Gods, Ghosts & Borders

Picture a man in a robe, candlelight, some private telephone line to God that the rest of you don't get. I'll tell you what it was actually like, and you're not going to like the answer. I couldn't unsee it, and neither will you.

I spent years inside those walls learning to kneel before something no one in that building had ever seen, heard, or touched. Not one of us. Not the abbot, not the old monks who had worn the robe for forty years, not the earnest boys like I was, who mistook devotion for a kind of sight the rest of the world simply lacked. We knelt anyway. We built our entire lives around a presence none of us could hold in our hands, and called that the highest kind of holding.

You are waiting for me to tell you it was fraud. It was not. That is the part that took me half my life to understand. No one in that monastery was lying. Every one of us felt something there in the dark, something real enough to organize a life around. The older I get, the less I care whether that presence was true. What holds me now, what I cannot put down, is the question of how a mind builds a thing so convincing out of nothing at all, and then kneels to its own construction as though someone else had made it.

Let me tell you what the old monks never told me. I do not think they knew it themselves.

Before there was a God to kneel to, there was only a sound in the dark, and something in us deciding, in less time than it takes to breathe, whether that sound wished us harm.

No catechism teaches this. I learned it only after I had left, in books that never once spoke of the sacred and did not need to, because it was already there, waiting quietly in a footnote for someone patient enough to find it. Something moves in the grass. It is the wind, or it is a lion. Mistake the lion for wind, and there is no second mistake to make. So the mind that survived long enough to become mine, and yours, is a mind that leans, when uncertain, toward fear, toward the shape of someone standing just beyond what it can see.

I knelt in that chapel for years believing I was answering a call. Now I understand I was only very good at hearing lions in the grass, and calling what I heard by a gentler name.

Does that undo it for you. It did not undo it for me. It only moved the mystery from one room to another, from the God I could never find to the mind that kept finding Him anyway, faithfully, in the dark, without once being asked. That mind is older than any god it has invented, stranger than any wall it has built, and it may be the only thing in this story still worth kneeling to.

Here is something else no one warns you about the religious life. It does not cure you of ghosts. It only teaches you to see more of them, and to give them better names.

There was a brother in that monastery, an old man, already dead before I arrived, and yet I could have told you the shape of his temper, the particular kindness in him, the exact face he wore when a novice burned the bread. I knew these things only because the living monks kept speaking of him in the present tense, as though he might still walk through the door and set something right. Brother Anselm would never allow that. Not would have. Would. He had been in the ground ten years and he still held opinions.

We carry our dead the way a tree carries winter, not as an ending but as something the branches have simply agreed to hold. You will learn this yourself, if you have not already: that a person does not finish when the body does, that some room inside you keeps a chair pulled out for them, unoccupied, waiting. For a long time I mistook this for faith. I no longer think it needs so grand a name. Perhaps it is only this, that the mind cannot bear to leave anything unfinished, and has quietly decided that love is the one thing it will not permit itself to complete.

Make of that what you will. I have stopped being certain it is a flaw.

And then there was the wall.

Every monastery has one, some of stone, some only of understanding, and ours had both. There was a line past which you did not walk, a gate that closed at a certain hour, and a knowledge, never once spoken aloud, that the men on our side of that wall belonged to each other in a way we did not belong to the men beyond it. Nothing in the stone explained why. The wall did not know it was sacred. It became sacred only because we agreed, together, silently, day after day, to treat it as though it had always been.

I have since watched nations do the very same thing with a river.

You will meet people, in the life ahead of you, who will die for lines, actual lines, drawn on actual paper, by men who never once met the ones who would bleed for them. Do not mistake this for foolishness. It is the same old reflex that once kept your ancestors breathing, the quiet, constant question of whether this one belongs to you or not, grown older now, dressed in a uniform, and handed something sharper than fear. The tribe still needs telling apart from every other tribe. It has simply found larger walls to do it with.

So here, at last, is my confession, the whole of it, the thing forty years of silence finally taught me to say plainly.

I did not leave that monastery because I stopped believing in something greater than myself. I left because I came to understand that the greatness and the mind imagining it were never two separate things, no matter how badly those walls needed me to believe they were. The God, the wall, the ghost of Brother Anselm. Not three mysteries but one, wearing three different robes, and the mystery was never above us or beyond the gate. It lived inside the skull the entire time, doing what it has always done, quietly building invisible things and then forgetting, almost at once, that its own hands had built them.

I am not telling you to stop kneeling. I knelt for years and do not regret a single hour of it. I am telling you to notice, at least once in your life, what it is you kneel to, who built it, and whether you built it yourself without ever once being told.

That is the whole of what the silence taught me. It is not much. But it is more than I carried in with me, and more than most men learn in a lifetime spent walking past walls they never thought to question.

Now. Do you still want to know what it was like in there.

Or do you understand, finally, that I have already told you.