8. Nice To Hear From You!

Well, it's pretty amazing to hear from some of you already by email. All three notes  were from Saugerties, but there’s a wider world out there, although I’ve met some in the village who don’t believe it.

"A monastery in West Saugerties?" wondered  one correspondent. Very definitely.  As I think I mentioned, it's not all that large, but Google Earth sees us just like any other old resort house on the mountain.

Except for our neighbor Lance,  we’re pretty much alone up here on the mountainside.  He's a quarter mile down the road in a house sitting on a promontory overlooking the valley.  Other than Lance, the remaining humans near us are the folks at the foot of the mountain, who look up from their gardens and wave when we drive by in our old SUV.  That never happened often, but lately Agnes and Terd have been going out on some sort of mission.   And regrettably,  our plumbing woes have sent me down to the hardware store in the village more often.

A surprise this morning! A lovely young woman named Sara called to order wedding invitations to be printed by yours truly. Kids today like a deep impression, almost through the paper, something we printers of old abhor. But the monastery can use the income. However, I don't want the abbot to think I'm industrious and ask me to seek out business. This old man and old press can't take it!  Besides, I hear we’re so much in a financial hole that a few printing jobs won’t solve our  problem.

7. What's In A Name?

What a wonderful invention is the Internet.  In addition to this blog, I’m trying to create a web page for the monastery so we can ask for donations.  Just the like the Big Boy Pastors who fill the airwaves and the worldwide webspace begging for money.  Do we take charity?  Of course!  We’re mendicant monks.  That’s how we’re supposed to live, on the charity of others.  For all I know, the monks invented Purgatory so you could avoid it by sending us money!  I’m kidding. I think.

As a cloistered monk, I should NOT be on the computer, but I surf the World Wide Web and find such a massive amount of information that I am truly amazed it can all be contained in man-made systems.  My PC here in the cellar is like a crystal ball where I can see anything that Google allows me to find.  I began the blog with trepidation.  Not just because my abbot would be displeased, but while confession is good for the soul, talking about oneself can bring feelings of conceit and self centeredness.  A monk is supposed to have neither of these traits.  But I’m a 67 year old man and I’m convinced that my faults are here to stay.  I hope for them to be forgiven, because it’s too late to believe they will be removed.  I no longer pray for them to evaporate in some great cloud of holiness.  I pray instead that my shortcomings won’t hurt others.  It’s the best I can do.

Our monastery is not much of a holy temple.  It’s quite run down and in need of maintenance that we can’t afford.  Our home’s official name is Our Lady’s Monastery at West Saugerties.  We call it The Craphole.  Eleven guys living in the cramped space up on the second floor behind the old trophy room …. well, you can just imagine what it looks like.  I don’t need to be descriptive;  you can guess the condition of  a mountain retreat that is subject to the rigors of northern winters and never receives regular maintenance or repairs.  Except for the toilets, of course.  We know what’s important.  

Where was I?  My name is Brother Saint Jessica, but I’m most often called Jesse.  We are part of The Order of the Brothers of the Holy Varlet, based in Fermoy, County Cork, Ireland.   Our tradition is to take the name of a female saint.  I suppose our founders hoped women’s names would lower our testosterone … no comment.  We never use our birth names or any other male name.  But, away from the Abbot's hearing, we often call each other by a masculine-ized nicknames.   Brother Saint Helen is called Raiser (for hell raiser) and Brother Saint Catherine is simply Cat.  Brother Saint Theresa is Bear, because he’s a huge guy, but most often he’s called Terd, from his habit of shouting “Bastard!” when he hits his thumb with a hammer.   In fact each of us probably has two or three  names that have arisen over the many years we’ve lived together.  My other nickname is Ace, because once when a few of us were in a restaurant years ago, a pretty waitress told me she'd like to go out with me.  We were in our robes!  But nothing stops a determined woman, I guess.

By the way, I’ll bet you don’t know who St. Jessica was, do you?  Look it up.  I really should get off this damned computer.  Besides, the wi-fi signal I’m using is getting weaker.  It’s from a neighbor down the road who was too lazy to put a security code on his router.

6. From The Editor

Well, I didn't know Jesse's email address was still active (BrotherJesse@windsweptpress.com),  
but I just got a note from Sleepy in Coxsackie pointing out that St. Lucy was never known in any of the Church archives to be voluptuous.  Certainly not by her students, probably.  Yes, I know she lost her eyes and re-grew them after a pagan Hottentot gouged them out!  Awful story.  Why did they have such messy martyrdoms back in antiquity?  Couldn't they have just popped a nine millimeter behind her ear or administered a lethal injection? And why do we always blame pagans.  The pagan young ladies who sometimes come up the clove* and bathe in the little falls at the end of the road have always seemed quite lovely to us Brothers!  I can't imagine them gouging anyone's eyes out.


Anyway, Jesse once told me Voluptuous Lucy on our stained glass window is St. Lucy Junior, the first daughter of old St. Lucy.  She became a wayward teen while Mom was recovering from her martyrdom and couldn't see what Lucy Jr. was wearing when she left for school in the morning.  Eyeglasses run in the family.  Astigmatism was rampant and many of her contemporaries said St. Lucy the Mom couldn't see very well with or without her eyes.  But we presume the eyes helped a lot.  


Church history!  You can't make this stuff up!  Well, Jesse could.   RSF!!  (That's rideo sicco fortis, latin for LOL.)


Bouncer


*What we call a cleft in the steep mountainside around here, like a more vertical gorge with alternating waterfalls and pools of water.


(Crank it up.  The volume is a bit low on this, but I liked the composite of different years, musicians, etc.)

5. Here In The Cellar (3)

We Religious Brothers … there are eleven of us … have spent most of our lives as contemplatives, praying and studying Holy Scripture and the texts of the Church Fathers.   And except for one of us, we also provide minor services to more important scholars of antiquity, men and women who have added greatly to our understanding of the Church and Theological history.  We ourselves have not made any great discoveries or indexed prodigious amounts of commentary.  One of our Brothers compares us to office boys in the halls of universities.

As I said, that’s all true except for one, Terd, who is a well known scholar on the writings of Athanasius of Alexandria, an early Church doctor.  Brother Theresa … that’s Terd’s professed name … has been open about why he came here a few years ago.  He disliked living in what he called “academic communes” and sought some anonymity by asking to join our order … he’d been a Capuchin monk … and re-locating to its farthest outpost in West Saugerties.

I don’t know how our former Abbot, Sparky, got this computer.  He may have planned to market our services to a wider set of customers throughout the world.  That makes me laugh.  Sparky would not have had much luck finding any additional work and none of  us wants any. We’re pretty laid back.  I’ve had the same project now for 4 years that I originally estimated would take me a month!

4. Here In The Cellar (3)

This old print shop is where I live out my days of self-imposed  retirement.  By that I mean I just stopped working, unlike most monks.    I gave up my calling, but not my vocation, so I'm still on the payroll of rice and beans just like the other guys.  Abbot Agnes says he thinks I am going through a depression of old age.  But I’m not depressed, just sad sometimes.

The building creaking and groaning above me began life in the 1800's as a Catskills resort for the middle-middle class and when later gifted to our order it became a small monastery without all the bother of a working farm (we have only 14 acres, much of it vertical, sitting on the mountain side.)   Some time before I got here, when the endowments ran out and we needed an income,  I’m told that we ran a school. It wasn’t exactly a “Minor Seminary,” but rather served as a port in the storm for head strong teenage boys. We took only few at a time, but even the small income supplemented what little money was coming in.   Alas, after a few years the state education department closed us down, saying our building was unsafe.  However, we’ve all survived here and we could have been helping some troubled teenagers for the past 40 years.

So, let's get to it.  We'll begin with the next post.  These aren't chapters in the classic sense.  They are posts,  and therefore much less formal than you might expect.
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3. Here In The Cellar (2)

You might wonder how I came to get on the Internet.  Only a few years back,  I discovered the Abbot Agnes had a laptop computer in the bottom drawer of a tiny desk the prior Abbot had used for his office.  Agnes said neither Sparky (Brother Abbot Saint Florian of Linz,) or he ever had any need of it.  I asked to borrow the little computer and told Agnes I would use it to seek donations from the general public. I said it with a straight face and I kind of intended to do just that, despite the small likelihood that such begging would be lucrative.   He was frankly disinterested, knew nothing about the Internet and evidently thought of it as a modern version of the old Western Union Telegraph, where messages came in on spaghetti-like strips of paper that were cut into sentences and glued on a message form.

Now that I know a little about the wired world, I can say with some degree of certainty that tremendous odds were stacked against my success as I got the laptop connected to the Internet and started a blog.

And while it’s true that I may be the only novice ever to open the directions packed with the computer and follow  them explicitly from A to Z, it’s also true my Guardian Angel had to have contributed to the enterprise significantly.   She is something!  More about her later.

2. Here In The Cellar (1)

Hello out there!  I’m a monk!  Let me tell you about myself.  First, where I am!

If you fly south from Albany down the Hudson River toward New York City, the Catskill Mountains will be seen off to your right, their green stretches of forest coming all the way from the western horizon.  Closer to you, less than ten miles away, the rippling blanket of pine and hemlock  drops precipitously down an escarpment to a flat plain of mixed hardwood forest and open fields that run to the waterway gliding by beneath you.  The river is the Hudson, a stretch of water that is edged with towns named Red Hook, Saugerties, Kingston, Poughkeepsie and Port Ewen. 

Push the stick forward a tiny bit and move your feet to adjust the ailerons and your plane will swoop around and point west toward the mountains.  Follow a glide path gradually sloping down to just below the top of the mountain wall ahead of you.  Aim right at it, losing altitude as the mountain grows larger and details begin to show.  Between the trees you’ll see a house here and there.  Look for an old summer resort that is long past its prime, a cluster of buildings with a dilapidated tennis court.  There!  Among the trees.   Atop the highest roof of the resort sits a man in a monk’s robe.  You wonder why.  Well, because I’m a monk.  And you’d better pull up now because I don’t like airplane crashes.  I’ve been in one.

I don't spend much time up here on the roof.  Most of the time I can get a wifi signal down in the cellar.  The abbot here at Our Lady’s Monastery at West Saugerties has told me on more than one occasion to stay below decks.   So I spend most of my day in the cellar.  In the monasteries of olden times I might have been the cellarer … the monk  who kept track of  the  wine.  Given the predilections one might expect to find among a bunch of old celibate guys,  any wine we use today comes from the a liquor store in town and is held under close guard by the Abbot. We don’t need to have that kind of spirit sitting around beckoning to us.