Self-Made Man (21 page)

 

This made me wonder how esteem was truly won and lost between the brothers. I knew from Vergil that being accepted into the community was an enormous affirmation. Presumably, it had been so for all the monks. But I also knew from Vergil, and had gathered from other comments Felix had made, that there was at least one monk among them who had lost the respect of his brothers. No one was indiscreet enough to name him at first, but as my stay extended, and Ned's own troubles with the esteem mill ground on, I found out who it was and why the other monks thought less of him.

The subject first arose one day in the shop. Vergil mentioned that one of the other monks, Brother Crispin, was suffering from depression and taking medication for it.

“He's depressed because he feels that the rest of us don't respect him,” he'd said. “And he's right, we don't. Yet he keeps doing the very things that lost him our respect in the first place.”

The implication was that if Crispin just got off his ass, he'd gain their respect and—poof—no more depression.

Felix, I found, shared Vergil's dislike for Crispin. “Some people,” he interjected, during a conversation we were having about life at the abbey, “would rather take Prozac than deal with their problems.”

We were taking a drive together that afternoon. I didn't have access to a car, so in an effort to spend some private time with him and to get to know him better, I asked him to take me out for the day, and he agreed. It was then that I learned how wrong I was about him. How I'd misjudged him. Despite his remark about Crispin, he wasn't at bottom the brusque, cutting bully I'd taken him for. On the contrary, he was very kind and open with me.

We talked about emotional life at the monastery and he admitted that there were serious problems with intimacy in the community. Most of the monks, he said, were incapable of talking about their feelings with each other, or for that matter discussing anything more than sports and the weather. They were typical guys in that respect.

“It's possible,” he said, “in a monastic setting like this to go twenty years or more without speaking to someone and not know why.”

But, he emphasized, there were a lot of forces militating against good communication skills. Aside from all the emotionally repressive socialization that men of their generation traditionally underwent, the older monks had had the added burden of being trained from seminary on not to socialize with each other. Getting them to loosen up now would mean contravening everything they knew.

He told me that in the old pre–Vatican II days the novice monks were forbidden to spend time alone with each other. They were forbidden to go anywhere in groups of less than three. Partly the idea behind these rules had been to foster a sense of community, but the more pressing concern had been to remove the temptation of inappropriate intimacy between the brothers. Inappropriate intimacy wasn't entirely a euphemism for gay sex. The monks were supposed to avoid deep friendships or platonic attachments of any kind with anyone of either sex, lest these attachments come between them and God or create competing loyalties within the group. But as Felix put it, sexual tension was a pressing and ubiquitous near occasion of sin nonetheless, and the rules existed largely to keep the men out of temptation's way.

He spoke of a growing generational divide between the older and younger monks. Moreover, he said that a number of the young novices they'd had in recent years had found it as difficult as I had to integrate themselves into the community, and for similar reasons—the emotional remove of so many of its members, the institutionalized stifling of harmless intimacies, spontaneous affections and even, dare one say it, joy. As Felix spoke, I remembered Father Fat telling me about one failed novice who had been caught keeping a kitten concealed in his room, a serious no-no. For my part, it had struck me right away as a noticeable lack that the monastery harbored no pets of any kind, even outdoor ones, which the grounds could surely have accommodated. I asked about it and was told that it was a matter of policy, and one that now didn't seem at all incongruous with the somewhat stunted emotional life of the abbey.

Felix got a little defensive then.

“You might be tempted to think that we don't even like each other, but there's a lot about this community that an outsider doesn't see, a lot that goes on beneath the surface that makes us a community.”

I knew this was true, partly because I had learned so much already about the silent quality of male friendships, but also because I had heard other monks speak about these hidden intimacies. They spoke of knowing other monks by the sound of their footsteps in the hallways, or knowing that Felix himself always sneezed in groups of four. Even in my short time at the abbey, I had learned to recognize Vergil's shuffling, slippered gait as he passed my door on the way to and from the bathroom. I could see how there might be a million tiny intimacies like that between these men, great kindnesses given in passing. But they could not entirely replace what wasn't there.

Felix admitted as much. As he told it, he had once been more open to and even attempted more direct emotional contact with his confreres, but he said he'd gotten hurt and had since shut himself down.

As I asked him questions about himself and as he spoke and revealed more of his private thoughts to me, and saw that I was open to receiving them, I could see his doctored imperious persona falling away. I could feel his loneliness, his need for intimacy so long suppressed, pushing out like the palms of someone's hands against the window of a sinking car. He was still alive in there, intact behind the dejection and neglect.

That's why I knew that when he said, “Some people would rather take Prozac than deal with their problems,” he was really saying, “Does Crispin think he's the only one here who's in pain?”

It was also just the old masculine reflex, the same one that Vergil had had. To them, Crispin was weak and he was using a pill to do what he should have been resolute enough to do for himself. But there was, I thought, also a touch of envy in their judgments. He had had the courage to cry out.

 

I was curious to know how Brother Crispin saw all of this, so finally I decided to go and see him. I hadn't spoken more than a couple of words to him since I'd been at the abbey. He was very quiet, the kind of person who disappears in a group. I simply hadn't noticed him much. Now I knew why, and I felt bad about it.

He was seriously overweight, by a good seventy-five pounds or so. In the almost ashamed, self-deprecating way he seemed to inhabit his flesh, you could see the magnitude of his isolation and unhappiness written all over him. His black hair was shaped in the old bowl cut monk style minus the tonsure. The bangs were blunt and high over his forehead. He was pasty and his face was defenselessly young. Despite his forty-one years, you could still almost see the eighth grader in him.

Whatever anger Crispin felt had turned inward, as it so often does in depressives, and he presented a meek, defeated front, his shoulders sagging down and in as if to shield the solar plexus, his gait lumbering and slow. He worked in the library, literally barricaded in by the books. They were piled all around him, though I doubted he had the energy or focus to read them. I knew I didn't when I was depressed.

Getting him to talk was work, but we finally came around to the topic of his depression and he said he'd been on Prozac but had switched to Zoloft. I asked him when the depression had started. He said that a few years back, during one of the periodic gatherings in which the monks discuss community business, he'd lost it. He said he just stood up and screamed at everybody, finally unleashing years of suppressed discontent.

It was hard to tell from what he said whether that scene had precipitated a genuine breakdown in him, or whether the monks simply deemed that kind of public display of uncontrolled emotion psychotic under any circumstances. In any case, Crispin said that after the incident he'd “gone away” for a while. Again it was hard to know whether he went to an actual mental ward in a hospital or to a special monastic retreat facility, and whether he'd gone of his own accord or whether he'd been sent. I got the impression he'd been sent, but Crispin was reluctant to say more and I didn't want to push him on the question.

I could see my own story in Crispin's. Just being in that place for a few weeks I'd already begun to feel that if I'd really been a young man considering this life or if I'd been young enough not to know better, and had joined in a fit of visionary zeal, I'd have been heeled and reduced just as surely as Crispin had been.

And again it struck me that Crispin's fate was not linked primarily to monasticism, but rather to the all-male environment in which he lived, the only difference being one of degree. Far, far worse would have happened to him in prison or the military, where the weakest are always weeded out or trampled by the strong. But the instinct was the same. He was at the bottom of the pile, the fat kid on the playground, the hated projection of everybody's hidden weaknesses, the shivering manifestation of failed masculinity on display. He was a grown man, like Ned, who hadn't had the pink properly pounded out of him.

 

My time with Crispin had left me feeling sad and anxious to leave the abbey. I, too, had started getting depressed amid all the pain I'd uncovered. But I didn't want things to resolve themselves in this way. I didn't want to leave with nothing but a mound of bad feelings in tow. Yet I only had a couple of days left.

I needed to change the tenor of my encounters. I needed someone to talk to, someone outside the fray. Father Fat came to mind immediately.

But outside the rec room it was hard to command Father Fat's attention. He was very busy during the day, as most of the monks were, and if you were going to take up his time, it had better be a cosmic matter. That meant, more or less, confessing your sins. So I decided to confess my sins. It was odd to think of the confessional as being a place where you could get to know a man better, but Brother Felix knew Father Fat a lot better than I did, and he had suggested it.

“Doing crosswords is one way to get to know Father Richard,” he'd said. “Another is by asking him to be your confessor.”

Besides, I'd been looking for a confessor among the monks. The burden of having lied to get into the monastery, and of having continually deceived these people on a matter that would be a grievous offense to them if they knew about it, had been weighing on my mind for my entire stay. I felt guilty and I wanted to come clean.

Two days before my departure, I arranged to meet Father Fat in my room midmorning after lauds. Right on time he knocked on my door. I asked him where we should go, and he said, “There are two chairs. Let's do it right here.”

So we did. He sat in my reading chair and I sat in my desk chair and we started.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said. “It's been longer than I can remember since my last confession.”

That was the only formal thing I said during the whole confession. The rest was just talk, which was exactly what I'd been hoping for. It began with me expressing regret for the ill will I bore some of the monks. Then I touched on some of the points of Catholic theology that had always bothered me. He interjected things now and then, but mostly he just listened.

Then I began to ask him about himself, his background, why he became a monk. With characteristic economy, he said: “Somewhere between becoming a policeman and becoming a cowboy I became a priest.” It was probably the most honest answer anyone there had given me. Though Father Claude hadn't said it in so many words, I gathered that he'd joined for a similar reason. It was a form of civil service to a certain generation, like being a soldier. If you weren't cut out for one, you did the other.

But there was far more to it than that for someone as complex as Father Fat. He had gotten his degree at the local college where he and many of the monks now taught, and he said that when he was a student there he had been very impressed by the monks he met.

“I thought that if they got to be the kind of people they were by living that life,” he said, “then I wanted to give it a try.”

And if ever there was an advertisement for the life, Father Fat was it. He was an exemplary man. Not by any stretch perfect. But exemplary. Deeply good. Deeply kind. Solemn, humble, generous.

I asked him about the hugging thing and the difficulty so many of the monks had in showing affection for each other. I was curious about where he fell on that spectrum. He told me about his friendship with Father Henry, which had been a long and devoted one. He said that he went to visit Father Henry in his rooms or in the hospital quite often these days. They would talk for an hour or two and then they would always hug long and hard at the end of it.

“I'm helping my friend to die,” he said.

We just sat with his last remark for a while. Father Fat had looked me right in the eye when he'd said it, to see if I could take it, if I'd look away or be embarrassed. I held his gaze and nodded, and we kept looking at each other for several long moments. Finally, we broke the contact and he brought us back around to my confession.

“Okay, but all of that's not what we're here for, right?”

“No,” I said. “There's something else I need to tell you. But I'm worried about telling you.”