CHAPTER 2 - CHINA
The dry yellow parchment pages crinkled like autumn leaves in his white-gloved hands. The smell of a vegetable stir fry laden with tofu wafted into his small guest room from the kitchen. Had he not been so absorbed in the four hundred year old documents before him, the monk would have heard the gentle rhythmic scraping of cooking utensils in a wok as the dinner sizzled over a gas burner. He was here to solve the mystery of what happened to the previous keeper of these parchments, and the one before that, and the one before that, all the way back to the fifteen hundreds in France.
Rumors about the existence of these documents had abounded for decades--along with stories of the catastrophic misfortunes of those who eventually possessed them. No one would tell him who the previous keepers were or where they went. Had they simply died off? Were they killed? Was he next? Were these parchments blessed or cursed? Brother Francis O’Neil needed to answer these questions, not so much for himself, but in order to protect others in his spiritual lineage if the parchments indeed attracted danger.
The first recorded death connected with someone who eventually was associated with the documents was that of Baron de Chantal. It was his grieving wife who had written about half of the correspondence in the stack of parchments. Had that long ago death begun a cycle, created a curse? Brother Francis was not a worrier by nature, but in recent years he had been clobbered over the head, nearly drowned by someone, and eventually shot. He was becoming increasingly cautious and needed to break through this stone wall of silence to see if any of his misadventures were related to the fact that he was to one day inherit the parchments. He needed to solve this puzzle before anyone else got hurt. Time was clearly of the essence.
His French was never very good. The monk spent twice as much time on his French homework in college, just to get by, as he did with other subjects that came more easily to him. Maybe all that study had something to do with why the horseshoe of hair now ringing his head had more silver than brown in it. Brother Francis smiled as he remembered his French professor coming into their classroom and finally speaking in English one day. This was the first time in two years that the professor was reduced to speaking in English. "Hoping against hope I come in here every day and try to teach you people French." Most of the people in the class of approximately twelve students were taking French to fulfill an obligatory language requirement, so it was either that or Spanish or German. Brother Francis chose French because it was the language of his spiritual family.
Founded in the early sixteen hundreds by St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane de Chantal, the Salesian community, as it would eventually be called, has branches all over the world. Lay men and women, as well as clergy and vowed monastics, follow the message of the Gospel today as exemplified through the spirit and experience of a widow and a kindly and practical French bishop. Now in his sixties, Brother Francis could smile gratefully about many of his life experiences—but more about that at another time. The older spoken and written French of the fifteen hundreds and sixteen hundreds was even harder to decipher than modern French for the Salesian monk. The good news resulting from the electronic age is that the monk now has a small computer-like electronic dictionary to look French words up in. The even better news is that the dictionary talks--even though it sounds a bit like an old “Chatty Cathy” doll. Brother Francis can hear the word he does not understand, which adds up to a multitude, spoken in French. He is actually learning as he is translating.
How was it that a young man from a tough section of Philadelphia, roots of which he was quite proud, would end up in mainland China reading material from over four hundred years ago, written by the original hands of the authors? Who were the people who had these documents passed on to them through a series of events spanning four centuries? Try as he might, the “mystery monk,” as Brother Francis has sometimes been called, could not seem to avoid being drawn into unsolved mysteries--and occasionally even murder. He shuddered to think that the latter might be the case yet again. It was hard enough to deal with complex and dangerous situations at home in his monastery in Pennsylvania, but it was even more challenging when abroad. The Chinese people were wonderful to him. He had enjoyed his hospital rotations in three Beijing hospitals about twenty years earlier. He took what he learned from those experiences and continued to develop his skills. Brother Francis practiced Chinese medicine at home in Pennsylvania, in addition to clinical psychology and natural medicine. He made yearly trips back to mainland China to work with the sick and the poor as a way of returning the favor he had received in being able to study their five thousand year old system of medicine earlier in his life, and practice it today.
The writings of St. Jane de Chantal and St. Francis de Sales were largely available in English. During the past few decades, encouraged by the spirit of Church renewal of Vatican Council II, most religious communities "went back to their roots." They researched the spirit and message of their founders. Thus it was that the members of the Salesian spiritual family began learning more and more about the personal and spiritual experiences of their founders. The material that Brother Francis held in his hands, written in black ink on parchment sheets, had not yet been seen by any of the Salesian scholars. It had not, in fact, been seen by just about anyone in four hundred or more years.