Monks Follow Me

regularly, give me plain looks that insist across
the silence between us, "You know what
you need to do. You know." Especially on
those days when I find it particularly difficult
to be nice and when I feel particularly bad for
not being nice very much of the time--those
are the sort of days that signing up at the local
abbey hangs over my head like a devoted
cloud, fully realized, unrelenting. Recently I met
a Brother Timothy in Willits. Brother Timothy
had a constant frog in his throat, and when he
spoke I knew some of the things he had seen
in his day without having to ask. He talked
about the other monks with an extremely
judgmental tone. The ones he liked he said
were "hot" monks. To a Franciscan, that meant
they must have damn near lived on air. To be
hot you had to have been eating out of
dumpsters since '64, had to have been wearing
and washing the same one set of clothes since
two weeks after the day you lost your last job,
had to stand up fast after eight hours straight
of praying and prostrating in front of the altar
and cry, "More, more! Give me more! I want
more burdens to shed. Give me another
chance!" Brother Timothy told me in one of his
heated asides that They (with a capital 'T')
had given it to Judi Bari, had finally forced on her
a slow and painful death, not just because
she loved the trees so much and was willing
to fight for them, but because she was a woman
who loved the trees. This was a terribly rich
and dangerous combination. "Don't be too rich,"
he warned, "And above all, don't think They
don't know what riches really are. In the end,
They have no choice but to lash out and grab
hold of whatever They can in Their final, frantic
efforts to fill in the massive holes Their money
carved out of Their hearts."

(1996)