The Oblate's Confession

by William Peak

  It was haying time. I was still very young. The next day I would work and play again with Waldhere and Ealhmund. But that night, as I stood on our terrace, the breeze just tickling the skin of my face, it was as if summer had come to an end.

  XVIII

  The sun must not have been fully up yet for the hermit’s cheeks and eyes have a reddish cast in my memory, the light from the fire still barely perceptible. Probably it was the interval after Prime as I don’t remember feeling particularly rushed or hurried. By Terce there was always a sense of urgency to the day, the feeling that my time on the mountain was running out. It would have been cold too. The mornings on Modra nect were always cold. As I remember it the hermit sits opposite me, the small fire burning between us, one or two tabula lying forgotten on the ground at his feet. Despite the chill, he doesn’t have his hood up or a blanket around him. The patch over his right knee has worked free and, as he speaks, he picks at it absently. He was probably already talking about prayer. Ever since I’d asked him to teach me to pray, it seemed that was all he wanted to do, talk about it, not really showing me how to pray so much as explaining its existence, trying to get me to understand how such a thing as prayer came to be. I would have quit listening when he got to the part about obscurity, how, despite the free will He’d given us, God could still reach out to us, however obscurely. Father could prattle on about “obscurity” forever, citing examples from everyday life, things that we know but cannot see—hunger, love, yesterday, tomorrow—and generally making me wish I could go back to bed. But I wasn’t thinking about bed that morning. For some reason Father himself had my attention, not what he was saying so much as what he was doing, his physical self, the shape and perfection of his hands, the way he sometimes winked when making a point. I was studying his feet, noticing the way his toes lined up in order from smallest to largest, when I realized it had gotten very quiet. I looked at the hermit. He looked at me.

  “Sir?”

  “I asked how you’ve been getting along with the river.”

  The river?

  “The river? You were to concentrate on the river, on a spot in the middle of the river?”

  “Oh, that.” It was bad enough that he’d caught me not paying attention, but to be reminded of the woman.... “I don’t see why I have to do that.”

  The eyebrows shot up. “It was difficult?”

  “It’s not that, it’s just that...I mean what has all this got to do with prayer anyway, staring at the Meolch, talking about free will and obscurity. What’s it got to do with learning how to pray?”

  The hermit frowned, looked away, seemed to think about it. “You know you’re probably right,” he said, beginning to smile, “I mean you’re probably right, nothing, it has nothing to do with prayer.”

  I looked at my feet. I never knew what to do when he agreed with me.

  “Do you know what the word ‘oblate’ means, Winwæd, an oblation?”

  “It’s a sort of gift,” I said.

  The hermit nodded, not really looking at me, looking at something else, something out among the trees. “Yes,” he said, closing his eyes. “Yes, a sort of gift.”

  A bird called somewhere off to our right, called again, was quiet. I waited.

  “Woodpecker,” said the hermit, thinking about something else. He opened his eyes, looked at me, frowned again. “Look,” he said, big hands pulling the woolens taut over his knees, “if I’m going to show you how to pray, teach you to pray, I must show you, teach you, how to find God first, mustn’t I?” He looked at me as if uncertain. “I mean that comes first, doesn’t it? You can’t pray to someone unless you know where he is, can you?”

  “God’s in heaven.”

  The hermit nodded. “Yes, yes He is, but He’s here too, isn’t He? I mean God’s everywhere.”

  I looked around the campsite—dirty pots, broken bits of firewood, twigs, kindling, unswept leaves, a pile of roots—it seemed an unlikely spot for the Lord of Hosts.

  The hermit laughed. “‘And they found Him in a stable,'” he said. “Come on Winwæd....”

  “I can’t see Him.”

  The laugh became a smile, serious. “No. No you can’t, can you?”

  He didn’t want an answer.

  “So how can you pray to someone, commune with someone, if you can’t see him? I mean if you’re going to talk with someone, speak with him, you have to know where he is first, don’t you?”

  I nodded, Yes?

  “Well, in a way, that’s what the river is about. It’s a sort of exercise, a first step, to prepare you for prayer. What happened when you looked at the river, when you stared at just the one spot?”

  I shrugged. “It isn’t easy.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, you know, I’d be watching it, watching the spot, and then I’d notice something else, a stick or something floating by, and before I knew it, I’d be watching that instead.”

  “So you had trouble keeping your attention on the one spot.”

  “Yes.”

  “And where do you think God is?”

  I just looked at him.

  “No, seriously, where do you think He is?”

  “Everywhere? You said He’s everywhere.”

  “Well, not quite everywhere, I mean not somewhere you won’t let him in.”

  “Free will”

  “Don’t look like that. It’s a powerful force.”

  “‘Free will is God’s greatest gift and pride the ring man places on his own finger in thanksgiving.’”

  The hermit smiled. “It’s nice to know you’re listening. But it is you know, it’s true. One could say free will is the most powerful force in Creation for it even walls out God.”

  I raised my feet to the fire, wiggled my toes. “I thought God could do anything.”

  “I know,” the hermit said, thinking about it. He picked up a small stick, looked at it. “It doesn’t make sense does it, I mean that something can wall God out? It doesn't seem right.” The hermit bent the stick in two but it wouldn’t break, was too green. He straightened it back out, bent it again, but still it wouldn’t break. The hermit pitched the stick onto the fire. “In this sort of work,” he said, eyes still on the place where the stick had landed, “and praying is work like any other, you will find many things that don’t seem right, don’t make sense. Such things are called contradictions, paradoxes. You will have to get used to contradictions, Winwæd, if you want to succeed at prayer.” The stick, having nearly straightened out again in the heat, now began to turn black. It did not catch fire. “I could tell you it’s not so much that we wall Him out as that He permits us to wall Him out, but it still doesn’t seem right, does it, more like the answer to a clever riddle than the truth? But it is the truth somehow; I mean we can hold Him at a distance if we’re not careful.”

  “How?”

  The hermit looked at me, looked back at the fire. He rubbed his hands on his knees, noticed the patch, pulled it back to look at the skin of his knee. A few hairs sprang out and I was reminded of the hairs on Brother Botulf’s head. “Well, I don’t know how,” he said, “not exactly. But I do know the form it takes.” He looked at me, pointed at the side of his head. “Thoughts. God grants you the freedom of your thoughts, your ideas, independent of Him. He doesn’t intrude upon them. It’s the one place He doesn’t go unless He’s invited. And even then it’s not really Him. I mean when you think about Him you’re not really experiencing Him, you’re thinking about Him, that’s all.”

  “Sir?”

  “It’s similar to what we were talking about earlier, what you pointed out. Thinking about God is as different from experiencing God as talking about prayer is from actually praying.”

  The first wind of the day passed through the trees overhead on its way down the mountain. A smaller, reverse breeze slipped back up the mountain beneath it, moving over the ground at our feet. I moved a little to my right to keep the smoke out of my eyes.

  “Thoughts aren’t real, are they?
I mean you can’t touch a thought, can’t feed it, cut it in two, set it upon a table? Thoughts are just thoughts, Winwæd, phantoms. We invent them, we create them, and, no matter how great they are, they are still only thoughts, ideas, puffs of smoke.”

  “So?”

  “So God is real, isn’t He? I mean He’s as real as that tree or this rock. He exists. And, like the tree or rock, if you want to experience Him, know Him, you don’t close your eyes and think about Him. No, you get up, walk over there, touch Him, look at Him, smell His bark, chip at His edges.”

  “God doesn’t have bark.”

  “Exactly!” The hermit smiled as if I’d said something clever. “You can’t see God that way, you can’t smell Him, can you? But, just like the tree and the rock, to have contact with Him you must know where He is. I mean you wouldn’t walk over to this rock to experience the tree, or to the tree to touch this rock, would you?” “No...?”

  “Well then, that’s what the Meolch’s all about.”

  “Sir?”

  “The Meolch? I had you concentrating on a spot on the river?”

  “I know but I mean I don’t see how it’s....”

  “Look, we know God doesn’t exist in thoughts, right? Created can’t contain Creator?”

  “Yes....” I didn’t really understand that but I didn’t want him to explain it again.

  “And if you want to experience God, like the tree or the rock, you have to go where He is?”

  I nodded.

  “So you have to go someplace where thoughts aren’t.”

  “Sir?”

  “In order to experience God you have to go someplace where thoughts aren’t. You have to stop thinking because, when you’re thinking, the best you can hope for is to think about God, your image of God. And while your image of God may be very nice, it isn’t God. Right?”

  I felt as though I’d been tricked. A part of me could see where we were and the track the hermit had followed to get us there, but I didn’t see how it could possibly be true. How could you go where there weren’t any thoughts? You would have to leave your head behind. And once you got there, how could you experience God without thinking about Him?

  “Do you find that contradictory, Winwæd, paradoxical?”

  That he had an answer to my objection didn’t make me feel any better about it.

  “Remember the river you have inside you?”

  “The one that flows from left to right?”

  The hermit blinked. “Yes, yes, in your case it does. But that doesn’t matter. What matters, left to right or right to left, is that the river is you, I mean in the sort of work I’m teaching you, the river is you—your life, your mind, your soul—it is you.”

  “The river is me.”

  “I know, I know, but bear with me.” The hermit stopped, thought about it. When he began to speak again it was in a different voice, as if we were now talking about something else, an entirely new subject. “Have you ever seen something,” he asked, “have you ever seen something or heard something that so surprised you, so startled you that, for a moment or two, your mind went blank? In the world they talk of being rendered speechless by something and this is what they mean. They are not really speechless, though they cannot speak, it is that, however momentarily, they have been rendered thoughtless, empty, their minds deaf and dumb, pure. Do you know what I’m talking about Winwæd, have you ever experienced anything like that?”

  I nodded. Brother Eadnoth covered with spots, humming to the moon.

  The hermit smiled. “Good. That’s good. But, as I’m sure you know, such moments are rare. Most of the time, most of the time whether you are awake or asleep, your river is like a river at flood, all sorts of things bobbing along on the surface—sticks, logs, leaves, maybe even bits of houses, fences, somebody’s hat. These things are your thoughts, the thoughts that constitute the daily activity of your mind, the thoughts that are—in a sense—your mind, the thoughts that many people take to be their complete and utter selves.”

  “My thoughts are me.”

  “No, no they’re not! That’s what other people think, not you, not a monk. Thoughts are just thoughts, remember, phantoms.”

  “Thoughts are just thoughts.”

  “What you want is to not think, to be able to leave your thoughts behind, let them pass by without bothering you.”

  Why did it have to be so hard? All I wanted was to learn how to pray like Father Hermit, maybe save a few lives, work a few miracles.

  “That’s what the river is all about. If you can let its current, its load of debris, flow by without distraction, you will find you can do the same thing with your thoughts, with.... What? What is it?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  The hermit watched me, waited.

  I shook my head, looked away, looked back. “It doesn’t look so difficult when you do it; I mean you don’t make it look so difficult.”

  “It isn’t....”

  “I thought God loved us. I thought He was reaching out to us, however obscurely, all the time. Why’s He make it so difficult if He loves us, why’s it have to be so complicated?”

  The hermit smiled, apparently pleased with my problem. “It isn’t difficult, Winwæd, it just seems that way. We’re unaccustomed to it, that’s all, unaccustomed to emptying ourselves, humbling ourselves....”

  “Right.”

  The hermit frowned. He looked around the campsite absently, noticed the tabula lying at his feet, picked one up. “Look, what must I do if I want to write on this?”

  I glanced at the thing—it was covered with writing, someone’s prayer request. I shrugged. “Remove the old writing?”

  “Exactly. There isn’t enough room for more words, is there? Not as it is now. But if....” Father swept the tabulum back and forth over the fire. He looked at it, passed it over the fire once more, examined it again, showed it to me—eyes asking what I thought of his work. The surface of the wax was smooth now, only a few swirls remaining to mark the spots where, before, there had been letters, entire words. I had to smile. It had been neatly done.

  The hermit didn’t smile but you could tell he was pleased with himself. He shook his head. “Our minds are not unlike tabula,” he said, “covered day and night with thoughts: old thoughts, new thoughts, thoughts about work and people. Sometimes there are even mistaken thoughts, strange scrambled things full of misplaced words, errant ideas, ancient worries lording it over new.” The hermit paused, looked at his tabulum. “It’s a complicated block of wax, the mind. And on top of all that, we expect God to write something.” He looked at me. “That’s what prayer’s all about, that’s what the center of the river’s all about, asking God to write something on our tabulum. And of course He wants to write something, has been dying to write something ever since the beginning of time; and, now that we’ve asked Him to, asked Him of our own free will, He finally can. But how can He?” The hermit looked at me as if expecting an answer. “How can He write something on your mind if it’s so cluttered, so confused with your own thoughts and messages that anything He placed there would be misunderstood, misread, mistaken for something else, part of another thought, something about yesterday’s supper or the color of that bruise?” He pointed at the place where Waldhere had pinched me. “What then, Winwæd, what then?”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t the slightest idea.

  Father smiled. “We must clear our tabula. When you pray— when you pray as I am teaching you to pray—you must warm the wax of your mind, allow the heat to erase your thoughts, allow it to erase your thoughts one by one. And then you must wait. You must wait quietly, absently, while God writes what He will. And what He wills, of course, is Himself. What you will read, encounter, is God.” Father shook his head. “You mustn't worry about the thoughts, they’ll come back. They may even try to come back before you’re ready for them, while you're still at prayer. But when this happens you must erase them again. With a simple sweep of the will you must soften the wax of your mind, keep
your tabulum clear and empty so as to leave it open to God.”

  “Absently?”

  “Absently?”

  “You said I have to wait ‘absently’ for God. To write on my mind or whatever. What do you mean...‘absently’?”

  The hermit looked up at the trees. “I said that, ‘absently’? Well, that’s all right. That’s good.” He looked at me. “You do wait on Him absently, or you should, absent will, absent thoughts, absent everything but Him. You empty yourself of all but Him, no thoughts, no sounds, so you can hear Him.”

  “I thought He was going to write something.”

  The hermit frowned. “Write something, say something, these are metaphors, Winwæd, metaphors. You understand the word?”

  I nodded quickly. The last thing I wanted was another definition.