The Bridegroom Comes: Chapter Six: Like A Ravening Lion

Glancing up through the window of the visitors’ quarters, Anton watched Father Esaias walk past along the path by the main hall, pounding a wooden mallet against the plank he carried, the semandron, the rhythmic tapping calling the other monks and those on retreat to Vespers. Anton set the balled-up pair of socks in his hand down on the bunk. He’d have to finish unpacking later. That could be a problem: Vespers would be followed immediately by dinner, eaten with the monks in the strict silence of the refectory. From there, monks and visitors would file back into church for Compline, the bedtime prayer service. Anton had requested an audience after that with Father Danieel, the abbot. By the time they were done, night would have fallen, and “lights out,” like all rules at Saint John the Forerunner, was strictly enforced. Anton quickly pulled folded sheets and blankets off their shelf onto the foot of the bed and threw his pyjamas on top, resigning himself to having later to grope around in the dark. Making a hasty sign of the cross before the icon over his bed in the Orthodox manner, thumb folded against forefinger and middle finger, hand moving quickly from forehead to belly, then from the right to left shoulder, he followed the wooden sound out the door, toward chapel.
Before crossing the Church’s threshold, Anton again crossed himself and bowed low to brush the ground with his hand in a ritual metanya. Stepping through the doors, he barely noticed the baskets of scarves set aside to remind women to keep their heads covered at all times, a sight he had previously found irksome. Passing from the Church’s narthex into the nave, the main worship space, he walked to the right side, the side reserved for men.
During his first visit, Anton had been put off by these old-world customs, by the monastery’s strict piety. This time, he found himself embracing it as a welcome relief from the moral ambiguities that threatened to overwhelm him. Upon his arrival for both retreats, Anton had been handed a brochure reminding visitors, including men, to dress modestly and to limit showering to nighttime hours after the monks had retired to their cells. He had found that difficult at first not to read as a tacit admission that the monks were prey to unnatural desires. It troubled him all the more to find such passions conceded by men of “the angelic life.”
Now, he was more inclined to admire the monks for their forthrightness, their willingness to confront directly the pull of the flesh in their desire to commune with the angels. His exposure to Tracy’s world had made him more aware of the permutations of human desire, its perverse capacity to flower into unpredictable forms. Surely it was understandable that men who had renounced the physical love of women should seek to limit as much as possible reminders of their bodily presence, even that such men might find their eyes lingering over the exposed flesh of other men. After all, Anton had heard what went on in prisons. And, if some of these men were prone to such desires and had chosen this life to escape from them, --that, too, seemed understandable; admirable even.
Father Esaias emerged from behind the left side of the iconstasis through the deacon’s door, carring a censor, shaking the bells attached to its handles in rhythmic groups of three as he walked up the women’s side of the nave, then back again through the group of male worshippers standing on the right. As he did so, Father Dositheos, one of the young monks, began to chant the opening words of the service in the peculiarly oriental tones of the Greek Church: “Evloyeetos o theos eemon, ke nyn, ke aee, kai ees tous eonos ton eonon. Ameen.” Anton joined his fellow parishioners in making the sign of the cross in a grand motion. In spite of his ignorance of Greek, Anton knew the English equivalent by heart: “Blessed is our God, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.” As Father Dositheos continued the chant, the other monks, gathered in a small group before the lectern in front of the nave, took it up. As far as he could, Anton mentally tracked the prayers in English:
Come, let us worship and fall down before Christ our King.
Come, let us worship and fall down before Christ our King and our God.
Come, let us worship and fall down before Christ Himself, our King and our God.
Throughout the long Vespers service, his thoughts wandered. It didn’t help that everything was sung in Greek. Anton had been raised in an American branch of the Church which worshipped entirely in English. Father Danieel and his monks disdained such compromise, regarding it as a modernist adulteration of Holy Tradition. Members of an ultraconservative strand of Orthodoxy, they regarded Anton’s co-religionists as little better than Protestants. Anton had been made painfully aware of this during his first visit, when one of the monks pointedly reminded him that Communion should be taken only by those who had prepared through fasting and prayer.
Watching the monks intone the service, he found himself wondering which ones might have chosen this life to escape wayward desires like his father’s. . . . Not just his father’s. He winced at the thought. Wasn’t that precisely what had brought him back to the monastery, himself? His meetings with Tracy had grown increasingly troubling. To the qualms of guilt he experienced at the deception was now added . . . this other thing.
Worried that he had shown too much of his hand with his questions about “Peter,” Anton had avoided the subject during subsequent lunches. At the same time, he continued, as best he could, to keep the focus off himself. But, this had been difficult, being as he had presented his own supposed “coming out” as the pretext for his being there, at all. His recent slip into personal divulgence had provoked that ridiculous, emotional scene in the bistro. Up to that point, he had managed to ignore Tracy’s increasingly frequent, but always indirect, invitations for Anton to share his “story.” Tracy’s popularity among the bistro crowd had been Anton’s greatest ally in that respect. Up until their last meeting, their moments alone at the table had never lasted long before being interrupted by the banter between Tracy and his friends, all of whom seemed to regard the bistro as a kind of social touchstone, a place to learn the latest gossip, crow over the previous night’s conquests, or retreat from a disastrous date.
It had become clear that this tact of avoidance could not last indefinitely. That was not all that troubled Anton. Since their last meeting, he had become aware that he, too, in spite of himself, had begun to look upon Hunter’s as a kind of retreat. He had started eating lunch there several times a week, occasionally stopping by after work, too, to get a cup of coffee. More than once, he had found himself leaving the bistro later than he intended, dreaming up excuses to present to Cynthia. He had actually caught himself enjoying the banter among Tracy’s friends. Paradoxically, though, on the drive to the café, he often found himself hoping that Tracy would be alone. At first, of course, that seemed natural enough; it would allow him more freedom to pursue the information he was after about his father—“Peter” as Tracy called him; he had not yet dared to ask whether Tracy had ever known him under another name. But, with each passing week, the urgency of collecting that information seemed to fade, while the anticipation of these meetings grew sharper. He caught himself measuring the hours at work leading up to Hunter’s, to meeting Tracy.
He was jolted back into the service by the motions of the men around him, crossing themselves and brushing the ground thrice in rhythm with the deacon’s chanting. The familiar ritual bowing clued Anton in to the meaning of the Greek words: “Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen. Alelluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.” The use of Greek faintly annoyed him, especially since he had discovered that most of the monks had been born and raised in English-speaking countries. ‘Get over it,’ he admonished himself, ‘it’s their home; I’m the guest, the one on retreat.’
Retreat from what?’ Certainly, from the bean counting of his work. Lately, the thrill of the hunt had abated, his investigative procedures become merely mechanical. He found himself wondering about the lives of the suspects over whose accounts he pored, dreaming up whole back-stories, inventing sympathetic motives other than greed for their attempts to conjure illegitimate possibilities out of the inexorable calculation of profits and losses. Disturbingly, the main character in these daydreams often looked like Tracy. Even more disturbing was the face of the man he played opposite: Anton’s father. Only, Anton could not remember his father’s face. He had to assume it was much like his own.
He came to with a start, aided by a shift in the tempo of the monks’ chanting. Their rapid-fire Greek suddenly stretched into long, reverential syllables, words with which Anton was, for once, familiar:
Agios o theos;
Agios ischyros;
Agios athanatos:
Eleeison imas.
Anton translated inwardly the words of the Trisagion prayer: Holy God; Holy Mighty; Holy Immortal: Have mercy on us! With each phrase, he joined the monks and his fellow retreatants in another series of low bows, brushing the ground, berating himself as he did so for having allowed his imagination, once again—and at this, of all moments!—, to drift back to the images that had been plaguing him. Had he not come on retreat precisely to escape them?
Work had once been Anton’s place of retreat: from home, from his life with Cynthia and the girls. They had never really been the center of his life, but he had deluded himself that his long hours of working into the evenings and weekends were a form of self-sacrifice on their behalf. Anton thought of himself as an excellent provider, a source of the financial and material security his own father, with his wanderings from job to low-paying job, had never provided, even before his flight. Anton believed he loved his daughters, but when faced with what were supposed to be moments of domestic bliss, those rare moments when little Sophie climbed into his lap with a drawing, or Rachel timidly asked if he’d like to see her in the new dress she and her mother had brought home, he often found himself at a loss, longing for the certainty of ledgers and accounts.
As for Cynthia, he had never deluded himself that he felt an especially strong attraction toward her. He loved her in the sense that she was an excellent mother and a good wife, someone he could rely on to pick up the slack with the girls at home, to greet him late in the evening with a warm word and dinner. For Anton, this was the stuff and substance of married “bliss,” the sufficient reality behind the Hallmark-generated hype. To be sure, they had had their moments of romance: a year-and-a-half of dating, then engagement, nights and weekends spent together while he finished his undergraduate degree. If the whole thing had felt scripted at times, Anton attributed this to his Orthodox upbringing; the Church, with its roots in an Eastern European peasant milieu, where arranged marriages were the norm, retained a critical attitude toward Western notions of Romantic Love.
Cynthia, too, had been very sensible about this. A refugee from a previously failed marriage, she made it clear to Anton that she shared his skepticism about the relative value of impermanent passions, though she was not especially interested in the theological underpinnings. To Anton, who had fiercely re-embraced Orthodoxy in the wake of years of intellectual pretense in college during which he proclaimed himself an atheist, years that culminated in a deep depression and sense of anomie, Cynthia’s attitude toward religion was puzzling. Raised an Episcopalian, she seemed to see the faith as little more than a familial obligation. Ironically, this appeared to have eased her consent to convert prior to their marriage. She seemed to see it not so much as a conversion as a change in outer trappings: the presence of a few icons on the walls at home, and longer hours than really necessary spent in church.
Though Cynthia claimed, on the rare occasions when she commented directly on Anton’s piety, to find it admirable, he sensed it sometimes irritated her. This had especially been the case during the week leading up to his retreat. Behind her interruptions as he stood alone in his study, saying evening prayers in front of the icons, his sensed a growing resentment. Dimly, he wondered whether she somehow sensed that the new fervency and length of his private prayers had something to do with the stilted manner he seemed unable to escape in answering her questions about how his day had gone.
Anton, himself, puzzled occasionally over the link between the fierceness with which he was driven to stand at prayer, the hollowness of the words he recited mechanically from memory or from his prayer book, and the curiously intense pleasure he experienced at Hunter’s. He simply knew that he felt more alive there than at any other moment of his week. At the same time, these illicit moments left him feeling profoundly guilty, casting about for some means of atonement. And so, he had arranged this retreat at the monastery—his second, since his arrival in Texas—and for a meeting with Father Danieel He felt he needed to bring into some order the fragmented portions of his life.
Of course, he could not go to Father Kyrill, his parish priest. He knew he was supposed to; but, he found himself increasingly alienated from the life of his parish. Confessing fully to Father Kyrill would require that Anton talk openly about his lunch meetings with Tracy, about both his plans for revenge on his father, and the confused feelings that seemed increasingly to be getting in the way of those plans. And Father Kyrill was a good confessor—damn him; he was not the type to just take Anton’s words at face falue; he would force him to put into words longings and desires which he preferred remain unspoken. So, Anton had stopped going to Confession and Communion, ushering his family out of church immediately after Liturgy to avoid any occasion for his priest to inquire into his new abstinence from the Sacraments. The one time Father Kyrill had managed to pull him aside, Anton had mumbled something about pressures at work and not being able to fast properly, then had excused himself to search for Sophie, avoiding his pastor’s look of concern.
Of course, there was the danger that Father Danieel would take the same approach. Anton half expected him to. But, there was the comfort of distance: The abbot had never met Anton’s family. Moreover, he seemed likely to look more sympathetically on the demands for justice that drove Anton on, and less likely to inquire into other motives.
About the latter supposition, Anton could not have been more wrong.

* * *
Arriving at the guest house shortly after Compline, Anton was slightly annoyed to discover, through the glass partition separating the reception area from the bookshop in which the priest-monk received those seeking spiritual council, that another visitor had already gained admission. Anton drew a chair to a position where his presence could be noted through the glass, and sat. He used the time to plan out how he would present his case. There was really no need to go into the pleasure he experienced in Tracy’s company. Compline had given him time for reflection. The feelings he had begun to fear might border on some kind of perverse attraction were surely just a pretext for forestalling the confrontation with his father. His sin was cowardice—not, not anything else. No, that was his father’s sin. He just needed to sort out his anger, to get clear on . . . on its justification. After all, the Church did not condemn all forms of wrath; some anger could be righteous. But, what troubled him was the sense of selfishness involved; for anger to be righteous, he sensed, it must somehow be impersonal, disinterested, like the investigations he conducted at work into other people’s shady dealings. He needed to make it clear that he was not after personal gain. He had long ago resolved that whatever payment he forced out of his father’s winnings, would go entirely to his mother.
His thoughts were interrupted by the departure of the other visitor. Anton got up and walked into the bookstore, pausing briefly at the entrance. Father Danieel remained seated behind his desk. Anton greeted him in the manner traditionally reserved for bishops and abbots, bending at the waist in a low bow, brushing the fingers of his right hand against the floor, then standing with right hand cupped over left, palms up, in request of a blessing. He felt disconcerted by the irritation that crossed Father Danieel’s face as he stood up, made the sign of the cross over Anton, then placed his hand in his visitor’s to be ritually kissed. Anton had heard that the Greeks were less punctilious about such formalities. It troubled him that the abbot perhaps found him pretentious. Or, maybe he was just tired; the monks awoke at midnight for corporate prayers in the chapel, started their day with 6:00 o’clock Matins, and were said to keep long hours of private prayer during the night. No doubt, the abbot was eager to retire to his cell.
Anton sat in the chair Father Danieel offered him from the other side of the desk, then waited. The monk made no effort to speak, and kept his eyes lowered toward the desk. Apparently, it was up to Anton to justify this intrusion.
“I wanted to seek your counsel about a situation I’ve gotten myself into.”
“. . . Yes?”
Anton launched into his prepared remarks. The monk seemed to listen intently, but kept his eyes lowered toward his desk.
“. . . Tell me more about these meetings.”
“There’s not much to tell, really. We talk. He’s confirmed that he still sees my father.”
“You asked him directly?”
“No. Of course not. But, I’m sure.”
Fr. Danieel frowned. “Have you read the desert fathers?”
“I’ve read parts of the Philokalia.”
“Then, you know what they say about the importance of guarding one’s heart?”
Anton nodded vaguely.
“You’re attracted to this man.” It was not a question, and Anton made no response.
“What you’ve undertaken would require great strength. ‘Your adversary the devil prowls around like a ravening lion, seeking someone to devour.’”
Anton was somewhat taken aback. “Perhaps I’ve gotten in over my head.”
Father Danieel let the comment hang in the air for a while. “Sometimes God lets the Devil test us.”
“What do you mean? . . . To show us who we really are?”
“. . . Yes.”
“Can we change who we are?”
“At a price. . . . Are you capable of offering this man up?”
“You don’t mean . . . ? My father?”
“. . . Not only him.”
Anton sat in silence. He became aware that his heart was thumping. . . . “Is it wrong for me to pursue justice?”
“Any action from a divided heart is wrong. . . . But, so is inaction. ‘If your eye offends you, pluck it out.’ . . . Our Lord says, ‘Pluck it out,’ but not ‘Avert your eyes’: If you back down from the test, you may think you’ve renounced the Devil, and not even know you’ve turned your back on God.”
As Father Danieel stood up, Anton was startled to discover that the interview was over. He rose, but neither asked for nor received a parting blessing.