Saint (Priest, #3)

by Sierra Simone

It’s important for me to honor my promises to myself—even if they only matter to myself. Especially if they only matter to myself.

I’m grateful and I’m content. And contentment is enough,

I wasn’t coming back into the Catholic fold because I felt shame about whom I liked to take to bed or whom I let into my heart. I came here for God. I came here to stay alive.

There’s a lacerating sort of satisfaction in knowing that he’s thriving now, without me. That I was right to leave him, to extract myself from his life. Everyone really is better off with me here at Mount Sergius.

“I love him so much,” I whisper, rain running off my head and down to my lips, where the drops fall along with my words to the mud and grass below. “And it hurts and I want it to stop. Please, Lord. If you love me, make it stop.”

came here after the bleakest night of my life; I came to somehow turn a selfish, horny millionaire into a good man, and this doubt—this selfish need for love and sex—is the proof that there is still more work to be done. I am an undone man; I am unfinished; I am so far from where I want to be, which is as close to God as a person can get.

I am so far from being a saint.

The doing is the point.

It feels nice to do good things.

don’t know how to reconcile my choices with a doctrine I know is fundamentally broken, because at the end of the day, I still choose celibacy, and I still choose being a monk. I still choose this life.

suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,

“Opting out of the world doesn’t help anyone but yourself,” Elijah says, and there’s a real edge to his voice now. An edge sharp enough to cut. “What is the point of all this holiness if it doesn’t reach anyone else? What is the point of becoming good if that goodness begins and ends with you?

“This,” he says, gesturing around to the cottage that has held so many of my best and worst moments, “is a waste of privilege. A waste of a life. You have blown a hole in the hearts of everyone who loved you for absolutely fucking nothing, and I hope it was worth it. I hope God was worth it.”

Slowing down and taking time—to listen or ruminate or be anything other than absolutely productive in the sense of churning out choice after choice—was worse than pointless. It was weak. And now in that weakness, I’ve found strength.

“You’ve been thinking of me.”

This feels like admitting my heart wasn’t mine to offer God in the first place.

I led someone I love into unfaithfulness to someone they love and I feel like shit about it.

Who does that? A bad man, that’s who. Selfish. I’m still so selfish.

“Vows are not meant to be burdens, Brother Patrick,” the abbot says gently. “They are meant to clarify our lives and why we’re here. Perhaps what is causing these larger feelings is not guilt that you tested the boundaries of your conversatio morum vow, but rather an invitation from God to ask yourself what you really want before you take your solemn vows. To ask yourself if you feel called, truly, to your life here.”

I have to be a monk—I can’t not be a monk. It’s what saved my life. And if I stopped…

“About the answers. It’s because every time I leave, I have more questions.” And then he adds, “And because every time I leave you, the only thing I can think about is coming back.”

But it’s one thing to stop when you think you’re alone in wanting it, when you think you’re the only one with desire scorching up your thighs and searing the inside of your skin. It’s another thing entirely to stop when the man in front of you is sinking his teeth into his lip and also giving you that eyebrow.

It’s that indefinable flow of pleasure, that getting hot while doing hot things to someone else, that heady sense of power and love, knowing that you’re making someone else feel so good they can’t stand it.

how am I supposed to save my body for God when this feels so necessary, so inevitable? So right?

And when I try to think of something to say to God, some apology I can genuinely speak, my tongue stays still. I feel miserable with what I did, but I know I would do it again. And again. As many times as there are chances. And I don’t know what the right prayer is for that.

my chest is still full of all the things it was before: regret and not-regret, a desire to be God’s and the ache of still being Elijah’s.

if there’s a way to do both, if anyone has ever found a way to do both. To live their life in prayer and silence and also with their heart beating inside someone else’s chest at the same time.

“But you can’t choose me,” I whisper. “You can’t choose me. Because I can’t choose you back.”

The vows I made, the promises I made, the life I swore to lead…they are gone now, blown away in the dry, pagan wind whispering outside the chapel. They’ve been blowing away since Semois, since that day in the hermitage. Maybe even since the day I saw Elijah sitting in the cloister, waiting to tell me that he was getting married.

Just for this trip? Just for the next couple of weeks? What are a few weeks in a lifetime of devotion when you think about it? What are a few stolen hours when the rest of the day is prayer and work? What are a few what ifs when the rest of my life is set in stone?

“You’re as intoxicating quiet as you are laughing. And you’re as beautiful serious as you are silly. And you are altogether more potent like this, more powerful, more stirring, and maybe it’s because silliness and contemplation are so much the same thing. Maybe it’s because no matter what you’re doing, you’re reminding me that I’m here and alive and that there’s more to living than work. That sometimes we can sleep in or play or pray and have nothing to show for it.”

But what I actually want is getting hazier and hazier these days. I want it all—kisses and prayers, sex and contemplation—I want Elijah and God. I want the right to hunger and to crave, but I also want to be a monk, to find those crisp, keen moments of joy that can only be cracked open through the fires of showing up day after day after day. From denial and effort and rejecting all else that isn’t a holy life. Why can’t I have both? All? Why do I have to choose?

Because I love him and I would play the what if game forever if I could, but I can’t, I can’t. I built my life around being a monk—I built my mind around being a monk. I can’t surrender what saved me. Even for the sweetest what if I’ve ever known. Right?

I’d rather the sting of repentance than the anguish of wishing.

will go to my grave loving him. And I know he loves me back. So why am I denying us?

I love you like that. I love you like this. I love you like everything.

This is the beating heart of the problem: if I leave, then I’m asking him to trust that I won’t make him compete with literal infinity, to trust that I’m leaving because I want to leave. But…if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t leave at all. And that’s the undeniable truth.

But is it possible that you love this life because it is the closest one you’ve found to the one you truly need?”

The reasons you go can be anything. But the reasons you stay? They need to be everything.

No, most people don’t guess, do they? That sometimes the people who laugh the loudest and reach for life the hardest are the ones closest to darkness.

Because I don’t understand what’s lost in my devotion if I’m also having sex. Sex makes my prayer better, not worse.

But you could never compete with God, because the two of you magnify each other in my heart. I know God and I feel God more keenly and more deeply because of you.”

I already love him like how forever feels. I already love him like eternity is in the rearview mirror. I love him like everything.