A draft blows through the bad frame of the windowpane. I can hear bare branches clacking in the January wind in the night outside. I hope someone brought that dog inside.
It’s almost 11:00 PM. All the monks are tucked away in their beds except maybe for the abbott. He stays up late and works on his mosaics. I try not to disturb him. It’s a different kind of sacred time for him. After a long day of duties, it’s now time for art.
I’ve seen him work. He cracks each special imported Italian stone into the perfect shape and size. All of these little hand-crafted stones have their own pixellated purposes. Insignificant rocks by themselves. Together? A masterpiece that will last unto ages of ages.
Each stone is no doubt cemented in place with a prayer.
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.”
We visitors all stay up late. Some of us read, some of us work on insane Quixotic projects. Some fight Hell.
There’s the businessman figuring out next steps. There’s the postulant and iconographer. There’s the young couple with their infant daughter. There’s me, about to hit 50, finally arriving to the present. And there are always visitors—couples, individuals, groups—who, obedient to some transcendent impulses, arrive at this little sanctuary on an Oklahoma prairie seemingly out of the blue. They “come and see.”
We all have our stories. Our own little stones. We keep them to ourselves for the most part—we’re supposed to—but this quiet life of prayer and work, this ora et labora—comes out a little word or two a month or more at a time.
I’ve never known tighter bonds forged in shorter time with so few words.
It happens when we run into each other in the dark hallways or, more often than not, at the coffee maker, whose use falls into a nebulous theological category. “Coffee must be made Kurdish style,” the hieromonk told me on my first morning here. Evidently “Kurdish style” means something Chernobyl-esque: three huge, heaping scoops of coffee from a bulk tub of grounds, up to and beyond the rim of the filter. “Close the coffee room door and only make it after morning liturgy.”
Cream and sugar are for the novices.
But after 9:00 PM? The rules are less clear. The nights elongate for many of us, stretching from the abrupt sunset to the sluggish sunrise. Coffee fuels the fight.
A gust rattles a window that was no doubt installed before the first Space Shuttle disaster. I check my phone. Looks like The Situation will continue into its 210th day.
In the southeast, a small oil rig flares its gas. It’s about two miles from the monastery grounds. On clear nights you’d never know it was there. But tonight the clouds descend to the deck. The wind carries flurries of snow across the fields, stitching the seam between Heaven and earth. The fifteen-foot gas flare lights it all up, emblazoning the whole southeast horizon like an inferno.
Holy Theotokos, take my family under thy protection…
I say the words every night. Sometimes I pray them.
Someone laughs in the winding corridors of the monastery. And then, a shushing.
It’s a strange thing, the rubrics of the monastery. It’s a retreat. A hospital. A place of realignment. We are all here to fight the most important battles of our lives, but we are urged to do so in silence. In that silence we can hear.
“The Father uttered one Word; that word is His Son: And He utters Him for ever in everlasting silence, and in silence the soul has to hear it.”
I run into the businessman in the coffee room. It’s after 11:00. He’s brewing another pot. We both surprise each other with words we didn’t know we needed to hear. Or that we possessed.
“Talk to the abbott,” he tells me, regarding a matter I’d relegated to long-term storage. I told him I would, surprised to discover that I meant it.
Father Abbott is in his studio, breaking rocks one-by-one and putting them in the places they were made for.
This is how icons are made.
Beautiful, moodful writing, thanks for sharing!
Beautiful style