From Comfortable Distances (48 page)

She brought them out of
shavasana after she had placed her loving hands on each one.

“Let’s all come into a
seated pose for some final breathing,” she said. “Roll onto your side, take one
more minute in this solitude, in this place of rest and gratitude, and when
you’re ready, find your way to the front of your mat in a cross legged pose as
we began. Once again, listen to your inhales, your exhales. And together, we
will chant the sound of Om; this is not a religious sound, just the sound of
the universe coming together, our oneness as people who do life together. You
may repeat after me, or just take in the vibration.”

“Om,” Tess hummed. “Om.”
She let the sound drift from her throat to her lips, feeling its vibration in
her whole being. “Om,” she hummed for a final time before she bowed her head to
the earth and raised herself up.

“Thank you for allowing
me to share this journey with you all,” she said. “The light in me bows down to
the light in each and every one of you. Namaste.” The yogis chanted back in
unison, “Namaste.”

In the moments of silence
which followed, Tess understood what her mother had felt – how it must have
been so satisfying for her—outright joyful—to guide others as she did.

And then the silence
broke and everyone in the room, mentors included, applauded her, Tess, the
first teacher trainer to complete her practical exam. It had been fun, natural.
She had let go, trusted herself and plunged into it and now she felt dizzy and
light headed from the experience, unable to remember any specifics of what she
had said or done during the time that she was the teacher. She moved to find a
place on the floor beside Dale and the others who had seated themselves after
her class, and then the mentors were speaking, thanking Tess before they
started their critique of her class, which had caught her off guard – she
hadn’t expected them to discuss her class in front of the room of forty
students.

There was a consensus
that she had slowed down, and that there was a new graciousness to her, a joy
that radiated from her. One of the mentors commented that she saw a more
open-minded and accepting Tess than she had seen that first night that Tess
came to take a class at the yoga studio. Tess could remember that night, which
seemed very long ago, the closed mindedness she had felt towards taking a yoga
class, the bickering with Michael en route to the studio. So long ago, but in
reality it was only eight months back. So much had happened since then, between
meeting Neal, her mother dying, the new friends she had made, yoga. Was she
more joyful? She didn’t know. Her life certainly had taken on new dimensions.
The mentors went on to say that they had witnessed Tess’s evolution into a more
compassionate person, into someone they would want to take a yoga class from. “A
tough act to follow” was one of the comments a mentor said regarding her class.
The mentors bowed to Tess and said Namaste, the rest of the room following and
Tess did the same to them and then it was time for the next teacher trainer to
perform.

It was over. All of that
prep and worry and fear, and just like that, it was over. That was what Tess
thought as she made her way through the Midtown Tunnel and towards the Belt
Parkway. Relief, that’s what she felt. She yawned. Relief and exhaustion.
Revisiting the day’s events, she believed that she had done fine on the
comprehensive and she already knew that the mentors felt strongly about her
practical exam. The question that came to her was the one she had asked herself
again and again over her lifetime each time that she had completed a deal or
relationship or endeavor: now what?
Now what?
Tess didn’t know. Her
mother used to tell her followers, “Before enlightenment you have to take out
the garbage each night and after enlightenment you have to take out the garbage
each night.”

 Not that she was
enlightened, but it was the sentiment that she associated with. Things may
change on the inside, even if they appeared the same on the outside. That
fascinated her about life—how just looking at another person she couldn’t know
much of anything.

The yoga tests were over.
It was hard to believe all that time and energy and now she was free. She
sighed. She felt as if she had accomplished something. Exactly what, she wasn’t
sure of, but she was sure that a few months back, the thought of standing up in
front of the room and teaching a yoga class and enjoying herself was
unfathomable in her life. That was enough to make her insides rush, as if she
were plunging down a waterfall. Who knew what was to come next in life? Maybe
she would give it a go being a yoga teacher. Sitting in the city traffic, the
thought of living in Woodstock appealed to Tess. Wide open spaces, not all the
rushing around. She could try it. See if she liked it. But she’d feel
ridiculous teaching yoga, wouldn’t she? It was a nutty thought, but so were
most of the ideas she had acted on in her life. She didn’t have anything left
to prove—she had been a successful entrepreneur for three decades now. Moving
up to Woodstock, teaching yoga in the old house was a real possibility for her.
Prakash would be supportive of that. Michael, well, he would get over it. Neal
would want her to follow her path. He would support her regardless of what she
chose to do. Oh, but she was being ridiculous. So she had fun teaching her yoga
class. So what? She enjoyed lots of things at first, but over time she got sick
of them. The 11N exit for Mill Basin was there in the distance. Tess maneuvered
her way into the right lane. She followed the curve of the exit onto Flatbush
Avenue. There was certainly something to the familiar, but she knew that with
time, everything new became familiar.

In Your Own Garden

The Return: April 2003

Most days I woke up and
read and when the bells rang I made my way to my pew in the chapel. I liked to
get there early. Sometimes I had my own words with God. Sometimes I sat and had
no thoughts. I took in the stained glass and felt warm in its glow. I nodded to
the other monks when they walked in. I was always uneasy seeing others first
thing in the morning. I would think, here we all are again and while it was a
glorious thing for me to see my brothers alive another day, I was never quite
sure what to do with us all being there again. We came together every day,
throughout the day, both in the chapel and for meals and to work, so that after
time I began to feel that there was no mystery in the everydayness of my life.
I began to wonder what would happen if I stayed out in the fields gardening
when the church bells rang or if I walked down the road, away from the
monastery on my own pilgrimage. I wondered what it would feel like for me—would
I feel guilty? Free?

So much of the
Benedictine rule is based on fear of the Lord. Eventually you cast out fear and
love God and that becomes your reason for doing everything. Sometimes I felt
that I was out of the shadow of fear for the Lord and in the sunshine of his
love, but then I would be praying and it was fear that was there with me, not
love. At those moments, I felt away from God’s grace.

“What do you seek?”the
abbot asked and I responded,“The mercy of God.”

But at some point in the
months before I left, I had stopped seeking the mercy of God and sought to be with
God on my own terms. To construct a tunnel between us and not keep building a
rope bridge that God could cut lose at any moment. I didn’t seek his mercy so
much as I sought a mutual relationship with
Him. I sought a union that wasn’t
based on subordination. I wanted oneness. After all of my years in the
monastery, I didn’t see how being there was leading me any closer to God.

“What do you seek?” the
abbot asked and I thought freedom, a chance to find God on my own terms. To let
him know me not for my actions, but for who I was at my core. I wanted God to
observe me being me as I struggled in the world and took chances. Who would I
be outside of the monastery? After twenty-three years in the monastery, I had
ceased to think it terribly important what label I wore when it came to my
relationship with God. Monk or man, religious or secular.

Something in me shattered
when I told myself that I was going to leave the monastery, as if my body were
made of glass. Moments later, when the words I had spoken to myself sunk in, I
felt light, weightless. I was going to leave. As quickly as a part of me died,
a part of me came to life. I felt giddy.

The journey home was
long. Father Demetrius drove me with my suitcase to the Muenster Family
Restaurant, where the bus stopped that would take me to Saskatoon. He didn’t
look much at me during the few minute drive. When it was time for me to open
the car door and get out, he nodded and I nodded back at him. There was an
end-of-the-world tone to our parting, and while a part of me longed to stay, to
override the feelings within me and go back to the monastery and carry on,
whatever it was that had awakened in me gave me the strength to keep going. I
waved goodbye to Father Demetrius as he made a U-turn and headed back to the
monastery, but he didn’t wave back.

The world seemed flat and
endless en route to Saskatoon. So many miles of barren, burnt-out land. Nothing
had changed, or so it seemed, in all of those years that I was tucked away. I
passed cows and graveled roads and trucks. I had worn my heavy black robe for
so long, that sitting there in my old black pants and black sweater felt odd to
me, like I had shed my skin.

The Saskatoon bus station
was dingy and cold. From there I took a cab to the airport and when I rolled down
the window, I shivered in the breeze. I felt frail and hollow. If the cab
driver tried to make conversation with me I didn’t notice, as I was preoccupied
with the scenery. It had been so long since I
had seen anything other than the
Muenster prairie. I thought back to the day many years prior when the young
Romanian couple, Dora and Alex, had driven me to the monastery.

The abbot and Father
Demetrius had spoken to someone in the Canadian passport office to renew my
passport so that what I held out to the airport personnel was a copy of an old
passport with a letter from the monastery and the passport officials. Once they
let me through, I was detained at the security check. They had decided to pull
me off the line to go through my luggage and as a security officer was
examining the few articles of clothing and toiletries in my suitcase, I wanted
to tell him that he was not going to find anything—that I
had just left a
monastery where I had been a monk for 23 years—but hearing it in my mind, it
seemed a ridiculous thing to say.

At the gate waiting for
my flight to Minneapolis, I had the urge to call Father Demetrious, to let him
know that I had made it to the airport okay. But he wasn’t expecting to hear
from me. My ties to the monastery were broken. There was no one there who was
waiting to hear from me.

I thought about calling
my mother, but I feared that she was still in shock and unclear as to what I
was doing with my life. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I
didn’t feel as if I belonged to
anyone or anything—I was just Neal on his own
and I felt a sense of gratitude and longing for all the years in which I had
been part of a brotherhood. And then I remembered that I wasn’t alone even
though I had left the monastery, that God was still with me, and that made me
feel lighter and easier with myself.

My flight from
Minneapolis to New York City was delayed for hours. At first I read into
that—it was a sign, a chance for me to change my mind, to return to the
monastery. People around me were chatting, complaining, laughing. I thought
about how easy it was for me at the monastery, how I never needed to speak or
explain my silence. It was acceptable to be quiet at the monastery. Here,
amongst people making small talk, I felt uneasy, as if I was a freak. I decided
to close my eyes, meditate. Think and not think. I called my mother and told
her that she shouldn’t head out to the airport, that we were delayed and that I
would simply take a cab from the airport. Four hours later I was on a plane heading
to JFK airport in New York.

On the plane, I sat next
to a woman who was a chaplain at a San Francisco hospital. She was 27-years old
with sunny red hair, a pale complexion with freckles, and pool blue eyes. I
told her that I had just come from a monastery and she didn’t ask for any
details. She told me that she was scared when she had to talk to people about
their impending deaths as what did she really know about death? She mentioned
that she had faced and overcome her own illness but with the dying there was
even a sense of guilt about that as they hadn’t been able to triumph over their
illnesses. She wondered how and why God had trusted her to counsel these
people. She told me that she thought of running out of the room when she was
with the sick because she felt like a phony, an imposter, only somehow just at
her breaking moment she would know what to say to them, how to be with them. I
mostly nodded listening to her. She was so young to have such a big job was
what I thought.

She was going to New York
City to meet up with her boyfriend, who lived in Boston. She was taking him to
a wedding where she would introduce him to her parents for the first time. She
had anxiety over this—it mattered to her that her parents liked him.

I started thinking about
my parents. My father having passed away and how strange it would be to see my
mother after all the years that had passed. What did we even know about one
another? At the monastery, she had written to me regularly and vice versa and
we had spoken on the phone now and then. Her letters were mostly about her
activities at the nursing home, how the seasons took over the landscape and
such. My father’s funeral 10 years back had been quick—I had orchestrated much
of the ceremony during which time my mother and I had spoken only briefly and
then after taking care of some legal issues with her regarding my father’s
will, I was back at the monastery. We were virtually strangers to one another
and it made me feel apprehensive that I was going to be living alongside her in
the next few hours, as I didn’t know what I would say to her in this period in
which I was trying to figure out if I were a monk or a secular man. I had a
fleeting wish that I could go off and live alone for a bit but then I realized
that everything ahead of me was exactly as it should be, exactly what God had
prescribed for me. I was going to say yes to everything and not get in the way.

When the plane landed, I
walked with the girl to the luggage claim and there was her boyfriend, who had
waited for her at the airport for hours as a result of our delayed flight.
Saying goodbye to them both, wishing them a good weekend, made me feel
lonely—lonelier than I remembered ever feeling and I thought again about the
monastery, about turning around, about going back to the life I knew. Being at
the airport in New York, it was all too much for me. So much had changed in my
life since that day I started out so many years back. And then my duffel bag
appeared on the baggage claim carousel—the items within linking to me to the
last 23 years of my life: my books and journals and some pictures of the
brothers which I had taken with me. If I closed my eyes, I could see my room as
I left it back at the monastery: the thin white bed sheets pulled back slightly
on my cot-sized bed and my desk lamp positioned just so on the narrow desk that
was positioned against the wall adjacent to my bed. There lay my Bibles that
were too heavy to travel with and some books and articles I had accumulated
over the years by Thomas Merton and C.S. Lewis and the like as well as my
gardening books. I could see the door to my small, hollow closet in which I had
two robes hanging—both worn and in need of repair. I had left some possessions
as an act of faith, perhaps. I wondered if Father Demetrius would clear out my
room now that I was gone or if he’d leave it as is, in the hopes that I’d
return. Through my confusion, my
doubts, he had never voiced his opinion as to
my leaving, although I knew that he didn’t approve of it. The unspoken view was
that to leave the monastery was a breach of devotion.

In the taxi ride from the
airport to my home in Mill Basin, the final leg of my journey, I felt like I
was so many different Neal’s. I had lived in Brooklyn for my first 23 years and
I had been on the prairie for 23 years. My life split in half. Thinking about
what was to come, all the unknowns ahead, I felt a sense of liberation as well
as a tinge of fear. It was easier to change one’s life than I would have deemed
imaginable. One morning I was one place, and later that day, I was in another
place. Wherever I wandered on the prairie, whatever time of day, I searched for
the church cross way up high to lead me back to the monastery. At that moment,
nightfall approaching, I looked up into the night sky. Stars were beginning to
appear, the moon still a shadow. Here, in Brooklyn, I didn’t know what my
guiding star would be, my landmark. Coasting on the Belt Parkway all seemed
familiar, yet different, smaller perhaps. I remembered sitting in the olive
green Oldsmobile beside my father, en route to Buddies Fairyland Arcade across
from the Floridian Diner, where he would take me to go on rides and eat French
fries and chocolate éclairs after church some Sundays. I didn’t remember much
about the rides we went on or our conversations those Sundays, but I remembered
how proud and important I felt riding in that big car beside my father. He was
never much of a talker, but sitting next to him, I didn’t have the need to
speak.  There was a time in the first grade that I had made a Halloween
decoration in class—a black and orange scary cat cut out—with the help of my
teacher. I had kept asking my father to hang it up in the window of our house
as a decoration and I suppose I had gotten annoying as he had grabbed the decoration
from my hands and before I knew it he was ripping it up in front of me.
Startled, I had run out to the porch and cried—perhaps one of the most intense
cries I ever had in front of anyone. In between my sobs, I went on about how I
was going to get in trouble at school because he ripped it up and my mother had
come outside to comfort me, promising me that she was going to help me to make
a new one and then I was screaming that I didn’t want another one, that it was
an ugly stupid cat and I didn’t want another one. Later that afternoon, when I
sat at the dinner table with my mother and father, we were quiet and polite, as
if the incident had never happened. There were times my father could make me
feel that his having me for a son was the joy of his life, but there were other
times he made me feel like I was an annoyance.

The taxi driver was
making his way off of the Belt Parkway via exit 11N and I felt myself
stiffening up. This was it. The last few minutes of my journey were coming to
an end. I would be face to face with my mother, setting foot in the house I had
grown up in, the house I hadn’t seen in over two decades. We passed Kings Plaza
and there was the familiar Brooklyn traffic at the intersection of Avenue U and
Flatbush, cars beeping, some turning, others going straight. And then we were
at 66
^th
street and I felt empty inside, as if someone had turned me
upside down and shook me out. I was still thinking that I could turn around,
that I could go back to the monastery, but the driver was asking me for the
exact house address and I was telling him 56 Barlow Drive and he was making the
left turn off of 66
^th
street onto Barlow, pulling up in front of the
house.