BROTHER ASS

by

Eduardo Barrios

I

"Fray Lázaro," the provincial reminded me this morning, "the fest of Our Sainted Father Francis that has just passed, marked the seventh anniversary of your entry into the monastery."

Indeed, seven years! And since we are now into November, I have been a Franciscan for seven years and one month. Yet I still don't feel that I am a good friar.

Should I hang up this habit, Lord?

But..., how can I if I know the loathsome disillusion found at the end of every worldly road? Every path is a repetition for the man who has lived for some time, Lord. He is fatigued before he starts.

And where can I go then when I feel downcast?

Ah! And besides, I know the nameless, unexpected bitterness standing in the morning of each of life's highways. That thought alone grieves me, Lord. Dismayed, I seek a shelter where my heart can rest more easily and allow repose to settle in more deeply.

I must stay here, then. I love this humble house of Our Seraphic Father..., and because of some inexplicable weakness, I love this hour in the garden.

I come here every day while my more serene brothers are taking their rest and I stretch out on the hard ground here beneath the satin sky. That's it, oh Lord! Your kingdom is soft; man's earth is rough.

Today, the heat in the refectory was oppressive. The voice of Fray Pedro, whose turn it was to read, seemed to sink into slumber. At times he tried to revive it by force, but then it would fall again, just like the spray from a fountain whenever the pressure fails.

Here, too, in this small garden, boxed in by the cloisters, the breezes stop, leaves turn soft in the heat, and the grass like limp. Even one's vision weakens. The sun sparkles on the fruit of the prickly pears; the fleshy pads grow hot, the thorns completely dry. The cloister seems to shine, standing solid in the scalding heat. The pigeons and other birds have all gone into hiding.

I see the row of doors that lead to the hermetic cells and I imagine the friars asleep in suffocating siesta.

Solitude under the sun! An archaic air floats from the old cloisters at this hot hour, passes through the arches between the fat bellied pillars and, joing with the torrid atmosphere of the garden, rises like the vapor of a gigantic yawn.

And here I am, Lord, just like every other day, unhappy with myself. I am certainly not a good Franciscan! And I am beginning to fear that I never shall be.	I came quite late in life to this holy place. The world, its people, that rude awakening... above all the rude awakening... had already taken root in the fullness of my experience and I can no longer be as pure as a good friar minor ought to be. I am not innocent; I am not simple. Innocence is an emptiness protected by a veil of simplicity. The ups and downs of life tend to scratch holes in that veil, making us receptive, and then the emptiness is filled with knowledge. Knowlege leads to understanding but not to the plenitude of Franciscan life...to a state of Grace, never!

By now it must be three o'clock. The air is getting cooler. They have turned on the water that runds along this bed of clean little stones. The birds have returned, singing frenetically and, nearby, a white flower that I had not seen before has opened

I have to go to services and leave this peace, this spontaneous, uncultivated activity that I envy.

Transparent stream, wide-open white flower that blooms in the afternoon, little bird boiling over with music, pray for your brother Lázaro who envies you! You give your langorous perfume, the humble music of your clear waters, your undirected happiness and you are not made unhappy by the benefits your gifts provide. You are indifferent and that neutrality brings you into harmony with the imperturbable serenity of Nature. You know nothing and your ignorance brings you perfect wisdom. Through your selflessness you become one with God. Pray for me!

I don't know if you can hear me. But as I get up from the ground and shake off the shreds of grass clinging to my robe, I feel pure gratitude in the air, a gratitude that penetrates my soul.

There is the smell of earth becoming damp, of plants being refreshed... There goes Fray Juan with his robed tied up around his waist and his ahiry legs combing the tall grass. He is carrying a large white pot, as white as his soul.

Bother Juan, you who have a white-pot soul, you pray for me too.

***************************

In the still dark, early hours I was awakened by a soft, very discreet tapping at the door of my cell.

It was Father Superior.

They had sent from the Hospital of San Juan de Dios for him to confess a dying patient and he had come seeking my company.

The hosptial is a half-block from our monastery . But oddly, Father Superior is always pleased to go on these errands with a friar at his left side.

I arose quickly, by the light of the small oil lamp illuminating the wounded side of my Crucified Lord, and we left for the hospital.

While the Superior was confessing the patient at the far distant end of an endless ward, I took a walk in the darkened garden. It was cold. The sky was cloudy, black, solid. It was still a long time until daybreak and it seemed to me that the world was hidden, sealed deep withing a still-closed blossom.

There I prayed from memory my canonical Hours for the next day, from Prime to Nones.

Then we returned. I didn't want to go back to bed because there were hardly two hours left until time for chorus, so I began to reflect upon the Superior and my other brothers.

Analyzing it, I see that I don't love them.

And how, Lord, without feeling love for them will I ever be able to say that I love thee?

I shouldn't know them so well. Without my thoughts I would love them; and loving them, I would feel less alone. Knowledge elevates, Lord, but the heights are always lonely.

To this day, every time I study a person deeply, I feel them slip away from me. They ought to inspire respect or appreciation in me once I knew them completely, but full knowledge always kills my interest and I am left alone with an aversion to the well known.

I am hoping for love, dear God, because I feel so alone and love is Grace.

Back to the people. With all the compassion in my soul I pardon all of them. And nothing more! My soul still doesn't tremble with love for Your creatures.

There are some good friars of humble heart and buring spirit here but they have a submissive intelligence that doesn't satisfy one who needs also to admire them. They don't live in Your Divine Grace, oh Lord, because You never forged their minds in the sacred flames and, therefore, they lack the intuition needed to gain spiritual peaks. Ia am speaking of Fray Luis, Fray Bernardo, and even Fray Rufino...

Fray Rufino! In him from time to time, when I look into those eyes that seem lost in a bottomless nebula, I think I can distinguish a certain vision that anticipates significant deeds, a primitive and subtle sensitivity for the eternal. Only in him can I see anything close to the afflicted and fortunate, the seraphic friars minor from the fields of Assisi and Perugian

Others... How many?... Too many!... fill the community. Unenthusiastic friars attending their Offices with functionary zeal. They are happy. They laugh pleasantly and cordially, even joyfully, with the visitors whom they attend with elaborate effort, filled with the happiness that anything new and entertaining elicits as it enters an otherwise monotonous life. They work ceaselessly but they often complain of the overwork brought on by the lack of servants, those willing lay brothers who become more scarce every day.

Those lay brothers, Lord, that I cannot bring myself to approach, with that despicable humility of inferiors and a more than slightly impudent familiarity.

Usually I think those lay brothers are humorous. An uncomfortable humor. In the chorus they pray with much sighing and lots of huffing, using the entire capacity of their lungs. They cough, they sweat, they snort. One could well say that they operate under steam power.

I'd rather look at the idle hands of the Superior, soft, pale, a little fat.

I always say to him:

"Fray Luis, you have the hands of a bishop, made for blessing as they peek out from beneath the rigid folds of brocade, for reflecting the many bright colors of the gems embroidered into the vestments or supplying an ivory support for the golden crosier."

He impales me with the seriousness of a corrective glance; but he smiles inwardly.

And every since I first said that to him, he takes very good care of his hands; whenever he approaches me, his hands precede him.

There is, nevertheless, beneath that softness a strength...

Voices... Let's interrupt this....

It must be the two old lay brothers who are making their morning rounds putting out the night lamps!

But it sounds more like an alarm...alarm and discovery.

I open my window a bit.

There they are. I see the round, dark heads under their hoods, the brown habits cut at the waist by the white line of cord. They are two dark, dense spots on the gray line of the cloister columns that, harmonizing with the transparent lilac of dawn, have taken on a diaphonous, hazy blue coloring.

"This isn't holiness or anything related to it!" exclaims the voice of the elder.

I understand. They have caught Fray Rufino at some unseeming mortification of the flesh. That flesh already so meager, oh Lord!

Oh, sine mente caput, vigilis et inedia multa exhaustum!

I don't see him. He seems to be behind the pillar. Nor can I hear what he is saying. His voice, hardly discernible, sounds far away like a whispered moaning.

The lay brothers continue angrily:

"Get up from there!"

"Even if it is summer, little brother! Holy Mary! The weather these mornings is too cool."

"It's much too damp, Fray Rufino. Lying down like that in the mud! And I'll bet you spent the whole night here!

"Look! He's all purple and swollen!"

"And this cold has brought on so much stomach trouble! We all suffer from gas and the runs every morning!"

They take him away. They cover his head with his hood. I never get to see his face. Carried off between their two rather hefty bodies, he looks like nothing but an empty robe.

The truth is that in the presence of such acts by Fray Rufino, I'm constantly astonished. Paralyzed by shock. Even worse, I just stand there like an idiot.

And when I realize, Lord, that you have chosen him, I conclude that your Grace is nothing to be desired.

Not a judicious thought in his head, a head even further weakened by fasting!

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When I return after teachaing a class in Franciscan history to the novices, I find that my cell has been cleaned.

I am not surprised. I have become accustomed to receiving this morning present from Fray Rufino. He feels close to me as to no one else in the monastery because the two of us have yet to be ordained. We are still only deacons: I, because of my scruples about the sins of my worldly past and the difficulties I've had in pruifying my soul; he, because his penitential way of living has made it impossible for him to finish his studies.

The morning is cool, sparkling, and as pure as the voice of a bird. I have opened wide my window and doors and the new, still young smells enter. I inhale them to the bottom of my inner being.

I have nothing else to do, no business left hanging, no emotions to disturb my breast. I think of nothing. I want nothing. I see that the air is clean... clean all the way up to the blue. The garden where everything shines of youth and light is clean. My cell is clean. My feelings are clean. My conscience. My senses.

So I am happy.

This is real happiness, Lord, cleanliness inside and out and feeling my soul fresh and transparent turned into a glistening mirror to which quiet sensations softly come, like sympathetic beings appearing unexpectedly with smiling and open faces.

I'm on my way. The garden calls me at such moments. I want to walk about, dressing myself in the light of the benign sun, feeling my sandals pick up the dark, spongy earth, and looking into the well to see the bottom reflect the sky that is like an innocent, humble, and silent spirit.

I went.

There was no odor of flowers in the garden; there was a smell of green, of living green.

Going into the kitchen garden, I sat next to the cabbages and caressed a gray, shining head for a long time. A hard head of cabbage as gray as if it had been plated with silver, a cabbage that was swollen with the essence of life.

My sense avidly perceived everything as new and clean.

Fray Bernardo had hung a wicker work cage to the frame of his cell door and in it a linnet was hopping.

A pure white dove came down out of the old olive tree, perched on the rim of the well, and began to drink stagnant water from the wormeaten wood paying no attention at all to Brother Juan as he raised the bucket to fill his bisque-ware pitcher.

Finally I stood, opened my hands, closed my eyes, and raised my face to the sky. The sun spread its warmth between my fingers, splashing it over my immobile features, and then forced its way through my eyelids to take possession of my veins like some divinity of well being.

Now I comprehend, Lord, the pleasure that Your Divine Clemency has reserved to the blind.

All of a sudden I instinctively opened my eyes to find Fray Juan at my side. He was carrying the pitcher and I asked him for a drink.

Lord, that simple, pure water entered through my mouth, bathed my breast and reached into my heart.

"Father Lázaro, do you know what?" Brother Juan asked me then. "A miracle! A real miracle! Fray Rufino... we've all just seen it... put out a plate of leftovers in his cell and the cats and the mice came, as if they were the best of friends, to eat from it together.

"Really? Parise be to God, brother!"

I had to exaggerate my surprise. The perenptory blinking of his eyelids and candid arching of his brows, the light blue eyes of good Brother Juan demanded it of me.

"Really, Father. And can you imagine what he said when he saw us so inspired and trembling? That it was nothing, that a Holy Dominican had already done the same thing at least a century ago in Lima, and that he had only asked for the intercession of that beatified priest to achieve the same blessing for our monastery. Imagine! he said is was nothing!... A miracle! That's what we all insisted it was. A miracle! But then he became confused and repeatedly asked us to keep quiet about it."

"But you have told everyone in the community, certainly."

"In honor of our Lord Jesus Christ such events must always be reported. Even the world outside these walls should know. Ah! But there's still more! He spoke to them as they ate. He spoke to cats and mice, Father Lázaro! It was as if I were listening to the Little Flowers at the part where Our Father Saint Francis spoke to the birds. 'From now on,' he told them, 'you are not to be enemies since it is against God's love for his creatures to hate and devour each other.'

Isn't that a saint for you? And he has exactly the same kind of faith when it comes to plants. Father, do you see that shoot of jasmine there? Well, sir, he saw it the other day just as it was beginning to show and noticed that it was already half broken off and he splinted it with small sticks stuck together with bits of clay so that it could cure itself. Only God know what miracle may result from that!"

Yes, Brother Juan, this whole morning has been a miracle.

**************

The lay brothers caught an owl in the steeple and it is now cornered on one of the beams in the cloister. Several of us have gone out this afternoon to see it.

And, in the middle of all the good fun, Fray Elías made a bit of fun at my expense.

Since he is a friar without illusions, without a past, without mistrust of himself, he has no understanding of the spiritual ills that other souls can suffer; what long lasting torture one's acts can produce in their conscience; nor how many hours there are during which a monk's robe can burn like some new sin.

Thus he managed to compare the owl with "the souls that gnaw at themselves in the shadows," and when I offered a reply, he said with an air of bored contempt:

"Stop that nonsense, brother. You put on the robe once and for all, sing mass, and serve God with real simplicity, with happiness, and with strength, like a man."

Then he went on to talk about Our Sainted Father, about the parable of perfect happiness, about how he once called melancholy the "Babylonian sickness."

And that made me angry. But undoubtedly it wasn't just that. It was the way he lowered his eyes in an ironic fashion when he spoke to me, fixing them on my toes, a thing that has always made me very nervous. Perhaps that's why I had so little patience and snapped at him so severely.

Well fine! Just like everywhere else, there is no lack of uncomfortable moments in the monastery. Even God himself must plow the soil before he can sow seed and so it is that He often sows his best lessons during those few bad times. Didn't the unpleasantness uncover for me the angelic nature of Fray Bernardo's soul?

When he saw how exasperated I was, he very sweetly turned to Fray Elías and cited these words of Our Father of Assisi, "Nobody, unless he be tried by temptation and torment, can correctly be called a true servant of God, because the very ring with which Our Lord espouses the soul of his servant is forged in the conquest of temptation and torment." And then taking me by the sleeve, he led me off to the cloister of San Diego where we spoke about our love for our brothers in Jesus Christ.

Fray Bernardo has a face that shows sixty peaceful years. It is tinged with tiny surface blood vessels, a very white circle of hair surrounds the perfectly bald tonsure, and a pair of clear, trembling and generous eyes hides behind the bloue-colored glasses.

And this amiable old man loves mankind. How and why does he do so? Because he sees them as children. To do this he procedes by looking at their faces with his imagination rather than with his eyes. He then evokes the appearance they must have had at the age of ten, and their faces, restored to their infancy, grow fresher and become tender again, softened and modified by love.

Infantile faces, pretty ten-year-old faces, how innocent you appear on the other side of the blue glass through which the gentle old man looks at you! Because all of you --even you, corrupted woman, and you, bitter and irrascible man-- display superimposed on your adult faces

that other you from yesteryear, the one that a mother's hand once caressed, the one that almost certainly was more than once punished by some hard, unjust and open palm.

In this way, Fray Bernardo feels an almost maternal love towards every man. Fray Bernardo is a heart that comprehends; that is so much more than a mind that understands. A heart that measures our lack of defense in view of our lifetime surrounded by Nature.

This is the reason the little old mad speaks as he does, filling himself with a pointed tenderness that at times feels like an aching pain.

I remember his words:

"Yes, the infinite simplicity of man is to be marveled at, Fray Lázaro. Most times they act like innocent children, no more responsible for their faults than for their good deeds. Observe them. They don't even make an effort to change their faces. Like children, they hold onto their pleasures. They move to and fro, never stopping. They do a thousand enchantingly useless things. Many of them think they are working when. in reality, they are doing no more than playing at work. At most they satisfy the superfluous necessities that they themselves invent. And all that just in order to spend the wealth of life that God has given them and that they, therefore, need to waste. They talk from morning to night, repeating the same small, homely ideas dressed in words that are equally cheap and tame, ideas and words learned from others who have, in turn, adopted them because of a simple need to imitate. They even investigate things with an innocent but serious curiosity just as we, when we were children, took apart our grandfather's watch without knowing how to put it together again. At times, they do make things up! How many stupid things are there to be invented? And to each one they impute, in their puerile dreams, a philosophical transcendance. I remember the machines I used to invent with bits of chalk, pieces of string and old match boxes. They could do so many wonderful things, yet they did nothing at all!... And at every step they battle over some meaningless nonsense, some whim. They hit each other and then reconcile like the school children they are. At last when night falls, they go to bed worn out, having surrendered to an ineptitude they cannot understand. But God has sent them the night. The night, so like the shelter of a mother's lap, gathers them in, covers them, and puts them to sleep. But there is also something sad about them. They become ill and suffer undeserved accidents. Some endure them with such fragility that they evoke our most heartfelt and pitying prayers. How, Lord, can these creatures have the strength to offend You, the Almighty? This man, this woman, that other, that sick child, what can they have done to You? And the needy who come begging at our door every morning? They have just awakened and are already fatigued. Why must they bear their existence like an eternal exhaustion? Fiat voluntas tua......... And when they do something good? They are generally so little responsible for it that our exclamations are loaded with pity. Poor man, how good he is!"

"You're right," I interrupted at that point, "because what were the companions of the Poor Man of Assisi, and he himself, but the simplest of children?"

Fray Bernardo knew the answer. He raised an index finger to the temple of his glasses, looked at me over the top of the frame and, waggling his finger in warning, said to me:

"Yes, simple children, but read the Little Flowers well. Every time they did or said something simple, they sensed the Living Christ in their hearts."

The Living Christ! I felt like screaming.

Only for an instant! Later...

My God, how one analyzes! You analyze things... and in the end Fray Bernardo was correct. We analyze things with the same infenuous curiosity with which we took apart our granfather's watch... without knowing how to put it together again.

Lord, free me from analysis. It kills any intuitive action. Refine and simplfy me. Give me that simplcity that liberates us from our personal limitations.

I know that I love You Lord. I know that I love You because I recognize Your existence in the deepest, darkest recesses of my inner being, but I need to discover Your existence in all the other souls as well.

For this reason, deliver me from analysis. Bring my judgment and my feelings into harmony and allow me to reconcile myself with all Your creatures. Such a reconciliation, the larva of perfect love, eliminates the error of individual determination, of setting oneself apart.

Analysis, Lord, results in no real knowledge for Your humble servant after all. Perhaps good and evil are nothing but the manifestation, through opposites, of Your Total Design for all creation.

Analysis, Lord, is the means by which the moralists, so wise in matters of pride, attempt an interpretation of Your Total Design without seeing that they are only fragmenting it, that they are individualizing the universal. And they can hardly conceive, in the end, a law for dealing with the first principles of Your ethic. They barely possess a human concept of good, a human concept of evil... and the few feelings that govern the game.

Fray Bernardo is right, Lord. Men are children and as such they will always find the loose pieces of the watch in their inept and useless hands.

Lord, You must make me impersonal and ingenuous, like others, and humble. Then I will act without thinking and with a free heart. I will not love other men, as I love then today, through You. Through them I will love You. Like the simple men of Assisi, I will feel the Living Christ in my purified soul. Your Grace will have descended to Your servant and, just like the air in the tubes of the organ in our church, I will always sing the note that glorifies You and I will have reconciled myself to Your every form.

*****************************

Our brothers the mice have played a good one on you, Fray Rufino. Now thay have invaded the monastery.

And Father Procurator, Brother Storekeeper, Father Sacristan, and even the cooks are at this minute putting their complaints before Father Superior, because the cats refuse to hunt them down ever since you taught them to eat from the same plate with the mice.

"It's inconceivable!" they protest angrily. "In just a few days those creatures have invaded everything. It's a plague, a real plague!"

"The pantry is in a pitiful state!"

"And my supplies?"

"Well, and the beeswax, and the host, and the oil?"

"Even the meat is all dirty and mouse-easten in the morning. The milk is full of mouse droppings!"

Highly incensed, trying to show the greatest indignation possible, they went into the Superior's office just a minute ago. One even proposed that the Father Provincial should become involved.

I don't know, I don't know! Lord, what will be the end of all this? The other morning Brother Juan, still feeling the joy of this "miracle," commented on the way Fray Rufino had treated the new shoot of the jasmine, saying, "Only God knows what miracle may result from that!" I would be willing to forecast today that Fray Rufino is about to have a few bitter moemts because of the immoderate behavior of our little brothers, the mice.

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How can two people look so much alike?

Because it wasn't she, no! I have seen her too many times since the calamity. She is very different. Her marriage, the eight years that have passed... No this is another woman.

The one who stared at me in the church is exactly like her, but at the age of twenty, the age when I placed my unguarded heart in her lap and she, transformed by the slightest flirting of that piano player into a child fascinated by some beautiful chimera, allowed it to fall.

But she is the same, marvelously identical! Who is she, Lord, who is she?

Fray Rufino and I were going to take communion. We entered together from the sacristy heading for the sacred altar. Then I looked toward the congregation and a pleasure --her look--

caught my wandering eyes and vanquished them. I looked at those light brown eyes. Those eyes, My God, that I used to compare to two burning bees!

How they upset my spirit at that moment!

My tragedy resurrected itself. A resurrection I had never before felt. No, never, because we never seem to remember well the horrible pains, those that shock us but once, at some unique moment in our life. They require a new spear thrust, one that strikes like lightning to illuminate for a few seconds our foggy memory and allow the whole tragedy to surge forward and be suddenly revived. That's what happened this morning.

How I suffered!

Then at the altar rail with my back to her, I began to understand. My soul was immediately filled with its turbulent worldly past. Lord, I could not receive You.

I ran for the sacristy door where, for some unexplained reason, I stopped.

What I did then, holding onto the beads of my rosay with all the strength of my restless fingers, astonished me. I asked myself, as I do now, "Who is she, Lord, who is she?... Then, as now, I searched my memory and my imagination, like a prisoner in his dungeon cell seeking some illuminating ray of light, to find nothing but the gray, hard, impenetrable wall. I looked at Fray Rufino. He was waiting for You, Lord, with a smile on his face, his eyes closed and sunken, a vision of eternal holiness.

Fray Rufino, I still seem to see you olive-colored head, inclined over the linen of the sacred altar cloth held up by your rough, dark fingers. The badly shave tonsure, the ring of stringy black hair, the face slightly deformed by deep caverns and sharp bones. All were alive with a strange and beautiful spirituality. And when you took the white Form into your mouth and closed your dark lips with loving reverence, I felt myself present at an exhibition of august piety.

Fray Rufino, you will always approve of your brother Lázaro. I am not lost, no! I no longer need inquire who that person is. All my yesterdays are dead. Those illusions are nothing now but lifeless phantoms that scarecely pulsate in my memory. Today, all my old expectations lie among those human feelings that used to tie me to the world, a cadaver among cadavers.

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