Brother Jesse's Lamentations

[dave]

From The Dead


(This scene takes place after the monastery burns to the ground. By this time, Agnes has left and come back and Jesse has become the abbot. Agnes dies in the fire. He is suspected of starting it and he refuses to leave the building when Jesse tries to save him. The scene opens with Jesse at a small motel where the Brothers are putting up while they figure out what to do.)

I sat outside our room at the Mountain Meadow Motel the next morning, enjoying the very early bout of spring weather. The temperature would climb to 60 today, according to the weatherman, who said so this morning on the small black and white TV in one of our rooms, the one we call Gryffindor. I tipped back in the cheap plastic chair against the wall of the building and felt the rear legs begin to bend under my weight. As I leaned forward, a small green station wagon turned in from the main road and proceeded down the drive to the office, located off to my left in the center of the motel. A short man with a mustache rolled his ample body out of the car and began to walk toward the office. When he saw me sitting in my work robe, he changed course and walked over to me.

“I’m looking for Brother Jesse,” he said.

“That’s me,” I said as I stood to shake his hand. He took it … I thought reluctantly … and then asked if we could sit and talk. When we found two chairs that would hold each of us, he began.

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“I’ve been following your blog,” he said. “I’m Roger Kumminski, the fireman who went in after your abbot.”
.
I felt fear well up in my stomach and said nothing.

“The brother was alive, you know, when I found him,” he continued.

I knew that, of course, and I knew Agnes was dead when they got him into the ambulance.

“I heard what you testified at the courthouse,” the fireman said. “When I found him, he talked to me, too.”

A silence ensued. Unable to stand it, I asked, “So what did he say? Could you understand him?”


Unchain My Heart

[dave]

“Yes,” said the fireman, “I could understand him. The first thing he said was to leave him. He wanted to die. I didn’t want to leave him, so I started dragging him out. He fought me. I stopped for a breath and then I tried to put my air pack mask on him again so he could get some air. He knocked the damned thing away from his face and then he said, ‘I’ve got to get to Jesse before he jumps. He’s up there.’ He said, ‘He’s in his chapel. He’s in his chapel.’”

Roger Kumminski had been looking down at the ground in front of us, concentrating as he told his story. Now he turned and looked at me.

“What did he mean?” asked Roger. “Did you jump out a window to escape the fire?”

I didn’t think it would be helpful to explain my past fits of depression.


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“Agnes had been my Abbot,” I said. “It was his job to worry about the welfare of each of us. I used to climb out on the roof and enjoy the view. Agnes always worried I’d fall off. He was confused when he spoke to you. Maybe he ran up to the third floor chapel looking for me during the fire and couldn’t find me.”

Roger gave me a strange look.

“Brother Jesse, I’m a good Catholic,” said Roger. I don’t believe in lying to the cops or the D.A. I told them all I knew. But I can’t testify against a religious brother either. I told the D.A. that and he said he didn’t need me to testify anyway.”

“Look,” I said. “Agnes had cancer. His liver was shot. He wanted to die. I was his abbot, Roger. He asked me to help him to die. I will live every day with that, but I did what I thought was right. I guess eventually the D.A. agreed, because no one sent me to jail.”

Oh What A beautiful morning

[dave]

“You thought you were risking jail? They didn’t let you go because of that,” Roger said as he turned to look at me.

“You did what you thought was right,” he continued. “But me, I’m a fireman. It’s my duty to save people whether they want that or not. I tried to bring the Brother out because that’s what I’m supposed to do.”

“What do you mean, you “tried to bring him out” of the fire.

Roger leaned back in his chair and stared up at the mountains across the road and off in the distance.



“I failed. Failed my duty,” he said very quietly. “I didn’t bring your abbot out of the fire. I left him there just like you did. I was running out of air in my backpack and he kept dropping to the floor like dead weight and pleading with me to let him go.”

“The fire was getting worse,” he said. “I could hear the structure creak and the smoke and was starting to blow around like a whirlwind. I knew we didn’t have much time left.”

Suddenly, I felt sorry for this poor man who had no reason other than what he believed to be his failure to explain why he had let Agnes die.

Roger was looking at the ground again and he spoke in hushed tones, almost reverently.

“I got thinking about my wife and kids and …. you know, I just wanted to take them all out for a pizza when I got home. That’s all I could think about. Just a goddamned pizza! And then I ran.”

In my mind I was there with Roger, running for the exit. Out into the snow, running after the life I wanted so badly to hold on to. To hug those I loved, to live life, to eat a pizza.”

“But Agnes got out,” I said. “I saw him brought to the ambulance on a stretcher.

“He jumped from the roof,” said Roger.

“What?” I almost shouted.

“I don’t know how he got up there,” said Roger, “but somehow after I left he got out on the roof and jumped. That’s why we could hear his scream. He was outside on the roof.”

My abbot, the man I had felt so sorry for after his death, had either been forced off the roof by the flames or decided to embrace eternity as I had often considered. If the latter, Agnes had stolen my final act of self-glorification. For only a person who truly cannot get over himself ends his own life.


The Call

[dave]

end of The Roof.


2. St. Lucy The Voluptuous is next.


Just to recap, we're excerpting five themes from Monk In The Cellar:

1. The Roof

2. The Night Chapel and St. Lucy

3. Immy, Jesse's childhood girlfriend

4. Sally, woman he met in the woods, who he believes to be his guardian angel, and who becomes his real estate broker. I know ... it's confusing.

5. Fathers


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[dave]

Shiver Me Timbers

[dave]

The Story of St. Lucy The Voluptuous


There are stories of old that nightly shenanigans went on within the walls of the old monasteries of Europe. Boys and girls together do what boys and girls do, of course. A vow of chastity made fervently in adolescence when a youngster enters the religious life can become mere words to some. From today's vantage point, we look back on a time when sex was not held in such a rarified compartment of life. It happened all the time, so to speak, as well as early in life for most young people in peasant societies. True, a young woman could get pregnant during sex, but almost every young woman got pregnant anyway. Statistics for the middle ages ... such as there are ... show that most brides were quite young and pregnant when they showed up on the porch of the church for the priest's blessing. Interestingly, before 1200 A.D., that's all a couple got. There was no "sacrament," no marriage tribunal, no divorce or annulment. A marriage was a personal contract that was witnessed by the community and of no interest to the Church at that time. In most countries, priests were married by the same process.

Come forward almost up to modern times, through the Circus Fun House of Victorianism, and you won't find much carousing at most monasteries. The men have taken vows at a later age and they are serious about them. Celibacy, though difficult, is seen as a means to freeing the spirit.

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The real St. Lucy is the patron of eyes. But in this story, she is no more than paint on glass, the product of a drunken Bulgarian's imagination. And to Jesse she is a kind of temple whore, who walks around in his mind and keeps him wondering if a life without companionship with the opposite sex was the right decision for his life.

After all, boys will be boys, and even if they're good at suppressing their basic desires, their subconscious seldom gets the news.


Feargal Sharkey - I've Got News For You

[dave]

The Night Chapel

(By this time in the story, the Abbot Agnes, only a year before arrived from Ireland, has left Our Lady's at West Saugerties under questionable circumstances. He will surprise everyone and come back, but in the meantime Jesse has been elected the new Abbot.)

I've been around this monastery for thirty years and I try to forget why the little room upstairs is called the Night Chapel. I happened to stumble into the small space years ago during my first month at Our Lady's and thought the room would make a perfect chapel with the addition of a stained glass window. We eventually installed one from Bulgaria. You barely notice the beautiful window from the outside in the circular driveway, because there is no illumination from within shining out through the glass. The window appears darkened and the colors are completely muted. But when seen from inside the little chapel in the daytime, the window is a gorgeous palette of rich colors surrounding St. Lucy, who according to the legend inscribed on the bottom of the window, is the patron saint of eyes.

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As one sits facing the tiny chapel's altar, light from the stained glass streams in from the side and bathes the single pew in a bouquet of pinks and golds and pale blues. Saint Lucy 's likeness was painted on the glass in a pleasant manner. By that I mean the artist did not render her druid-like with a drawn face and emaciated features. Instead the saint is portrayed as young and pretty in a bare shouldered pose with her arms thrown back behind her head. Before the Monks stopped coming to the chapel, they were often found there in the afternoon sitting in the pew sideways, staring at St. Lucy instead of focusing their attention forward at the altar and crucifix.

Wonderful Tonight

[dave]

Truth

(Sitting in the Night Chapel, Jesse is visited by Julio, the safe-house guest. Julio has been eating the food delivered by the United States Government. So too for a time have Jesse and some of the other Brothers.)

I had no idea what Alfred's plans were for Julio's interviews. I asked the United State Government Employee to let me know when he took Julio off the monastic schedule so that I didn't wonder where the man was and go searching for him. I really did not want Julio wandering around on his own. I was therefore surprised when our “guest” stepped into the Night Chapel one morning when I expected him to be with the Brothers in The Pit or the Scriptorium.

“Are you lost, Julio?” I said with a smile.

“I wanted to talk to you about something,” he said. “I appreciate the nice food you serve me, but most of the guys are eating the beans and rice and I feel sort of funny about that.”

“You shouldn’t,” I replied. “They are eating what they want … what they’re used to … and so should you.”

I knew how he felt. I had gone back to rice and beans and I’m not sure if the reason was simply because that’s what I was used to or if I felt a bit like Julio.

“Could I eat just the beans and rice if I wanted?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, “if you think you can get used to it.”

“Why is she wearing glasses?” he asked.

“Who?” I replied. I followed his gaze and saw he was looking at the stained glass window.

“The angel,” he said. “She’s wearing glasses.”

“That’s St. Lucy,” I replied, “the patron saint of eyes. She’s been known to help people to see better.”

“She’s gorgeous!” he said, “but aren’t the saints all old people?”

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“You mean from centuries ago?” I said. “Not all, but I think St. Lucy is from around 300 A.D., almost two thousand years ago.”

“Yeah, so how would she have glasses to wear two thousand years ago?”

“Well, it’s a painting on glass,” I said “No one knows if St. Lucy was pretty or ever got old or anything else about her, so the artist was free to see his own truth in the legend of the woman.”

“But he put glasses on somebody from back when there were dinosaurs,” said Julio, his biology askew. “You’d think an artsy guy would know there wasn’t no glasses that far back.”

“Literally, that’s true,” I said, thinking this might be a good time to give our guest a lesson in the evanescent. “But sometimes the artist wants to say something subtly, so he includes a symbol in the painting.

“Her glasses are a symbol?” Julio asked. “Of what?”.

“Maybe of her acuity in seeing the truth of things most of us would miss,” I said, stretching a little. “Because sometimes the truth is invisible and we don’t see it.”

“And sometimes,” he said, “we just see what we want to see.”


True Colors



Oh, what the heck. To me this is classic Lauper and in my mind her best.


Stay

[dave]

Julio left the chapel and I remained with the feeling I'd been taught a lesson. Well, I had indeed been kidding him a little. My point was honest, but I didn't tell Julio that I painted the glasses on St. Lucy sometime in the '80's.

When my mother died and left me a small amount of money, the estate lawyer sent a check which naturally fell into the hands of the abbot. Times were good then and instead of his grabbing it for the general welfare of the monks, Sparky (the Abbot before Agnes) told me I could use it as I liked, but of course not in conflict with my vow of poverty.



I was aware the “Night Chapel” had been completely unused for so many years and it seemed such a waste of space. Under the arched attic roof, the small room could with the right treatment be cathedral-like, a quiet place for meditation high up in the Chapter House. Before plumbing, the “Night Chapel” was where you went to relieve yourself in the middle of the night. The bare room contained nothing but chamber pots set out on the floor under a plain small window used for ventilation. In the morning the full vessels were lowered by rope to the front porch for emptying, and I always wondered if that had started the rot of the porch's beams. When toilets were installed throughout the monastery in 1923, the Night Chapel was never used again. Possibly because of its history, no plans to convert the room to other uses were ever offered.

“Why not turn it into a real Night Chapel?” I said to Sparky, who had replaced Lord Vader (Brother Jean D'Arc). “It'll be small and for anyone's use at night. They can just walk up from the second floor.”


“Well, they can just walk down to the first floor to the real chapel,” he said. “They have to do that for matins and lauds anyway.”

“I think there's enough money from my mother to buy a pew and a stained glass window.” I said. “I have some carpentry skills and I'll do the work myself.”

“If you want to, Jesse, go ahead,” he said without much enthusiasm. “But why St. Lucy?”

“Because she's on sale,” I said, with perfect monkish logic. Half price, for no apparent reason, although I was not completely truthful.

St. Lucy's outfit … her bustier gown as Harpo calls it … didn't appear all that revealing in the catalog, but the photo was only representative of work done by the painter each time a window was ordered from Bulgaria. The reportedly famed Bozhidar Boyko of a town near Sofia named Bozhurishte may have had a bit more rakia with his lunch on the day he executed our window.

Sparky said it should be easy for anyone to paint the dress higher on the saint's chest but I should have gotten his prior approval on the stained glass, since the window was a permanent addition to “his” monastery.

“Your monastery?” I said, testosterone rising.

“Well, certainly more mine as the Abbot than yours as the local monk pornographer!” he said.

“I think if everyone using the chapel had concentrated on their meditation,” I said, “no one would have noticed her attire.”

“You do, huh?” said Sparky. “A dance hall girl flying around on the wall while you're praying? Look, Jesse, you did a great job on the room and it will prove useful, I'm sure. Just put some more paint on the lady, OK?”

“Sure,” I said. “I'll do that.

So I painted glasses on her.

Out of Control

[dave]

Cast Your Fate

I sat looking at St. Lucy and thinking about the day I painted the eyeglasses, remembering the feeling of being such a great smartass. And the truth is that I lied to my abbot. St. Lucy was not on sale. I have a reason for rationalizing to myself that it wasn’t actually a lie. But I’m afraid to write it down here and find it’s pretty thin.

Sparky knew exactly how to handle me. He said nothing. Even a week later, by which time he surely could have dropped by the chapel to check St. Lucy's neckline, Sparky had said nothing. He never did. Meanwhile I felt dumber and dumber. But I never pulled her dress higher with a paintbrush, and I won't until he comes back from the dead and tells me to. I wish he would. I miss him.

“I hate to disturb your meditation, my dear Abbot,” drawled Harpo, “but I have need of your sagacity.”

“Good Morning, Harpo,” I said, “what's up?”

“I'm considering changing my vote for the acceptance of Postulant Julio into our exclusive club,” he said.

“You'd still be out-voted,” I said, sensing that an uncomfortable conversation was about to take place.

“Still,” he said, “I could then say to my Brothers that I was now officially against what you have unfortunately named The Visiting Scholar Program.”

“And sew seeds of discontent?” I said. “What would that accomplish? And why have you changed your mind?”

“Many reasons have occurred to me since the night we voted … in a rushed manner ... but I understand we had to move quickly to accept Alfred's offer. Perhaps what bothers me the most is that it has violated our rule of poverty.”

“But we're not personally getting anything out of this. We're not even eating the good stuff from the pantry. We're still on rice and beans.”

“As you know, my esteemed Abbot … and that's not sarcasm … the vow of poverty is less about cash holdings than it is about trusting in the Lord to provide for all our needs.”

“And since he works in strange ways,” I said, “why not through the United States government?”



“Government spooks, I believed they're called,” said Harpo. “Let me ask you something, Abbot. Would your father have been proud of your vocation to our religious order of Brothers?”

“Yes, he would have,” I answered, knowing where Harpo was probably going.

“And would he be proud of your liaison with an intelligence service?” Harpo continued.

“Probably not,” I answered honestly.

“You did what you thought best to save the monastery,” said Harpo. “I am not here to accuse you of wrongdoing. My purpose is to save you from yourself, my Brother. You are more important than this place.”

“Each of us is,” I said.

“And so it was my intent to remind you of that. Let us give God a chance, Jesse. I don't know if he has a thousand dollars per week to spend like the United States Government, but I am sure he can figure out the best way to save us.”


Sometimes we walk right up to a decision we're trying to make and don't recognize it until it has traveled some distance down the path with us. We should stay at Our Lady’s and trust that God would provide for us. Harpo was right. That’s what our vow of poverty was all about.

What we now had, however tentative, could indeed be what God was providing. Or it might not. Who knows? Only a certified canonized saint, I suppose, who talks regularly with Our Creator, would know for sure. The rest of us struggle blindly through life as it hits us.

I'm a contemplative, meaning I believe in contemplative prayer where I simply shut up and listen, a simple process. I use words in God's presence only when I'm in trouble, when I'm acting human.

Road and the Sky

[dave]

High Voltage

I hope you didn’t think that during college I alternated between playing in a rock and roll band and studying my bible. I lost my intense religiosity halfway through high school and never regained it. To this day I am not religious, nor are my brothers here at Our Lady of West Saugerties. Neither are we necessarily zealots for any given set of finely constructed beliefs. (Those are the folks we call “Jesuits.”) We are simply men who have been chosen by a God with a sense of humor to lead a life of prayer and contemplation. And in doing so we discover our relationship with him … or her, if you want. Many people have been given their beliefs. Mine were a gift with strings attached. I gave them back years ago and now I have to work hard to discover my own faith. It’s a job. That’s why I call it a vocation.



A true vocation is seldom brought about by proper schooling or cultural immersion or uncles who were priests and aunts who are nuns. A real vocation is like your psyche sticking its hand in an empty light bulb socket and getting the shock of its life. It’s like you were standing in the checkout line at your local supermarket and were suddenly struck by a stupendous insight, followed by an insanely terrific desire to go home and pack your bag and move to a monastery to spend your days in prayer, contemplation and manual labor. The process isn’t that simple, of course, but the psychic change is exactly that simple. It is a calling to live a different life and it comes from a God who has bought your soul and all your dance tickets. He will run the rest of your life for you, if you let him. It’s his plan from now on, not yours. As Bouncer (Brother Bilhild of Thuringia) says of his vocation, “I sure as hell didn’t come up with this idea.”

Dangerous

[dave]

Orders

When I decided to consider myself retired, Sparky and I had an discussion.

“Monks don’t retire,” he said. “Do you want some time off to hitchhike to Alaska?” he joked.



“Sparky, I just don’t have the heart, the eyes or the memory to do the work,” “I’ll have a verse in my head and turn to verify it in another manuscript and by the time I open that book I’ve forgotten what the hell verse I was comparing.”

We had been sitting at a table after our breakfast of rice and beans. The other Brothers had left for their work. In the agony of my defeat at the hands of the aging process, I had risen from the table and begun to pace the floor.

“Sit down here, Jesse,” said Sparky. “You’re upset and you’re in no condition to tough anything out. Take some time off. Just hang around, do some cleaning. When you feel better we’ll discuss what you might do in the future.”

Then he leaned closer to me and said, “But hear me. I do NOT want you in that night chapel!”

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s not good for you,” he said.

“But what do you …”

“Discussion over,” he said. “You have your advice from your Abbot.” And with that he got up and left the breakfast room.

And so I decided to spend my days in the cellar. Harpo seemed pleased. He had not been able to climb all the way to the attic, but he could now get down one flight of stairs to see me in the cellar, except for the day he tumbled down them. There seemed no need of my old printing skills at the time, so I would think up humorous book marks, print them up and deliver a hundred or so to public libraries on my trips to the plumbing section of various hardware stores in Saugerties and Woodstock. I made sure to stop at the library in Catskill or Palenville. I must have been an odd teenager, because I often went to the library for girl watching..

Learning To Fly

[dave]

Translation

I just had to get away from everyone this morning and so I came back down here to my old haunt in the cellar. In an idle manner, I looked around the Internet. It occurred to me that I hadn’t thought lately of Bulgarian artist Bozhidar Boyko, the painter who executed St. Lucy on stained glass. Googling him up, I discovered Bozhidar is evidently no longer in the small town of Bozhurishte near Sofia, but according to a local news article that I was able to translate using



Babelfish, he has left town. It's always dangerous to trust language translations from Babelfish, of course. I once heard about the terrible autobahn accident that a well known Brother in Germany survived and I sent him a note. I cranked the phrase "wishing you a speedy recovery" into Babelfish and emailed the results in German off to Stuttgart. Later his assistant told me that in vernacular German it actually said "I demand you quickly re-assemble yourself."

Anyway, after running the Bozhurishte Daily Bugle news article through Babelfish, I’m aware Bozhidar has left town to either buy a serpent or to marry his sister.

Remember ... you heard it here first!

The Bulgarian National Anthem with English subtitles.

[dave]

Raiser says Agnes is worried about money again. Waste of time, I’d say. Our Lady of West Saugerties will fall down around our ears some day or burn down or we’ll be evicted for some reason that hasn't occurred to us. Whatever happens, it is out of our hands. We'll just survive, somehow. I suppose the eleven of us could head down to the malls and become superannuated stock boys at Best Buy or greeters at Sam’s … get jobs and become solid citizens.



But we are not solid citizens. We are revolutionaries. We are monks whose job is contemplative prayer and study. No, it doesn’t make sense to most people. It doesn’t have to. I liked almost everything the Trappist Thomas Merton wrote about contemplative monks, except for his statement that our purpose is to pray for the world. Bullshit, Thomas! You were a little too left-brained. Not even we understand our purpose. We do it because we somehow know it is the right thing for us to do. The world can follow its logic. We’ll follow our …. well, I guess I’d say our hearts. Yes, the word I want is hearts.

As I age, I worry less about my soul. I think it will do what it is meant to do. I am more afraid for my heart, that part of me that feels someone's agony other than my own, the only part of me that stands a chance of leaving this world in better condition than when it got here.

Hip to be Square

[dave]

My new office is pleasant. With the little student desk now moved from Sparky’s old office to the Night Chapel, there is a palpable sense of power as I sit in the colorful light of St. Lucy’s window. I am anything but powerful, but I like the feel of it anyway. The pew, bought second hand from the new owner of a deserted Methodist church, together with the splash of greens and pinks and blues from St. Lucy’s window yields the aura of a cathedral in what is really the old overnight shithouse.

I have finally admitted to myself that I lied to Sparky years ago when I told him St. Lucy’s window was on sale. It was indeed so expensive that when I found it in the catalog and knew I would buy it I had to make considerable deletions to my original construction plan and budget. St. Lucy’s window is why there is only one pew and the altar is home made. No, no, it wasn’t her neck line that most attracted me. It was the colors … the pinks and blues and greens of a most glorious sunset. The colors that have always meant safety to me.

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Yes, I know where that comes from. You’re talking to a Jungian here. St. Lucy in her presence on glass takes the harsh daylight of reality and filters it into the gorgeous colors shed on my space. Yes, my space, Goddammit. I built it. With my mother’s money. It’s true I am a monk and own nothing. But I can possess this wonderful space, a room in the attic where no one ever comes. They used to, right after I built it, but not any more. It’s far from everywhere else in the monastery. Besides, you can still smell the offal after all these years. It’s in the wood. And everyone in the house knows this is my space. Or was until Sparky told me to stay away from here for my own good. That’s why I wound up in the cellar, you see. But now I’m the Abbot. I go where I want.

Bad Reputation