The Abbey

by James Martin

  “How do I do that?”

  “Well, you could just imagine yourself talking with God. Sometimes people imagine themselves in God’s presence in a general way. Or sometimes they imagine that God is sitting in a chair next to them.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Okay,” said Paul. “Maybe you could write God a letter. Maybe you could write your own lament psalm.”

  “Doesn’t God know what I think already?”

  “Doesn’t a good friend know what you think already?” said Paul. “Didn’t your friends know how you felt at Jeremiah’s funeral? And didn’t you share your feelings with them anyway? It’s part of being in a relationship with someone.”

  Anne thought about Kerry’s ability to listen.

  The abbey bell rang out several times. “That’s Compline,’’ said Paul. “Would you like to join us?”

  “No, no.” She rose from her chair and looked outside at the sky, where a sliver of a moon sailed over the church steeple. “Thanks for your time. Would you tell Father Edward I’d still like to see him sometime?”

  “I promise,” said Paul. He opened a closet door and pulled something from a shelf. “Take these,” he said, handing her a gift box of jams. “If you get hungry writing that letter, you can have some of these blueberry preserves.”

  17

  Father Paul was happy to have met with Anne. Though he enjoyed life at the abbey, he treasured opportunities for pastoral work. Of course, as Father David, one of the former abbots, reminded Paul after his election, any time an abbot spent with his brother monks—visiting the sick and elderly men in the infirmary, encouraging young novices during times of confusion, advising monks in the jam factory on management decisions; in fact, any time that he spent with a brother at the abbey—was pastoral work.

  “You know what I mean,” said Paul. “It’s good to talk with people on the outside.”

  “Agreed,” said Father David cheerfully. “Plus, talking with seculars reminds us that monks aren’t the only ones who have problems.”

  But it was more than that. Paul liked helping people who didn’t have as many invitations to see God in their lives. Monastic life made it easier to find God. Not that he believed monks were holier than anyone else. Actually, he felt that the opposite was more often true.

  A monk’s whole day was built around praising God. “Monastic life makes it hard to forget about God,” his novice director told him. But people on the outside faced pressures that sometimes made it harder to remember God. For one thing, there were the constraints of time. That’s why Paul believed mothers and fathers and doctors and lawyers and teachers and janitors—at least many of them—were holier than monks. They had to make room for God in a world that often crowded out God.

  That was another reason he liked talking to visitors. Paul could see such holiness in them. And it consistently amazed him, no matter how many times he saw it, to watch how God worked so personally, so intimately, with people. He could see how God tailored his approach to fit each individual. In one person God might work through a close relationship, in another through a book, in another through prayer, in others through music, nature, dance, children, coworkers, or art.

  Paul knew this was a grace: he saw God in nearly everyone he met. As he did in Anne, who seemed to be drawn to God even if she wasn’t aware of that yet. Even in her grief, Anne seemed open to what Paul had to say.

  Mark was another person whom Paul felt he had been able to help, if in a small way. When Mark started working at the abbey, he seemed frustrated and lost. His frustration sometimes made him taciturn, reserved, and at times even dejected. Paul wondered if the loss of his job at the architecture firm in Boston had led Mark into a mild depression.

  In time, Mark began to open up to Paul, mainly when the two of them were on their way to do something else. Mark, an active, occasionally jittery man, rarely paused long enough for the kind of in-depth conversation Paul was accustomed to having with the monks. On the way to examining a rotten tree that needed chopping down, en route to checking on a leaky faucet in the dormitory, or while helping him set up for a big celebration in the refectory, Mark would share some of his life with Paul.

  Mark’s questions were usually about two topics: work and relationships. Misfortune in his professional life—losing his job had sapped his self-confidence—seemed the most important concern for Mark. But for Paul the deeper question was one of loneliness. Mark dated a lot of women and, though he only occasionally alluded to it, slept around a lot. Sometimes he got drunk in Center City and fell into bed with whatever woman he had met that night. Paul prayed that he could help Mark see that whatever job he did, whether as an architect, carpenter, or handyman, was valuable in God’s eyes. And that life was more about love and intimacy than random sexual conquests, as wonderful as sex was.

  “What do you know about sex?” said Mark one afternoon.

  “I wasn’t always a monk, you know,” said Paul.

  “You dog!”

  The abbot laughed, confessing that although he wasn’t a ladies’ man, he had dated and fallen in love twice before entering the monastery. “And I still have the normal urges of any human being.”

  Paul thought it was healthy for them to talk with one another about their respective lives—one as someone looking for a wife, the other as someone who had vowed chastity, but who still wanted to love and be loved. Paul prayed that Mark would deepen his respect for himself, for what he did and who he was. Sometimes he thought Mark’s sleeping around masked a sense that he didn’t feel worthy of a long-term relationship. Mark had told him as much a few weeks ago when he admitted, “I’m worried that I get my value from whether or not a woman will go out with me.” Most of all, Paul hoped he could help Mark see that God loved him.

  Mark also had an unnaturally rosy view of monastic life. After a heated argument with one of his girlfriends, Mark said the next morning, “Maybe I should just move in here and not worry about dealing with human beings anymore.”

  Paul said, “Who do you think lives here?”

  The abbot often had to remind people on the outside that the monastery was no paradise.

  Describing life at P&J was like describing a good marriage: hard to sum up. It wasn’t perfect, but he loved so many things about it—from the first day he entered.

  But it could be lonely. Even after years in the monastery, Paul often caught himself musing about what it would be like to be married to one of the two women he had dated in college. The fact that one had just gotten divorced only seemed to make her more “available,” though Paul wondered if she ever even thought of him. Although he enjoyed the community, he missed the intimacy that came with what the monks called an “exclusive relationship.” Sex he missed a great deal and thought about that daily. His earlier life had taught him about the joys of that part of life.

  Even more did he miss having one person on whom he could rely, on whom he could count, and who relied on him and counted on him. His novice director told him that the biggest challenge of religious life lies in knowing that you’ll never be the most important person in anyone else’s life. Paul knew that and accepted it. But he didn’t like it. Sometimes, when he was listening to one of the monks complain about the food for the second time in as many days, he would think, I gave up a wife for this?

  He would reproach himself for those feelings, and then reproach himself for reproaching himself. In those times he turned to a line he used with the novices, from the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: “My own heart let me have more pity on.”

  So as much as Paul felt he could help Anne, he was a little worried about finding her attractive. During their first visit he caught himself staring too intently into her blue eyes and enjoying their conversation too much.

  The abbot of the Abbey of Saints Philip and James glanced at the watch his parents had given him for his ordination and realized that the Vespers service was about to start. The bell rang, and Paul smiled. He really did enjoy the comforting stabilit
y of monastic life. He decided to offer a special prayer for Anne: that God would console her in her grief, and that he, Paul, would be able to help her as best he could.

  18

  “Dear God,” she wrote.

  This was Anne’s fifth try; several crumpled sheets in the wastebasket testified to this. She rose from the kitchen table and walked to the window. From there she could see into some of her neighbors’ houses, where they were finishing up late dinners, washing dishes, or watching television in their bedrooms. Her own house was so quiet now. She never could fathom how one boy could make so much noise, and she had frequently badgered Jeremiah not to slam doors, talk so loudly on the phone, or scream while he and his friends were in the house playing video games, but now she missed the commotion. Although she liked the quiet in the monastery, the quiet in her house was different. One was a presence, the other an absence.

  She looked at the picture of Mary and Jesus on the refrigerator door.

  I’m not sure if I believe in you anymore, but I want to tell you something anyway. So it’s this: I don’t understand why you took Jeremiah away from me. Why you took him away from this world. Why you made him die the way he did. Why he died, and the other boys lived. I didn’t want them to die. But I wanted my son to live. I’ll never understand that. Never. He was such a beautiful boy. When he was little, he had the sweetest laugh. It was the most beautiful sound that I ever heard. His father used to say that we should bottle his laughter and give it in big doses to people who were sad, because it would cure them. Jeremiah giggled at everything. I couldn’t believe how much I loved him when he was born. I just couldn’t believe it. It was like there was this secret reserve of love that I had been saving up all those years just for him, and it all came out on the day of his birth.

  When he was a toddler, he was incredibly curious. Exploring from the moment he could crawl. Getting into cupboards and trying to open all the closets with his pudgy little hands, because he just had to see what was inside. One time I accidentally left the door to the hall closet open, and he pushed himself up high enough so that he could grab onto a shelf and pull down a whole comforter on top of himself—and he just laughed. And he wasn’t afraid at all. Other children would have cried. But he loved it. He loved looking at the world. When people saw him crawling all over the place they would say, “Watch out when he starts walking!” His father gave him a little T-shirt that said, “Here comes trouble!”

  But he wasn’t a troublemaker at all. He was such a sweet kid. Used to love to watch the ants going into their little holes in the pavement, the birds perching on the bird feeder, and he could spend hours looking for bugs under the rocks in the garden. Liked books too. All my picture books and atlases from the places Eddie and I had been. “Where’s this? Where’s this? Where’s this?” he’d say. He told me once that the way that he looked at the maps was the way that God looks at us. I can’t believe I just remembered that. I bought him a little plastic globe when he was three, and he played with it like other kids play with baseballs. He took it with him everywhere for a few months.

  After his father left us, I worried about his not having a man around, and that I wouldn’t be able to handle raising a boy, but I did, and later on I worried about Jeremiah being too shy to have friends. But he was okay. Some of the kids teased him because of his little stutter in kindergarten, but by the second grade that was almost gone and he could fit in. The teachers all loved him, because he was so sweet.

  God, I always worried that he would turn into someone I couldn’t handle, especially as he got older. That he would surprise me and turn into someone else. That I would lose him. I knew enough sullen teenagers. But he was okay. He was more than okay. All along he was okay. He was a lovely kid. I loved him so much. He wasn’t perfect. Who is? I’m not. His father certainly isn’t. But Jeremiah was a beautiful boy. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.

  Then when he started to hang around with Brad and the kids from the neighborhood, he really blossomed. Boy, he loved playing with them, and I loved seeing him get dirty and laugh; even when he got hurt, he thought it was okay because he was with them. They didn’t seem afraid of anything and he

  Anne’s chest tightened, and she was tempted to stop writing. But she scratched out “and he,” put a period after “anything,” and continued.

  Maybe they should have been. The night of the accident he begged me to go to that movie. Begged me. Begged me. “Can’t you please drive us?” Everyone else’s parents were busy. But I didn’t want him to see that movie. It was too violent, and it was too late. I need to remember that. The therapist told me that. I was protecting him. I was. I was protecting him because I loved him. I need to remember that I didn’t want to drive him and told him to stay home because I loved him.

  God, when the police knocked on my door, I knew what it was. I just knew. That knock sounded terrifying. No one else knows that. I knew when I heard the knock. So loud. When I opened the door, I couldn’t breathe. I saw the blue uniforms, and I heard their voices, and I just screamed. Sometimes I see that terrible blue color in my nightmares. I feel like I’ve been screaming ever since.

  God, why did you do this? How could you do this to my beautiful boy who loved your world and whom I loved so much? I miss him so much, and I would do anything to see him even one more time. Just so I could say good-bye and hug him and kiss him and let him know how much I love him. And I don’t know if there’s a heaven, but I want to see him again, and I can’t believe I won’t see him again, so I guess I believe in heaven now.

  Anne set her pen down. Rereading the letter, she was surprised. It wasn’t as angry as she thought it would be. It was more sad than angry. It was more about Jeremiah than about God. It was more about telling God about Jeremiah. She wondered if this was what Father Paul had in mind. Maybe it wasn’t the way you should write a letter to God. She picked up the paper and hunted around in a dining room cabinet, crammed with bills, for an envelope to put it in. One was at the bottom of the drawer. Folding her letter carefully, she placed it inside the envelope.

  She took it out again because she forgot something. At the bottom of the page she wrote:

  Anne

  Now what?

  19

  Gardening was one thing that kept Anne sane after the accident. Her full list of sanity-preserving measures would have included: dinners with Kerry, who always made her laugh; yoga classes in Bryn Mawr, which lent her weekends a measure of calm; talking on the phone with her roommate from Haverford; going to work every day, even if she wasn’t always crazy about the job; and long walks by the Wissahickon River, especially in the spring and summer.

  But gardening she could do without having to leave the house, or at least the yard, which helped when she didn’t feel like seeing anyone or driving anywhere. Even when she felt sullen, she could work outside by herself. Plus she liked wearing her mother’s straw gardening hat and her father’s old canvas gloves, which smelled like years of work, sticking her hands into the moist earth, and feeling like she was doing something.

  Today she was planting batches of zinnias, marigolds, pansies, and snapdragons that she bought on sale at the supermarket. The oranges and yellows and pinks and purples looked so glorious on the metal shelves outside the market that she grabbed as many of the green plastic trays as she could and piled them on top of the groceries in her shopping cart.

  The potting shed was one of the few things her husband left behind that she used without feeling resentment toward him. Eddie had been her boyfriend since high school, and although she worried about his laziness even then, his near complete lack of drive after he graduated from college stunned her. His job at the insurance agency paid well enough, but he seemed uninterested in even trying to move up through the ranks.

  What bothered Anne much more was his lackadaisical care of Jeremiah. She never did figure out if it was inability or unwillingness. Eddie was wildly enthusiastic during the pregnancy, reading books and going online to learn about child care, an
d helping her as much as any expectant father would. At Jeremiah’s birth, Eddie was exultant, spending hours staring at him in his crib, buying him little Eagles and Phillies shirts and bibs, sending photos to his family, and even bringing Jeremiah to work one day to show him off to his friends.

  But after a year, when it became clear that parenting wasn’t about showing off your baby—that is, when it came to changing diapers, getting up for early-morning feedings, and taking Jeremiah to the pediatrician when he got one of his frequent ear infections—Eddie was largely useless.

  “I’m too tired. I just can’t do this anymore,” he said once during one of Jeremiah’s late-night screaming jags.

  “You think I’m not tired?” she shouted over the baby’s squalling.

  Eddie loved Jeremiah. He just didn’t want to take care of him.

  So she wasn’t as shocked as her friends were when he decided to “spend some time apart.” Kerry told Anne that if it were her husband, she would have him castrated. “If he had any balls to begin with,” said Kerry.

  At the time, Anne was so busy caring for Jeremiah, working in the accounting firm, and driving back and forth to day care to have any energy to think about anything other than her child. “I’m too tired to be angry,” she told Kerry. If anything, she was disappointed. Sad. But not angry. Not yet at least. The person she thought she had known best proved to be someone who, in the end, she didn’t seem to know well at all.

  So when he asked for a divorce, she gave it to him. Just like that. The alimony wasn’t much—Eddie’s spotty job record made that an easy prediction—but it helped, especially when Jeremiah was a toddler. Anne would get angry at Eddie only years later, when the full magnitude of his colossal irresponsibility dawned on her.

  When she pulled the marigolds from their plastic tubs, their roots emerged with an audible rip. She knelt on the edge of her backyard garden, pushed aside some warm brown soil with her gloved hand, made a tidy hole, filled it with a handful of fertilizer, poured in a little water, placed a bunch of yellow and orange marigolds into the opening, filled the rest of the hole with soil, and patted it down with a satisfying thump. That was her favorite part of working in the garden—gently tamping down the soil. She always asked her mother, the gardener in the family, if she could do that during her mother’s yearly plantings. It felt like she was protecting the flowers.