She squeezes my hand. “Well, isn’t that a calling?”
I’m not sure yet, but I do know one thing—that last night was the first time during the Exercises that I truly prayed. And I had told the complete truth, for perhaps the first time in many years. That call in the dark was less a prayer than a full confession to whoever was out there listening that I had hit rock bottom, that my life had lost its meaning.
Help me, I had prayed. Give me proof that I am not completely alone.
Maybe what I’d needed was not an answer, but simply the act of the asking.
TODAY IN THE MOUNTAINS, something changes in the Exercises. When I close my eyes, the entire desert is on fire, everything appearing with new and startling clarity. I watch as John the Baptist is killed. I watch Jesus walk away with his head hanging, like a man collapsing into himself. I watch him disappear into the desert to pray.
Don’t worry, I whisper, as I discover him crying in the desert beside me. I’m here.
I watch him feed the five thousand, the bread and fishes born again and again against the flesh of his hands. I walk beside him on the dusty road from Jericho and listen as two blind men call out to him, loud as hell, loud as the gas sellers in my neighborhood in Damascus. Everyone in the street tells them to shut up. Jesus calls them over, has pity on them, presses his hands over their eyes, and gives them sight.
I’m amazed. “Why did you have pity on them?” I ask Jesus. “Because they were blind?”
He grins at me like a schoolboy. “No. It was just because they kept shouting my name even when everyone told them to stop.”
I’m not satisfied. “If they were blind, then how did they know you were coming?”
He turns to me and says sharply, “When you were blind, how did you know I was coming?”
15.
SOMEONE ONCE TOLD ME that we know that the Spiritual Exercises are authentic when our visions start telling us things we would rather not hear. I hope this is true, because these days, Jesus is taking on a life of his own and seems entirely not of my own making. Today I watched him turn over tables and cast out the moneychangers at the Temple. He has quite a temper suddenly. I was tempted to read him the line from his very own Sermon on the Mount about the blessed peacemakers.
Paolo is also confused. He is not sure how God could not give me a sign, I could choose not to become a nun, and then, in response, receive days of baffling and highly powerful visions.
“It’s just like St. Francis,” he tells me. “At the end of his life, he felt that he had been abandoned by God, and so he retreated to Mount La Verna in anguish. It was there, when he was most abandoned, that God gave him the stigmata. The moment he felt most alone was the moment God was closest to him.”
But what does that mean? Part of me wants to believe that my visions carry some deeper significance. It’s true that I want a family and that I want to write and return to the world I left behind. But if a firefighter has to choose between his own desires and the vision of a house in flames, won’t he always run into the house to put out the fire, even if every fiber in his body is asking him to run in the opposite direction? I have stood and witnessed tragedy so often in my life without being able to intercede, and it seems impossible to imagine turning that possibility down if it presents itself.
Could I have misunderstood—could it be that I have finally received the sign I was asking for that night in my room, in the moment I thought I had been left behind?
“Do you still think you aren’t called to be a nun?” Paolo asks.
“I don’t know,” I admit.
“Think about it for a few more days.”
16.
NOW I AM BACK AT THE BEGINNING. I still wake up from my dreams and see that vision of an endless desert road, stretching on forever, fading from the backs of my eyelids. I remember the story of Elijah collapsing beneath the broom tree, kept alive by the bread of angels.
I am supposed to be advancing through the Exercises, and still I have not made my choice. Dima has already chosen to become a nun, and Rania paces all day in the valley, struggling as much as I am. I cannot put this off forever.
So, after waiting a week for a revelation, I give up, and I try the old standby. I make a list.
NUN MARRIAGE
To heal myself To love someone for my entire life
To heal my family through prayer To have children
To heal the world To be part of something that
To live a life creating hope remains on earth forever
To spend my life learning to pray To have a partner in loneliness
To find poetry again To take care of a family
To make God the center of my life To become greater than myself
To make love the goal of my life
I want both lives. They both promise solace, at last, and the thing I long for more than anything else: a home.
But because I cannot live both, I choose the monastic life. The list is so much more selfless. And it is slightly longer, after all.
17.
I ENTER THE WEEK OF CRUCIFIXION, after some twenty days in the desert. The Jesus I have come to know will soon be gone. I know that I should be grateful for the hours I have passed with him, but still I’m angry. It has taken me half a lifetime to find him, and now he is going to die. I came to the desert knowing how his story would end, and yet for once in my life I wish it could be different. It would be nice to love someone without counting the days until he died tragically. I would have liked to save a life. It is right, I realize, that saying in the Talmud and the Quran. Whoever saves a single person, it will be as though he saved the entire world.
On Holy Thursday of the Exercises, I hike with Jesus up the Mount of Olives until we come to rest at the Garden of Gethsemane. Among the ancient olive trees I sit beside him as he weeps and begs God that he might live. His hands cling to each other until his knuckles turn white, and sweat pours down his face. Let this cup pass, he keeps begging. Let this cup pass from me. He is beyond comfort. I have never seen a man so weak—and yet there is something touching in that moment, in Christ confronting God, in asking him, Is suffering necessary? Must the story be like this?
Watching him, I am embarrassed and quietly in awe, the same feeling I had the first time I saw my father cry, realized that he was not invincible. I keep my distance. I don’t think this conversation was meant for my ears.
I am in the desert, hidden in a valley of hermits’ caves and empty spaces, lying on stones. I watch Jesus weeping just a few paces away from me, too far away to touch. Then, something in his grief hits me—the reason why he is crying. He is about to lose everything. He is about to give everything away.
Oh no. I’m giving away everything—my family, my friends, the streets I love.
I sit with that.
I am never going to have children. I am never going to conceive a child.
Suddenly, my stomach feels like it might burst open.
I look over at Jesus, weeping. Until now, I’ve never had the courage to think about being a mother. I have not been close to my mother for such a long time that I assumed I had missed out on that essential transmission needed to become one myself. Being a mother has always in my mind meant passing on curses, not passing on life. Every one of my sunken relationships has only reinforced that I lack the ability to nurture. I kill plants that can survive alone in the wild. Whenever there are problems I run away, which does not bode well for the life of an infant.
I have always felt that I wasn’t made for motherhood, that I would never manage the tasks of doing laundry, of making school appointments, when I can barely balance the details of life on my own and tremble with anxiety over the prospect of speaking with the deli-counter man. Yet now I want children. I want them with a ferocity I have never felt before—my twenty-seven-year-old body is literally crying for them in the desert. I want to be a mother. I want it more than I have ever wanted anything in my life.
I remember the verses from Jeremiah: A cry
is heard in Ramah—wailing, bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children, who are gone.
Yes, they are gone. It is too late. I already made a promise to God, and now I lack the courage to undo it. I whisper in the valley, “God, let there be another way.”
A few strides away, Jesus whispers, “Let this cup pass.”
I feel closer to Jesus than ever before, the two of us among the olive trees, collapsed in our pleading.
I cry all afternoon in the desert. I must exorcise this demon from my body completely if I hope to continue down the monastic path.
LATER THAT NIGHT, I tell Paolo about my afternoon in the desert.
“Stephanie, it’s true that someone who chooses to be a nun only because they feel they cannot be happy being married has no religious calling,” he says. Then he looks at me with strange eyes, as though he has been granted a glimpse of me from the inside, as if he knows how small his words sound in the face of this moment.
“To be honest, I think you’re being very brave,” he finally admits. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through. Because it seems to me that to have a child is as big as God.”
He is right. It is as big as God, made concrete in a tiny, living person. It is to give birth to an entire, new world.
We sit there together, Paolo and I, staring at the walls. I know that he is worried for me. But I have been clear about my desires. I want to join the monastery.
He looks at me across the table, and when he speaks his voice is full of tenderness. “Who knows? Perhaps, if you do choose to become a nun, then thirty years from now you will be here, sitting at this table. You will be sitting across from a young woman who is considering becoming a novice. And you will suddenly look at her with surprise and think to yourself, Where did she come from, my daughter?”
18.
AT NIGHT, I HAVE A DREAM. There are no images, just a great violence coming over me, and a voice saying, You don’t have a calling.
It is not a kind voice. It keeps me up all night. Which makes me wonder why, if it is God, he decides to speak to me only when I don’t ask him to.
In the morning, before the prayer, I stand outside and look out across the desert, my eyes stinging from lack of sleep, watching the sky and earth fold one over another like a blanket of light and red spaces. Paolo comes up behind me, equally exhausted.
“You had a dream, didn’t you?”
I nod. “How did you know?”
He looks out across the railing. “I felt it. I had it too.”
Studying monasticism in a classroom does nothing to prepare one for moments like these—for meeting the angels and demons the ancients write about, but that we take pains to convince ourselves could never exist. I am in over my head—and I no longer know what voices I am meant to believe. Who was that voice calling out to me in the night? Was it God? Could it have been my own voice? Or did it belong to some darker force? In Arabic, there is even a special word for that voice, waswas, meaning “a devilish insinuation,” “a doubt,” “a misgiving,” and a special Quranic verse asking to keep it away. It is related to the Arabic noun waswasa, meaning “a rustling,” as in a whisper of leaves.
It doesn’t matter. It is too late to change my mind. I walk into the desert after the prayer, as deep into the desert as I can manage, and I ask the stones to cleanse from my mind any voices that might steer me from my purpose. I ask for a blank slate. It is my mother’s birthday, and Good Friday in the Exercises. After weeks of walking beside him in the desert, it is time for me to go and watch Jesus die. It has taken me so long to believe that he might exist, I can hardly bear that I have to let him go. I promised myself that on this day, as he dies, I will formally give my vow to God that I will become a nun.
What is there to say? I watch them bind his body. They put him up against the light. He looks terrible and beautiful. He opens his hands to the air.
The chief priests say to him, He saved others but he cannot save himself.
I look at him, and I remember how hard he wept in front of God, how much he had clung to life before finally relinquishing it. Yes, life will be like that after all. To save others means to not save oneself.
He is gasping in the desert. Looking straight ahead and gasping.
We had always been taught that Jesus is not alone in that moment, that we can also carry the cross with him and take the burden of the world onto ourselves. I need to believe that this is possible. I need to believe that we can participate in transforming hell.
My mother is fifty-four years old today. She had been my age, half a lifetime ago, when she had given birth to me.
I look up. Jesus is slowly hanging his head and going silent.
No, I will not have children. I will carry this knowledge within me instead of a child—the knowledge that I will save others. I fall down on my knees in the desert, and I pledge my life.
19.
WHAT TO SAY ABOUT THE HOURS since he died? He is gone now. The desert feels so empty without him. I keep expecting him to appear, suddenly—for me to catch a glimpse of him sleeping beside a stone, or screaming at a fig tree in frustration, to once again walk with him beside the sea. Instead the desert stretches out, and it has never felt so lonely as this.
He took all of the miracles with him, all of the light that used to lift from beneath the earth, all of the angels. He packed them in a small cloth and carried them away, with his wounded body, into the bowels of the earth.
Ignatius has put aside an entire week to experience the Resurrection. But I don’t have the heart to go there, to pretend that this death never happened. I skip those pages in the Exercises, now that the Crucifixion is done. It’s still too soon. I know the man I learned to love in these mountains will rise someday. But for now I simply walk in the desert, missing him.
20.
I HAVE ONLY A FEW DAYS remaining in the monastery—at least until I return. I still can’t get used to the idea that this place might become home forever.
After four weeks I’ve had my fill of meditating all day, and so I’ve spent today waiting for a man whom I barely know to appear—not Jesus this time, but Frédéric, a young French novice who has been living in the monastery for three years now. All month, he has been away on retreat at Mount Athos, a peninsula in northern Greece full of monasteries, monks, and hermits, one of the holiest places in the Orthodox world. I was nearby once, but no women are allowed to enter the monasteries—including females of all animal species except for cats, who are useful in keeping the mice population down.
Everyone is waiting for Frédéric, not just me. I have met him, and he is terribly charming, the kind of man you meet in storybooks and old films but never expect to encounter in real life. He is a real desert monk, with this mane of wild, curly, blond hair and sparkling blue eyes the color of cornflowers. He speaks his Arabic softly, tinged with a French accent, so that he comes off as a cross between a hermit, Lawrence of Arabia, and, well, basically every woman’s fantasy of an incredibly handsome French-speaking poet, which he also happens to be.
The local people think that he is a saint, and I have often heard him compared to St. Francis. I am of the opinion that very few people on earth can be compared to St. Francis, but in this case even I think it is warranted. For one thing, Frédéric talks to cats, goats, birds, and every other animal, in French of course. He is also beloved by children, who grab on to his legs and climb into his arms at every opportunity. He is a musician of great talent, playing the guitar, the Chinese flute, and singing with that tenor that God seems to bestow on monks more often than other people. Then, there is of course that shining—that classic otherworldliness that one sees sometimes in Buddhist monks—that transcendence that is instantly recognizable. Frédéric is to monks what Julia Roberts is to film stars. I look at him and think, A calling looks like that.
Though I barely know him, I keep glancing every few hours down the long flight of steps to the valley, wondering if I might see hi
m, leaping in his joyful way up the stairs. I’m not sure why, but I have a feeling that this Frédéric has something to teach me. We are going to spend the rest of our lives together, after all, a monk and a nun working through life in the land of the angels. Only he has a three-year head start.
By evening, he still hasn’t arrived, and so we begin Mass without him, lighting the candles and singing the Alleluia. His voice takes us by surprise, sewn in with our poor and trembling voices in the middle of the song, swelling with the tones and richness of the monasteries in Athos, and our song takes on a beauty it has never possessed in the month I have lived in the monastery.
It feels like new life. Frédéric, back at last, from the Holy Mountain.
21.
I HAVE BEGUN WATCHING HIM. In the afternoons, I still take my long walks into the mountains, and when the evening falls and the light begins to fade, I find a stone midway up the mountain and watch from a distance. After a few moments, he always arrives.
He does not know that I am watching. By now I have mastered the art of watching unnoticed, from all of those hours of standing back and watching the angels. He is that much more beautiful, not knowing that I am there. He walks with the grace of an animal, as though he belongs in those mountains, his feet moving from one stone to another the way a man’s hands might caress the body of his wife after a marriage so long that they have witnessed grandchildren being born. He never looks down. His right hand slowly makes its way across a masbaha, a string of black beads, and I know that under his breath he is chanting the Orthodox Prayer of the Heart, the prayer said over and over until it becomes as regular as breath, allowing the monk to pray without ceasing.
The Bread of Angels: A Journey to Love and Faith Page 16
