Eden

Isaiah had submitted his application to Butler College, and what with doing it at the ass end of the year, and then all the little documents lost, letters needed, it had been several days into the New Year before Isaiah had received an acceptance letter. It was a cold grey time, and something happened to him when the letter arrived. He read it with a feeling of dread, like lead sinking in him. He read it thinking that his life had not been slow at all, but very fast, really, and that it was going someplace faster still with him in the back caboose, confused. He was back in his mother’s house after the high of being at Monserrat, being with Jason, being a godfather, being the head of the literary society and assistant head of the drama club, and the liaison for Monserrat to Our Lady of the Snows and Citeaux. He was tired, and despite what his mother said, he chose to roll up into a ball and go to sleep.

For a bear, when she comes to the end of things at the cold part of the year, she eats, rolls up, and goes to sleep. This is natural. It is called hibernation. When humans follow nature, pestered by everyone around them who disapproves, pestered by the world that never rests, and doesn’t have patience for people who want to stop and make new decisions, it is called depression.

And it was depressing.

In this free fall depression, with the constant worrying and nagging of the house—go back to school, go to work—even though he’d only been out of school twelve days when this started, he crawled and cried and wondered, and tried to get to something.

He walked a lot. This was not so much for health as to get away from his family. He tried to walk his way out of his troubles, out of this mood, and out of the conviction that for now, he could do nothing.

Later on, he would say, or he would write, that when God spoke it was not audibly, at least not for him. It was by a strong, strong un-voiced command, the certainty that a path could not be taken, or at least, not taken yet. And so it was here. He just knew that he couldn’t go to Butler.

One day he found himself walking and walking until he arrived at Monserrat. How strange it looked now that it wasn’t his. And to think it had only been a few days. He didn’t want to be one of those who always came back to the scene of the crime.

He went to the library. He went to Brother Romuald.

“You have a vocation,” said Brother Romuald.

“A voc.…”

“You... It doesn’t happen to everyone. God has told you to wait for what he has to say to you.”

“Yes!” Isaiah said, snapping his finger. “That’s it. That’s exactly it. But... I can’t get a quiet place. My family...” Isaiah waved his hands in irritation, “I can’t get away from them. I can’t get that quiet place.”

Romuald was quiet for a moment, and then he clasped his hands and said, “If you don’t mind a few hours of labor a day, I do know a place that specializes in quiet where no one would mind letting you wait for God.”

Isaiah looked at Romuald, and then Romuald looked out of the window, and Isaiah followed his pointing finger.

“The monastery?”

Romuald only nodded.

The bells rang at three every morning, deep, sonorous, tolling, and the ghosts of footsteps were heard. When the footsteps began to die down, Isaiah slipped into house shoes, wrapped his housecoat about him, and then headed down the large old halls to a great door and through that great door arrived in a gallery overlooking the long stone nave of the church. It was like traveling in the belly of something into the very depths of the earth, the sea, the universe, everything. Getting to the bottom of it all.

The monks’ voices in their choir lofts seemed to rise up from beneath the bottom of everything.

Sing a new song to the Lord

for he has worked wonderous deeds

his right hand and his holy arm

have wrought salvation

sing a new song to the Lord....

Matins, the office past the middle of the night. Then Lauds at sunrise, or what would be sunrise come spring. And then Terce, Sext at noon. Vespers toward the end of the day, right before dinner, Compline to round it out and greet the night. And then the whole of the house enveloped by the Great Silence, a large mouth that swallowed them and shut them in from all things. This was the life of the monastery, and less than two months after graduation, it became Isaiah Frey’s too.

Church was always something Isaiah had gone to, and he always read the Bible. From the moment he had been taught there was a God, he couldn’t understand not being obsessed with him. That was the best way to put it. He had completed reading the Bible by the time he was thirteen, and though he read it everyday, and when he learned about the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, prayed that as well, in the back of his mind he hoped there was a little more. Not that the Bible was a bad book, only... Well, he didn’t know how to say it. It seemed the world was so large, and there was so much out there, surely there couldn’t be just one way to look at it, one way that, by the time he had taken his first boyfriend, he had already gone beyond.

Junior year there had been a lecture on Hinduism, and he heard the words of theBhagavad Gita spoken by Ben Kingsley behind a great image of Krishna projected in the auditorium. Looking up at the Lord Krishna, he had been undone. He wanted to weep almost. Blue and gold blue, stepping out of the sun with that look of power on his unearthly face. Isaiah had never been moved by a picture of Jesus which, to his Protestant side, made sense because it was only a picture. But now he understood what he heard about Hinduism, about how gazing at the statue was an act of devotion that brought you through to the god, and through that god to God. The hairs rose on his neck and on the backs of his hands as the words of the Gita continued, and he unlearned in a flash what he had been taught: how Catholicism, boring as it was, was the ultimate truth and everything else was delusion, however well intentioned it might have been. Or it was almost true, but not quite true. But no.… Everything was real. Every single thing. This Krishna he had only heard of in passing was God. How many faces did God have? It was a dizzying revelation. He remembered a song he had heard once. An old slave song.

If you think you got a ‘ligion

and you wanna keep it to ya,

keep it to ya’ self.

He’d heard it at a school presentation, and the woman had explained that of course, ligion was religion, and that in slave times, as she had said, when people first came from Africa, any personal religion, anything that brought them to God was kept secret from the mainstream religion they had been baptized into or converted to. She hadn’t explained the Byzantine systems of Santeria, Candomble and Voodoun. He’d learned about that later. At the time, however, when she had talked about that, he still hadn’t really understood what she’d meant.

In the monastery he began to, though. He had thought, somewhere in the back of his mind, not only would he get some peace, but that Jesus would finally speak, that the God he had been taught about who, he hated to admit, he could not always feel close to, would arrive at last. Every Easter and Christmas was like this. God was very very real to him, but there was as yet no way to link him to God. He remembered that the word religion came from ligio, it was the ligament that connected you to the divine, to all things.

All of these things went through his mind because he had expected, in the monastery to feel those connections to what he’d been raised with. Yet here, he began to make a ‘ligion, or ‘ligion came to him.

The Silence herself was powerful and very real, and it was a great dark woman. She had many names, and he could talk to her and knew she was God. She was the Lady of the Night, deep and dark, the real Mother of God. At first he was timid about addressing her this way, going into this heresy, as timid as he’d been when he decided he was gay and went to Jason. But he was just as free too. He had entered into something else, into a new mythology. And in the morning, The Lord of the Sky, the burning Sun rose up. These powers were so real to him he snuck away to read myths and legends to learn that he had not invented them, that other people knew them. They came to him more real than saints. More real than Jesus. God made sense, seen everywhere in a host of gods and goddesses. For the first time God spoke, not in a trinity, but in new faces every day. His monk’s cell was decorated in a way that might have made the abbot go apoplectic. Tea lights before Krishna and the Asvins, incense in front of Shiva, Demeter and Persephone. In the morning he prayed the psalms and then worked in the kitchen, cleaned the guesthouse. Noon prayer was after this, and then in the afternoon the giving himself up to worship, reading the Qu’ran and the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. Rumi. The world was not godless. God was everywhere. Even at Mass. So he didn’t stop. It just seemed to make more sense. He was unquestionably, undeniably glad.

One night, before autumn of the next year, when Isaiah was thinking that he should probably consider graduate school, but it was not seriously on his mind—this life was seriously on his mind—Romuald came to him looking sad, and Isaiah thought that he was going to say, “It’s time to leave. The holiday’s over.”

But instead he said, “The monastery is being sold.”

“What?”

“Abbot Prynne’s been trying to save us, but it’s not that many monks left, and he called a meeting today and said that there was no need for us to run such an expensive place for so few. He’s also been talking about us going out into the world. Like we’re Franciscans!” Romuald added scornfully.

Well, Isaiah would have to leave, but at least it wasn’t a punishment. This gave him the freedom to ask what he could do to help, to genuinely care.

“Nothing yet. It’s not official, but Prynne is right. This place is a castle. One of the brothers suggested just building a smaller house on the monastery lands.”

“What would happen with this place?”

Romuald shrugged.

“My whole life I have been obedient. That was one of the vows I took. Someone was always there to tell me what came next. Now... I don’t know what comes next. I don’t even have the imagination to figure it out.”

While Isaiah was puzzling all of this out and wondering what would become of him he received news of a visitor. He nodded and came to the guesthouse.

“Melanie!”

She was in a sundress and sunshades, tanned till she was almost as dark as Isaiah. She took off the giant yellow sun hat and kissed him. Then she hitched her thumb behind her and said, “Whaddo you think of him?”

“Who? That guy with the potbelly?”

“It’s a little potbelly,” Melanie reprimanded, scowling.

“He’s alright.” Isaiah shrugged. “Why?”

“Because he’s my husband.”

“It was just one of those things,” Melanie explained in the guest commissary while her husband was off getting lunch.

Privately Isaiah thought that choosing Fig Newtons when you usually had chocolate chip cookies with your lunch was just one of those things. This was flat out weird.

“I was out in Rhode Island with my aunt. And I decided I need a change.”

“So you got married?”

“Well, hold on. Harvey’s not so bad. Really he isn’t. And… Look around. You see everyone our age getting married, having babies, turning into grown ups. And you can’t tell me they’re all madly in love with each other! So I decided what I needed was a change. I needed to get some of that married life too. And Harvey... He seems like good marrying material. So he proposed and I said—” she stopped to wave at him as he was coming with their food tray—“What the hell!”

“What the hell?” Isaiah mouthed incredulously.

“Exactly,” said Melanie with enthusiasm.

There was nothing else Isaiah could say on that score, so he shifted the conversation to himself.

“How did you find me?”

“Were you trying to hide?”

“No,” Isaiah said. “But I realized I hadn’t left any address, and I wasn’t really able to call.”

“Well, yeah, that whole not leaving an address thing was kind of shitty. But I called and your mom told me. So I came to tell you I’m back in town. Are you gonna be a monk or something?”

“No,” Isaiah said. “And I’m leaving here in a few days. I needed to clear my head for a while.”

“So this is like rehab,” said Melanie.

Isaiah looked around at the guesthouse eating room, a few Cistercians coming in and out in their white robes and said, dubiously, “Yeah. Just like it.”

Isaiah had come to hear whatever he was supposed to be told, but now, as fall approached, what he had learned was how to pray. Though he could pray he could not write. And now he knew that he had to leave. The monastery had taught him everything it could, and staying a moment longer was just hiding. It was time to get up and go, but the only place he could go was back to his family’s home.

He came back in November. It snowed early that year and his mother made snide references to having normal children and not being able to support a son who did not want to work. She was right of course. He didn’t want to work. At Christmas he went to work for the department story in dress shoes and slacks and a white shirt, and his mother remarked that someone with a degree could do something else. But life was very dull for him. As Christmas approached, and he realized he had been out of college for a year, fulfilling none of the promise in a college graduate, none of his wonderful future forecast for him back at Monserrat, the only comfort was meditation, the putting away of pain in the silence of his room, and letting the Gods come to visit. They healed through the jazz music on the radio and the self medication of sleep that made days shorter and filled nights with dreams.