What follows is a short story I wrote to express the conflict I feel inside between worldly and monastic life. It's meant to give an overview of both the good and bad within me, from a difficult childhood and anger issues to a deep and sincere appreciation of monasticism.
Jianyu was a ball of rage. Weeks of pent up frustration had been brewing in the deep, dark recesses of his heart or whatever repressed feelings go, like an emotional pressure cooker. For some reason, everything bottled itself up inside of him until it became unbearable, boiling over into a fit of anger or tears, or else he'd lapse into an insufferable sullenness. He could never seem to escape the external pressures of his own life. Work. Family. Relationships. The expectations of society. They seemed omnipresent. And the internal pressures, well, they weren't so easy to shake off, either. More often than not, they'd eat at him from the inside for long periods of time, until he was at the point where he was so consumed by them that he felt like all that was left of him was an exposed nerve pained by every word, every touch. Nothing ever seemed to go right for him, like he had died and gone to a hell where you were subtly tortured in the mundanest of ways.
He had to face the fact that he was completely miserable, and it seemed like everything around him was to blame. Or was it really his fault? Everyone else around him seemed to make due. Why was it so hard for him? Perhaps because of some failing on his part? Karma from a past life coming to bite him in the ass? He wasn't sure, and right now, he didn't really care. All he knew was that some asshole had put gum in the dials of his lock at work, "A great start to what promised to be a great day," he thought.
All his life, Jianyu had been picked on. By his classmates. By his stepfather. By coworkers. It was always something. Too short. Too poor. Too weird. Too nerdy. Too unfashionable. Too much someone else's kid. Too quiet. Too unsociable. Too scary (satanist, goth phase). Too hard working. Too godknowswhat. Everyone seemed to find something to punish him for. "Maybe I
am in my own personal hell," he mused.
He was often angry and defensive as a result of this, but he was also empathetic, generous, and thoughtful. He wanted so desperately to be a good person, and tried to develop patience for other people. Unfortunately, he had acquired his stepfather's short temper, and found it difficult to shake off the years of conditioning. He was used to yelling and violence, and was intimately familiar with the feeling of fear. And he realized that years of being afraid of his stepfather's outbursts fed his anger and impatience. The things that had made his stepfather angry in turn made him angry, because they would trigger so much of the suffering he experienced as a child, and it was like he was mad at the people and situations that sparked his stepfather's fury. The last thing he ever wanted was to be like his stepfather, and it pained him that he was.
At the moment, he was on the verge of both fury and despondency. One of Jianyu's other less attractive traits was his tendency towards self-pity. Standing there, looking at the lock, which he was able to clean without as much trouble as he worried he might, he felt sorry for himself as he brooded, fantasizing about all the terrible things he'd love to do to the person who desecrated his personal space. "Motherfucker," he half yelled, half whined. "Why does this shit always happen to me?" Jianyu tried to calm himself down, focusing on his breathing. His anger and dejection brought a host of familiar thoughts to the surface of his mind, chief among them his lament at the backwardness of the world, which seemed so full of competitiveness and violence for such a social species, and the conflict inside of him between his desire to live a worldly life and the desire to become a monk. Why did he have to work so hard at dead-end jobs just to survive? Why do most people seem more concerned about getting ahead than helping others be successful? Why was the world so seemingly soulless and thing-oriented? He was having what you might call a dark afternoon of the soul.
He was getting old. He just turned 40. He didn't have a very fulfilling career, and it didn't pay all that well, either. He didn't have any worldly goals or passions, and no real direction to go in. He liked to work, but it was hard to find a decent job these days without a college degree (especially a rewarding one that paid well). He liked learning, but he was hesitant to put himself into tens of thousands of dollars of debt pursuing an education designed to make him more marketable rather than a better person. The world seemed so contradictory; and you either have to be a participant or a renunciate. There was no middle ground as far as he could see. You were expected to study what you needed to get a job, then work until you're old and grey, life being more of a soul-sucking experience than an enriching one. His heart yearned for something more, but the world crushed those dreams with an invisible hand; and religious monasticism seemed more and more the only escape, something his mind turned to again and again.
Deep down, he knew that he was a good person. At least he tried to be. But it was a struggle, and he knew that he could be better, happier. "We have such potential as a species, but as a society we tend to value all the wrong things," he mumbled. It was like his very beingness was torn. Torn between wanting to be a part of the world and wanting to renounce it, devoting himself instead to a contemplative life. He appreciated aspects of everyday life, but they were just not satisfying in a way that was difficult for him to explain. Kind of like the things he found pleasure in also seemed fleeting and trivial compared to a truth more profound and immutable, a truth that he intuitively felt existed. And yet he wondered. Maybe he just wanted there to be something more because he'd looked into the abyss and was afraid, afraid that life was ultimately an endless cycle of grasping at shadows to fill a primordial void that couldn't psychologically or physiologically be filled—a gaping emptiness that consumed all and out of which nothing escaped. Maybe what we see is all we get. The thought depressed him further. All he really knew was that he was tired of feeling lost and fragmented and like he was running out of time, and it was time to start his shift.
Jianyu worked as a housekeeper at a busy Catholic hospital. He was optimistic about it at the beginning. He'd just been laid off from his last job and was scrambling to find something when his girlfriend suggested he should apply where she worked. He did and got a call fairly quickly for an interview and was hired that day. The hours weren't ideal, and he had to work more weekends than not; but it was a job that paid a bit more than his previous one. Plus, it was for a nonprofit, spiritually-based healthcare provider, which greatly appealed to him. He knew going in that it wasn't a glamorous job, and that it wouldn't be easy—he'd be cleaning hospital rooms and common areas and dealing with sick people and in regular contact with every bodily fluid imaginable on a daily basis. He was understandably a little intimidated by it all. But at the same time, he'd be doing something essential at a place designed to help people in need; and he thought that maybe, if he could approach it in the right way, it could help him to deepen his own personal spiritual practice. With naive hope, he thought to himself before his first day, "If I do this job selfishly, only for myself and the money I'd get each payday, I'll most certainly suffer. It's hard work. It's dirty work. It's dangerous work at times. It's work that many might look down upon. And little about it will likely be enjoyable in and of itself. But if somehow I can find a way to do it with those I'm serving in mind, the people who come because they're sick or dying or visiting loved ones who are, and not allow my heart to be hardened by the work itself or the suffering around me, then the rewards I'll receive will be priceless."
In his heart, he truly believed that all people share a common bond, a common nature, as humans. But he also believed that, in some shape or form, we'd lost that connection to one another somewhere along the way. Inspired by this idea, his hopes about starting a new job, and a biography of St. Francis of Assisi he'd been reading, he wrote in his journal: "We get so wrapped up in our own lives and narratives that we lose the ability to love others as ourselves. It seems like a wonderful ideal, this selfless, reconciling love, but I don't think most of us actually think it's possible. But what if it is? What if all the great spiritual teachers throughout history are right? To be able to develop an honest and healthy sense of humility, to intimately realize that nobody is beneath me, and to have the opportunity to serve those in need, are both things I desire greatly. I'm inspired by stories like that of the life of Francis, who overcame his fear and self-centredness through acts of humility and charity in his own spiritual journey, caring for lepers and the poor out of love and compassion and being able to see in them the presence of God so easily obscured by their outward circumstances and our own spiritual blindness. While I'm certainly no Francis of Assisi, I see in the story of his life an example of a path to inner peace and theosis, that experience of real and transformative union with divine nature that I think is open to all." And that union was the one, true goal in his heart.
Unfortunately, his new job wouldn't prove to be the means of achieving it quite like he'd hoped. Despite being a nonprofit, it was run like any other business, and Jianyu found himself chronically overworked, underpaid, and full of stress. They were consistently short-handed, and he was often doubled up and covering for other people, which made it difficult for him to give the patients whose rooms he cleaned the time and attention he wished he could offer. Housekeepers were expected to be in and out of a room in 8 minutes, hurrying through their patient rooms so they could strip and clean as many discharged rooms as possible. It was a race against the clock, which put a lot of pressure on everyone to be efficient rather than caring and comforting. Even so, Jianyu still found time on occasion to spend a little extra time with those who he felt needed it, sometimes spending his breaks talking with someone or just taking a little extra time in their room, listening to their story as he cleaned. He greatly enjoyed these conversations, and always felt a sense of joy when he could make someone feel even slightly better. A smile here, a laugh there. Sometimes a thank you for his work. These were the little things that kept his spirits up and kept him going throughout his hectic days. He genuinely wanted to be of service, as little use as he often felt.
Jianyu thought back, through forgotten memories and a stream of monotonous, unfulfilling days, to the last time he truly felt happy, content, at peace with the world around him. His mind instinctively wandered into the walls of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Trappist monastery in the wooded hills of rural Oregon about thirty miles southwest of Portland. He initially went because he was curious about what Christian monasticism was like and how it differed from the Theravadan Buddhist monasteries he was predominantly familiar with after starting Thomas Merton's autobiography,
The Seven Storey Mountain. He wrote not thinking he'd be welcome, not being Catholic at the time, but was surprised by an open invitation to visit for five days or so, an experience that would serve as the catalyst for a quite unexpected spiritual journey.
All of his monastic experiences in the past had given him a favourable impression. After the initial shock of going from the busyness of worldly life to the relative quiet of the monastic day, free from the distractions of entertainment and the internet, he'd settle into the rhythm of the monastery and his own mind, and the peace such surroundings offered. But this experience in particular planted a seed in his heart that grew into something more than he was prepared for, something that pushed him further into a tradition he previously had no interest in, and into the life of someone he didn't know he needed until that moment. It was this experience that led him to truly appreciate and understand the teachings and example of Jesus, seeing his life as a mandala, a living tapestry meant to inspire and hearten those who could see him for what he was,
a lamp shining forth the
bright light of hope into the future in order to guide us and help us not lose our way to the kingdom of heaven, that joyful world we wish to one day see, born out of love in action. And that journey, he realized, began inside, began with a conversion, began with connecting to that little point Meister Eckhart spoke of "wherein the soul turns back on itself and finds itself, and knows itself to be a creature," sprouting forth like a new life born from the old. And that journey is what drew him to the monastery and to the mystics who often haunted their halls.
He knew that it wasn't because these places and people were magic in and of themselves, only that they helped nurture the 'fallen grain of wheat' so that it could grow and "produce much fruit." Part of us has to die for us to find our true self, our spiritual self hidden beneath the clutter of our mundane, busybody thoughts and evolutionary drives, that spark of consciousness which Thomas Merton said "experiences something of the fulness of intelligence, freedom and spirituality that are actualized within ourselves" when we're "plainly conscious of the real meaning of our own existence." And for Jianyu, much of the world around him seemed like so much '
rocky ground,' where any spiritual seeds that were planted lacked the roots to sustain themselves and were easily swept away by the cares and concerns of everyday, modern life.
There was a simplicity and wholeness to modern life that was missing, a moral connection that was lost or broken somehow. He couldn't quite articulate it himself, but he'd found the idea first expressed in
The Idiot, where one of Dostoyevsky's characters, Lebedev, goes on a long tirade about the lack of a 'binding idea' left in his day and age versus the twelfth century, when things may have been material worse but people more spiritually rich. The character isn't a particularly good or even reliable one, but he expressed this idea in a way that caught Jianyu by surprise, seeing in it something deep and profound and utterly true. Today, prosperity and wealth may indeed be greater than in the past, the frequencies of famine may indeed be lessened, and the speed of travel and communication may indeed be immensely accelerated; but to what end? What do we do with it all? Do we feed the poor? Do we clothe the naked? Do we love others as ourselves and voluntarily repent of our misdeeds, seeking one another's forgiveness? Or was Lebedev right that we're all just "stewed to mush?"
The moment he entered the grounds of Our Lady of Guadalupe, however, thoughts of that sort immediately fell away. There wasn't anything missing or broken. Quite the opposite, in fact. What he noticed more than anything was the sheer abundance of what was mostly missing from the world and what he so desperately craved. He noticed the peace. The calm. The way nature was incorporated into the design of the chapel and meditation hall. And most of all, the glow of the monks' faces. They had a moderate amount of wealth and prosperity from the sale of logging rights to the state; they had plenty of food to eat and to share with guests such as himself; and they even had cars and email; but they weren't lacking that 'binding idea.' Rather, that 'binding idea' permeated everything there, including the daily schedule the monks so religiously followed. It was built into the very heart of the monastery, what gave it life.
Thinking back on all of this, he realized he was mostly angry because he was suffering. And not simply from the more obvious reasons, because of his misfortunes, material circumstances, or surroundings, which, in the grand scheme of things, were all superficial, fleeting, and unimportant. No, he was suffering because of the shallowness of his own spiritual life. The rocky ground that he saw in the world mirrored the rocky ground in his own heart; and the monastery was none other than an outside reflection of that 'little point' inside of him he had so much trouble reaching, like an oasis in the midst of a vast desert, the innermost temple of the holy spirit, where God dwells and in which we dwell in God to '
become one spirit.' And to reach the latter, he knew that he must first enter the former, to plant himself in fertile soil so that he could eventually 'produce much fruit.' He knew in that moment what he had to do, what he'd been putting off for too many years—he had to follow his heart and follow Christ: into the desert, into the garden of Gethsemane, onto the cross, and ultimately, into the still, deep, cooling, love-filled waters of the silent life.
