THOMAS LARSON

(Written 2022)

(A short story about the retiring Abbot of Our Lady of Gethsemani Trappist monastery, James Fox, and the first night in his hermitage alone, armed and undergoing a trial by snakes. He is rescued the next morning by his dear dark friend, Father Louis. The year is 1968.)

Nose – buried in his A-initialed hanky – dust like Arabia billowing from the retreating Jeep – the abbot hoists a duffel of sacraments and a .410 shotgun – snug in its own leather long pouch – up the six steps to the cabin’s side porch and front door. He slides the long glass door open – six miles from Gethsemani (he’s been dropped off telling the monk to retrieve him in twenty-four hours exactly). This will be his life’s last home – his penitent new abode – his hermitage. (He thinks and writes and prays everything in clipped, unfinished phrases.) He calls his new home, Calvary. It’s mostly finished, roof on, windows set, screened, and spray-wiped. The electricity hums from a small transformer – in a shed of its own – like a chapel of power.

Inside, the two large rooms are stone-walled against the summer sun. He looks out the wraparound windows that view a grand scene. In gratitude he sighs at the sight – as if Kentucky still frontiers the dense green Daniel Boone knew. He sees neither house nor billboard – only forest-covered knobs and corn-sentineled fields in the valley below. He louvers open a window and a breeze – gifted he’s sure – rattles the screen: He says to himself – “Hello Jesus.” Here, now – he’ll accede to the final call – to be alone with the ALONE.

For a year, hawklike, he’s overseen the cabin’s design. He’s nodded at every pencil-line of the build. Two identical oak-walled, oak-floored rooms, one a sanctuary for the Mass – the other his living quarter. Each room cantilevered out at ninety-degree angles from one another – one facing south with a cross atop – the other facing west – both exaggeratedly tall with sentinel windows – modernist brash a la Frank Lloyd Wright. The building is bolted to an L-shaped foundation. The stone-layered walls are summer cool and winter temperate – rough-chiseled, cement-chinked. On the north side is a cistern – the Water Bearer – an omen of the goodness that comes from below.

Brother monks and priests have warned him – Edelen’s Place – the spot given by an abbey donor – is known to attract moonshiners – they roil midnight in their jeeps and trucks – rabbit guns and six packs – look out for them – look out for their animal menagerie (the hills have eyes, the trees have tongues) – pack your Bible and your shotgun – skedaddle invaders with buckshot – above their heads, of course. Protect God’s lair – an abbot and his changes are as welcome on this mount (Calvary, it is) as anyone.

In the kitchen alcove, on a hotplate with a ceramic coil, he heats Chef-Boyardee Beef Ravioli. Brother Nick outfitted the place with cooking supplies – cans of black beans and chicken noodle soup, tin dishes, tablecloth and cloth napkins – a few woodshop crucifixes on the walls – clean sheets and a Kentucky Star quilt on the bed.

The abbot spoons a heap of ravioli into a porcelain bowl – gives thanks and chews each bite thirty times – the more disciplined he is, the more hickory-branch thin he stays – but Oh, he misses already his pan-seared steak and crisp French fries – his nightly abbey fare – his alone. He leaves a wooden spoon in the pot – and his dirty dish in the sink – and lays down on a cot to rest (in prayer) before the long night travels in.

No one but one knows he’s here. He thinks of the self-starved, fifth-century Benedict. He, too, is drawing near the age and demeanor of the wizened, venerated old man. Who among the long-lived escape wizened? His oval rimless glasses – beside him on a stand – magnify an abject eye strain. His toothy grin is rare. Skinny as a well-digger, he is ever self-conscious. He hates the camera: I look like a Louisville mortician peddling coffins. Think of Mary and smile, he signs his correspondence. Not advice to others – a buffer to husband his energy.

All of that edges him – if he thinks it through – toward a trapeze-sense of dangling. Soon he’ll begin composing his resignation letter – once sent, it’s irrevocable – a light will shine he’s sure on a new way – fully and freely lived for GOD ALONE – now, here, in his ridgeline hut – a light illuminating darkly a selfish aloneness – whose intensity he decides will burn him to a crisp. He sometimes shakes so much at the fear – of he knows not what – that he staples himself to limbo.

The sunset brewing – his halting slumber drifts: How many hours until his midnight Mass? Several, sadly. He is nervous – minus his account files and ledgers. He turns – he tugs at the pillow – he cradles his laced fingers behind his boney head. He gets up and paces – beholds the late evening sun escape – out the valley-view window – how looking-out-upon is looking-in-at-him. In a way like the abbey – his new home fully enclosed. But isolated for one. Alone. He feels the bow of the descending darkness – unoccupied, rural, vast – undisciplined, encroaching – the Knobs like a flotilla of Queen Marys – and beyond the Knobs – unseen from the abbey’s lie – Christ – he sees – is tug-boated into harbor.

On the floor, he puts an ear to the boards. The sound of water in the cistern – rising from the mantle of granite – trickling through the limestone cracks – dripping into the deep siloed pool.

Compline comes – single-voiced, choral-less – hurry the Examination of Conscience – As the daylight dies away – Let phantoms fly – Do not hide your face from me – The enemy hounds my spirit – Tomorrow – Show me your mercy at daybreak – from Peter – The devil prowls round like a roaring lion – Looking for something to eat – Stand up to him – Do not give the devil an edge – Lord, grant me a quiet night and a perfect end.

An order has it had. The boy. The student. The monk. The abbot. The recluse. Aged, not dead, shrouded, not buried. And among the rocks – the nocturnal serpents, tongue-heads sprouting from their holes.

The boy among the mother’s brood of seven to whom she says one day and over and again: Children, all of you shall serve God. The great difficulty, to stay true to this service. You Catherine shall be a nun and marry Christ. You boys shall be priests and serve the Father. I do not worry about you girls. But you boys. It goes without and with saying. Women shall seek you, desire conversion. Beware their disguises, meeting you alone, their praise, their deference. When they do, you ignore them, better, you flee the temptation. My untroubled rest shall be that you profess and serve Christ all your lives. My soul’s stirring needlessly shall be like Judas that you betray the savior by cashing in the pieces of silver. I cannot forbid you enter college as your father wishes. But when you do, your faith shall be upended to the degree that you may lose it. As sure as I’m Irish – the Church sewed the cassock with the tightest of collars – for a reason.

The student – father-blessed – gets his wish – Harvard College – annual full scholarships – four years of Liberal Arts, history major, finishes in three – with a Phi Beta Kappa key – grad school in Business Administration – look out – a Wall Street Horatio Alger destined to pocket a million – while his sister, Catherine, at Radcliffe, a brilliant scholar, a future professor – lights Aquinas fires, organizes Catholic clubs, chums Sadie Hawkins dances – brother and sister as close as siblings get – until Catherine, in graduate school, her appendix ruptures, hospitalized – and out of nowhere she dies – she just dies in the bed where she lay – why? – the likely cause: Jesus uses her to cast a terrifying light so her favorite brother declares at her funeral – he is called elsewhere – from the money-grub – to the priesthood – as mother wished – seated there, smug, grateful – it is how you were made and must be – the gift his sister’s sacrifice brings pries him open: She the rock on which I build my service to the Trappists.

The monk, and the real work begins – first week at Gethsemani brooding on Fenway Park – second week comparing the Merchant Marine – island adventure lost, girls, the least of it – third week learning the hand signs – two fingers touching the wrist as if taking one’s pulse = coffee – memorizing the divine offices, all seven, distinct and yet not – eating the mush-ridden vegetarian food – each day more grueling as it comes and more welcome as it passes – repetition uncomforted by repetition – either Jesus and Mother or nothing – the greener green gold of the horizoned hills – sandalling the cloister cooled stones is cold comfort – what venom lies beneath? – the grinding production of fruitcake and hams and jams and bourbon balls – commerciality he supports, volunteers to manage – as a means to live with frustration and distraction – the longing and the fantasy – such, such is the goal – to stay put and accept one’s lot – a lot to accept – feel the hurt deepen, lighten, deepen – and felt – it passes – Sweet Jesus I’m not there – I’m getting there.

Then as abbot – in his spacious abbey apartment – at this hour he would run his bath – undress and let fall his habit, his silken skivvies. Naked, ready to descend into the claw-footed tub – he would pause his St. Anthony-fervency. He would run his hands up and down the oaky rigidity of his Lincolnesque frame. He is proud of his latitude – there is the skin over the skeleton – not an ounce of fat – not even around the hips – his plank-like body worked taut and smooth. It is not the every-monk’s manual labor that thinned him so – but the durable New England gene pool he’s blessed with – and his ability to feel full on infrequent doses of calories – to will satiation – to abstain from part of the meal at mealtime all his life.

Dozing not dozing – he sees what’s left on his desk. Invoices for bushels of flour – buckets of lard – toilet paper rolls by the flat – a bundle of monks’ letters to clip or begrudge – please send long underwear – OK – and these three books, not on the approved list – blots them out – each man his peccadillo, his failing, his individuality –their picky timid wants – like flies buzzing his windows – torturous interruptions – and he cherishes rising and retrieving the swatter from the wall hook – and he smashes the little buggers – and a more than a few like disobedient Cistercians escape his aim – and he quickens his stalking – until one settles on his blotter – and another on his vestments – and there they are mushed in the final judgment.

There, too, in his mind – the set of photos – whose daily reminder he misses the sight of – him sincerely smiling with Bishop Sheen – sincerely smiling with Cardinal Dougherty – nervously smiling with the Kennedys, Jack and Bobby – and, best of all, grinning like a county sheriff with the Kentucky Mountain Men, a local fraternal group – he and the Boone bootlickers – peas in a pod – enjoying a laugh under a goalpost-sized white cross.

In the abbot – man equals role – character marries destiny – business savvy unmasks aspiration – in the abbey the self is immolated – the unstirred coals simmer still – and now, here, his opportunity – to return to contemplation – uninterrupted – out and on his own – the recluse – who is yet unburied – these ideas lift the veil. He stirs – midnight always comes – from which the curse of “his times” he will soon be free – the mid-1960s (he insists you know) and their rush to the “East” – to Zen and its convolutions – to evasions of doctrinal challenges – of his distant immunity to pledges and penances and edicts from Rome – of sexual innuendoes he censors in the thought of his monastics, coming in – still in decent numbers – but leaving: for every four, three leave – for love, to marry, God tells them each to a man – the abbot will be free of buying and staffing the daughter houses (Mexico, South Carolina, a lunar colony) – he will be free of monk-lusting women (as mother warned) in letter, phone message, doorstep uninvited – free of God-Is-Dead and the vexatious Not-God, the God of Absence – he will be free of the next nagging enclave, Vatican III – and a Church as an institutionless institution – free of the folk-music masses – free of the laity and their daytime or evening TV addictions – “Perry Mason” – “The Fugitive” – “My Three Sons” – arteries clogged with Batman, “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” Feminism – hurry down to a stone soul picnic (where had he heard that?), Mary and Joseph away from the manger – the Dairy Queen in Bardstown open all night in the summer.

I fear, Lord, all I have left to my name is Chef-Boyardee – a wooden spoon stuck in its lumpish leftover – and still you do not desert me.

The burial. The shroud. The recluse. The abbot. The monk. The student. The boy. Serpents retreating back down their holes, readying for the next bell.

Nightly in his apartment – he sinks into the bath’s chill – the chosen point – his Hell-Reversing penance. The water stings – as it should. Nominated station – the anointing of Benedict – vanishes in the South-Pole frigidity. It isn’t that bad – he suffers and he lives – they are reciprocal – a daily feast and famine – if merely punished or maimed – but living with its possibility – that’s the point – to suffer in humility – to be generous with his flesh like Christ – not as generous, no, though Christ valued Christ’s life, did He not as well – did He not – as his limbs drooped, his muscles enervate – did He not wish He wasn’t dying so – He cried out wishing he wasn’t – did He not – to be forsaken, Father – did Jesus not give His life so the Right Reverend Abbot – in his rub-a-dub-tub – Order of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance – who receives fifty hours less time in Purgatory – a reward for his service – all because God-in-His-glory Catherine – and the gratitude of his Trappist brothers – let him withstand this bit of frostbite – a bit of numbing pain pooling him in a watery grave – whose willfulness be his charge – once he gives up the ghost as Christ did at Calvary – did He not – at a Calvary of the abbot’s own.

At this, he thinks to rise from the biting chill. But he waits. He counts to sixty – then another sixty (the slight quickening) – his jaw fixed, eyes closed, arms shaking – no spasms. Then he’s up – half out of the tub. He shuts his eyes and breathes wantonly – feels he should have stayed submerged another sixty and another. His orneriness sets him to another dunk – O witch, O wardrobe of water – his usefulness ensouls him as strongly as his divinity – and it would force him back down into the water – colder still – yes, Jesus, make me – Make Me! – until he is shaking all over – his teeth chatter – his toes scrunch – his insteps arch – his fingers web out, oddly grasping the cold as though it were beach sand – his nether (useless) parts contract, clench – his muscles tumesce – until – tick – tick – tick – if he stays full-fathom deep – he will ice-cube and die – not so bad.

Sweet is survival – up and out of the tub – now for good – the water sheets off him fishlike, cascades onto the white rug – he’s shaking as if gonged. He towels off – gets in bed – feels the cruel fold of the sheet under his chin. What does God think of this homegrown penance? The abbot has never asked – he assumes it’s within reason – his seventy-one years continue their test of faith – what else is the life for the monk for? His self-enclosed self also washes down – courses over his skin – immerses his loins – tightens his anus – these grandiloquent tingles are also thoughts of God. Through a crack in the sky He erupts down to reanimate His will – demands the abbot (through Christ and Mary – smiling) to whisper – his punishment taken, served – in his prayer-voice he whispers-chants – even now – JESUS MAKE ME LOVE YOU MORE.

Awaken. At least forty years this ritual chosen-devoted.

Night, stars, no moon. Clock hands straight up soon. The cosmic flower garden of galaxies. And the sound indoors of crickets without. Late August’s coming – the azimuth of night. The hour until is now. Thy will – not mine – be done. It’s time. Thy will is mine.

He parts the curtained threshold to his home chapel. There, at the tabernacle, a wooden box atop a polished marble sand – he genuflects. The tabernacle – prepacked with the Eucharist reserves – is now on the altar. To the altar – erected on His behalf – he bows. He bends and kisses the shiny brass. Upon it rests the tiny paten with a large piece of leavened bread – cloth-wrapped from the abbey’s kitchen – the sacramental host – and a cup of wine. A vial of water. No books. Readings reside in memory – he signs the cross’s four points on his lips. He speaks, sotto voce – without pauses – the rhythm arhythmic.

Forgive me for leaving the monks behind – when they need me now – my first night away – have mercy on what this first night holds – I am as new as I was when my mother brought me into the world – and still to this day I have not betrayed her. Forgive also my ego – indispensable I believe to the security of Gethsemani – a duty directed by You into a new manager – elected and trusted by the brothers – but not until I relinquish the position of Christ in the monastery – as You will decree and as I shall obey.
Glory to God, glory to God, up – up – in the highest. Peace to people of goodwill. I celebrate the mystery of His coming – with my prayers and my remembrance of His sacrifice. Glory to God.

From Job in the Old Testament, he recalls:

I know that thou canst do everything – and that no thought can be withholden from thee. Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? Therefore, have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me – which I knew not. Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak: I will demand of thee – and declare thou unto me. I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself – and repent in dust and ashes.

From Psalm 31, he recalls:

O Lord, bow down thine ear to me; deliver me speedily: be thou my rock – for a house of defense to save me. For thou art my rock and my fortress – therefore, for thy name’s sake – lead me, and guide me. Pull me out of the net – that they have laid privily for me – for thou art my strength – and For You am I saved.

He stands aside the altar and drops to his knees, then prostrates himself on the floor. His arms lengthen – the upper arm muscles stretch and ache – his knees ballpeen on their knobs – his forehead sanctifies the oak floor. He freezes – like the cold shallow depth he loves – for five full minutes – pray God support his aloneness – bind him to his perfect home – his humility forgiving his comfort – his sanctimony unsentimental.

He returns to the altar and, from Luke 23:33-35, he recalls:

And when they were come to the place – which is called Calvary – there they crucified him – and the malefactors, one on the right hand – and the other on the left. Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them – for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots. And the people stood beholding. And the rulers also with them derided him – saying, He saved others – let him save himself – if he be Christ, the chosen of God – let him cry – Save Me! Save Me!

And the liturgy of the Mass like morning dressing or evening bath flows – and no mote blinds his eye – and no stone stumbles his step – and no paned flies mock him – and nothing even close to that – as yet. And – again – he makes the sign of the cross a third time – on his forehead, his lips, his heart – and before he prays – an intercessional prayer – he is grateful to have remembered to cushion his knees on the kneeler on which he is kneeled:

And to Pope Paul VI – and to Archbishop Floersch – and to Lyndon Johnson and the President of Vietnam – and to men in uniform following orders – and to Father Louis – and the Father Louises of the world – and to the women they have wronged – and to Brothers Cleophus and Samuel who are sick and to Brother Aelfric who is dying – I offer this Mass in their names – and I offer it – with selfishness intended – to me – the Mass giver – who has come to You – the Author of All Nature and All Superstition – to ask this once only – please plant me into the pastures of my life – after my abbotcy and care for me – as if I were your child – leaving mother – and leaving college – and leaving Wall Street – at which I was too talented for my own good – though not for managing the abbey – as You have shown – but soon leaving the abbey this year, next year, and my Trappist brothers – shall I once again locate the No-Self I knew as a boy – the pure love of God the tended.

On the altar he pours a drop of water into the wine. He asks God to accept this offering – his communion rite. He prays a thanksgiving – and he asks for a blessing for the savior in whose name the Eucharist is given. He recalls the words of Christ at the Last Supper and he recalls his recitation of his version in the slow-dying body in the cold of the tub and the frozen flames of death:

Wherever those who believe in Him gather, they take of the bread as though they are eating his body – and they take of the wine as though they are drinking his blood – I know in the moment of this remembrance tonight – at the midnight hour – the host before me is the body of Christ – and the wine before me is his blood. To remember is to embody – to awaken the senses that Christ is with me in my sanctuary to celebrate the Mass. I call the Holy Spirit to come down and mingle with these gifts of bread and wine. I elevate the host above and hold the bread aloft – my eyes close – my skin garments the silken fabric of His presence – the air of Eden – the temperature Holy and rising. I lower the host and hear from a distant soundless organ the Agnus Dei – the Lamb of God – its refrain chanting like a boat pile-hitched to a dock – bobbing to and fro and fro and to – the gentle lapping that washes the world of its sins. I bring the host over the paten and tear it in half – I say the Lord’s Prayer as I come and I go – and from each piece – now the very body of Christ – I break the first chunk and then the second into five pieces – two pieces for the nails in His hands, two pieces for the nails in His foot, and one piece for the slice in His heart-encased rib from which – the Self leaks out – the Self is removing itself from the Body – and the No-Self – the Blessed No-Self – call Him the Christ-being – begins wriggling in. Between the Self and the No-Self – between God and the Not-God – falls the shadow of the Kingdom – and I enter Your Servant – to which You ask – where have You been all this time? And I say – Nowhere – Here.

This improvisation – surely – the forked tines of a foreign presence surely – frightens him – as never before – as of such newness that he fears its irreducibility – he will never live up to the purity of the speech he has given – he thinks it must be like the honeymoon lovers are shocked to awaken from – this Mass – incomparable and undreamed-of – a Mass for the woods – his first – for the realm of the unblessed.

In the never living up – he hears it – a thump on the front porch – like a package drop-delivered – and another double-thump – as if tossed from nearby – slapping the door and hitting the deck – and another thump-thump – the sound of a body or a body part bellying on the oak planks – and another-another. The abbot puts the host down. He glances at his bag – unzipped on the couch – his flashlight – and beside it, waiting – his shotgun. He’s got both. He moves to the door: Beamed and armed response.

JESUS, make me love you more.

Ear to the door – like leaves scuttling on the planks. But it’s summer – the alien is unwelcome. He pulls the door handle – tactfully – one eye peers at what darkness illumines – and there – a swamp topped by what coils and writhes.

Knees the door shut – loads the gun – grips the flashlight in his left – the gun in his right – sweeps the door open.

A single copperhead with hourglass bands on its back – on the welcome mat – smells the air of the indoor bait. Softly coiled, head still, tongue flickering. Behind it, three more in vigilant coils – heads sway a tad – tongues dart. Copperheads – one after another – commonly known and met – the most venomous of the Kentucky serpents – their dominion the Knobs – espying the brush-addled monk or deer hunter – along the Penstemon paths.

The door shuts – quietly, prayerfully.

JESUS, make me love you more.

He opens the door and at a spot behind the snake before him – he sees its wedge head retract to strike – the slit eyes, the smirked mouth – and he fires. He slams the door.

Ear cocked – he listens. Cracks the door – shines the light. The one closest has gone – a miracle – but another winder sides up – a replacement, Kamikaze attack.

He must rid the porch first – of the threat. If bit – he’ll tourniquet the limb – razorblade the wound open – suck out the bitter poison. If he doesn’t get it all – the agonizing swells of his dying limbs for hours.

He reloads – readies for another look and shot – can he plug them all? Why even shoot? Maybe Jesus has dropped the copperheads onto his porch – not so he’ll kill them – but regard them as coexistents. It is their realm – the Garden and the Prohibition – now both the woods surrounding. They knew his gun is loaded – he is fallen and his intent is to kill. Thus the numbers assembled – striking like Mosby’s Raiders.

And he – a reptilian missionary himself – range Christlike among them.

Oh JESUS, you must not have heard – MAKE ME LOVE YOU MORE.

Again, he reloads – places the gun on the table – stands the flashlight on its face – returns to the altar – kneels and genuflects to the tabernacle – and this time – is told:

To examine myself before I aim – if I can refrain – I whose Christ-being shoots the gun – not the boy or the student or the novice who loves and leaves his mother – but the great monastic – the abbot who has broken none of his vows and still feels – no, still enacts – what the man on the cross feels – but if instead I shoot the snakes – every last one – many or a multitude – and gather the dead beasts in my hands – and present them and await His judgment – and take my place beside His throne – one more sacred mystery revealed – the revealed One to whom I have given in my career five thousand Masses – so He continues to die and be resurrected – alive in the conundrum’s space and time – or I holster my gun and stroll among the serpents – coax them into my arms – loft the copperhead in ecstatic trust – one, then another, then a dozen, raise the coiling swill of hide and horror – high above my razored head – to protect His creatures great and small – the wake ruddered – the rapids run – and he chooses – he lofts gun and light – opens the door – beams to see the porch bare – skitters to the balustrade edge – lights the ridge line and the outcropping of rock that surrounds his precious Calvary – and there – like a school of fish beached on the sand – he sees a thousand copperheads – and more – not the many but the multitude – slithering side to side – heads rising – giddy at the whiff of a Trappist prey – lowering, rising, calliope-like – coiling over and around and under one another – one ball of digestion in the reptilian order – eager their moment to moil the porch – under the spell of the abbot – like wriggling postulants – and so they thump – at his feet – the gift of their obedience – Be unafraid – he lights the offering – a mounding pile of copperheads – his servants – Be unafraid – and he kneels down – and each snake tucks its head in – rattles a soft-tail greeting – Be unafraid – and he offers his hands – open and flat for the snake to climb on his outstretched palms – Be not afraid – and he spatulas pancake hands under the snake who stirs not, flinches not – is content to the becalming palms of faith – and he unbends his knees and stands and brings the serpent up – the rubbery sweat of the skin on his – its scales a rolling pavement – his fear dissolving in the gentle gnawing of their fangs – O come-unto-me – until snout-to-snout, the copperhead – where all is one – tongues his lips – a tickle of twigs – he dares say – creaturely foreplay – He is unafraid – he doubts it was ever not so – and he lowers the living altar and settles its warm pale obliging belly on the porch – his comrade senses the stairs – coils down each newly lain and nailed step – rejoins his army, its scout, its emissary – goes in peace – and the serpent horde parts and makes way for this Columbus – it has come home richer for having gone – and the copperheads ease and quiver less and cease their dilated writhing – and he shines the light out along their carpet-like lie – a settlement, quelled, herded, tempered, a Christianized conquest – and he prays the prayer of thanksgiving – because he has asked JESUS to make him love Him more – because JESUS reciprocates with the Truest Love – which is always what He gives. The viper army has come not to harm you – he says – only you can do that – he says – but to teach you the way of the viper – which is the way of the Lord – he says – you learn that loving the viper manifests His Obedience.

What is left now that redemption won’t heal?

He will awaken after sound sleep. He will listen for his ride as morning turns. He will hear the Jeep – or will it be a small Grand Prix of Jeeps – grinding gears up the incline. He will imagine the snakes, his tamed and sanctified friends, lying along the ridge, heads aloft, parting their monolithic tangle as the Jeep multitude pulls up. He will crack the door, scan nearby and far, go out to behold the serpents of His Savior – nothing there and there for nothing. And he will wonder not whether they were ever there but where they have slithered to, a sidewinding circus who transforms those in their outposts of solitude and romance. His ride will honk, he will saunter out, none the worse for wear, tiptoe down the snake-cleansed steps, with gun and bags. He will greet those – far more than the one – who left him twenty-four hours ago, the driver and the others, now, a sweet surprise – ah, one brother after another brother and another – a phalanx of doubting kind –and oh, the Good Father Louis – his dear dark friend – the snake in the abbey – to think that (unthinkingly) he left him in charge – the irony bearable because of the Night No One Will Believe – and now he smiles at his pals – congratulating him, post-initiation – the newest Gethsemani hermit-in-training – what it takes to leave the community – no one can know – laughing, back-slapping, heralding his equal – one of them in their fold – and yet his Own Man Too – clap-happy glad – Louis’s tidings above all – speaking for all – of such joy he claps his hands on his abbot’s shoulders and squeezes – of such force the abbot feels redeemed by Louis – his confessor – the one on whom he has lashed penance so many times – and has been forgiven for having done so – and he recalls Louis telling him days before – that once he goes to Calvary – he will emerge a New Man – the man he was intended to be – armorless at last.

Welcome Father Abbot. Welcome. We missed you. Let us drive you home. We gathered to pray last night that Christ Jesus protect you in your loneliness, and we see this morning that all things are quiet on Calvary ridge, your beautiful home still stands, no harm has come to you, we trust, neither in your person nor in your dreams, where Christ also treads, where you learn how He makes you love him more. What will be has been written. This we believe. This we know. And we believe that you are not ready to leave us for your hermit digs. Not yet. Perhaps someday. Within the year. But not yet. We need the Love He brings through you still, you, His Master-Builder, His Knight of Order, of Our Order, His Emissary, His Choice and Ours. Our Abbot, Parent to us Children, bestows his Love now more than ever, more of his Love after he has survived the forested night, for we realize when you are gone how weak we are, how we yearn for the wrong things, for the material realm we need you to teach us to reject, for the baseball d the swimming pool and the Ferris wheel and the pleated skirts that swing and sway as they walk and our mothers, for how unfocused and loose and undisciplined we are, how, only this morning at Lauds, we cried out for Our Father Who Art In Heaven and Who Art Before Us Without Whom We Cannot Go On. Oh, We have missed you, Father Abbot. We are glad, as Father Louis has said, that when you left the enclosure at the edge of the abyss, most of you, more than enough of you went through. But not all. Some part of you stayed behind so not all was lost. And we felt it. To a man. To a monk. We felt it. And it is why we have all come, all one hundred of us to welcome you back. You must not leave us again – not until we say you’re ready.