'And then you fell in with the monks …', W. says. It's the most mysterious of episodes to him, W. He's never had it satisfactorily explained to him how I ended up living with the monks. What drove me to them, or them to me?
How did I, who had no religious belief, no experience of religion, no understanding of religion, end up living among the monks as their guestmaster? Why, out of all the other candidates – and there must have been other candidates, other monk hangers-on, who would have wanted my job – was I the one who became Guestmaster to the community?
He sees in his imagination, W. says. I was the opposite of one of Dostoevsky's holy fools. A Prince Myshkin without humility and saintliness, an Aloysha without goodness, a Saint Francis without mercy. I was a Saul who never converted, a Judas after his betrayal … Maybe they wanted to reform me, W. says of the monks. Maybe they wanted to test their spiritual strength.
He sees it in his mind's eye, W. says. He sees the unholy fool standing between the monks and the world, letting in their guests, preparing them lunch or dinner, and showing them up to their rooms, which he had carefully prepared. He sees it, although he doesn't understand what he sees: the unholy fool making beds and running his cloth along the dado; the fool in the supermarket fetching food for dinner; the fool taking coats and hats and making pleasantries in the oak-parqued reception room; the fool arm in arm with a monk he's escorting across the icy pavement. He sees the unholy fool sitting in attendance on nut-brown Copts with twinkling eyes at ecumenical dinners and calling taxis for white-robed Dominicans heading to the station.
How it confuses W., for whom the story of my life, otherwise, is relatively clear. The monks took me in: but why? why me? What recommended me to them? What, when I had no idea of what living a spiritual life might mean?
W., by contrast, has every idea of what living a spiritual life. He, too, lived among monks, and for a time -over a long summer on the Isle of Man - even thought of becoming one.
Ah, but he can say little of it, not to me, who puts everything up about him, W., at his blog. A veil has to be drawn over some things. A kind of silence has to observed – and W. took a vow of silence, back when he was thinking of joining the Trappists. But he came to know what it meant, a spiritual life. He came to understand the essence of religion.
And isn't that where it began, W.'s real sense of religion, of religiosity, which has nothing to do with sighing after a world beyond this world? Isn't that where he understood that the question of religion wasn't to be left to philosophers and metaphysicians, and with the philosophical and metaphysical conceptions of religion?
W. was silent, he says. He spent days in solitary prayer. In the time between services, he wandered the beach, meditating upon religion, the essence of religion. He'd begun to understand, he says, that it was the world here and now to which religion attended. To world as it currently is! As it is, and insofar as it harbours its redemption.
And what did I come to understand, from my years with the monks? What did I make of the icons on my bedroom wall, and of Athanasius's Life of Saint Anthony on my bedside table? That, too, is a mystery to W., for whom it has always seemed clear that I know nothing whatsoever of religion. There I was, nonetheless, a Guestmaster, and for several years. There I was, masturbating in my attic room as the monks around me prayed unceasingly for the world.
Lars Iyer's Blog 