The Abbey

by James Martin

  “Well,” he said, “It’s ora et labora. Prayer and work. I’m actually quite busy.”

  “Oh, I’m sure,” she said airily, though he could tell she didn’t believe him.

  When Paul entered the novitiate, his friends had one of two reactions. They thought either that Paul was wasting his life, after having finished his Ph.D. in church history and then securing a tenure-track position at Villanova, or that he was entering a perfect world where strife was unknown, mortal problems were banished, and a rich prayer life was the norm.

  Neither was accurate. Paul knew his vocation wasn’t a waste of a life; it was a fulfillment of it. A few years after he entered, he was asked by the abbot to teach church history to the novices. “We’ll use all your talents here,” said the abbot. “God gave them to you, and then God gave you to us.” And he enjoyed putting his skills to use. Later, after he was appointed novice director, Paul sent a postcard with a picture of the abbey to his former department chair at Villanova. “Teaching again,” he wrote. “And no committees!” The department head wrote back on a postcard, saying, “Sign me up.”

  As for the monastic life being without strife, Paul often told the story of Brother Francis, a monk, now long dead, who had a unique way of communicating his displeasure with his fellow monks. Whenever the monks chanted a psalm that mentioned the word “enemy”—as in “Rescue me from my enemies, O God”—Brother Francis would pointedly look up from his prayer book and glare at whichever monk was annoying him that week.

  And a consistently rich prayer life? Paul had been a monk long enough to know that the spiritual life was one of ups and downs. Often he felt close to God—in his private prayer, while praying in community, or during the busyness of the day. Sometimes a word or phrase from the psalms seemed to pierce his heart like an arrow. Many times a Gospel story he had heard dozens of times over the years seemed brand new, as if he had never heard it before, taking on an irresistible urgency. Just as often, he would be laughing with a fellow monk about some craziness in the abbey and feel a burst of consolation about his life. And a few times Paul had what he later realized were truly mystical experiences. Once, during Vespers, he felt utterly filled with God’s expansive love, as if his heart were not big enough to contain it. He treasured all these moments.

  But he also knew that the spiritual life had its dry patches—sometimes long dry patches—when God didn’t feel close at all. Prayer could seem routine, even boring. If I have to sing this psalm one more time, he once caught himself thinking, my head is going to explode. Mass could be, he had to admit, dull at times. And his personal prayer was sometimes filled with distractions. Oddly, though, the longer he was a monk and the more he read the writings of the great spiritual masters (all of whom experienced more or less the same thing), the less he worried about dry periods. It was like any relationship: things couldn’t be exciting all the time. Perhaps, Paul thought a few years back, the human heart couldn’t take it, if God were always so close.

  Life in the monastery was fulfilling. It was also busy. For his sister he had once typed up the schedule of an abbot’s typical day—“The Abbatial Day”—along with the names of the various times of prayer. Paul loved the word “abbatial.” It was absurdly pretentious, so he used it as often as he could to get a laugh from the other monks. “Please sit on the abbatial couch, Father.”

  Paul kept that page, which he copied and sent to friends on the outside, since they so often asked, “What does an abbot do all day?” He wished he had it on hand when that benefactor made her comment.

  The Abbatial Day

  3:30 A.M.: Vigils. The first prayer of the day, and my favorite. It took me almost a year to get used to the schedule, but after that I found that I loved praying in the dark, before the day has begun.

  4:15–6:00: Breakfast. A simple meal, followed by some quiet prayer and spiritual reading in my room (my “cell,” as we call it), and of course showering, shaving, and so on.

  6:00: Lauds. Daily Mass follows. I’m usually the celebrant for the major feasts, but I take my turn with the other priests here for the rest of the Masses.

  7:00: Spiritual reading, correspondence, preparing talks for the monks in “chapter,” our community meetings. This is when I write my homilies too, if it’s my turn to preside the next day.

  9:00–12:00: Visiting the monks in the infirmary; checking in at the jam factory; meeting with the “cellarer,” the monk in charge of food and provisions; and speaking with the director of the physical plant about the grounds and such. This is when I sometimes feel like I’m running a small town.

  10:00: Terce. This prayer can be said wherever I am, for example, in the jam factory.

  12:15 P.M.: Sext. At this point in the day, I can find myself nodding off during our prayer—not a good thing for the abbot to do.

  12:30: Dinner. The food’s quite good. And since I’m the abbot, I can make sure of that!

  1:00: Cleaning up in the kitchen.

  2:00: None. This prayer is so named because it is in the “ninth hour” of the day after dawn. (It’s pronounced “known,” by the way.)

  2:15–5:30: Spiritual reading, more correspondence and e-mail, chapter talks, checking on the sick monks in the infirmary, visiting the working monks, meeting with monks who run other parts of the monastery, with a break for personal prayer.

  5:30: Vespers.

  6:00–7:30: Supper, cleaning up, private meetings with the monks or spiritual direction. This is when I sometimes see people “on the outside.”

  7:30: Compline. The last prayer of the day. At the end of Compline I bless all the monks with holy water before we retire for bed. To see the older monks, some of whom trained me, bow their heads and ask for a blessing is humbling.

  8:00: Leisure reading, catching up on the papers, bedtime. I’m usually beat.

  Being abbot was something Paul never aspired to. Nor could he have imagined he’d be a candidate. But as the election approached three years ago, he began to sense that the monks were looking for a younger man to take over. As a middle-aged monk who had completed his formation, spent time as the novice director, and was in decent health (except for a persistently bad back), he suspected that he would probably be in the running. But it turned out that Paul’s election was a surprise only to him. He won on the first ballot.

  Even with his responsibilities, and even though he missed the simpler life of a monk, life as an abbot suited him. Paul seemed to be good at it, and in general the monks liked him. Most of them. There were always people in the community who didn’t get along, and didn’t get along with him. One monk, who disliked Paul from the day he entered the novitiate, turned red when Paul was elected. So Paul tried to treat him with extra care. But he liked being abbot. And he loved living here.

  On the other hand, as he often reminded seculars, life at the Abbey of Saints Philip and James was not perfect. Despite their best intentions, monks argued, grew angry at one another, and occasionally held grudges. Monks were still imperfect, and sinful. As Paul knew he was. A line from Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk whose books he had first read in high school, put things in perspective: “The first and most elementary test of one’s call to the religious life—whether as a Jesuit, Franciscan, Cistercian, or Carthusian—is the willingness to accept life in a community in which everybody is more or less imperfect.” Paul memorized the line and often used it with the novices.

  John Berchmans, a Jesuit saint he read about in the novitiate, wrote, Vita communis est mea maxima penitentia. Some pious scholars translated vita communis as the “common life,” that is, the everyday life of men and women—getting up, going to work, struggling through life, and so on. But Paul suspected another meaning was more likely. “Life in community,” life in a religious order, was his greatest penance. On cold winter days when a third of the monks had the flu, a third were sullen, and another third were angry at him for some decision he had made, Paul prayed to St. John Berchmans.

  Paul often thought that he might am
end Berchmans’s quote to read, “Life in community is my greatest penance and greatest blessing.” He loved so many things—from the first day he entered. During his first week at the monastery he told his novice master that he loved it so much that he wanted to sing. Father Edward responded, “Well, then it’s a good thing we do sing—several times a day!”

  His other loves were easy to name. Paul loved the structured schedule, which freed him from wondering how to arrange his day. He was also happy not to worry about where he would be in the future. His brothers and sisters seemed to move from job to job every few years, and last year one brother had to relocate his family from Philadelphia to North Carolina. By contrast, Paul was planted here until he died, when he would be buried in the cemetery. “Here’s my future home,” he once said to his sister, when they passed by the rows of white crosses. She found it morbid. He found it comforting. At the end of his novitiate, Paul took the monastic vows of obedience, conversion of life (in other words, to live like a monk), and stability. Stability was the easiest vow for him.

  He loved praying—singing really—in common with his brother monks, because when he was happy about his vocation and wanted to shout to God, he could do so; and when he was doubting his vocation, there were others who were not and who could carry him along with their prayers.

  Seeing the seasons change on this magnificent plot of land was another joy for Paul. On stormy days Paul could peer out the window of the dormitory to watch the tall green pine trees bend in the wind, and that was beautiful. On snowy days he could watch the roof of the jam factory pile with wet snow, and that was beautiful. And on spring days, his favorite, he could admire the cherry and dogwood trees in the cloister garden that burst into pink and white flower, and that was the most beautiful of all.

  The abbot stared out the window at the violet sky, then sat down at his desk, took out a note card with a photo of the cloister garden, and started to write a note to a woman who had just donated a stack of Bible commentaries. Not only did the library already have that particular series of books, but they were old and out of date. Paul wanted to thank her anyway.

  11

  For the next few days, Anne couldn’t get that line out of her mind: “Close to Jesus to the last.” That’s exactly how she felt with Jeremiah. On the ride to work the next Friday, she kept her radio off, so that she could try to figure out why these words hit home. As she passed the exit for the monastery, she momentarily considered stopping at the chapel to see the picture of Mary again, and then laughed.

  “Oh, I’m sure that would go over well!” she said aloud in the car. She shook her head, imagining the reaction when she told her boss that she was late to work because she was visiting a monastery.

  After Jeremiah’s death, Anne was grateful that she had a job. Of course there was no question that she would continue working; even with the rent from the second house, she had to support herself. But after the accident and the wake and the funeral and the weeks inside the house, she was, finally, relieved to have something to take her mind off her grief. After a few months she started to feel trapped by the house, as if it were crushing her with memories. So even though she found it nearly impossible to concentrate and everyone treated her as if she were a fragile glass vase, she eventually called her boss and told him she was coming back, and she was happy that she did.

  Those lines about Mary stayed with her. During her lunch break that Friday, she went online, found a search engine, and typed in the words “Close to Jesus to the last.”

  Lots of super-Catholic images popped up on her screen, the kind of stuff she loathed. A kitschy picture of a lily-white Mary holding a bloody, dead Jesus. A Flemish painting of the Crucifixion, with a weeping Mary and another person standing at the foot of the cross. And a painting from Jesus’s point of view from the cross, with Mary and some other women collapsed in sorrow as the Roman soldiers looked on. In a few clicks she discovered that the quote was taken from a lengthy prayer called the Stabat Mater, about Mary standing by the cross. Anne started to read the prayer, but lost interest. She didn’t like the rest of the prayer, just the lines on her card. Again, Jeremiah came into her mind and heart.

  Suddenly, she was angry with herself. What am I doing looking at all this religious stuff? What bullshit. God hadn’t helped her when Jeremiah was dying. God certainly hadn’t helped Jeremiah. God wasn’t close to her, or Jeremiah, or anyone.

  She clicked off the page, popped her head into the office next door, and asked her younger colleague, Kerry, if she wanted to get a bite for lunch.

  “Sure,” said Kerry. “What are you up to?”

  “Nothing,” said Anne. “Wasting time on the web.”

  By the end of the day, she felt an unfamiliar mix of emotions. Jeremiah was on her mind, as always. After three years, she was getting used to that, and used to feeling that her insides would open up whenever she thought about him. The therapist she saw for a few months after Jeremiah’s death told her that thinking of him so frequently was normal. But now there was something else: curiosity about the monastery, especially about that painting.

  12

  On her way home, Anne approached the exit to the abbey on the Blue Route. She grew increasingly annoyed with herself, wondering why she kept thinking about that painting of Mary. It seemed a waste of time. How could she ever know what Mary felt anyway?

  She was also wondering about putting her grief behind her. Or if she ever could. As was often the case, Anne was confused not only about what she was feeling, but about what she was supposed to be feeling. What was normal? She didn’t want to forget Jeremiah—that would be impossible—but she wished that she could stop obsessing over his death, stop turning it over and over in her mind. She wanted to remember him only as alive, not dead. Was that even possible? The therapist had told her that whatever she felt was normal. “Let yourself feel what you feel,” she had said. “There’s no timetable for grief.”

  The image of Mary returned to her thoughts again, insistently.

  Mary didn’t have to grieve much over Jesus—just three days, right? Then he was back. Jeremiah had been dead for three years.

  “Try that, Mary,” she said in the car, out loud. Then she felt guilty about saying it. But she didn’t know if she believed in God anyway, so who cared?

  So she said it again, “Try that, Mary.” She felt better telling Mary, and maybe God, exactly what she felt.

  Then she felt ashamed. Mary had watched her son suffer for three hours on the cross. Anne remembered holding Jeremiah’s hand in his hospital bed for three hours, until his death. She held him tight even after the doctors told her that he was “gone.” Gone. What a stupid thing to say. Gone where?

  Mary would understand her holding on. One mother would understand another. Anne felt her throat tighten; she wanted to speak to another woman who had lost a child. What would Mary say?

  “Oh, what the hell.” She pulled off on the exit leading to the abbey.

  It was her favorite time of day, right before dinnertime, and the waning sun threw rose highlights on the underbellies of the scudding clouds. Her mother used to call the color “sky blue pink.”

  She followed the sign that pointed toward the abbey, eventually drove through the open iron gate, and started up the long driveway to the monastery. She remembered sitting beside her father as he drove his old Ford Falcon up this same drive. What had drawn him here? His work with the monks always seemed to be something he just did—like paying the bills every month or mowing the lawn every week—which she never questioned. She would no more have asked why he went to the abbey than she would have asked why he took out the trash on Wednesday nights.

  Why hadn’t she talked to her parents about their faith? When she was young, Anne felt that religion was being forced on her, and as a college student she was relieved to be able to put all that aside. But now she wondered about what had been going on with her parents. If she had talked with them about their faith, maybe she’d believe in something today,
instead of feeling that she was missing out on something other people had. She knew, though, that if she had asked, it probably would have turned into another heated discussion about why she didn’t go to church.

  She parked where Mark’s truck had been just a few days before, in front of the chapel. Two other cars sat in the parking lot.

  The stout wooden door to the chapel swung open silently. Once inside, Anne found herself on the other side of the wall that had annoyed her when Father Paul pointed it out. An elderly woman wearing a pale blue long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and sneakers knelt in the pew directly behind the low brick wall in the visitors’ section. Anne sat in the last row. From there it was difficult to see the painting of Mary, which was against the wall on the side of chapel.

  Anne craned her neck to get a better view. It's absurd to have a visitors’ section, she thought. What kind of church are they running here?

  She stood up and walked past the praying woman, who looked up just in time to watch Anne pass the low brick wall and enter the monks’ section of the chapel. The woman sighed heavily, apparently annoyed to have her privacy disturbed.

  Up close, the colors were more vivid than Anne remembered, brighter than on the card. Mary’s dark red, almost brown, dress had a delicate white star that lay over her right shoulder. And Jesus wasn’t wearing a white robe, as on the card, but a cream-colored one. His right hand formed a little peace sign, with his first two fingers pressed together. Mary wasn’t looking at the child in her arms, though. She was looking out at Anne.

  “Look at me,” Mary seemed to say. “I know what you went through.”

  Someone coughed. And not the praying woman. Someone else. Anne’s face flushed, and she froze in place. After a few uncomfortable seconds, she turned to her side and was horrified to see an ancient monk sitting in one of the back stalls, staring at her intently. She had obviously interrupted his prayer.