The Holly King

by Chris Martin

Images of monastic life at Mashipan: monks and novices dining, at prayer, in the kitchen, raking leaves, sewing; walking, reading, singing.

  “To say a monastery is like a family, I think, trivializes the relationships and the idea it upholds,” Humphrey says. “It is a unity under a single idea or mission, composed of members struggling to maintain that mission on their own. It can be political. It can be loving. Despite itself. It can be a laboratory of minds.”

  Back to Humphrey and Carson, in Humphrey’s room. “Before we go further, can you talk a little about some of the brothers here? Many of them seemed very appealing.”

  “Many were.”

  “Like, I recall Father Simon. I remember he liked baseball and opera, which I couldn’t make sense of.”

  “Well, really, he’s an example of the dynamic here. As I said, some of the men enjoyed the freedom Solano gave them, being given permission to question any or all facets of their faith. And as that gathered steam, some had some trouble. It doomed many into a cycle of questioning everything and not just their faith: their outlook on life, their morals, their sexuality, their choice of coming to Mashipan. Which to several, like Simon, was a last, clerical resort. They were arriving at conclusions they didn't expect or want. Simon, Father Simon Huston, reached a point where the primacy of a Christ became an impossible idea. He left it all behind. He turned agnostic. He lost a lot of weight, he became a flight attendant, he went to see the world.”

  “Oh. Wow.”

  Over images of Mashipan and photos of its earliest members, Humphrey continues. Many of the faces and expressions evolve from sainted kindliness to a weary strain to coolness, even upset.

  “Brothers left often. You might say even fled. At the same time word was getting around about what was going on here. Not just in the Catholic domain but the ecumenical. For those who left, there were others who replaced them.”

  “Women.”

  “Women. Solano made the decision to let in women after awhile and of course the entire dynamic changed. For the good, I think. Though it took a while. It was fairly disruptive. Such a complete change in ... the air. The structure. The order of things. In fact, despite all the heresies being entertained here on the mountain, and the scandals around my art exchange, the presence of women completely upset the archdiocese. And then of course Rome.”

  A photo of meeting in Solano’s office, he in his ministerial chair, a few brothers and for the first time, two women, seated, discussing. Carson narrates: “Meanwhile, as if an unspoken spell or virus crept among the order, monks like my brother began one by one discussing and petitioning Father Archibald for the freedom of direction and action they knew was occurring off the mountain, among the nonreligious.

  “One issue, really the first, that came up right away,” Humphrey explains, “was introduced by Sister Helene Millay. She came from running Catholic Charities and within two or three days, she raised the issue of collective charity. What is Mashipan doing? Shouldn’t we be doing this this and this? She was swift and precise and threw many of us for a loop. Even though you could argue that what she was asking about should have been at the very core of what Mashipan was about.”

  “What was the delay? Why weren’t – “

  “I can only say it had been pushed aside by the scholarship, the questioning, the intellectualism. That was making our doing anything more than giving away our pillows or working a soup kitchen just too daunting. It’s hard to do both, think and act.”

  “Still, even before Helene came, we were hearing about NGOs and other secular groups doing essentially the church’s work without need for approval or direction by any church at all, or even government. Groups of lay people, atheists included, devoted to alleviating the burdens of the poor without the underpinnings of spiritual doctrine. Quote unquote normal people were engaged in acts of charity, beneficence, assistance and building support structures like financial endowments to do just that. Fundamental human morality was all the inspiration needed. And that fed our intimidation. And a growing sense of futility.”

  Over the photo of what appears to be a very tense supper table, Carson says, “According to my brother, all of this came to a head around the time he was planning a performance of Bach’s cantata, Ich Habe Genug.”

  Humphrey in his cell: “I – well, one day – we – found ourselves arguing whether it was better that the contemplation of life resulted in compassionate service to others or the creation of art. These were the kinds of things we would discuss. This time, the discussion started because I was trying to locate a day in the calendar to have period instruments arrive and a place to house the singers, coming in from St. Olaf’s, who would perform a Bach concert for us.

  “There wasn’t a place to put the singers and the day I had in mind for the performance was supposed to be a day for sending blankets and food and the pillows, our famous handmade pillows, to Sri Lanka. An earthquake there killed, I recall, perhaps 3,500 people. A terrible destruction. On top of a civil war that already destroyed their civil society. Certainly a time for action, as Sister Helene saw it.

  “And for some reason, over a dinner, which was no longer a silent meal, after years of sometimes agonizing arguments, arguments in which brothers would break down or leave or even renounce their faith, for some reason this one discussion over where the singers would stay cast a pall over us. Lasting for months.”

  A long pause. Humphrey waits for Carson to say something, until he adds, “And we didn’t have the performance. We just couldn’t. Art, of any kind, just seemed terribly trivial.

  “In fact, it opened this enormous predicament for me, and for others. Which essentially was, what are we doing here?

  “How did that argument go? What were the steps, the lines of inquiry?

  “Well, for me, the first step I suppose was wondering, what was the point of all this art? It had been my way, my hold on adopting or adhering to a Christian life, studying the art, listening to the music, reading the theologies. My Christian life was not at all based on faith. The faith didn’t mean anything to me.

  “So, I asked myself: if the art is only a fragile take on this religion, that what was I doing with the religion.

  “Clearly you weren’t the only one who went through this. Others went through the same process.

  “They did. And now it was my turn, I suppose. I was being confronted through the one thing that made me feel like a Christian. So I reminded myself: being a Christian was something I chose. I wasn’t born into it. I didn’t feel it, you know, viscerally. In fact, I have all these other religions, more or less alive in the world, to choose from. And, when I looked at that, I thought, well, in fact, they have tenets and insights not too divergent from Christianity: peace, forgiveness, justice, compassion, love. Even everlasting life. There are not many religions which say, ignore peace, who cares about compassion, and when you die that’s it, good luck.

  “Which reacquainted me with the role of death. In everything. All these virtues, love, peace, compassion, justice, they all eventually lead to the question, how do you want to understand death? Because how you want to understand death can help you chose your religion, if you want one.

  “Except in my case, death is not a mystery. At least not one you should concern yourself with in this life, because you’ll never be given a useful answer. It’s almost pointless. I don’t even feel the need to ask the question. Even if my answer is ‘I’ll be given a hundred virgins,’ or ‘I’ll see my loved ones again,’ or ‘my body will be whole again’ or ‘I’ll get to come back to this world as another creature,’ it’s just a guess. And depending on how creative and pleasing that guess is, you begin to verge on storytelling. On art.

  Carson asks: “So choosing a religion is a matter of taste.”

  “That’s right. How do you like the ceremonies, the clothes, the traditions? The art? Hinduism might just be for you.

  “I fell in love with Christianity because of its history, its theologic constructs, and its art. Fin
ding the divine in beauty and representation was my transit to peace, which would set me free to help others. That was the core of my belief, I got from Peter, reinforced by Father Archibald.

  “But reducing that down it became: satisfy me first, then I can help others. And put like that, having this art around me, even sharing it with others, it was really, obviously secondary to coming to the assistance of others. Shamefully obvious.

  “Any way, among the community here, this discussion of art over action reignited old questions, old inquiries. And I wasn’t alone asking this, making this connection. Father Henry, who had been a priest leading large congregations, who had raised money for magnificent organs in desperately poor communities, and always said he felt ambivalent about the priorities that entailed, came to this question: If the art exists to aid or luxuriate in or even embodies your contemplation, what was the material of your contemplation?”

  Here Carson slides in what you might consider found examples of the material of contemplation (a sequence reminiscent of the found materials of contemplation you see in a Terrence Malick film): shafts of light bounded by stone walls; wind playing through branches; a monk with eyes closed; the moon and its likeness on still water; a universe of dust motes; dawn over the murk of a swamp; a woman descended into prayer; receding mountains of clouds; the patient footsteps of a man walking a carpeted, candlelit labyrinth. Humphrey continues over this.

  “Productive contemplation requires peace and separation. Solitude. Especially if you’re contemplating life through the teachings and example of Jesus. That is such an exquisite filter to work through, you need peace and patience to approach any kind of understanding of the question. What did Jesus mean? What did he mean?

  “But instead of ever truly dwelling on this – and I can’t say I did – Jesus has always been a bystander in my Christianity, admittedly – I was starting to see that living by the teachings and example of Jesus, or anyone, or any idea, means deliberately adding a burden to everything you do, even contemplation. In contemplation, or call it prayer or meditation, nothing should be in the way. Some prefer to chant or recite or add something to concentrate on. But I never understood that. Isn’t having something added to your prayer exactly what you’re trying to overcome? Having something that stands in the way between you and perfect living silence? Because the perfect living silence could be, in fact, the manifest of the divine.

  “God is silence.”

  “Yes. Well, sometimes. But that is certainly what the religious aspirant ultimately yearn for. The presence of the divine, the deity, with you, sharing time and space. Hopefully forever. Anything beyond that desire is just a rule. Or an artifact.

  “So the question became, and Brother Anush broached this, why meditate on a search for the divine at all? If by some miracle the divine descends, what then? When no one answered, I thought of Sister Mallora, having come all the way from a church in Aleppo, Syria. And I asked this: isn’t the purity of your prayer or contemplation at stake? Even if you rid yourself of society and responsibility and life’s distracting pleasures and pains and come to pray in a precious environment like Mashipan, what does it mean if your contemplation isn’t limitless? Meaning, why does your meditative prayer have to first include thoughts of Jesus and God and the Spirit or even the divine?”

  “I don’t understand. Are you saying Jesus was getting in the way of your own religion?”

  Humphrey obviously gets uncomfortable with reductive thinking; it shows. But he finds a way to agree. “To a degree. I’ll tell you how this got started.”

  Photographs of Archibald Solano in the pulpit. Reading and writing at his desk from his enormous ministerial chair. We also see more of the sacred spaces within Mashipan, tidy untouched sanctuaries, hushed rooms, naves and apses empty of whispers.

  “To begin with, these were the very reasons Father Archibald called to us originally. To find Jesus in our hearts and then use that energy to go out and do His works. First, contemplate and find the divine, then go out. And like I said, that’s what I believed in too. Not only did we have our rooms, our cells. We had small chambers, vestibules, with candles and kneeling benches. And we had the chapel and of course our basilica where we held mass. Every opportunity to sit quietly with God, was here.

  “There was one particular vestibule on the far side of the basilica, the corner of the entire compound, which I discovered early on and would use as a retreat, to get away from the few remaining formalities of life in this monastery. When Sister Mallora found it, she liked it to. We devised a small a schedule for us to share it, but soon everyone else wanted their turn in the vestibule. It was very quiet and serene, with a tiny view of the mountains through a small window, but it became as famous as a single bathroom.

  “One day, we met to discuss drawing up a formal schedule. Sister Mallora joined in, already made aware of the popularity of the vestibule because she noticed that the hinge and door jamb was broken. She is the soul of gentleness but is also very crafty and she asked, could we all avoid going in there please until the door is fixed, counting on the fact that it would take a few days to get around to it, a common result for chores like these. But for the first time in the life of this monastery, there was an upswell of interest to repair the door of the most favored vestibule. Nine or ten people came with tools, but it became obvious that the job only needed two or three people, and they drifted away.

  “So there we were, myself and Brother Anush, Brother Ted and Brother Emile. At one point I stopped, with phillips screwdriver in one hand, screws clenched in my teeth, holding an enormous door, three inches of oak, while Brother Ted and Brother Emile, with his bad back, were on their knees moving it into position on the floor. And I could see suddenly what I was doing. The door was there to close in a room at the furthest corner of the monastery, to shut out – to shut out, of all things, a monastery which was already on top of a forbidding mountain, which had been founded on that spot to remove itself from the world. Brother Ted asked why I stopped, what was the matter, and I told him what I was thinking. The four of us stopped and sat down on the floor, backs to the walls, considering the absurdity of it all. And then left the door as it was.

  “Why was retreating to silence the idea? To be with God, sure, but even that suddenly seemed greedy. Undignified. As selfish or distracting or trivial or grandiose as making art.

  “If it was to find the right Christian or spiritual impulse well, didn’t I already know what Jesus says? It’s not a mystery. Love thy neighbor. Do unto others. The Lord’s prayer. Physician, heal thyself. It is easier for camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man ascending to heaven. Beyond that, much of what he says concerns internal Judaic debate or are parables expressing political code words of the day, or descriptive visions of heaven popular at the time. It was his action, going to death for others, aiding the poor and sick, that was the point. We who study Christianity know this. So why was this retreat from action necessary?

  “And suddenly, to me, with the candles and the cross and the velvet lined prayer bench in the vestibule and the stained glass, I wondered what exactly was Christianity for? That’s quite a leap, I know, because of a little household chore. But outside of dedicating ourselves to the crucifixion as an example of selflessness, the rest that we were living by came from the ancient precepts of a church which was locked in nostalgia for a view of the universe 2000 years old. Whose religion – again, beyond the crucifixion – was conceived and refined over and over by arguments and politics and theologies of the day, winnowed and vetted by men no longer alive to further agendas already forgotten. And while the tenets of this religion remain valuable and nurturing, on the whole, this religion we inherited is being asked to solve problems created under conditions only relevant today.

  “This was part of the problem, and something Solano had naturally investigated years before. And was fighting tooth and nail with the Vatican almost on a daily basis. When he wanted women to participate and lead with us, th
e Vatican said no. When he told them homosexuals were present in Mashipan, he was told to banish them. Banish. As if there were a desert here to send them out into. He was engaged with this thinking every day, just to keep his community going. I suddenly saw what he was seeing.

  “This isn’t that radical, asking this. Reformers ask this. Atheists forever ask this. It only seems revolutionary when you are supposed to be a devotee to a religion and you are at the same time talking yourself out of being devotional.

  “I mentioned this revelation to others, expecting another round of acrimony. And instead there was, well, stunned agreement, from a few. Mallora, in her quiet way, I remember nodding, with relief. The few of us, we felt like we’d woken up. And when we realized this, we didn’t think oh this is terrible! It seems to me we thought, what a relief! To identify one of the causes of sorrow in life – organized religion – and begin the work to circumvent it. Sitting next to Mallora was Helene Millay. Who, the next day, announced she had decided to take off the cross around her neck but still desire living and working here as a base for her work. Not as a bride to Jesus, but as a woman. That was the start.”

  We linger on Humphrey accumulating, perhaps reliving, the memory. Followed by a photo of the stout, enduring stone cross outside positioned to oversee the valley and the wide separation of mountainsides.

  Carson: “After years of discontent and discouragement from the church, Father Archibald began to wrench his community from the see of the Church. Defection is a long, heretical and administrative process. The Church doesn’t even allow such a thing any more. But the day eventually came.”

  There is one final photo of Solano into which we move, studiously, solemnly. With help from Humphrey and two other younger, stronger monks, he is heaving his ministerial chair into an enormous bonfire in the courtyard of Mashipan, surrounded by the applauding community he had gathered.

  “My understanding is that the church all but retreated. Cut its losses,” Carson says over the photo, to his brother.

  Humphrey replies, “When that letter arrived, turning Mashipan over to him, to us, it was an overcast day, in summer. Father Archibald had us all together in the courtyard and he read it – he and we were not surprised it finally arrived – but after reading the indifferent, formal termination, he added in his next breath, ‘And the earth said welcome.’ That felt like freedom.”

  A fade to black.

  But not for long. We come back to the photo of Father Archibald on Humphrey’s wall. He is smiling and sweet, though the black eyes behind his thick glasses can consume your attention. The camera moves up to the handsome portrait photo of Peter and then back down to Father Max.

  “After that, the passage of time muddles things a little bit.”

  Carson sitting on a chair, seemingly alone in Humphrey’s room. The chairs they sat in are gone. A stolen, confidential moment just between him and us.

  “Apparently, of all the men and women to come to Mashipan, Father Max Lincoln was one. A few years back, with Humphrey’s urging. My brother says this is a platonic, working relationship, and I believe him. Not that it matters.

  “But together, Humphrey and Max started Mashipan’s juvenile mission. Which opened and expanded Mashipan for the first time down to the valley. After the earth said welcome, the valley was the first place they went to.

  We see for ourselves a shot first of an unassuming sign on the road: New Mashipan. Then, the family of buildings and gently rolling grounds under snow. Many more people are down here, just not in robes. They are young, excited, gathered in small groups with backpacks and duffelbags on the ground near a line of buses, as if they'd just been dropped off. Some of them wear red Santa hats. Two girls walk past Carson. Both smile and wave.

  “On a wide, easily accessible meadow they built a retreat and sanctuary which has since become Mashipan's face to the world. They also work in prisons, establish health and pregnancy clinics, work in city shelters and delinquency halls, among police gang units and provide pro bono legal help. Almost everything Peter and Humphrey once talked to each other about. And more. Training is underway to operate on the ground during disasters and conflicts. Not just administering to the lost, injured and displaced. But as apolitical peace negotiators, to step in when the U.N. or other nations intentions are compromised or ineffectual.

  “It’s sad, but also a little reassuring I think, when I consider that much of this sprouted from Peter's death. Which is why I asked my brother if I could meet Father Max.”

  We see Humphrey, in his room, on another day, listening to the request, demurring, nodding as if he should have known Carson would ask. “We’ll see. He’s not well.”

  And Carson says, “Ok, ok. I understand.” And the camera turns off. That’s that re: Father Max.

  Cut to Carson’s own footage of workers at Mashipan carrying crates and boxes, as well as sagging, heavy-looking rug rolls wrapped in paper, to a staging area near the edge of the mountain. Over the last few days, a transom has been rigged to hoist these items down to a loading area a thousand or more feet below.

  “My brother tells me that even before Father Archibald took ill, the community was already carefully making its way into a future where no one religion was adequate. Where, in fact, religion itself was considered problematic.”

  From a balcony or loft, we look over the sanctuary of the basilica, toward its chancel and apse. Along its length, an abundance of heavy red, purple and yellow insulating drapery. Red carpet runs down the middle of what would be the nave, but the only pew left is being carried away by two of the workers.

  "Today, the mission which New Mashipan has found for itself is beyond ecumenical. On the one hand, its creativity in working with youth, its anti-poverty programs, its social justice and peace attaining missions are its strongest expression. It is often on the short list of Nobel Peace Prize and Goldman Environmental prize nominees.”

  Roving, peaceful shots of old Mashipan, the mountain priory, under snow. A Mashipanite shovels a walk. A lingering shot of the complex from its nearby cemetery. All of the stones have crosses on them, some elaborate, some plain wood. Carson continues.

  “On spiritual matters, things are more complex. More subtle. It is groping toward a reverence for the sacred that is not bound by anything other than itself. The Mashipan community works diligently to secure a space for sacredness in all of society and in all individuals. The way an eternal flame is perpetually stoked. Protecting and enhancing the sacred, while important, is its single allowance to the monastery’s previous mission.”

  Etched into the marble floor of the New Mashipan sanctuary, around a bowl holding such a small flame are the words: “The presence of the sacred is what is eternal in life.”

  “But while the sacred moment, perhaps applied over a sacred place, is what Mashipan strives for, above everything else, there are issues over what exactly that means: a sacred moment versus sacred place, those old confounding problems of time and space, are still being worked out.

  “Also, not to be ignored are some of the methods sacredness is being honored. One of the ways Mashipanites try to secure sacredness is eliminating traditional icons of the religious. Icons which, as the thinking goes, may trigger associations of the sacred but also may be encouraging a step away from the actual sacred moment and into the profanity of religion."

  Humphrey walks through the snow, carrying a thermos to the men working near the obelisk. From a distance we see them put down their tools and meet him, taking cups and happily watching the coffee pour. Tilting up, we see the cross is carefully, oh so carefully, lifting off its mount by a swarm of ropes.

  * * *