CHAPTER EIGHT

“FRERE, IL FAUT MOURIR.”⁵

We go on soon?

Perhaps Whadizit? and I were a duo routine. He would call my name and begin laughing, and the customers would join in while tossing him coins that he would hurl back, crying “Schlitz!”

A performance not unlike the one I’d been living.

Give me a role that simple men like myself can understand. Build a little box on which I can stand and permit passersby to ridicule me. If it be flagellating to express my eternal damnation, that is just the performance I can comprehend. So when they point and laugh, I can do the same.

Why include me in a narrative that I can’t live up to, and when I’ve tried I failed? The concept of God’s love simply overwhelms me . . . where a woman’s or a brother’s does not.

Whadizit? said we were to go on soon. In this world and not a mythical other place no living being has ever experienced.

“You are lost in thought,” Brother Stanislaus said as he led me down a dark passageway, which opened into a large courtyard that I assumed was the monastery’s cloister. He pointed to one corner, yet I could see nothing but several mounds of dirt. As we moved closer it became apparent that these were freshly dug graves, and once we were alongside them, we witnessed monks sitting in them, lashing themselves with disciplines and crying, “Frere, il faut mourir!”

“It’s when they are the most happiest,” Brother Stanislaus explained.

The hooded monks flagellated themselves with acute intensity, as if they were beating molten ingots into some preconceived shape. In this case, Christ . . . or his facsimile.

I recalled Thomas Merton describing his earlier dissolute life in The Seven Storey Mountain:

I was stamping the last remains of spiritual vitality out of my own soul, and trying with all my might to crush and obliterate the image of the divine liberty that had been implanted in me by God? With every nerve and fibre of my being I was laboring to enslave myself in the bonds of my own intolerable disgust. . . . But what people do not realize is that this is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and the freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.6

I thought, Men longing to transform themselves on the smithy of their souls.

“When will they stop?” I asked.

“At dusk, they return the soil to the graves and carefully put the sod back in place, and then it will resume once again tomorrow with new penitents. But I brought you here to see what is soon about to occur. Wait here.”

Brother Stanislaus disappeared into one of the many entryways encircling the green.

He reappeared, pulling his wagon of the enshrined. Accompanying him, a white-cowled monk transported a man-sized scale with a round glass face. They made several more trips, then set about erecting a tiered stand on which they stacked the ceramic saints. Alongside it they situated the scale.

“It’s not all tedium inside here.” He smiled broadly.

And as I watched the monks climb out of their graves and begin to shovel them full again, others commenced entering the green, shouldering timber crosses that overshadowed their stooped bodies. Each positioned himself at a designated spot in the courtyard and, after stripping to a loincloth, lowered the base of the cross into the ground. (Reservoirs lay disguised under the sod for this ritual.) Within moments, a dozen monks had strapped themselves to their roods.

This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and the freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.7

The comment made by Brother Stanislaus—”It’s not all tedium here”—unsettled me as I watched these men assume the positions of the narrative at Golgotha. Periodically, the voice of one would ring out across the courtyard:

“Why have I forsaken Him?”

This refrain continued throughout the evening. The only illumination as night fell upon the hanging men in loincloths was that coming from the votive candles in various colored jars illuminating the weight guesser’s stall. He stood impassively beside the scale as if he were on a midway awaiting the crowds that never showed.

I sat in one corner of the green, transfixed by this pageantry and the fitful sonorous lament. My perception was that these were coveted roles assigned by the abbot to those he deemed the most devout members of the religious community. Yet they marked the passing hours as if they had murdered Christ within themselves again and again.

At intervals throughout the night the abbot reappeared, brandishing a long rod on whose tip hung a metal cup. Upon filling it with water, he would lift the cup to the lips of each monk. The official sentry, Brother Stanislaus, stood alone in his stall with the flickering faces of the ceramic saints stacked behind him.

I thought about the room I had recently exited, with the living curiosities mingling and relishing their time with each other, knowing that soon they would have to return to acting out their roles on midways set up in meadows and cow fields just outside town limits. There would be a barker outside their tents cajoling fairgoers inside.

Juxtaposed with that memory was what I now witnessed: monks reliving the death of God’s only begotten Son while experiencing celestial joy at having been selected for this role they would perform from dusk until sunup.

I read their lamentations as the yearning of the consecrated to hoist themselves out of their bones, their flesh, which burdened their souls and hindered them from ascending to another place. I envisioned them dragging their bodies about like veritable crosses.

As if their enacting of the crucified Christ was liberating, and as if, come morning, each, in a state of euphoria, would feel cleansed, after twenty-four hours without sleep.

At some point I’d become aware that I wasn’t the only outside witness to this spectacle. Far to the left of me, in one of the entryways, huddled Albert/Alberta. Shortly I saw the Living Venus de Milo slip in, and in her shadow Whadizit?. One living curiosity and then another. Randomly, as if they hadn’t conversed with each other, sitting separately, mesmerized by the cries punctuating the darkness while Brother Stanislaus looked on.

As if the cries were uttered on their behalf . . . perhaps even mine.

That the keening might carry us aloft.

Surely another hour must have passed when the lamentations began to give evidence of a draining stamina. They had in fact become more melodious and had begun to meld into one collective supplication for release. I couldn’t help imagining that the petitioning monks were now sensing that only their voices remained, that they, in fact, were singing themselves out of their pilloried bodies. There existed a tangible air of gratitude, of thanksgiving, in those more harmonious sounds. As if they felt, in some heightened hallucinatory awareness, that they were escaping, cry by cry, out beyond their parched throats and lips. And come daylight, their bodies would be left to unshackle themselves and tramp back into their monastic cells.

It was then that I heard a rustle and turned to my right to see Cleo, the normal and lovely wife of debonair two-school-rulers-tall Hans, pushing the baby carriage before her. Unlike the others, who sat partially disguised in various entryways about the courtyard, Cleo rolled the buggy directly among the crosses before sitting down and lifting Serpentina upright to witness the incantation.

I couldn’t speak for the living curiosities, or even Cleo, as to why they maintained a prayerful attitude—as did I—in the presence of the multiple witnesses to the crucifixion.

Except to say that, independent of the monks’ liturgies and the practices of the church to which they belonged, the images of twelve men who had bound themselves to timbered roods upon which they sang “Why have I forsaken Him?” throughout the night spoke inscrutably to a longing that each of us is unable to quell.

And in the adjoining room, the Great Waldo was downing the final libation before he returned to his designated role of swallowing white rats. Or the Eng brothers echoing “You first” as they accompanied each other to the tents.

What was my place in this constellation?

But I must have dozed off, for when daylight broke, the green was refulgent in the morning sunlight, with no sign of the living curiosity audience, a dozen men on crosses, or fresh sod over the monks’ graves.

Even Brother Stanislaus’s booth had been struck.

He was nowhere in sight.