The Monastics

Two of my closest friends live in monasteries. The first is in West Virginia. He is an Eastern Orthodox Christian, tonsured in what is called the ryassaphore. It’s a sort of stepping stone between being a novice and taking your final vows. He signs his letters to me Fr. Ivan. The Fr. standing for Father, a title he earned after three years of monastic life, and Ivan being the name he took when he started his new life in the monastery and thus “died to the world.” When I knew him, though, he went by Garrett.

Before entering the monastery, Garrett was required to give away all his possessions. We were living together at the time, so I helped him load up many of his things in my car and take them to various donation centers. Though I dreaded the approaching date of his departure, I could see that it felt good to be rid of all these things. Eventually, the only things left were a couple changes of clothes and his cat. The cat—a lean, black female named Anya—I didn’t want him to give away.  I had come to love this cat. She could be quite standoffish, swiping at me from under the couch and attacking my ankles, but we had formed a bond over the years. I hoped that he would leave her to me. If he had asked me to take her to the shelter, I would have kept her for myself. But he was able to convince the head of the monastery to let him bring her with him. He told me that it was something of a tradition there to allow the novice monks one token possession. One monk from Japan was permitted to bring a Game Boy, which he and the other young monks enjoy once a year on Pascha. When spring comes around now, I like to imagine them in a green clearing, enjoying cheese and honey, sitting on a log in their vestments, the 8-bit sound effects cutting through the ambiance of the Appalachian forest.

We write to each other twice a year now, once in the winter and once in the summer. When he first left, though, I couldn’t write to him at all. I wrote many letters, but failed to send any of them. I wasn’t confident in what I had to say. So, though I thought of him constantly, we had no communication for the first three years. Finally, he wrote to me. How he found my address, I don’t know. I had moved to a different city by then.

He told me a story once about a clairvoyant saint from Greece who was known to talk couples through particular difficulties in their marriage without ever having met them. He knew the contents of each person’s heart better than they did and saw the ways they could be resolved in love, like a mathematician who sees how to resolve opposing sides of an equation. Ivan never claimed clairvoyance, but on the subject of my own relationship—I was unhappily living with a woman I had met shortly after he left—he wrote to me that life is like a bag of sharp rocks, the shaking of which results in those rocks becoming smooth. By the time I read those words, that relationship had already ended in a rather painful manner. But now I can see how we were indeed sanding each other down. He also wrote that difficult relationships are indispensable, for it is the difficult people in our lives who we are called to love—they become the foundation of our salvation.

Ivan and I loved each other once, back when we were both more difficult people. We had an unusual bond, the kind which neither of us ever attempted to clarify into words. He was well-read and extremely rational. The kind of person who, if you watched him closely, you could almost see the synapses firing. And he loved to argue with people. I had always avoided arguments, but I didn’t mind watching him argue with others. Some people were closed off, afraid of the ideas he confronted them with. But others were open to him, and he would debate them on many questions until the early morning—if the Filioque is heretical, why we should distinguish God’s energies from His essence, whether we can pray the damned out of hell. He had an incredible moral seriousness. The answers really mattered to him. The strange thing about our relationship was that he would never argue with me. He never pressed me on my beliefs the way he pressed everyone else—our professors, house guests, strangers in the park. I came to realize this was a little odd. It was as if Socrates were walking around the agora questioning everyone but one man, about whom he said, “No, I won’t disturb him.” You would wonder about the nature of that relationship.

The night before he left for the monastery, we shared bottles of our favorite three-dollar wine. After several glasses, we were able to put our feelings for each other into words, both what we shared and our intractable differences. Like I said, we were both difficult people—closed-off and defensive. But he was leaving forever, “dying to the world,” so we both felt called to greater honesty. The drama of that situation heightened the need. He had an affinity for portraits of male saints kissing each other—Peter and Paul, Sergius and Bacchus. “The kiss of peace,” it’s called. A symptom of his repression, I remember telling him, a sign he shouldn’t go. It was fitting that, after this difficult conversation, that was how we said goodbye.

Since then, I’ve adopted a black cat of my own. They have similar personalities, my black cat and his. They are sharp rocks, too. Ivan joked in his most recent letter that he sat down with his Anya and tried to explain to her that when she dies, her soul will cease to exist simultaneously with her body. She, of course, didn’t understand. He claims her ignorance of this reality—animals living as they do in a permanent state of nowness—is what keeps her from being truly cruel. Thus, she is merely “a bit of a bitch.” Human cruelty is only possible because we can be deluded into believing our actions to have no corresponding eternal consequences, or so he tells me.

One of the differences between Ivan and me was that he believed in God, and I did not. For me, we are much like our cats whose souls die with their bodies. I often argued that this fact gives life a certain urgency, since it is all we have. He would retort that it also opens a wide avenue for the kinds of willful cruelty unique to the human species. Perhaps, I would say, it gives life enough urgency to make up for the lack of enduring consequences, assuming there is no God to dole them out. He would disagree, of course, but never push me further.

I don’t know what I believe, really. I just know that you can’t force beliefs. Beliefs are like minerals in groundwater, acquired through slow diffusion and only changed over great time or under seismic circumstances. It might be more beautiful to believe what Ivan believes, that we will be reunited in heaven, a place where everyone is pure and all our differences have dissolved. It might be that belief in God is the only thing keeping us from becoming devils. Though I don’t think about human cruelty as much as he does. To me, cruelty seems to issue forth from the religious and irreligious alike. But I do think about our impermanence. I think about whether this is all we have and whether that saps life of its meaning or sustains it. Though, given that I see the soul as a fleeting thing, I have a vested interest in believing that its brevity gives it meaning.

But most of all I think of the second friend of mine to enter a monastery. The one who, unlike Ivan, took a vow of silence. While Fr. Ivan and I can still talk in our letters, to her I will never write. Nor will she ever write to me.

Her name was Sophia. The Greek word for wisdom. She studied philosophy and classics when we met in college. She inhaled texts in German, French, Latin, and Greek like you or I might breathe air, which is to say constantly and automatically. When I read now about intellectual prodigies like Goethe, Kant, Bentham, and Mozart, I picture her among them as a child, all of them discoursing in Greek and Hebrew in a little preschool for geniuses. But people that gifted are typically ill suited for this world, and they struggle in some way. Sophia was socially awkward and tended to hide behind the shelter of all the books she read. They were more interesting to her than the social world of people, and, I believe, to someone like her, they made a lot more sense than the world did. She was also—like Kant, Newton, and countless saints—a lifelong virgin.

We met in the college choir, bonding over a shared interest in medieval music. In choir, we never touched any music earlier than Palestrina, so Sophia gathered a group of like-minded musicians and started a group dedicated to Gregorian chant. I was among them, and she was our leader. We would perform in Catholic churches around the city, and since Sophia didn’t drive, I would pick her up, and we would drive together. I enjoyed the opportunity to spend this time with her. Her ability to inhale works of philosophy meant that you could learn more from her exhales than you could in most classes. I treasured the opportunity to learn about works I was familiar with but would probably never read—titans of the past centuries like Wittgenstein, Kant, Hegel, all the way back to obscure medievalists, saints who recorded their visions in Latin and remained untranslated into English. She enjoyed teaching me. I was like a child to her, in some ways. I showed eagerness to learn but was, compared to her, practically an empty vessel.

But, in other ways, she was like a child to me. Even though she came from a secular family in very secular LA—both her parents were attorneys—she had attended an all-girls Catholic boarding school from the age of six until she went away to college. The school had been one selected by her, as a six-year-old, for its intellectual rigor as well as its secluded location in the middle of the desert. I never brought up any use of drugs or alcohol around her, never swore, never discussed my atheism either. I even managed to avoid mentioning my girlfriend—someone I was quite serious about at the time—because I knew it carried the implication of premarital sex. It wasn’t that I feared her judgment; I didn’t want to taint her mind with such thoughts. I never even played music in the car when we drove together. I didn’t want to distract from the conversation, but I also felt a certain responsibility to shelter her from the vulgar world of popular music. It sounds silly to say now, but I really did want to preserve her—her rationality, her purity—perhaps to a fault.

There was one drive, however, that was different. We were coming back from our last performance as a choir. Sophia was leaving for a Carthusian monastery in the French Alps the following week. I saw on the car stereo that the song playing on the radio was “God Only Knows.” Something about the finality of this car ride made me turn the volume up. We both listened in silence, and when it was over, I turned the radio off again. She said that it was one of the most beautiful melodies she had ever heard. She asked who had performed that song, and I told her.

“The Beach Boys?” She was aghast. “The Beach Boys sound like that?”

She said she had heard the name of that group before, but it had struck her ears as so unserious, so frivolous, so LA that she had never bothered to learn anything about them. I shared the story of Brian Wilson’s genius and his troubles, too. I realized that they were similar souls, incredibly gifted but perhaps too pure for the world they lived in. She told me she couldn’t believe that song had been out there all her life, floating through her as radio waves, and she had never heard it before now. She would never be able to listen to it again once she left for the monastery. And for the first time, I watched her face show signs of an inner struggle. She had the distant gaze of someone thinking over a problem for which they don’t have the answer. And I saw that there was still a lot she had to learn about the world, which she never would if she went away. But she did, of course. And I never saw her again.

For a while after she left, it made me angry to think about what she could have done had she stayed. She was so smart, she loved music so much, and she was a natural teacher, especially of children. Children made perfect sense to her, being childlike in some ways herself. Faiths that prohibit monastic life—Islam being the major example—argue that people like her, like Ivan, should remain in the world so that they may better it, rather than leave it behind to achieve their own spiritual perfection. I see the reason in that. I regret that I didn’t try to talk Sophia out of it in the car that day. I hope that she has found what she wanted and that it is worth the loss to the world. Because I cannot contact her, I often wonder about the rhythm of her life up there inside those ancient walls. She might as well be in heaven. Yet, she is alive. What sustains her now, I wonder?

The word monastic means “a solitary person” or “a person, alone.” Perhaps Ivan and Sophia have a strength that I lack. An eternal spring which allows them to be truly alone, to be comfortable without the connections that give my fleeting life meaning. Ivan writes to me that in the solitude of the monastery, one can find a peace akin to a great slab of marble. My own solitude, I admit, reminds me more of a well which gets darker the deeper I get. Duplicity, conceit, coldness, self-opinion, and all the passions slowly melt away and are replaced by simplicity and compassion, he writes to me. And this makes me question my own choices, whether I should have walked his same path. Because I value those things, too. I think that we share some sense of what makes a good life. A life worth living. The difference is I just couldn’t let go. When they were leaving, my instinct was to join them. I could live in the monastery, too. We could stay together. I would give up everything. I would leave it all behind for them. But therein lies the difference, I see now. Because when they left, they accepted that it would mean leaving me.