The Abbey

by James Martin

  She watered the flowers at their base, and sprinkled a little on the petals, knowing not to overdo it during the daytime. Her mother had told her many times that too much water could burn the petals and leaves if the sun was strong. “You want to water them, not bake them,” she said. Anne remembered the feel of her mother’s hand steadying her own, helping her hold the same battered metal watering can that Anne used now. How old was she then? Eight? Nine?

  A small worm, unearthed by her plantings, writhed on the top of a mound of dirt—helpless, confused, unseeing. Anne’s felt sorry for the worm, who twisted and spun. Gently, she moved him out of reach of her trowel. She wondered if it would be better to bury him under a handful of soil or leave him to find his way back into the earth. She left him. An unseen robin sang from a bough in a pine tree in her neighbor’s yard.

  For sheer pleasure, she took off her father’s gloves and plunged her hands, almost up to the wrists, as far as they could go, into the loose dark soil to feel the warm earth.

  Anne planted the zinnias and pansies next, leaving the snapdragons, her favorites, for last. When she was a girl, riding her bike to elementary school, she would often pause in a meadow just outside the school grounds and watch the wild snapdragons loll in the wind, their bright yellow and dusty lavender heads bobbing in the sun. It was this memory that came to her now. She wondered, all of a sudden, if Jeremiah had inherited his love of nature from her. Why hadn’t she thought of that before?

  Still kneeling, she raised her head, at eye level with the taller blossoms. The orange and red zinnias she had planted last week had taken root. Now they were almost as high as the new pink snapdragons. And beneath them, the yellow and orange marigolds took up almost every inch of the garden. Suddenly Anne had an unfamiliar appreciation of beauty. The vivid color of the flowers in the bright May sunlight was like a scene from a postcard. Anne could hear the faint drone of a lawnmower, borne on the wind, but other than that, there was only silence.

  Then she had a strange feeling—almost as if God was patting down the soil around her life. She felt comforted. Calm.

  She looked up, as if expecting someone to say something. But there was only the wind.

  That was odd. As she watered the newly planted flowers, Anne felt a desire to ask Father Paul about those feelings. Then she rolled her eyes. If you had told me a few months ago that I would be thinking about a monastery when I was planting flowers . . .

  “Hey!” a man’s voice said behind her.

  Still kneeling, Anne turned and saw Mark’s legs, tanned and sweaty. He was wearing nylon shorts, beat-up sneakers, and a faded Red Sox T-shirt, apparently having finished a run. Kerry once had told her how attractive she thought Mark was, and now Anne had to agree. A few years ago she might have pursued him, but she was dissuaded by their age difference. Kerry disagreed. “Go for it.”

  “Need any help?” he asked.

  “No thanks,” she said. “But it’s nice of you to ask. I’m pretty much done.” She stood up, clapped the dirt from her hands, and brushed some loose soil off her shorts.

  “Garden looks nice. Hey, how’s that car?” he said.

  “Crappy,” she said, smiling. “But it works.”

  “That’s cool.” She could tell by his look—that swift visual assessment of her face, legs, and whatever else, which some men were so expert at doing without being obvious or rude—that he appreciated whatever he saw in her this morning.

  “By the way,” she said, “I stopped by that monastery of yours again the other day.”

  “Really? How come?”

  “You remember the monk my dad knew, Father Edward? Well, I wanted to visit him again. I thought he could use the company.”

  “That’s nice of you. Did you have a good talk with him? He’s a lot of fun, isn’t he?”

  “No, he was sick, so I couldn’t see him.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right.” said Mark. “Father Paul told me he wasn’t feeling well.”

  “So I spoke to Father Paul instead,” she said. He looked a bit surprised at that, so she followed quickly with, “You know, you could help me with this bag of fertilizer. I pulled a muscle in yoga the other day, and I can’t really lift it.”

  “That’s ironic,” he said. “Isn’t yoga supposed to make you flexible?”

  “It does,” she said. “But, you know, sometimes you overdo it.”

  Mark hoisted the heavy bag with one hand. Show off, she thought and turned her back to lead him to the potting shed. He was likeable enough, and she sensed his interest, but what a frat boy. She had had enough of that for one lifetime.

  Somehow he arrived at the shed before she did. Reaching around his sweaty T-shirt, she opened the shed door. “Just stick it on the ledge,” she said.

  “Hey, um,” he said after emerging from the shed into the sunshine, “would you maybe want to go out for a drink sometime?”

  Frat boy or not, it was still nice to get compliments. “Oh, I don’t go out with tenants.”

  His face fell for just an instant and then, recovering, he grinned again, falsely. “Oh, um, I didn’t mean on a date, you know, I meant more like . . .”

  “Oh, I know,” she said. “I was just teasing.” She turned and began walking back to the garden, to spare him the indignity of her witnessing his disappointment. “Maybe sometime we could get a drink, but I’m pretty busy these days. But thanks.”

  “That’s cool. Need any more help right now?”

  “No, but thanks. Big help already.”

  Mark raised his eyebrows, smiled, and raised his hand in a farewell. Then he walked quickly into her front yard and onto the sidewalk, where he continued his jog back to his house.

  Well, that was awkward. Anne thought about how much she missed sex, how she used to enjoy it with Eddie in the early mornings during the first few months of their marriage. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and then gathered up her gardening tools.

  But those flowers. And that odd feeling of comfort. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to talk to Father Paul again.

  20

  Later that day, Anne called the guest house, talked to Maddy, and made an appointment to see Paul. Maddy told her that Father Edward was feeling better, but was still not taking visitors. “Abbot’s orders.”

  On Monday she brought the jam to Kerry’s office and placed the jar on her desk with a thump.

  “Yum,” Kerry said. “And thanks. The blueberry is my all-time favorite. My mom used to make these amazing peanut butter and blueberry jam sandwiches for us and pack them in our lunch bags for school. We even brought those jars to the shore. Those monks make some kickass jam. How was your trip there? Did they convert you?”

  Anne laughed. “Well, I’m Catholic already, so there wouldn’t have been much use in that.”

  Later on, over sandwiches and sodas in the small employee lunchroom—an unused office with four tables, a mini refrigerator, and an unreliable coffee machine—Anne told Kerry about her time with Father Paul and how kind he was to her. She couldn’t not tell Kerry, but also worried about her response. Kerry had just disagreed with the way Anne handled Mark after she told her about their time by the potting shed. “He’s hot,” she said. “You should have at least agreed to a drink!”

  Anne explained how she had gone to visit Father Edward and ended up speaking to the abbot. But she didn’t tell her about the letter he asked her to write.

  “The abbot?” she said. “Is that what their leader is called? I guess that makes sense. It’s an abbey, right? Is it like the mother abbess in The Sound of Music? Is he like a male mother abbess? Does he sing? Did he tell you to climb every mountain?”

  Anne laughed again. “I think she’s probably like a female abbot. I guess. They sing there, but it’s not Rogers and Hammerstein. It’s all Gregorian chant.”

  “Well, that’s cool,” said Kerry. “I’m glad he was nice to you. You deserve it. The ministers I knew growing up were okay. Most of them. Did I ever tell you about all those Presbyterian y
outh groups my parents made me go to? They were pretty fun. Roller skating. Ice skating. Presbyterians skate a lot, apparently. Plus, ice cream. We were always eating ice cream. One weekend we all went to some retreat house in the sticks somewhere in the Poconos and played games and talked about Jesus. And had ice cream, of course. It was pretty fun, actually. But church isn’t my style anymore. I’m glad he’s nice to you, though. What’s he like?”

  “Father Paul?” said Anne, taking a sip of her Diet Coke. “Um, well, you know. He’s a priest, or a monk, so . . . I don’t know. He’s nice. He listens. I actually, um . . .”

  “You . . . what?”

  “I kind of like going there. It’s peaceful, you know? And pretty. And there are worse things in the world than peaceful and pretty.”

  “True,” said Kerry. “Just be careful. You don’t want to turn into some sort of religious fanatic.”

  Anne put down the soda can and raised her right hand. “I vow that I will not become a religious fanatic. So help me God.”

  21

  “I’m not sure what to do with this,” said Anne as she reached across the coffee table and handed Father Paul a white envelope.

  The two were in the abbot’s office after Vespers. The waning sunlight filtered through the leaves of the maple tree outside Paul’s window, dappling the faded oriental carpet and the red wingback chairs on which they sat. A few minutes ago at the guest house, Maddy had surprised Anne by greeting her with a hug and then led her to the abbot’s office.

  Paul examined the blank envelope. No address and no return address.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Who’s this for?”

  “It’s the letter to God,” said Anne. “Remember?”

  “Ah yes. Of course,” said Paul. “What was it like writing it?”

  “Well, it felt good to get my thoughts down on paper,” said Anne. “Actually, I thought I was going to be angrier, but I wasn’t. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t. It was more sad than angry. And more of it turned out to be about Jeremiah than about God.” Anne paused. “Do you want to read it?”

  “No,” said Paul, smiling. “Thank you.” He handed the envelope back to her and then smoothed the front of the black scapular that covered his white robe. “It’s a letter to God, not to me. I’m glad you wrote it. And I’m sure God has already heard what you have to say.”

  “Well,” she said, “I hope so. Sometimes I’m not sure about all that. Sometimes I think that even if God does exist, I’m not sure I want to know him.”

  Paul’s gaze seemed to invite her to continue.

  “I mean, sometimes I think I’d like to believe in God,” she said. “And I think about how much my parents believed, and what a comfort it was to them. But then I think about the way that God is. He took away my son, first of all, so why would I want to believe in a God like that? It seems so . . . masochistic.”

  The abbot’s face revealed neither surprise nor disapproval.

  “Plus,” she continued, “I keep thinking about this person in the sky who’s judging me every minute of the day. Looking at everything I do—all the times I didn’t go to Mass, all the times I got angry after Jeremiah’s death, and all the times that I got pissed off at my ex-husband—and ticking off everything in little boxes that say ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong.’ Then when I come to the end of my life, there will be too many checks in the ‘Wrong’ box, and I’ll go to hell. When I was little, my parents used to say, ‘We may not be able to see everything you do, but God does.’ It used to freak me out. So who wants to believe in a God like that? Not me.”

  “Me neither,” said Paul. “That’s not the God I believe in.”

  Anne squinted in confusion.

  “Look, I do believe God will judge us at the end of our lives. Jesus tells us that in the Gospels. And, at least as I see it, a God who didn’t judge what we do is a God who doesn’t care how we live. And who would want to believe in a God who doesn’t care how we treat each other? But for me God is much more about mercy and love than about judgment and punishment. We see that over and over in Jesus’s parables. Can I ask you a question?”

  Anne nodded.

  “Are there any similarities between the way you viewed your parents and the way you view God?”

  Anne considered that for a moment.

  “Sometimes,” Paul continued, “our images of God come from the way our parents treated us. So if we had parents who were judgmental or harsh or exacting, we often transfer those same attributes to God. This ends up influencing the way we relate to God. That’s why I’m asking.”

  Anne looked out the window and strained to see the sunset through the leaves. “I’m embarrassed to say this, because I loved both of my parents and they were really wonderful people, but . . .”

  “That’s okay,” said Paul. “I’m not saying this to denigrate your parents, but to invite you to understand your relationship to God better.”

  “I have to admit,” she said, clearing her throat, “that my parents, loving as they were, were pretty, um, demanding.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well,” she said, shifting in her seat, “I had to sign a little sheet every night that was posted on the refrigerator that said that I did my chores for the day, and I had to make sure all my toys were always put away in my room or my mom would freak out, and I had to bring my homework to my dad every night for him to review. And if I didn’t do those things, there was hell to pay.”

  “Really?” said Paul. “Hell to pay? That’s an interesting choice of words.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “God is not your parents,” he said. “Just because your parents were demanding doesn’t mean that God is like that. Sometimes we have an image of God that really isn’t God. And we get stuck on that God. It’s Anne’s God that you’re talking about. It’s Anne’s God who is the harsh taskmaster. It’s Anne’s God you don’t want to relate to.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “I’m talking about your images of God,” said Paul, “and how they influence the way you relate to God. Are there any other images of God that you like?”

  All at once Anne remembered her experience in the garden. How peculiar. She had come here planning to tell Paul about it, and then forgot, and was now happy to have remembered. It was the reason she was here. “Actually, the weirdest thing happened the other day,” she said.

  Paul held out his right hand, palm up, by way of encouragement.

  “So I’m in the yard the other day, gardening. Which I really like to do. It was on Sunday. Remember how nice it was Sunday?”

  Paul nodded.

  She told the story—of working with the plants, patting down the soil, remembering her mother, the strange recognition, the unfamiliar sense of God.

  “I thought,” she said, “that it felt like God was patting down the soil . . . around me, sort of.”

  A gentle smile came to Paul’s face.

  “Does that sound insane?”

  “Not at all. It sounds beautiful. God is the gardener who tends you like a flower, who nourishes you, just as you care for the plants in your own garden. That’s lovely. It’s also wonderful that you connected that to a comforting image of your mother. Can you let that be your image of God for now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” he said, “that image may be a gift from God. It may be a way that God’s inviting you to see things in a new light. Who says that you have to think of God only as a judge? Who says that’s the only image you can use? There are lots of images of God. And I think God’s just given you a new one.”

  Anne looked at him, drinking in his words.

  “Funny enough,” said Paul, “that’s a common image in the spiritual life. You know, after Jesus rises from the dead on Easter and appears to Mary Magdalene, she thinks he’s the gardener.”

  “Yeah,” said Anne. “I remember that story. Always seemed hard to understand.”

  “It is a little mysterious. It’s strang
e that Mary can’t recognize him after the Resurrection. After all, it wasn’t like she had never seen him before. But maybe the way he looked after the Resurrection was a little . . . different. In any event, she thinks he’s the gardener until he says her name. Since then there’s been a tradition in painting of portraying Jesus as a gardener. So you’ll even see paintings of Jesus appearing to Mary with some gardening tools. It’s really quite beautiful.”

  Anne could feel something within her relaxing, settling into the sound of Paul’s voice. She wanted to hear more and was happy when he continued.

  “And there are all sorts of wonderful ways of thinking about that. I mean, from a spiritual point of view. One of the old monks here likes to say that God plows up our soul and moves things around—as you do in a garden—so that new things can be planted there. You know how you pull up rocks and weeds to make room for new plantings in the spring? God shakes things up a bit in our lives, and it’s hard and painful sometimes, but all that earth moving can allow for something new to take root and bloom.”

  That image appealed to Anne, and she smiled.

  Paul asked, “Do you know about St. Thérèse of Lisieux?”

  “I’m really not up on my saints.”

  “Well, she’s often called the Little Flower and—”

  “Oh,” said Anne. “The Little Flower? Oh, I remember her. My parents had a picture of her in their bedroom. I don’t know much about her, though. What’s her story?”

  “Well, Thérèse of Lisieux was a Carmelite nun in the late nineteenth century in a little town in France, called—needless to say—Lisieux. She lost her mother when she was very young, maybe three or four, was adored by her father, and was pretty spoiled by her sisters. She lived in a cloistered monastery, so you’d figure that no one would know about her once she had entered the monastery. But she wrote this wonderful autobiography, and it’s just magnificent. Anyway, there is a passage about the way God looks at us, sort of like we’re God’s garden, and it . . . wait a minute.”