128. Sacrifice

I admit I’ve lusted over Lucy’s ample figure. I’m just a man. Lucy, Immy, Sally … they're all the same. Carl Jung explained them as my anima. In "Two Essays in Analytical Psychology," he said, “The whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned into woman from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air.”

If I had married someone instead of  becoming a monk,  this morning the woman and I might have shared our ….  16,425th breakfast together.  I wonder what we could have possibly talked about on over sixteen thousand mornings.  “Pass the butter” and “How about those Yankee’s” 16,000 times could sour a relationship, I’d think.

So how am I supposed to change my biology? As many of us monks have in the past, I deal with it. But not totally deny it. I lay awake some nights yearning for a woman to lie beside me. To talk to, share my thoughts and dreams and to tell my fears. To lay my head upon her … breast and listen to her heartbeat, to smell her sweetness. To feel so close to another human being, another soul. And to have planned a life together, to have raised children and to have sat on a Sunday afternoon after dinner on a wide porch in the soft sunshine and watched grandchildren playing on the grass. A woman to share my body on long walks in the woods and at night in the peace of our bedroom. To care for her in sickness and to hold her when she suffered pain or grief.

This is what I gave up to become a monk. I didn’t fully appreciate my sacrifice when I decided as a young man to enter a religious life. I didn’t know I was going against every cell in my body in remaining celibate. I knew I could live without the young woman I was involved with before entering the novitiate. Leaving her was in some ways  a relief. But I didn’t know that life without any woman would eventually become a hell of loneliness.

When I go up on the roof and look out over the valley I feel close to something that’s feminine. I can’t say why. It may be the lush fruitfulness of a summer afternoon as the haze rises from the river that runs through the valley to nurse the trees and grasses. It may be the wind whispering to me, calling to me, wrapping its arms around me.

The one time I came close to joining the spirit on the horizon … stepping off into her arms … happened after a rainfall. A storm had thundered down the mountain and pounded the Chapter House with blasts of wind and a torrent of rain. When it ended and the stained glass window of St. Lucy lit up with rays of sunshine through her colored glass, I went up the roof ladder hoping to see a rainbow. I popped my head out the trap door and swung my eyes west toward the late afternoon sun. There on the horizon golden clouds blazed, pink and green against a pale blue sky. I made my way along the peak toward it, to the edge of the roof.  It frightened me to suddenly feel something pull in my chest. A woman spirit seemed to be calling from over on the horizon, a place where we might live forever.