego bulging in proportion to the extent of his asceticism. In other words, the ego of the dirty naked little mute in the desert is greater than all others because he says ‘I will make myself so worthless to prove my devotion. I will handicap myself, God, I will give up everything, even You, to prove my devotion.’

  “What I propose are two things: one, my service and two, my eremition. For the first, I do not propose a blind following of clerical orders and papal utterances. My service is a devotion to synthesizing and then dispensing the quality of love and compassion that you say comes from God. But without diluting it one second with preludes that it comes from God.

  “For the second, let my monasticism be responsible for stopping the legacy of my bloodline. Stop it dead. Stop it from infiltrating society, insinuating its vein of materialism and aggression and empty appetite into a world that is already choking on the same veins from millions of others. To do what I can to improve that world, little by little, by my absence. Exist fully as the unaccounted-for outlier. The random particle of chaos that does good. From a long, unstaining distance.”

  When he’s finished reading he lowers the letter and looks through the camera to Carson, his chest rising, excitedly.

  Carson, almost flippantly, adds, “What my brother wanted is, well, impossibly self-canceling. You can’t separate yourself from something and still have an impact on it. If you press him, he’ll eventually agree with that. But it’s an interesting notion. An idea maybe worth pursuing even when it falls apart. He calls it ‘engagement through atonement.’ Someone else might call it being sorry about something and trying to make up for it somewhere else.”

  Close up on Humphrey, seated in the interview. As Carson speaks, his camera holds on his brother long enough for us to scrutinize Humphrey’s face as he listens to his younger brother’s strained, even discomfited question. For his part, Humphrey’s expression droops slightly, momentarily, listening. An instant of aging.

  “You told me once your intention was to cut off this limb, your limb, from our family tree and end the dysfunction there. Offering no children to pass it along. First of all, I don’t think we’re that bad. There’re certainly worse families. And secondly, you realize there have been many many men and women like you, hermits and suicides, through the centuries, right? And yet humanity just continues on, same as it ever was.”

  Humphrey repositions himself in his chair. But he realizes. He’s heard this before.

  “Engaging with atonement of course isn’t new. That’s just my term. And maybe atonement is presumptuous. Maybe it’s absurd. In my case, stopping the blood line, like suicide, is possibly even violent, because its pre-meditated. That was Solano’s opinion. But it still needs to occur in every generation.

  “The trick, Father Archibald eventually said, after months and months of not hearing from him, is not to make the atonement destructive. Or even deliberately constructive. Just neutral. So that the intention of atonement lifts and the act of atonement remains. This leapt off the page at me. It was everything I’d always wanted to say, even when I was squatting and hating.”

  Over images of Humphrey performing chores and the necessary small jobs required of life in a monastery, Carson says: “When my brother says he wrote the founder of Mashipan, Father Archibald, presumptive letters asking for acceptance into monastic life, he doesn’t say that he knew in his heart he would be accepted. Which he was, eventually. It’s that he presumed he could reach or interact with Father Archibald in ways that others couldn’t. That he would have a distinct station at Mashipan.

  “Which, incredibly, he did. On his end, Father Archibald, found something in Humphrey that fit his model at Mashipan.”

  Grainy, sometimes blurry black and white photos of Mashipan brethren, attending mass, doling soup to the hungry somewhere other than Mashipan, sewing little tuffets and pillows and delivering them to a hospital. On one of the photos Carson lingers, a photo of two brothers at mass, looking over their shoulders with grainy disbelief? disdain? dubiousness? at the thin figure of Humphrey who leans languidly in the rear of the church, hands in pockets, dressed in black jeans and his black, army pre-issued, punk-ordained, tooth-soled boots.

  “When Humphrey arrived, the monastic order was still intact. With a daily schedule, a series of liturgical activities, maintenance and chores, and one or two programs of Christian charity mixed with ministry. A small sewing operation, in which the brothers sewed little pillows and then sold them was in sluggish operation. My brother refused to participate in any of them. Older brothers and men of God were astounded not just by his laziness or apostasy, but Father Archibald’s willingness even to allow someone like him among the pious. Let alone without insisting on any other duties from him.”

  “Even to the men who followed a very liberal, revolutionary priest like Solano, I was a problem. We may have had a lot in common politically, morally, but their faith and my absence of that faith got in the way of any collegiality. They were still convinced, perhaps not so much of their doctrines, but at least of the emblems or icons of their religion. Which usually is enough for some. But these men came here to contemplate every facet of their faith, with permission to jettison whatever facet that didn’t work for them. That’s why they were here. They came for that and found me.”

  “You teased them,” Carson says. “About their faith.”

  “No not teased. I’d goad them into arguments, like, why is loving kindness or forgiveness the only vehicle to an afterlife? And why is there a redundancy like afterlife at all? Or I’d inundate them with questions about the catechism or the variations of apocalypse or Origen’s transmigration of souls, all of which was settled in the third century. I must have been very annoying. It was more childishness. Of another order. To some, I was simply precocious or an acceptable autodidact, but I wasn’t on their footing. Which I enjoyed. Tweaking them from below.

  “But the whole time, Solano said nothing. At one point, Prior Dursilla, who was constantly hearing from several of the men, announced that enough objections had been heard that I was now considered a closed topic.”

  “He was pretty sympathetic to them, though.”

  Humphrey grins. “He was. And following orders I think. But I enjoyed how it required a formal action to declare I wasn’t worth the effort. So, even though I was officially a novice, Dursilla announced, ‘The subject entirely of postulant Humphrey Hancock is ex nunc clausa.

  “Hearing this, one of the brothers, Brother Wilhelm, an older, let’s say less robust questioner of authority, thought then that I was a postulant, that is, not really part of the Church or the order of St. Luke the Younger, or for that matter the Mashipan monastery itself. He said, ‘if this is true, we must be reminded: Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. The old Church dictum, there is no salvation outside of the Church. Which meant, why were they letting in the draught, so to speak? Was I uninvited and therefore possibly anathema? At that point Father Archibald rose and said, because all is possible in God’s universe, so is its negation. Therefore it was incumbent, following God’s direction, for me to be here. As a negating element. And that was all he said about it. But that meant apostasy, heresy, bad thinking, all of that was allowable here. Sort of stunning when you think about it.”

  “And that was Solano’s preference: no authoritative interference. Several of the men were actually elated with this pronouncement. And others, much less so. Even when you throw open the doors, sometimes people won’t go through them.
r />   Carson suggests: “Father Archibald reminds me of Bergman’s God of silence. It can drive some people mad.”

  Humphrey obviously doesn’t share his brother’s obsession for cinema. He shrugs.

  “The only other time he referred to me was to say, jokingly, I was there to test his faith, not theirs, and not to mind the rest.”

  “What did you think about it?”

  “I was a little embarrassed that someone had to defend me, I think. A small growing pain. And slowly I realized more about what that meant. Because he, fairly, did not speak much to me either. His silence, as you put it, more or less condemned me, again and again, towards that solitary nihilism I thought I escaped from with Peter.

  “Even though that was something you asked him for: solitary reflection.”

  “Correct. I was given what I asked for. And didn’t want it. I avoided being alone, and instead sought out the others, to question them, bug them, however you want to put it. So I was again on my way to living a dancing, foolish half life of only questioning, without mercy or leniency. Plunged into this all-consuming self-regard. While all the others believed he was testing them with his silence on the topic of Humphrey Hancock, I eventually realized that overcoming or controlling this flailing around was Solano’s intended lesson for me. He was an exquisite teacher.”

  * * *