60. Women

Judy in Saugerties writes and says, “Gee, for a monk, there were a lot of women in your life.”   Well, my mother was one, so I might be expected to have a special fondness for women. And I wasn’t brought up in a monastery.  I had a normal upbringing with girls in the neighborhood, girls in school, girls at work …  girls, girls, girls.  Also, I’m a normal male and it’s difficult to always keep from thinking about women.  Most of the religious brothers and priests I’ve met are not “take ‘em or leave ‘em” about women.  Some are, it’s true, but for most it’s a true sacrifice to lead one’s life without female companionship.

Still, I can’t say I was a natural ladies man  … far from it. Understand that I came from a family of boys, and I’m sure that’s pertinent.  We would not have wanted a sister,  but if one had been dropped off at our house for inspection, the three of us would surely have been polite as we walked around the girl and studied her, as a group of gallery patrons might scrutinize a bronze statue.  When she popped her chewing gum, we would have quickly run off like scattering monkeys.

When I entered junior high school and was forced into social functions with the opposite sex sooner than I wanted, I found myself unable to simply walk up to a girl and begin a conversation.  I knew that such was within the scope of male potential, because I saw other more confident boys doing so. But I couldn’t seem to manage small talk.  Even saying the word ‘dance’ felt so unmanly that when asking a girl to dance, all I could manage was, “Would you like to?”   Had an overly sensitive father been standing at her side, I  might have received a black eye.

One Friday night, after standing around  the edge of the dance floor doing nothing but trying to look cool,  I finally worked up the courage to ask a particular young lady if she would “like to.”  As we stepped out on the floor, I very gingerly took her hand and then swung around so that the two of us stood chest to chest,  a phrase I could never have said out loud.  I slid my arm around her and put my hand on her back.  That felt brazen and  intimate to me, but everyone around us was doing the same and so far no one had been arrested.

I felt brilliant about my accomplishment, until I realized I was expected to make conversation.  “Would you like to” was used up and at this point certainly not appropriate.  “Nice weather,” seemed banal, even to me, and “How’s school?” might not be successful if she had just failed an exam.

Finally, thinking it would be safe, I tried, “How’s your mother?” 

“What?” said my surprised partner.  “Do you know her?”

“No, I just thought that… ah .. we all need to care about our parents.”

The conversation didn’t go much further.

But eventually a girl came along who stayed in my arms after the dance ended, a girlfriend.  With her, my social abilities quickly expanded, although they were never to be a natural fit.

59. Nowhere

I hope most of you don’t mind my telling you a memory from time to time here on the blog.  I’m a bit anxious about how things will turn out at the monastery and it helps calm me when I muse on things from the past.  In any event, by popular demand, here’s another Catholic school memory.  

I was in the 4th grade when Dad moved us temporarily to another town one winter and then back to our home city two months later.  This move caused a family whiplash of sorts and resulted in my brothers and I being removed from our Catholic school and inserted into a public school in the new town.

Deep winter reigned in the remote frozen village where we went to live for a short time.  Everything was wrong with our new situation.  Our house was tiny, cramped and awfully cold.  The little heater worked its heart to exhaustion trying to warm the house, but it did a terrible job.  I remember shivering for two months straight.  I didn’t mind sitting around on cold evenings wearing two sweaters while watching television, but to read a book I had to take my hands out of my pockets and wear gloves.  I checked the weather forecast in the newspaper each night, but it didn’t appear I’d be sitting in a warm room again until July.

In the little icy village my brothers and I were marched into a large brick school building and ushered into the office of a man who wore a three piece suit that had evidently been serving him well since before the war.  Calling himself The Principal, Mr. Wienow seemed about as interested in our arrival as he might have been had a toboggan salesman dropped by.  We were about to have a personal encounter with the unholy, the profane world of non-Catholics known as Public Schools.  Attendance at this institution mounted a terrific assault on my long held philosophy that a basic goodness pervaded the world and the people in it. Life as a sheltered Catholic boy came crashing to an end.  

My school mates swore in public and told dirty jokes within 5 miles of the school grounds.  They were disrespectful to the teachers.  Had they tried any of their antics on the nuns back home at Blessed Sacrament School, they would have landed in an orthopedic ward.  Many of my new mates didn’t even care about their schoolwork, nor how well they did on tests and quizzes.  When I explained to a classmate that the “J.M.J” I had written at the top of my test paper stood for Jesus, Mary and Joseph and invoked their blessing on my work, she looked at me as though I was a member of a cult.  Now that I think of it, the Irish schoolboy version of American Catholicism in the 1950’s was nothing if not a cult. 

But soon we returned to our hometown and I was relieved to find myself back in a Catholic elementary school.  My feelings upon arriving at Our Lady of Lourdes School wouldn’t have differed much from those of the Pope coming home to the Vatican .  The building was constructed in the architectural style of  a 12th century fortress that Ivanhoe would have been proud to own, and I’m sure he would have sworn allegiance to Rome on the spot had he been offered the keys.  The hallways were darkened in monastic reverence and the entire building smelled of sacred candles.  Statues of the saints, wall mounted crucifixes with palm leaves affixed all brought back a peace to my soul.  All the kids were in school uniforms and the nuns softly padded the halls in their medieval regalia.  God was in his heaven as the sun shone bright (figuratively) and everything was Roman Catholic all over the place.  It was definitely more monastic in flavor than the monastery in which I currently reside.

At Lourdes school, I quickly became lost in an ocean of children.  Fourth grade teacher Sister Clementia managed 56 children in a classroom built for 26.  That’s not a typo; fruitful Catholic parents,  heeding their Church, were hard at it procreating in those years and the schools were bursting at the seams.  Mothers were worn out and fathers worried about  money, but the Bishops were evidently happy.

Until I lost it years ago, I had a photo of our fourth grade class, Sister Clementia sitting up front near the camera and myself way back on the horizon of the fifth row, my finger just coming out of my nose.   The nun looks pensive as she sits there under a huge Flying Nun hat called the  Cornet, dressed in a cute little French outfit from the 15th century.  She may be wondering if a jungle outpost in Borneo would be more to her liking than bronco-busting tens of boys and girls each day.

I think the photo may have been taken on a Tuesday, and if it was the third Tuesday morning of the month, Father Fudzniak, who absolutely hated children and cared even less for nuns, was probably then walking from the rectory over to the school to preach at us.  Without asking, Father always chose his topic with no regard to what we were studying in our Religion lessons.  He might lecture us nine year olds on the evils of birth control or he might summarize the major points of the Third Lateran Council, which took place about two hundred years before Sister Clementia's clothes were designed.  Father Fuddy was an overly serious man, having lost his sense of humor in the war while assigned to an outpost in Borneo.

I was relieved to be back in a more militarily crisp environment where the order of the day was set by the nuns rather than the ping-pong precepts of modern child psychology.  Little man that I was, I appreciated someone being in control.  Whatever weapons were used …. rulers or blackboard pointers or “the back of me hand”…..  it didn’t matter to me.  What did matter was a predictable environment I could enjoy for six hours each weekday.

At lunch time, we were all sent to the basement to eat, a symbolism that was not lost on me.  Students up through the fourth grade ate in a low ceiling room filled with small tables seating eight, with tiny little chairs that were too small for the smallest of us.  Light streamed in the high cellar windows and outside I could see telephone wires that I pretended was the barbed wire fence I’d seen in the prison camp movie, “Stalag 17.”   Swaggering forth like a young William Holden, I approached the black attired SS prison guard (Sister Mary Gertrude) and asked if I could join my fellow prisoners outside on the stalag’s parade ground.  She grabbed the brim of my hat and pulled it down over my eyes, then spun me around twice and pointed me toward the door, just like Pin The Tail On The Donkey.  Staggering forward as if I had been on rice-only rations for six weeks, I proceeded out through the sally port.  Sister Trudy would have had good time in the Hitler Youth when she was a kid, I imagined.

I climbed the stairs from the basement and stepped out into the damp frigid air, letting my ears delight in the sound of traffic passing on the busy street.   My young soul had now been saved from the remote desolateness of a small town.  Lourdes School and its environs were to me much preferred over the eerie frozen quietness of that other village. Here there was slush and cars caked in road salt.  Even in winter puddles sometimes formed when the temperature peeked just above thirty two degrees.  Fog abounded most days, thrilling the heart of this winterized boy.  Everything was grey and wet, damp and cold.  But not frozen solid and below zero, thanks be to God.  Most days were pleasantly balmy in the low twenties.  By the time we returned, winter’s end was in the air with the temps headed toward thirty.  I didn’t need a thermometer; spring beckoned with the smell of melting dog poops as they began to warm up beneath the snow.

Now returned safely to my hometown, I’d had a long trip to nowhere, a scary detour on my journey upward.  As I walked the mile home after school, slogging through slush covering the sidewalks, I could not but thank all the saints in heaven that I no longer had to ride a school bus home across the tundra and put up with all those noisy and profane children.  I could walk home by myself, and when I arrived, feet and gloves and seat of my britches wet with the slop of winter in the city, I would head for the cellar and change into dry clothing while standing before the immense roaring octopus coal furnace, the winter god of my childhood.  It was good to be home.

Rave On!

58. Garden

When I walk through the village here,  I cannot say I am happy about the possibility of returning to the world.  I know readers will think the life of a monk boring compared to an existence in even a small town like Saugerties.  But … no offense intended … this is a profane place.  Profane in the sense that it’s devoid of anything spiritual in the daily rhythm of its life.  I’m not speaking about religion, nor even about God.  I mean there is no spritual space here for the important things in life like beauty and peace, let alone tears of joy.  There is no quiet dimension where a person can listen to his interior voice and just be, like up on the mountain.  Or silently exist with nature all around, sucking up the beauty of life on this blue-green earth.  

In reality, The Fall of Man turns out to be the Dream of Life most of us  lead, where we are separated from the creation that was given to us.   When you think of it … and I think about it a lot … we humans give up our inheritance with a mere twist of our perspective.  We are indeed in the garden, if we wish to be there.  An angel didn’t kick us out of paradise.  The siren devils in our heart marched us outside, where we stand in the rain and wonder why we are unhappy.  One devil is our need for noise and so-called excitement.  Another devil is our need to be treated “fairly,”  but we often mean  more than fairly.   Still another devil is our need to be in control.  But there are angels beckoning us back into the garden, and  I wonder if they have names.  I wonder if their names are Acceptance and Selfless and Listen?   

If I ever had a child I would name him or her Listen.  The Appleton family  in Connecticut in the 1630’s gave the names of Eliphalet, Mehitable, Israel, Hannah and Renewed to their children.  I like Renewed the best.  Perhaps they later had a little boy and named him Repent.  Too bad they didn't think of Listen.

As I stood in line at the hardware store, a pretty young woman began a conversation with me.  At my age, and given my vocation as a semi-cloistered monk, any women under age 70 is pretty.  And I’ve met a few over 70 who were pretty, too.  I was wearing just jeans and a jacket and introduced myself as Brother Jesse as I always do.  She immediately became enthusiastic, mentioned she was a fourth grade teacher and asked could I please-please-please come to her class on Career Day and speak to the children about my work.  Stunned, I mumbled my regrets and said it was a life, not a job and there wasn’t much in my work to interest ten year olds.  Then I laughed and offered to speak with them when they reached 21 years of age.  I told Bouncer about my encounter that evening.

“You should have accepted!” he said.  “Kids need to know what monks do.”

“They do? I don’t think so,” I said.  “What would I say?  ‘Good Morning, Children:  When I wasn't praying or buying toilet parts, I cut and pasted texts for the past thirty years while trying to discover the average height of donkies from two thousand years ago by interpolating hundreds of references pertaining to walking distances available from copies of the ancient texts?’”

“That’s pretty boring,” said Bouncer.  “I can see you don’t know how to entertain fourth graders … or their pretty teacher.  Don’t ever ask me out on a date.”

“Don’t worry,”  I said.

“The excitement is always in the telling,” Bouncer continued.  “I’d approach it differently, Ace.  ‘Good Morning, Children:  I also have my nose buried in the Church Fathers most of the day, but before I became a monk I was an Official Executioner for the State of New York!  I was an Electrocutor! You shoulda seen their eyeballs pop out when I turned on the juice!’”

“Oh, c’mon, Bouncer,” I said.

“And their hair got a permanent wave!  No extra charge!”  he shouted.

He was laughing uncontrollably when I  picked up my tea and moved to another table.  

“Ya gotta get their attention first, Ace!”  he shouted after me.

What could I expect from Bouncer?  There’s no question he has a warped sense of humor.  I was behind him last year when he walked into a religious store in Kingston, looked around at all the trashy items from China and said rather loudly,  “Gosh,  Jesse,  God really does make junk!”

 

57. Ex Libris

Seriously,  our work is indeed valuable.  But I must admit this opinion comes from a book lover.  I still remember my Mom taking me on my first visit to the Public Library when I was in the fourth grade.  And I won’t forget the very first book I checked out of the library.

It was a real novel called “Billy and Me,” meant for young readers, about a boy and  his best friend who joined  the Boy Scouts and had all kinds of neat adventures riding horses, paddling canoes and raising money.  I forget what the charity was.  Anyway, what really impressed me were the descriptions of, for example, the hot dusty trail rolling out ahead in the bright sunlight and the snow-white moon coming up over the hill on a crisp October evening.  I had never realized  such vivid pictures could be drawn with  words, excepting of course the Baltimore Catechism’s description of the Fires of Hell.


The Children’s Room librarian was an older grey-haired woman who had a clipped manner and a disapproving look sewn on her face.  Later in the summer, when I discovered I could check out books in the main lobby from a younger pretty woman,  I found one excuse or another to do so.  I love librarians …. always have.


The sign on the young woman’s desk said her name was Melinda and I thought it was just the most beautiful name anyone could ever have, even if it wasn’t a saint’s name.  As a bonus, she seemed to smell slightly of ink.  I  handed her a book for older children called , ”You Can Get It Free!” and to make conversation  I looked around the library  airily and declared, “Yes, I’ve finally found the secret the adult world has kept from me all these years.”  I was told later to check out all my books in the Children’s Room.


On a rainy September morning some years ago,  as I nosed my way along the great smelling shelves in the comfortable little village library in South Paris, Maine, I came across the book that had changed my life.  “Billy and Me,” misplaced by some errant child into the New Releases section, stared back at me.  Seriously, it really had changed my life!   It opened the world of the community library to me and thereby a public sphere of ideas and thoughts and arguments and discourse far beyond what I would have experienced  in the dungeons of  most small school libraries of the 1950’s.

Once my life of  libraries and reading had begun, Mom had a few misgivings over the nerd she had created.   She found herself constantly telling me to get my nose out of the books.  “Find something else in the world  more interesting,” she would say.   But that took a few years and when it happened, the girl in the 3rd row, 8th seat back  didn’t smell at all like ink.  She smelled delicious.  It's a wonder I became a monk.

 








Click here for the 50's "Book Of Love."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xDwq8NM9G4

56. First Things

I’ve never had much enthusiasm for paper work.  I was trained in Theology and the Ancient Texts during my basic religious preparation, of course, but never worked in that specialty until I landed here, where I was at first assigned to run a copy machine and to retype notes.   Brother Jeanne D'Arc from Namibia was on loan to us as our abbot for a year,  before we elected Brother Saint Florian of Linz (Sparky) to the office.  Brother D’Arc, a.k.a. Lord Vader,  was evidently on an Abbatial Executive Fast Track.  He joined the order and immediately was assigned as our abbot.  Vader understood life at the bottom of the heap, too,  and after he'd had a few months to settle in I spoke to him about leading a life for Christ that might include more than unplugging toilets and running the copier.

“You have complete freedom here to choose your pursuits,” he said.

“But what would you like me to do?”  I asked.  “I don’t have a request from a scholar.”

“Gee, Ace, that’s up to you.  Why not propose work that would be generally useful to the field? ”

“C’mon, Vader,”  I said, “ I haven’t the slightest idea what to propose.”

“Ask around,” he said, “maybe one of the guys will give you an idea that’s been running around in his head.”

“OK, Vader, I’m asking you,”  I said.  “So, by the way, do you have a scholarly pursuit I can help you with?”

Vader laughed while at the same time looking a little sheepish. 

“This time last year I was a high roller on Wall Street,” he said.  And then he turned and left the Pit.  I never understood how Affirmative Action got Vader from Wall Street to West Saugerties, but when he soon took his high-finance skills to Fermoy I wasn't surprised.  I heard later he didn't last long in Ireland, soon departing for the Far East.

Harpo had an idea and it was to cross reference all the travels of Peter and Paul around Asia Minor mentioned in the New Testament and the writings of the early Gnostics and Desert Fathers.

“Why?”  I asked him.

“Who knows?” he said, “you might discover some trend, or some insight will come out of it.”

“Like what?”  I persisted.

“How the hell should I know?” he said.  “It’s just a hunch.”

The work was a terrific learning experience and we did extract some ideas from it that caused us to propose projects to a scholar in Boston who for all I know is still considering it. 

Of course, we don't have ancient manuscripts here on the mountain.  But publishing houses have reproduced many of the old tomes  into modern photographic "books" that are actually loose leaf pages printed with the manuscripts at their original size or larger.  A huge portion of our endowment money over the years went toward the purchase of these copies; they’re very expensive but are the necessary tools of our trade.  (How we wish now we had not spent so much!) Add to our library all of the modern books of scholarship written by various authorities, plus the indexed notes of the monks that came before us, plus our own work.  You can see why the materials currently in use fill the walls of the Pit.  Notes and copies of work we’ve sent off to the scholars are stored in most of the rooms on the second floor of the Chapter House, except our few small sleeping rooms behind the old Trophy Room.  I’ve never understood why we bother to keep the copies, since they certainly must be safeguarded at the Universities.  Pride may be the only reason.

I sometimes walk through the Pit or sit in the Scriptorium and feel the symposiac luxury of all the knowledge that surrounds me.  To think that through our reasoning power we humans can reconstruct the story of our early Church and hopefully add a tiny dimension to the Gospel Story!  It’s enough to make me to want to rebuild the Tower of Babel all over again.

"We'll be right up, God!  We can help!"  

CLICK: Here’s the Star Wars Cantina Song in honor of Vader.  Haha!  If he were still with us, he would enjoy it! 
 

55. Beep Beep

Beep is back.  Brother  Wilgefortis of Wambierzyce, also known as Wile E. Coyote or just Beep Beep, came into Kingston on a Trailways bus this afternoon after being away for a couple of months and called to ask for a ride home.  He goes away every few years to calm down.  His DSM code is 293.81.  When his meds stop working and his mind zooms out of control, we have to restrain him from running down our road and screaming. And we’re constantly putting his clothes back on him.    He ran naked all the way to Blue Mountain a few years ago and stopped at the little market to buy a coke when he got thirsty.  The lady behind the counter asked him if he had money to pay for his drink and she said she had never seen a naked man search himself so thoroughly for his wallet. 

A few years ago, Beep was my roommate.  Up behind the old trophy room are 7 tiny bedrooms that served as sleeping quarters for the young men and women employees when the old estate was converted into a resort before we came on the scene.  Some of us swear we have seen the ghosts of the summer hires cavorting in the night after lights out.  It’s a harmless fantasy, probably, but Beep talks to the apparitions and orders them to “stop that, right now!”  He got into a fight with a long dead dining room waiter and somehow received a gash on his neck.  I watched Beep more closely after that, and kept an eye out for ghosts.

I was hoping Beep would stay away longer this time.  If we get kicked out of here we’ll have to look for positions doing useful work and also find somewhere to live.  Beep is not capable of holding a thought for more than five seconds.  Needless to say he doesn't interview well.

“Agnes, this is not a good time for Beep to return,” I said to the abbot when he asked me to run down to Kingston in the SUV and get Beep.

Agnes was still in his “No one has said we’re closing” denial at the time,  a position I now know to have been a complete falsehood. 

“We can’t leave him waiting at the bus station, Brother Jessica,” said Agnes.

“But how the ….”  I began to say.

“We will manage, Jesse.  Beep is our brother,”  said Agnes.

Which of course is true, if also lamentable.  I still think the rest home should have held on to him longer.