Paul's thoughts at Gethsemani:
Gethsemani Abbey, Kentucky
I woke up at 2:45 to get a jump on the monks and on whoever else might vie for coffee or the other all-night rations in the cafeteria. I didn't want to encounter other persons yet. This was my time, my only real time alone, because even on solitary hikes, you are surrounded by beings who watch you, take note of you, scurry or bite. Gethsemani during the day was full of butterflies. At night, the tree frogs chittered in the leaves in incessant waves, in orchestrated sound, it seemed - though orchestrated by what? At times they were as loud as a hundred broken fanbelts, noise rolling over noise, patterned, fractal. And then for a moment they all fell silent, and you could finally hear the crickets in the grass.
You heard all this on the screen porch outside the monastery library, but I liked my coffee in a certain metal Adirondack chair around the stone bend from the entrance bulbs. There, under the belfry, against the wall, the earth was black, the trees were shadows, and the sky was bright with the stars I remembered from when I was little. You could see the Milky Way spilt from north to south, clear across the sky, and the Big Dipper high up in the north, and Arcturus at the base of its kite. In the south, if you walked around the dormitory, you could see Scorpio with its red star Anteres just beside the hill along the entry drive. I always liked stars, but as I grew older and lights sprawled and people moved toward them like moths and erected more lights, the stars disappeared. I also found that most Americans preferred a 24-hour convenience store to a view of Anteres - that people in fact didn't really care for stars at all, except for the occasional chick who found it quaint that you could point them out. But this is all because we megalopolans forgot what stars looked like and what they did to the spirit - how they made our blood race when they shot, or how they put us at ease when we lay on the grass and felt our own place in the cosmos, our speck of emptiness.
They were shooting that week because of the Perseids meteor shower, which are called the Tears of St. Lawrence, whose feast is August 10. St. Lawrence, as you know Wilhelm, was roasted on a gridiron, and at a certain point told his Roman executioners that he was done on one side and needed to be turned over. At the end, he declared himself cooked through and ready to be eaten, at which point he uttered praises and died. I suppose as a result of his saucy exit, he is the patron saint of comedians, comediennes, and comics, as well as of paupers, who ought to have some morbid humor up their sleeves. So I watched his tears, the tears burning as flames across the dark blue Kentucky sky, and was hard pressed to imagine that the heavens do not declare the glory of God - there, at Gethsemani, under the steeple, under the belfry, which at 3 o'clock shook the coffee from its cup and down my pants, calling the monks out of their bunks for vigils.
The Gethsemani Trappists practice the seven liturgical hours according to the Rule of St. Benedict - prayer services, in the abbey church, that include hymns, scriptural readings, Marian devotions, and the entire Psalter chanted in parts over a two-week period. To me, Vigils was the most profound of these hours, more mystical even than the Mass. In Latin, vigilia means "wakefulness" - referring cruelly to the hour at which the office takes place but also, perhaps, to a particular mental state that can be achieved only at 3:15. The mind has an unusual focus in that darkness, that quiet. I've felt it upon rising for some early activity. I've even felt it in a different form on the way home from some drunk. Nothing at 3:15 is the same: not your thoughts or self-conception, not the way the cop eyes you narrowly. You are, at 3:15, free to be many things you cannot be at noon, at 4, at dinner. You may think whatever you please. No one will notice when you stare into the candlelight below, unhinging the syllables of a particular verse on your lips. You can be attuned to nearly anything then. It is either too early in the day to judge or too late to care.
So the monks filed in, slowly, quietly but sometimes knocking things over in their groggy state. Remember, they were much tireder than I was. For me, it was a week of three-in-the-mornings. For them, it was a life. They sat individually in their choirs, with empty stalls here and there for the infirm and missing monks. Then the abbot knocked on the blond wood, and they stood and began to sing. Up in the balcony, one or two others sat or stood with me, bowing when the monks did, during doxologies. But really it seemed like an immense solitude. The church was dark except for lights to read by and two to illuminate the stylized icons of Jesus and Mary at the opposite ends of the two facing choir rows. All my religious training - Catholic schools, CCD, Buddhist study - had not prepared me for the sense that this mystery at my feet was beyond me, beyond my scope or intellect. I felt dazed. The monks sang decently; it was not that. Many of the specific psalms were personal to me and moved me in new ways, but it was not that either. What it was, perhaps, was that this activity, this thing I was observing, this liturgy that had proceeded essentially undisrupted since the sixth century, was taking place now in these Kentucky woods, in my now. More astonishingly, it took place daily, yearly, as steadily as the sun's rising over the knobs and the changing of the North American seasons, whether I or any of the other pilgrims in the balcony were there to observe it or not - whether our "nows" existed or did not. In an absurd way, it reminded me of the matinee that plays at the cineplex even if no one buys a ticket. It plays for an empty house if it must. When the world is over, when the final person has perished, the last slasher film will play to its end credits. And then there will be no more slasher films, but they will have survived the last of us, even the monks.
There is not space here to write every thought that occurs during a morning at Gethsemani. After the hour-long Vigils, I poured some more coffee, borrowed a book about St. Lawrence, and returned to my cell, reading and writing there until Lauds at 5:45 and Mass at 6:15. By then at Gethsemani, the day has started. Your thoughts are no longer wholly your own. They belong to the day and the light, to stranger who silently eats oatmeal across the table but somehow reads your mind. They give themselves to the way time proceeds and pulls at you, tries to make a mess of you, even if you insist on remaining in the present. When the monks worked, making their fruitcake or fudge, I hiked all around their thousands of acres and seven knobs, pausing in places to meditate or to write notes, or just to watch the bees on the goldenrod or to assess the quality of a good stick I'd found. True, I was there to figure things out. I sought whatever wisdom the place could offer about the decisions closing in on me - namely, when and how to die. I would like to tell you that on the Feast of St. Lawrence, I received some special insight that led me eventually to Pittsburgh exactly two years later. But I did not, not on that day, because even if under those brilliant stars I felt myself recede to nothing, to no-self, by noon my ego was forcing me up a steep knob just to prove I was a man. It was later that week that the meaning of the garden, of the agony, infected me like a madness and sent me clear to the "Mount Of All Of Us," but that is for another time.
Gethsemani Abbey, Kentucky
I woke up at 2:45 to get a jump on the monks and on whoever else might vie for coffee or the other all-night rations in the cafeteria. I didn't want to encounter other persons yet. This was my time, my only real time alone, because even on solitary hikes, you are surrounded by beings who watch you, take note of you, scurry or bite. Gethsemani during the day was full of butterflies. At night, the tree frogs chittered in the leaves in incessant waves, in orchestrated sound, it seemed - though orchestrated by what? At times they were as loud as a hundred broken fanbelts, noise rolling over noise, patterned, fractal. And then for a moment they all fell silent, and you could finally hear the crickets in the grass.
You heard all this on the screen porch outside the monastery library, but I liked my coffee in a certain metal Adirondack chair around the stone bend from the entrance bulbs. There, under the belfry, against the wall, the earth was black, the trees were shadows, and the sky was bright with the stars I remembered from when I was little. You could see the Milky Way spilt from north to south, clear across the sky, and the Big Dipper high up in the north, and Arcturus at the base of its kite. In the south, if you walked around the dormitory, you could see Scorpio with its red star Anteres just beside the hill along the entry drive. I always liked stars, but as I grew older and lights sprawled and people moved toward them like moths and erected more lights, the stars disappeared. I also found that most Americans preferred a 24-hour convenience store to a view of Anteres - that people in fact didn't really care for stars at all, except for the occasional chick who found it quaint that you could point them out. But this is all because we megalopolans forgot what stars looked like and what they did to the spirit - how they made our blood race when they shot, or how they put us at ease when we lay on the grass and felt our own place in the cosmos, our speck of emptiness.
They were shooting that week because of the Perseids meteor shower, which are called the Tears of St. Lawrence, whose feast is August 10. St. Lawrence, as you know Wilhelm, was roasted on a gridiron, and at a certain point told his Roman executioners that he was done on one side and needed to be turned over. At the end, he declared himself cooked through and ready to be eaten, at which point he uttered praises and died. I suppose as a result of his saucy exit, he is the patron saint of comedians, comediennes, and comics, as well as of paupers, who ought to have some morbid humor up their sleeves. So I watched his tears, the tears burning as flames across the dark blue Kentucky sky, and was hard pressed to imagine that the heavens do not declare the glory of God - there, at Gethsemani, under the steeple, under the belfry, which at 3 o'clock shook the coffee from its cup and down my pants, calling the monks out of their bunks for vigils.
The Gethsemani Trappists practice the seven liturgical hours according to the Rule of St. Benedict - prayer services, in the abbey church, that include hymns, scriptural readings, Marian devotions, and the entire Psalter chanted in parts over a two-week period. To me, Vigils was the most profound of these hours, more mystical even than the Mass. In Latin, vigilia means "wakefulness" - referring cruelly to the hour at which the office takes place but also, perhaps, to a particular mental state that can be achieved only at 3:15. The mind has an unusual focus in that darkness, that quiet. I've felt it upon rising for some early activity. I've even felt it in a different form on the way home from some drunk. Nothing at 3:15 is the same: not your thoughts or self-conception, not the way the cop eyes you narrowly. You are, at 3:15, free to be many things you cannot be at noon, at 4, at dinner. You may think whatever you please. No one will notice when you stare into the candlelight below, unhinging the syllables of a particular verse on your lips. You can be attuned to nearly anything then. It is either too early in the day to judge or too late to care.
So the monks filed in, slowly, quietly but sometimes knocking things over in their groggy state. Remember, they were much tireder than I was. For me, it was a week of three-in-the-mornings. For them, it was a life. They sat individually in their choirs, with empty stalls here and there for the infirm and missing monks. Then the abbot knocked on the blond wood, and they stood and began to sing. Up in the balcony, one or two others sat or stood with me, bowing when the monks did, during doxologies. But really it seemed like an immense solitude. The church was dark except for lights to read by and two to illuminate the stylized icons of Jesus and Mary at the opposite ends of the two facing choir rows. All my religious training - Catholic schools, CCD, Buddhist study - had not prepared me for the sense that this mystery at my feet was beyond me, beyond my scope or intellect. I felt dazed. The monks sang decently; it was not that. Many of the specific psalms were personal to me and moved me in new ways, but it was not that either. What it was, perhaps, was that this activity, this thing I was observing, this liturgy that had proceeded essentially undisrupted since the sixth century, was taking place now in these Kentucky woods, in my now. More astonishingly, it took place daily, yearly, as steadily as the sun's rising over the knobs and the changing of the North American seasons, whether I or any of the other pilgrims in the balcony were there to observe it or not - whether our "nows" existed or did not. In an absurd way, it reminded me of the matinee that plays at the cineplex even if no one buys a ticket. It plays for an empty house if it must. When the world is over, when the final person has perished, the last slasher film will play to its end credits. And then there will be no more slasher films, but they will have survived the last of us, even the monks.
There is not space here to write every thought that occurs during a morning at Gethsemani. After the hour-long Vigils, I poured some more coffee, borrowed a book about St. Lawrence, and returned to my cell, reading and writing there until Lauds at 5:45 and Mass at 6:15. By then at Gethsemani, the day has started. Your thoughts are no longer wholly your own. They belong to the day and the light, to stranger who silently eats oatmeal across the table but somehow reads your mind. They give themselves to the way time proceeds and pulls at you, tries to make a mess of you, even if you insist on remaining in the present. When the monks worked, making their fruitcake or fudge, I hiked all around their thousands of acres and seven knobs, pausing in places to meditate or to write notes, or just to watch the bees on the goldenrod or to assess the quality of a good stick I'd found. True, I was there to figure things out. I sought whatever wisdom the place could offer about the decisions closing in on me - namely, when and how to die. I would like to tell you that on the Feast of St. Lawrence, I received some special insight that led me eventually to Pittsburgh exactly two years later. But I did not, not on that day, because even if under those brilliant stars I felt myself recede to nothing, to no-self, by noon my ego was forcing me up a steep knob just to prove I was a man. It was later that week that the meaning of the garden, of the agony, infected me like a madness and sent me clear to the "Mount Of All Of Us," but that is for another time.