From comfortable distanc.., p.12
From Comfortable Distances, page 12
She passed the church and thought of the quote I cannot step into the same river twice because I am never the same. Well, she would never put herself in this situation again, that was for sure. It wasn’t like she went around kissing men every day. It had felt like the right moment. Obviously it wasn’t the right moment to Neal. But to run away? That seemed a bit much to her. When she got to her car, he wasn't there. Was she supposed to leave the city without him? Was she supposed to drive around looking for him? What if he never made it home to Brooklyn? Then she would have been the last person to see him. She waited in her car for over twenty minutes, listening to her sound track from The Sound of Music, humming along to “Edelweiss.” There was a sadness to the song, a foreshadowing, that made it seem appropriate to the turn of events this afternoon. When the church bells rang in 5:00 pm, she started up the engine and pulled out of the spot. She drove down the block slowly at first, pressing the gas pedal lightly, as if Neal might pop up somewhere. He was an adult after all—he would find his way home. Besides, she couldn't read his mind—she didn’t know why he had gotten so upset. She accelerated and suddenly, she was laughing. She had never made a man run away from her with a kiss. The more she thought about it, the more she laughed, until tears began to stream down her face. She began to feel lighter and easier. There was no use trying to concoct reasons on Neal’s behalf. The truth always came out sooner or later. When it was time for her to know why Neal had run away, she would find out. That much, she was sure of.
Chapter 13: The Confession
Tess didn’t know how long she had closed her eyes when she jumped up, startled. Had the doorbell rung? She rubbed her eye sockets with the heels of her palms, a mannerism that she had always reprimanded Prakash for. Perhaps she had dreamt that the doorbell rang. Just as she was about to fall back down on her pillow, there it was again—the doorbell. Michael most likely. That was the problem with living in a small neighborhood. If someone was looking for you, they would see your car parked out front and know you were home. She wasn’t going to answer it. Michael would have to wait. She saw her answering machine blinking and remembered the messages Michael had left before she dozed off—something or other about a contract, and his thanking her for disappearing that afternoon when they had work to go over. She didn’t know if he had worn off on her, or vice versa with his work, work, work mentality.
Slowly, Tess made her way out of her bedroom, down the hall, down the stairs, and pulled open the front door, careful to hold in the alarm button, as she did not need the police showing up at her house right now. She had her share of drama for the day. Perhaps it was Neal coming to claim his bicycle? No one was at the door. She stuck her head out, one hand positioned to keep the screen door open.
“Hello? Anyone? Neal? Michael? If you are hiding, just come out. I’m going to close the door. That’s it, I’m closing the door,” she said, and that’s when she saw the envelope sticking out of her mailbox. Now Michael was writing her letters, she thought, grabbing it from the mailbox. Only she didn’t know the handwriting on the envelope. For Tess. She looked around for another moment, and closed the front door fast, bolting the double lock. You never knew who was lurking around, watching, waiting to break into your house. Being a realtor, Tess had heard all kinds of stories—burglars following women home from the supermarket and shoving their way into homes as the woman opened their front doors; men posing as delivery men pushing their way in once a person opened the front door. Tess ran up her stairs and looked out her front window before she turned the envelope over to its flap. It was from Neal. He had written his name. She unfolded the sheets of ivory parchment, counting one, two, three, four, five pages, taking in the precise cursive penmanship—had he written it with a fountain pen Tess wondered, noting how the ink bled the paper.
Dearest Tess,
I am sorry that I ran away today. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I hope that you will forgive me. The movie that we saw, The Sound of Music, was very beautiful, but very unsettling to me. I wondered during the movie if somehow you knew my story—if you had figured it out, and that you had taken me to see the movie to show me there was hope, that I may very well live happily ever after as a secular man. I was so I was preoccupied with trying to figure out if you knew, let alone with the movie itself, that it was too hard for me to even speak. And then when you reached over to me in the park…I will try to explain, but no matter how I say it, it sounds preposterous. I wish I had told you sooner, but there never seemed to be the right moment to say it. And then it somehow became a bigger deal than it would have been if I had told you right away. Your friendship has meant a lot to me, Tess. You have made me feel as if I was a man like any other man.
I’m a monk, Tess. A Benedictine monk. Or I was a monk. Right now, I am on a six-month leave of absence from my monastery in Canada discerning the vows that I took in the name of St. Benedict some 23 years back. I left the monastery in March; I am expected to return in September, although I can ask for more time if that's what I need—I can ask to be dismissed forever if I so choose.
Most days I am sure that my life as a monk is over. I left the monastery, Tess, not only to satisfy my own desires, but to satisfy God’s desires, too. It was God that gave me the strength and the will to go. I believe that my challenge from here on in life is to figure out a way to live in society without compromising my truth.
Coming back to Mill Basin after all these years and moving back in with my mother, into the house that I grew up in, has been a very strange experience for me. It has made me regress in many ways, relive the days, months, years prior to my decision to join the monastery. When I had finished Brooklyn College, I locked myself in my room for nearly three months, reading the Bible and praying. I had started to have conversations with Jesus, and it frightened me. I wanted the voices to go away. My parents, devout Catholics, panicked when I withdraw from everything around me. I thought that they would have been pleased over my passion with religion being the religious people that they were, but instead they treated me as if I was an experiment gone wrong. They sent me off to stay in the guesthouse of a monastery in Saskatoon, Canada in December of 1979 so that I would have a chance to figure things out—to see if a life devoted to faith and recluse was at heart what I sought. They sent me far away thinking that the distance alone would be enough to make me beg to come home. My parents thought I was going through a phase, and back then, I didn't know what I thought. There had been an afternoon I sat in my bedroom and I asked to know Christ, who he was, what he was, and I felt something brush my hands and arms and neck and throat soft as a tissue and a voice, hollow and distant, said to me, “I am you.”
At the monastery, the monks left me alone at first. In the silence, I was able to think. I watched how they lived—their community was devoted to prayer and study and silence. They helped one another, and although there was an aloneness to being at the monastery, no one there was ever alone in their hearts. We all prayed for one another’s well-being as well as for the well-being of others. As I got to know the monks, they talked to me of vocation and how if you heard the voice of Christ, you were to open your heart, listen and not run away.
It was a very long road ahead, Tess. After my three months with the monks, they sent me home so that I could figure out if I wanted to return—this time, for good. Going back home after those magical months was too much for me. I couldn’t find focus in Brooklyn. I missed the sound of the wind whispering across the prairie at night, the sound of the coyote’s crying, the stillness of the monastery. Every moment of every day was precious there—things were done with purpose. At home, I couldn’t hear anything except for noise that sounded like static.
In 1980, I returned to the monastery. It was May 6th, the day I turned 24. I went through a six-month postulate period in which I once again was asked to decide if this life was what I sought. After that, I took on a year novitiate. During that time, I learned about the order I was preparing to join, and I spent my days and nights assessing my call to the religious life. I came to define myself as a monk, and for the first time in a long time my life wasn't a mysterious puzzle. I felt as if I was exactly where I needed to be. I learned the Rules of St. Benedict. After my first year, I took a temporary profession, which lasted for three years. Next I took a solemn profession. Later, I studied to become a priest, which led to my being ordained.
It's hard to explain how the years passed—but I guess the same is true for everyone—we live and time passing is the consequence. Each day I woke up in the monastery I prayed, dressed, took a walk, ate a simple breakfast. Contrary to what most people believe, St. Benedict’s rule requires that a monk work with his hands about six hours a day and earn money to sustain the monastery. At the monastery we earned our living by making cookies and honey. I was in charge of making cookies, although it took me over eight years since the day I arrived there as a novitiate to earn that honor.
I stayed in my cell and prayed and wrote and tended to my garden for hours each day. There was always time to contemplate, to write, to think, to read, to speak to the brothers. I had a nice life.
But after many years, there came the nights when I would sit up on the roof of the monastery, looking up into the sky with the abbey’s telescope, and I would think about all sorts of things: why certain stars shined brighter than other stars, why I was living there when there was so much more of the world that I had yet to see. I started to question my life; perhaps I was at the monastery because of fear? Perhaps it had to do with a fact that I had repressed: I didn’t want to end up like my father who seemed to go through the motions of life; I didn’t want to just exist. Over the course of years, decades at the monastery, I had realized that my faith in God was beyond time and place—I knew this because there was no particular place I needed to be to pray –whether I was in the library, under the night sky, sitting across from my brothers during a meal, or in my garden tending to the land, I was able to speak with God.
I began to think about the choices I had made in my life. The truth was that before my monastic experience, I was a cluttered and preoccupied mess. I knew the Christian truth, but there were so many competing values in my psyche that everything was confused, unfocused, disjointed, and helter-skelter. I had allowed the expectations of others and society’s values to influence me and I had lost my focus. Being at the monastery helped me gain a better sense of who I was and who I was meant to be. But then I began to wonder, what if what I had gone through back then, in my early twenties, was what any young adult experienced? What if I had mistaken a religious calling for the chaos of growing up?
When I turned 40, I began to think about life outside of the monastery grounds. I kept thinking that there was a whole world out there waiting to be explored. The restlessness to look around, explore new surroundings, once born, didn’t die. I no longer felt at peace with my brothers. I feared that my restless energy was beginning to filter into the other monks. They looked at me with strange eyes, and I would catch them watching me during meals when they were supposed to focus on their food.
There was more. On the roof each night, the stars above me, I knew that religion had nothing to do with a place or a book. It was about connecting. I started to wonder why I sat in church so many hours a day if I felt purest in my heart and soul when I sat on the roof at night and watched the stars fall, or in my garden during the daylight hours and watched the seeds I’d planted come to life, or even in the kitchen, baking cookies. I began to skip going into the church and instead prayed aloud, chanting each morning as I walked the five-mile loop that circled the monastery. In the afternoons, I prayed as I sat by the pine trees and meditated. Each time I walked into the church, I felt the prayer go out of me. It was only when I was free, not confined, that I was able to communicate with God. I started writing In Your Own Garden one afternoon while I tended to the wild flowers that grew out in the fields beyond the potato patches. I began to feel connected to myself in a way that I had never felt before. Finding myself, connecting with God in this new way came at a price: the monastery was no longer my home. I asked my abbot if I could live in the hermitage down the road for a while—to make sense of my heart, be away from the brothers for a bit, and he allowed me to do that. After eight months of utter silence—reading and writing in my journal, long walks, studying the night sky for a sign that never came— I told the abbot that I needed to join the world, see if there wasn't something that I had missed along my way.
I left the monastery this March feeling like a fugitive. I believed, and I still do, that it was my job to finish my book, to share what I’ve learned with others—to remind others that going to church or temple each week is not what religion is about. That true devotion is a gift you give yourself, a connection with the universe, with God, that empowers you.
In less than six months now, I need to either return to the monastery or ask the abbot for another three months to discern my vows. I cannot formerly apply for a leave from the church until I am away from the monastery for nine months total. I don’t know what is in my future, but I do know that each day since I am away from the monastery, the reasons that I left are changing. Each day I am learning and growing and moving into my life. And seeing that movie today—I took it a sign from God that I was on the right path and that somehow, someway, you are one of my guides.
The cookies I bake each morning are for my mother to take to the nursing home that she volunteers at. It’s the nursing home at which my father died. I know that this is a lot to tell you, Tess. Right now I am in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, watching all the people come and go, searching for something outside that they can only find inside. I will light a candle for you, for me, for every soul who struggles and finds and flees and ultimately vows to live this life with heart and soul. I will light a candle and pray that you may see the light always, and that you may be the light, too. I am sorry that I couldn’t tell you in person, but I speak to you now as if you were me—for after all is said and done, you are me and I am you. Our struggles and joys and finding and freedom are but one and the same. If you will meet me at dawn by the water tomorrow morning, I will be thankful, as I always am, for your presence.
Yours truly,
Neal
Tess held her knees tight to her chest and sighed, deep and loud. A monk. She laughed out loud and scanned her kitchen—nothing at the window, nothing mysterious on the walls. She almost expected to see a camera set-up zoomed in on her; some new reality TV show about a woman finding out her new love interest is a monk. She laughed again, this time her laugh winding into a moan.
A monk.
Tess got up from the spot she sat in by the window, and went downstairs and out onto the backyard deck. The cool May breeze rustled her hair. She looked up into the sky and without fail, the stars sparkled down at her. It made sense to her and yet she felt lost, as if someone had dropped her off in a maze, leaving her to find her way out of it.
She laughed out loud again, and whatever it was scurrying through the tree whose leaves shadowed her, froze. A cat pounced from the tree and landed on the deck with a thud. In the darkness its eyes glowed fire. Little by little, under the starlight, she was able to make out its orange and white stripes. It looked to her like the same mangy cat whose path had crossed hers on her front porch. It danced forward, then back, as if it were walking a tight rope, trying to discern if she were friend or foe. When the wind brushed the trees branches, the cat darted.
A fugitive. That was what Tess had felt like when she walked away from her marriages. It never mattered who had instigated the breakup. In the end it wasn’t about placing blame but about facing up to the fact that sometimes it was best to walk away—to let go of what was and start over. If you never left the old, there would never be room for the new. Neal had told her that.
It came back to Tess now, that old, familiar I cannot go on living the way I am living one more day feeling. Not one more day. To jump off a bridge, to stand in front of traffic was always her first impulse. The easy way out. Anything was easier than living through change. The struggle of trying not to compare the here and now of your life with what it had been the day before, then the week before, then the month back. There had always been a glimmer of hope—no, not a glimmer. Hope wasn’t a glimmer. It was more like a tiny hand breaking the surface of dark, thrashing waves, pointing her forward, coaxing her toward something that she couldn't quite see, making her feel as if there was a chance she could reach the hand in time, pull it up from the water, rescue what lurked below.
When she had first learned she was pregnant, some 32 years back, Tess had decided that she wasn't going to keep her baby. She loved her husband and wanted her time with him alone. She feared what a baby would do to them—create space, distance. Besides, she didn't want to take a break from her career. Not then, after she had worked so hard to get to where she was. For a few weeks during that first month when she realized that she was pregnant, before she was ready to construct a plan about this thing that was growing inside of her, she had dreamt that a hand was reaching out to her, only she was never able to clasp onto the hand, never able to save it from whatever it was trying to break away from.
The silence she had felt inside those first few weeks of her pregnancy was both deafening and claustrophobic at once. She felt trapped in her own body. Then there was the fear that if she were to fall, get in an accident, she would have an explosion inside. No, she didn’t want to have something blooming inside her, crawling and pulling at parts of her she couldn’t get to. Feeling this strange creature's every move made her feel as if someone was examining her and she couldn’t see what they saw, only feel their frustration, their outbursts. The concept of someone knowing her from the inside out, of her knowing someone from the inside—of this creature sharing her mind and heart and her motions as it grew inside her—overwhelmed her. She imagined the creature listening for her breath, trying to fall in line with it. She imagined herself falling in line with its breath.
