The Oblate's Confession (37 page)

It has been said that failure is a condition of success, that without failure we would not know where failure ends, success begins. It has also been said that God uses failure, that it is a kind of communion, that He prefers to see us beaten, worn down, weary, dejected, for it brings us that much closer to Him, His own experience of life. But I don’t know. Such a view of things...well, it seems to me there could be problems with such a view of things. Still I must admit I failed many times when I attempted this sort of prayer, have failed many times. I sat by the river and failed. I knelt in church and failed. I lay in my bed and failed. And then, one day, like a gift, Brother Victricius sent me home early.

Being sent home early was not a common thing. I can remember it happening on only one other occasion, and that was the day
Victricius died. Normally, even if there had been nothing for me to do, I would have been expected to wait on the furnace master, follow him around as he performed his various chores, be ready to help him should he need me. And yet, for some reason I can no longer remember, on that day he sent me home early. Indeed it must have been very early because I can remember thinking, when I stopped and sat down, that there were absolutely no demands upon me, that, for once, I had no place to be soon, no office to sing, no lessons to be learned. It was as if, in the middle of the week, I had been sent to the hermit.

I do remember the place I stopped. There was nothing particularly remarkable about it. It was a place like any other along that path, the ground high at my back, falling away before me. I sat on the edge of the path and looked down at the river. The water is swift there but no longer as fast and loud as it is up by the furnace. Large flat slabs of rock occupy the far bank. Where the rocks enter the water, they are washed by the current and their reddish color becomes dark, almost purple. The hill people believe them the broken shoulder blades of a dead giant. Between the breaks in the rocks, sycamores have grown and, in some places, spread their bellies out over the surrounding stone. At that time of year there would have been dead leaves plastered to the rocks like yellow handprints.

My guess is that it was the interval after None, certainly a long interval, either None or Terce, for, as I have said, there was no feeling of urgency, hurry to the day. Indeed, the idea of the interval, a significant block of time stretching out before me without plan or requirement is an important part of the memory. Interestingly, I also remember feeling a certain sense of futility as I began the exercise, the idea that, having failed so many times, it really didn’t matter if I failed again, now, here, this time. I sat down, closed my eyes, the smells of autumn and the river filling my nostrils, and almost immediately a blessed sort of darkness enveloped me, doused my mind. This of course was exactly what you might expect the hermit’s emptiness to look like, feel like, but I wasn’t fooled. It was always like this when you first began, first
closed your eyes, and, sure enough, once I recognized this darkness for the false dawn it was, the recognition itself became my first distraction.

I took a big breath, eyes still resolutely closed, and imagined the distraction, the idea of a false dawn, bobbing up against the rocks on the opposite shore, catching once, then floating off downstream. I sat, waited, not pressing it, not hurrying, just empty, the river, my river, empty before me. It is always at this point, after the first distraction has penetrated your consciousness, that, as if it had pierced some heretofore impenetrable wall, a great flotilla of distractions breaks through, sails down your river—the soup we had at last night’s collation, the bread, Father Prior’s beard, the gray in it, why he wouldn’t let me ride in the wagon, the new ox, her eyes, and did they see as we do, oxen, do their great and luminous eyes see more than ours, better than ours, being as large and luminous as they are? Each of these I let float by me, willing my mind to ignore them, think no more of them than I would a log or stick, some piece of flotsam floating by, and,
eventually, as if my mind itself had grown tired of such foolishness, a sort of peace settled over me, a sort of absence. It is comforting, not thinking, as if thinking itself were an exercise which, when relinquished, leaves a person as tired and enervated as if he had been weeding or hoeing or doing something hard. And so, not thinking, empty of thoughts, I settled into a sort of rest, the murmur of water before me, water flowing from left to right, left to right as God’s waters flowed, left to right through me, through me and over the lip of our terrace, spilling down over the terrace, across the fields and into the village, into Eanflæd, the thought of this comforting, settling, lulling as sunshine lulls, my head inching forward, eyes closed, relaxed, Eanflæd now visible before me, Eanflæd as she would someday be, hair up, cheeks exposed, sweet, temperate, kneeling before the altar, fresh, virginal, maybe myself behind her, praying, the two of us belonging to the same monastery now, our monastery, Redestone, the whole thing coming together naturally like this, perfectly, God having created man and woman so that, naturally enough, in the great scheme of
things, they would come together like this, it being God’s plan, Eanflæd there, kneeling, I behind her.

I sat up as if kicked, looked around. There was nothing, no one, the flags stretching off up-river and down, mossy, silent, empty. I was horrified and at the same time elated. It was always like this when it happened, the mix of feelings, the confusion, the sense of having come very close to something very wicked. You felt at once both happy to have escaped and mortified at having allowed yourself to get so close. That such things could coexist was what was most frightening, that the world’s extremes survived in such proximity, prayer and profanity, good and evil, heaven and hell. That it was so easy to slip from one to the other, that prayer apparently left you open to this, opened you up, let Whatever in. The hermit didn’t talk much about it but Waldhere did. When he had found out about the sort of prayer Father was teaching me, he had said that I was playing with fire, that when you closed your eyes and emptied your mind like that, lowered all your defenses, anything could get in. I had never seen Waldhere so exercised. Of course by then he had begun his studies for the priesthood and so I knew he knew more than I about such things, but I also knew that a part of it might be envy, that Waldhere envied me the hermit, envied my relationship with him, the trips I got to make each week to the mountain. Still I listened to him when it came to the devil. I listened because, though Waldhere couldn’t know it, he was describing something I had already experienced. Sometimes, even when I wasn’t trying to pray, when I was just kneeling quietly in church, I would find myself thinking thoughts utterly alien to my own, images of Eanflæd and myself engaged in activities which I had never imagined, could not have imagined, activities which, clearly, must be coming from somewhere, Something, else.

I crossed myself, looked out at the stones the hill people believe belonged to a giant and said, “In Christ’s name I abjure you, Satan. Depart and be gone.” It made me feel better. Waldhere had suggested the formulation and I liked it, especially the word “abjure.” Then, because it seemed to flow naturally from one to the other, I added a bit of the prayer the hermit had taught me, “Christ
with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise, Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, Christ in the eye that sees me, Christ in the ear that hears me.” Something about the rhythm of the words as I said them, the repetition of the Name, relaxed me, comforted me. I remembered something the hermit had said when he was talking about God’s love, that it was around us always, here, there, everywhere, and again I closed my eyes and relaxed in that image, not really caring anymore whether I succeeded or not, the interval stretching out before me like summer, endless, eternal, nothing to do, no place to be, nothing to worry about, sitting, eyes closed, the river flowing past, my thoughts, my cares, flowing past, one by one, slowly, and, slowly, blessedly, I sunk into silence.

When next I opened my eyes the far bank looked different, flat, a picture of itself rather than the reality. I blinked, opened my eyes,
blinked again. Sound returned, the drone of the river, the whisper of air; trees resumed their proper dimensions, moved again in the breeze. Had it all stopped? While I was gone, absent, whatever, had everything stopped, the water frozen in place, the trees, sound, clouds, been arrested in time? I did not know. The sun seemed to stand in roughly the same position, and yet you could have told me an entire interval had passed and I would have believed you, an entire day and I would have been forced to believe you. I had no idea how much time had passed. I hadn’t been here. Or, rather, I’d been here but the here I had occupied was different from the here before me—a different here, a better here, the real here. I shook my head, looked around, laughed out loud, the laugh itself sounding different now, a bell of an entirely different character. I was happy. It had happened, I could tell, and I was very happy.

That was the winter of the famous storm when I was trapped by a great snowfall at the furnace and had to spend two nights alone with Brother Victricius. Victricius was funny about weather. For such a vigorous man, he was surprisingly susceptible to damp. I can still see him standing in the back of choir, sneezing and sniffling, one hand held out as if to say,
A moment, a moment please and this will pass.
Yet, despite his weakness, he behaved like someone inured to the elements. If it rained, the furnace master worked on. If it poured, still he worked on. I remember one time he caught a chill so bad he had to lean on me to get back to the monastery, sweat dripping from him like candle-wax, yet even that did not stop him. A night’s rest and he was back at the furnace, ignoring once more whatever ill wind the Lord chose to send his way.

After such a cold and wet autumn, that was actually not a particularly bad winter. Indeed, many were already looking forward to spring when the storm struck. There was even a story told of a man who had chosen that day to begin his plowing, how they found him in the middle of his field, goad frozen in place over his head, only the horns of his ox protruding from the snow before him. But I don’t know if that is true. The weather may have been mild, but I doubt anyone had really begun their plowing, at least not in our part of the country. But there is no denying it had been an easy winter and, in my memory, the day of the storm itself began agreeably enough. I remember coming out of Chapter, hurrying to catch up with Victricius who was always well ahead of me, and being surprised to find him still on the garth, head turned to the south, eyes closed, sniffing at the breeze that blew out of that quarter.

The weather held through the interval. In my memory there may have been a few pale clouds overhead but I am not sure. I remember only that it was nice, that we had no need of a fire. We
sang Sext and None at the furnace and, after each, resumed our work. I think Victricius was breaking rocks when the wind changed. I’m not sure, but that is the sort of thing he would have been doing at that time of year. I know I was working on the bellows, I remember that because I remember seeing the first of the snow flakes falling and melting on its brown and stippled surface. But that was later. The first change was the wind. Up there in the steep part of the valley the wind is a funny thing. A south wind such as we had that morning, because of the deflection of the valley wall, can feel as if it is coming from the north, and, likewise, a north wind out of the south. But there was no mistaking the sudden chill. One moment the skin of the bellows was soft and supple and, the next, it had become stiff and hard and there was a coldness around my ankles. I looked up. The sky overhead remained clear but there was a change in the quality of the light, as if it were no longer midday but sunset or sunrise, the light made bright by proximity to something large and dark. I shivered, dipped my finger in the oil (warm now compared to the surrounding air), applied another daub to the hide. I worked on for a while, the skin continuing to pucker and tighten beneath my fingers like something alive, like something retreating before the cold. Then the light went away. I looked up, saw something I could not believe, looked down again. Out of the clear blue air a dusting of snowflakes blew through the yard. One or two fell on the hide before me and I can remember still the way they looked, the damp shadows they left as they melted. Again I looked up, looked at the thing I had seen over Modra nect, the black curtain of cloud that had risen there like a new mountain, like a new mountain threatening to tumble down on us. I looked over at Victricius, pounded on the bellows to gain his attention. Though the wind was not yet strong, there was already something in the air that, in my memory, deadened the sound, as if even the cloud’s silence were louder than any noise I could produce. But I was heard. Victricius looked up, looked where I was pointing, blinked, looked again. He stood up, straightened his back, studied the dark thing hanging in the air over Modra nect. He shook his head, squinted as if doubting his