The Abbey

by James Martin

  The small white blossoms from the dogwood trees had been gone for several days, as had the puffy pink blossoms of the cherry trees, but the red roses were in full bloom now, and around the stone paths purple snapdragons swayed on their pale green stalks. Early in the spring, Brother Stephen, the monk in charge of the monastery gardens, had planted impatiens around the border of the stone paths, which Paul initially disliked. Too gaudy, he had thought. But tonight he revised his earlier prejudice: the pillowy bunches of reds and oranges and pinks were lovely in the waning sunshine. A blue jay cried out from the branches of one of the dogwood trees.

  There were some unexpected perks of being abbot. Paul always was partial to purple phlox and snapdragons, flowers that he remembered from his mother’s garden, so he asked Brother Stephen to plant some of both in the cloister garden, and Stephen said he was delighted to do it. “Your predecessor,” laughed Stephen, “couldn’t tell a rosebush from a maple tree.” Emboldened, the next year Paul mentioned planting some lilac bushes, which now exploded in color and scent every year and attracted a surfeit of tiger swallowtails.

  All the flowers looked marvelous together, the ones he didn’t care for and the ones he did. His appreciation was intensified by his cheerful mood, lightened by his talk with his old novice director, and encouraged by knowing that he would soon see God at work in Anne. Yes, he thought, the cloister garden looks especially lovely tonight.

  How beautiful the world looks when things make sense.

  26

  Anne was waiting for Paul in the abbot’s office. More comfortable now at the monastery, she had also become friendly with Maddy in the guest house. “You know the way,” Maddy had said when she arrived early for her meeting with Paul.

  “I come bearing gifts,” she said, standing up from her chair.

  “Thank you,” said the abbot. “How lovely!” He was carrying a large red book, with multicolored ribbons flowing from between its pages, which he placed on his desk.

  Anne held out a green plastic planter overflowing with purple-and-white petunias. “They’re from my garden. They’re coming in really well this year.” Through the office doorway, Anne glanced into the cloister garden. “But I guess bringing flowers here is like bringing you jam. Looks like you have more than enough of both.”

  “But these are from you. We don’t have any of those. And it will remind us of you and remind us to pray for you.”

  Anne was amazed by how Paul could so gracefully turn something awkward into something beautiful.

  “I have something weird I need to ask you about,” she said, as she sat down in the wingback chair. She flicked a piece of lint off the arm of the chair. “Oh, I’m sorry, that was rude,” she said. “First of all, how are you?”

  “No, not at all. I’m fine. What did you want to ask me?”

  “I had this strange experience in the chapel the other night. Remember when we were talking about images of God? My thinking about God patting down the soil and your talking about Jesus the gardener?”

  Paul nodded. “Yes, very well.”

  “Well, after we talked, I went into the chapel and sat in one of the pews. I wasn’t sure what to do, since I’m not much for prayer. So, anyway, I was just quiet for a bit. And I started to think about that idea of Jesus as the gardener. So I’m sitting there and . . .”

  She paused.

  Paul said, “Keep going.”

  “This is going to sound weird,” said Anne.

  “I’ll bet it doesn’t sound weird to me at all.”

  “So I’m sitting there . . . and all of a sudden I thought of this song I liked when I was going to Sunday school, or whatever it’s called now. We used to sing this song, ‘Morning Has Broken.’ Do you know that one? It was pretty popular back in the day.”

  “Of course.” Paul started to sing in a soft baritone, “Morning has broken, like the first morning. Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird . . .”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” said Anne. “Hey, you’ve got a nice voice.”

  Paul smiled slightly. “It’s more or less required here.”

  Anne laughed quickly and continued, “Anyway I used to love that line, ‘Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden, sprung in completeness where his feet pass.’ In fact, I asked my mom if it ever really happened, and she said that anything was possible. When I was little I used to think about Jesus walking across the desert, in Nazareth or Galilee or wherever. I’m not even sure if there’s a desert there, but I used to think of flowers springing up in his footprints in the dry ground. So anyway, I’m sitting in the chapel, and suddenly I have that image in my head of Jesus—walking across the dry ground and leaving flowers behind. It just sort of popped into my mind. And here’s the weird thing: he’s wearing my mom’s gardening hat—the one that I wear—and my dad’s gloves—the ones I use now.”

  Anne shook her head. “It was weird. It was so vivid. Not like I was having a vision or anything. I didn’t see him standing in the chapel or anything like that. More like it just came into my mind. On its own. But it was really beautiful. I had never had anything like that happen. It was nice, though. Is that normal?”

  Paul smiled. “Yes it is. It’s not something that happens every day, but these kinds of experiences are fairly common for people once they start praying. And it’s a real gift when they happen. Did anything else come up?”

  “Well,” she said, “I felt like talking to him so I said, ‘I miss him.’ And then he said . . .”

  Anne paused and looked down at her white dress shirt and red linen pants.

  Paul waited.

  “He said . . . ‘I know.’” Anne’s voice quavered. She could remember that moment so clearly now.

  “It was so beautiful,” she said. “It was like he really did know. And he really did feel sad for me. And just now, as we’re sitting here, I’m remembering that question you asked me about how Jesus felt. Now I feel like he really felt sorry for me.”

  She looked at the abbot then. “I’m not sure what to think about this. Is this crazy?”

  “No, not at all. It’s the opposite of crazy.”

  “So is this all in my mind, or did it really happen?”

  “Why not both?” said Paul. “God can work through your imagination. How else would God come to you in prayer? After all, he made your imagination. And you know what? Jesus does feel sorry for you. And ‘feeling sorry’ really doesn’t go far enough. Jesus feels with you. He has compassion for you.”

  Anne thought about times when she knew that another person wasn’t just patting her on the shoulder, feeling pity for her, but remaining there with her in the middle of the pain. There was a big difference.

  “I’ve never experienced anything like this—the prayer, I mean.”

  “Maybe God’s been waiting for the right moment to come to you in this way,” said Paul. “And I think it’s beautiful. Can you trust in all this?”

  “I think I have to trust that I’m not losing my mind.”

  “Well, if you are,” said Paul, “then all the saints and everyone else who has ever had any experiences in prayer are out of their minds too. Including me.”

  “Does that kind of thing happen in prayer a lot?”

  “All sorts of things happen in prayer,” said Paul. “The kind of images you experienced are just one way that God comes to us. For some people it’s mainly emotions that come up—like joy or contentment when they’re thinking about God. Other people have memories that bubble up, maybe from childhood, and they feel it heals them in some way. Or it reminds them how much God loved them even when they were young. Sometimes it’s just an insight—like figuring something out about a problem that’s been bugging you. All those things can happen. Then sometimes it seems like nothing is coming up. That can be pretty frustrating. But in those times we have to trust that God is doing some work deep within us. Because any time spent in God’s presence is transformative. But really our main work in prayer is simply to be present to God and open ourselves up.
‘Show up and shut up,’ as one of the monks here likes to say.”

  Anne listened.

  “But, yes, what you talk about happens. The question is, do you believe that this is God speaking with you and telling you that he cares? Can you believe it’s real?”

  Anne looked out the window at the darkening sky. All day she had looked forward to her meeting with Paul. At lunch, Kerry teased Anne after she admitted how much she enjoyed her visits to the abbey. “Dear Sister Anne,” she wrote in an e-mail later in the day. “When you join the convent, please remember to send me some free jam.”

  It didn’t make any sense—Anne obviously wasn’t joining any convent, and there were no women here anyway. But she found it funny and wrote back, “May God bless you, my daughter.”

  How had she come to this place, where a monk was asking her if she believed in God’s presence in her life? Was it by chance that her car had broken down and Mark brought her here that night in the rainstorm? Would she have felt comfortable calling Mark if he hadn’t stopped by the day before to tell her about the broken window and the baseball? She thought about her talk with Brad and the look on his face when she gave him the baseball glove. She was glad that she was able to comfort him after all this time.

  Then, sitting in Paul’s office, she remembered a moment in Jeremiah’s life she had long forgotten: when he told her about his first hit in Little League. She hadn’t been there to see it—and that’s when she promised herself that she would never miss another game—but hearing him describe what it was like to connect with the ball and make it to first base seemed sweeter than being there to see it. The look on Jeremiah’s face was that of absolute delight. Joy radiated from him when he told her the story. It was this memory that returned to her now.

  Anne felt lighter—like something new was opening up for her. It wasn’t that she wasn’t still sad about Jeremiah or didn’t want him back. More than anything she wanted him back. And it wasn’t that she still wasn’t angry at God. But she felt something else too. Anne felt that God was with her that day in the garden. She did. She felt that God felt compassion for her. She really did. She couldn’t deny that.

  So she said, “Yes. I think I can believe that.”

  “I’m glad,” said Paul, leaning back in his chair. “Because that’s the first step in prayer: trusting that these things that happen to you are coming from God. Think about it—how else would God come to us? Most of the time God comes to us through everyday things—like relationships and work and family and friends. But sometimes, as you found out in your garden and in the chapel, God comes to us in very personal ways. And you know what’s great? It’s tailor-made for you, Anne. God uses things from your life to speak to you—your love of gardening, your mom’s hat, your dad’s gloves. It’s sort of like the parables.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry,” he said, smiling. “I get a little carried away sometimes.” He removed his glasses to wipe away some dust with the hem of his black scapular. “What I meant was that in the parables Jesus used things from people’s everyday lives—like birds and seeds and clouds and things that people in his time were familiar with—and he turned them into stories to help them understand God’s love. The same thing happens in our own lives. God uses familiar things to help us understand God’s love for us. God speaks to you in ways you, Anne, can understand, using things from your life, things you love, to meet you where you are. It never fails to amaze me.”

  “I’m not sure where to go with all this,” said Anne.

  “Why not let God take the lead? Why not just be open to the ways that God wants to be with you?”

  “Okay,” she said, exhaling. “But I still miss Jeremiah.”

  “Of course you do. And you always will. But now I’ll say something that I didn’t want to say at the beginning, because I thought you might take it the wrong way. I wonder if it helps you to know that Jeremiah is with Jesus the gardener. The same person who met you in prayer is the one who welcomed your son with open arms into heaven.”

  Anne’s head dropped when she heard that.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that,” Paul said. “But I believe that.”

  Anne could see the church’s steeple through the leaves outside, and she remembered her father’s words, about it rising like a ship’s mast slowly coming over the horizon.

  “I think I do too,” she said.

  The bell rang for Compline.

  “Oh!” said Paul. “I’m always surprised by those bells, even after twenty-five years.” He stood and straightened his scapular. “Would you like to join us?”

  “Why not?” she said.

  27

  Mark was grateful that Anne had allowed him to turn the garage into a workshop. By the end of the summer, he had finished clearing out the trash that had accumulated from Anne’s two previous tenants, painted the cinder-block walls a glossy white, and installed new lighting, all of which Anne appreciated. It wasn’t as elegant a workshop as the one Mark’s mentor had in Cambridge, but it was a good beginning.

  Over the past few weeks, Mark had squirreled away enough money to purchase the basic carpentry tools, which now hung on pegboards, which he had painted white and nailed to the garage wall. His truck could withstand the elements in the summer, so there was plenty of workspace inside the garage. And he did not lack for business. Attracted by the apparently irresistible noise of hammering and sawing, the boys on his block had already poked their heads into the garage several times, which ensured that their parents would know what Mark was doing and that jobs would follow. Brad took a particular interest in the workshop and had started dropping by to examine Mark’s tools and talk with him about cars, and girls.

  “Maybe I’m not the best one to give you advice on girls,” he said to Brad one Saturday afternoon in late August. Mark was sanding a small pine bookshelf he had designed to sit atop Father Paul’s cluttered desk. It was going to be a surprise. He was grateful for the advice Paul had offered over the past few months and figured this would be a good way to say thanks.

  “Are you kidding?” said Brad, who sat on the concrete floor, cross-legged, looking up at the carpenter. “I saw that girl you went out with a few months ago. The tall one? With the Mercedes? She was hot!”

  “That’s not always the most important thing in the world—hot, I mean.” When Brad eyes widened, as if in a cartoon, Mark laughed.

  “Let me show you the right way to sand,” he said. “That may be easier to learn.”

  In the past few weeks, Father Paul had fulfilled his promise to find Mark more carpentry work at the abbey. Already Mark had completed a small oak table to hold a vase of flowers that stood next to a picture of Mary in the chapel. The old metal table was too rickety—it threatened to topple every time someone’s habit brushed against it—so Mark offered to build a replacement. Whenever he passed the chapel, he paused to stare at the new table, slender but solid.

  “Pride is one of the seven deadly sins, you know,” said Brother Robert with a sly grin when he saw Mark’s gaze linger on the new table.

  Anne was pleased that Mark had refurbished the garage, since she had never found the time to clean it out. She also respected Mark’s carpentry skills and was happy to help him in his work. She could tell Mark was still interested in her romantically, but she remained uninterested in dating a frat boy—even a kind one. Still, she was glad to support Mark. He seemed to appreciate this romantic détente and treated her with a guarded but noticeable affection.

  When Anne asked how much she owed for the paint and repairs on the garage, he shook his head.

  “You’re helping me out, so it’ll cost you nothing. The best things in life are free.”

  That was the same thing Father Paul told Anne when she offered to pay him for what she came to realize were spiritual direction sessions. (She had read that nomenclature on a flyer that she had picked up in the guest house.) Nonetheless, she made an anonymous donation to the monastery. Secretly she was delighted when th
e abbot told her what a blessing it was that someone had given funds to help renovate the chapel. The first thing he would do, he said, would be to replace the old metal table next to the portrait of Mary.

  Anne’s life had changed over the summer, which she ascribed not only to the workings of time, but to time at the abbey. Father Paul’s expression grew serious when she told him this a few days ago, after she stopped by with more flowers.

  “It wasn’t the abbey that did this for you,” he said. “It was God.”

  “Well,” Anne said, “if I hadn’t come to the abbey, none of this would have happened.”

  “And who do you think brought you to the abbey?”

  Anne started to say “Mark,” but realized what Paul was driving at. So she just laughed. She still was angry with God for taking away Jeremiah. And she still had a hard time believing God was behind every good thing that happened. But maybe, she thought, behind some good things.

  The photos of Jeremiah on her living room wall would stay. In fact, she added a few new ones. Beside Jeremiah’s final school picture, she hung a photo of his baptism that her mom had taken. Anne had dug it out of a box in her garage she had thought was lost and framed it to match the school photo she liked so much. Anne and her husband were holding their tiny son—who was screaming at top volume—and beaming. Her parents, standing behind them, wore, she admitted ruefully, small self-satisfied grins on their faces. But, she figured, they probably had the same look now in heaven as well, having seen her spend so much time at the abbey. Anne wasn’t ready to start going to Mass—still too busy—but she felt that it might be a possibility, sometime.

  Next to the photo of Jeremiah’s baptism was the photo of her own baptism, which Father Edward had given her. She had given Father Edward a framed copy as well, which he set on his desk. A few days ago he told her he prayed for Jeremiah and her every night.