CHAPTER 5

THE EAST LESSON

“The Law of Last Year’s Language”

IF, ON A VISIT TO ST. BENEDICT’S MONASTERY, you were to drive about a half mile beyond the main turnoff, there on your right you’d come upon a washed-out driveway leading to an abandoned ranch house. The yard is overgrown now, and the dangling barnboard siding and several broken windows leave the house fatally open to the elements. Out front is a large pile of trash and building debris, the remains of an abortive attempt by a new tenant to gut the place and start over. Inside is a strewn mess of smashed cabinetry, broken dishes, and a film of flour and Sheetrock dust, well laced with mouse droppings. It’s hard to imagine that anyone ever lived here.

Yet only a little while ago, the Stanley place was a functioning household: funky, to be sure, a real sixties period piece, but with all the comforts of home, even “hot and cold running water,” as Rafe liked to boast. For four years, off and on, it was my home. This was the house the monks generously made available to me while I was in transition from Maine to Colorado, accepting a modest rent in exchange for my equally modest efforts to stem the tide of entropy Rafe was assigned as caretaker, and it was through working together on the place that we really came to know each other.

That first winter in Colorado, Rafe and I spent Christmas together at the Stanley place, to the surprise of us both. His long-established pattern was to be in seclusion up at his cabin from the week before Christmas until well into the new year. But that year, old patterns seemed to vanish in the happiness of the new circumstances. On Christmas morning came a knock on my door, and there was Rafe decked out in his cowboy finery, a box of Christmas ornaments under his arm and a small present peeking out from his coat pocket. We decorated a tree, cooked a fancy Christmas breakfast, and, of course, exchanged our gifts. He gave me an Indian bear-claw necklace. I gave him a copy of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. We sipped our coffee in the sunroom and listened to Gurdjieff music on my old tape deck while the sun grew round and full over the snow-sparkled mountains, and both of us felt completely aglow in the joy of the day and each other. “The most wonderful Christmas I ever had,” said Rafe as he took his leave. The memories of that day kept me going for almost a year, and by Thanksgiving I was already anticipating a repeat performance.

And then, two days before Christmas, Rafe announced he was heading back up to the cabin for his usual time of deep solitude.

I was devastated—as much by the abruptness of his manner as by the actual prospect of spending my first Christmas alone—and tore off down to his shopyard to remonstrate with him. He was readying his snowmobile, a goodly bag of provisions already strapped aboard, and he was in no mood to chat. “But if last year was the most wonderful Christmas you’ve ever…?” I pleaded. He fired up the engine with a mighty yank on the starter cord and took off. In a rage, I walked home the long way, through the creekbed, dodging the icy branches and brambles that picked at what little was left of my Christmas spirit.

When I got back to the Stanley place, there were snowmobile tracks at the foot of the driveway—and gone again—and the crisscross marks of Rafe’s boots tramping a trail up the walkway. Propped up on the kitchen counter was an old monastery postcard. On the back of it were two lines, carefully lettered in Rafe’s inimitable hand:

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.

And below it, as a kind of postscript:

Not to worry. All is swell.

The lines are from “Little Gidding,” the last of the Four Quartets. I don’t know whether he’d copied them from the book I had given him the previous year, or more likely from Helen Luke’s essay on “Little Gidding” in her wise book, Old Age, one of Rafe’s favorites up at the cabin. Helen Luke’s profound counsels for “growing into age” had in more recent years melded seamlessly into the already pronounced set and drift of Rafe’s life. At the heart of his hermit striving was a continuous self-pruning, struggling to detach himself from the petty tyranny of “habits and emotional laziness,” as he put it—in order to make room for something of an entirely new order.

“Don’t you see how people who love each other trap each other?” he would snort. “You say, ‘I love you,’ but you won’t let me change. How can that be love? I think that’s why so many marriages fail, don’t you?”

It had all sounded good when we’d talked about it sometime back in August. But that was August, and this was Christmas Eve, by God! Couldn’t he just once make an exception? But already I was beginning to catch on to this most unusual aspect of Rafe’s character. For Rafe there were no exceptions. What you believed, you enacted. Period. All the rest was talk. And all talk was last year’s language. Seeing what he saw, he was doing what he did. And my gift that Christmas was to learn to live with it.

Looking around at our handiwork that winter of 1995, Rafe and I had to admit that the Stanley place had come a long, long way. Two years of chipping away at it together had restored the place not exactly to elegance, but at least to decent habitability. I had the distinct feeling that Rafe was enjoying the process as much as I. I was the carpenter, he was the plumber and electrician, and we both had a pack rat’s mentality. He would bring chairs, a rug, a bathtub—scrounged from the monastery Dumpster or bought dirt cheap at the local recycling barn—and occasionally a real gem, such as the powerful Ashley woodstove in the sunroom, or the matched barstools for the kitchen counter. “What this place needs is a…” he’d start, and the next thing you knew, there it would be—ungainly, most likely mismatched, but in its own way a treasure.

We even had a cappuccino maker—our one brand-new joint household purchase. After teasing me for a week or so about “what this place needs is a real cappuccino bar,” he walked in one day and plunked $87 down on the counter—“the whole of my social security,” he announced with twinkling solemnity. With that, and my credit card, we went downtown and bought a cappuccino machine, two festive stoneware cups, and a bag of espresso roast. From then on, for the rest of our time at the Stanley, the ritual was to sit at our barstools, raise our cups, look each other squarely in the eye, and offer the inevitable toast: “To the deepening celebration.”

But my tenure at the Stanley place was coming to an end. The monks had said I could stay “till spring,” and “till spring” it was. There came a sun-sparkled day in May when we raised our cups for one last time. Tears welled in my eyes, and Rafe turned his own gaze sharply away for a moment, then clapped his hand down fiercely on mine and said, “Hush, hush. When the building’s built, you no longer need the scaffolding.”

“But what about all that we did here?” I wailed. “The love? The concern? Where does it live now?”

“It lives in our hearts,” he said, “where it is safe forever.”

We packed up my stuff and moved me up the road to a rooming house I had found. May turned to June; the snowpack melted on the mountains, and the floods did what a winter’s freezing had miraculously not done—wiped out the plumbing at the Stanley. I settled in, Rafe settled in; life continued. In August, I went back to Maine for a three-week trip. A week after I left, he developed a serious infection, lost consciousness driving his old Scout down the hill from his cabin, and wound up in the hospital for a week. When I got back, not much was said. As noiselessly as mountain summer passes into fall during those early days of August, so our life passed imperceptibly into a new season. Rafe was quieter, he had less endurance, but otherwise was the same old self.

One day, up at his cabin, we were musing about places and things that had fed us in our lives—“the watering places,” we called them. Rafe was in one of those sky-blue moods, as frequently happened to him after times of deep prayer, and his eyes shone with a light from far beyond themselves. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he said, “The watering places! Yes, we need them. But we stay too long at them and get caught by them. We forget that one watering place leads to another. They are all connected by an underground river.”

We were silent for a while, his gaze trailing off toward Mount Sopris, glistening on the western skyline in its first veil of fall snow. Then, as if the underground river of his own reverie had once again come to the surface, he continued, “The moving of the mountain, by faith. The shifting of perspective to a new way of seeing, beyond attachment…”

“Are you there yet, Rafe?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “it’s all still becoming…”

The last weekend of his life, Rafe headed up to the cabin again, clattering along on the first snowmobile run of the new season. He was brusque and gruff when I saw him off at the shopyard, in his own space and all eager to be about the new language of eternity. I joined him at some point that weekend for tea by the woodstove. It was a sad, taciturn tea, as we sat in the enormous enfolding space mostly lost in our own thoughts. As I left, he spoke his last human words to me: “You’ll see. Nothing is taken away.”

By whatever hand of providence, I was not around for the last day of Rafe’s life. I had business in Denver and missed what others tell me was a Raphael of utterly transfigured joy and presence. Although my heart, I’m convinced, followed along on his passage that night, the first I officially heard of it was the following morning when I showed up for mass at the monastery to find a note posted on the door: “Dear retreatants, Brother Raphael died early this morning…”

It was the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Somehow I got through it, even sang the Gloria. Then, dissolving in grief, I headed back to my little room up the hill. Passing by the Stanley place, I suddenly saw snowmobile tracks stopping and starting again, and the crisscross pattern of boot tracks walking up to the house.

In an eerie déjà vu, I followed them up the walkway and creaked open the old door to a room now bare and cold. Instinctively my eyes went to the counter, and there, propped up as before, was a card. But this time it was an Advent card, from a box of yellowed note cards Rafe had up at the cabin, the faded design on the front proclaiming, “Behold, I come soon.” Inside, copied in Rafe’s painstaking hand, was a poem by Hermann Hesse. The ink was almost as faded as the card; clearly it had been copied a long time ago, somewhere in those years of lonely struggle. Rafe had brought it down for me on the last day of his life.

Here is the whole poem, just as Rafe copied it. It is the “law of last year’s language” in a nutshell, the quiet credo by which he had for all those years strived to live:

As every flower fades and as all youth
Departs, so life at every stage,
So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,
Blooms in its day and may not last forever.
Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,
Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give.
In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.

 

Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us.
The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.
If we accept a home of our own making,
Familiar habit makes for indolence.
We must prepare for parting and leave-taking,
Or else remain the slaves of permanence.

 

Even the hour of our death may send
Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,
And life may summon us to newer races.
So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.1

The east. Point of sunrise. New beginning. This year’s language. All his life, at whatever pain and cost, in whatever circumstances, Rafe trained himself to prefer it, to habitually attune himself to it. And it is crucial, for the language of eternity is not the same as our heavy, encrusted words of sentimentality and habit, our awkward attempts to love by embalming what we love. On my own, later, I found in Rilke’s Duino Elegies: “The free animal has its decrease perpetually behind it, and God in front.”

I have slowly come to see how Hesse’s words are true, and how in those brusque leave-takings that I felt as rejection, Rafe was actually giving me the greatest gift. For none of the journey onward is possible if one is still subtly comparing it to the past, still wishing for a return to the good old days at the Stanley place. Next year’s language is in next year’s words. And one can hear them and stay present to them in human flesh. But this is at the outer limits of our human capacity and can be done only if one is not at war with oneself internally, but aching wholeheartedly—body, mind, and spirit—toward the new arising, giving oneself totally and unreservedly into its hands.