CHAPTER 6
The frequent flyer monk was pretty good at letting go of problems and responsibilities when he flew, and even when he moved from patient to patient during his busy days. He pushed aside the thought of the approaching new year and the endless paperwork he would need to fill out again for the federal government. Accounting was not his strong point. Once he got beyond Quicken, the bookkeeping program on the computer, he was lost—sometimes even before.
The Abbot once wondered if it might be better, due to the yearly paperwork and his ineptitude with it, to let go of the federal legal status the monastery held and remain a simple Pennsylvania corporation missioned to live the monastic life and do good work for others. No one had any private bank accounts anyway. Everything went into the common fund and they did pay school, real estate, Medicare, FICA, and other taxes. One comfort was that Saint Jane Frances de Chantal didn’t like administrative duties either.
Then he remembered the dream, or vision, or whatever it was he once had. Abbot Francis was struggling to fill out the necessary forms for the previous tax year and had been up until after three in the morning. He dragged through the next day with the help of prayer and qigong, saw his patients, and made it to the various monastic exercises in the community schedule.
That night he saw a face before him while lying in bed. It didn’t frighten him. It took a moment but he recognized it as the face of his brother who had died the summer before. The monk felt a moment of profound peace and knew that everything would be alright. Some of the agitation returned the next day, but not as strongly. He called the Internal Revenue Service during business hours expecting to be put on hold but instead was given a clear explanation as to how to complete the monastery form for the past year—rules and regulations which he thought would make his head spin but didn’t. He was on and off of the phone within ten minutes and had been given a very simple way to correct what he had been struggling with in the paperwork.
Monks and nuns struggle like everyone else. That’s why when something exceptional like this happens Brother Francis hesitates to speak about it. People might get the idea that monastics have a corner on God and get special favors. Sometimes it seemed the opposite to the Abbot. In any case, he knew that he was meant to share this wonderful experience with others. Hadn’t his sister-in-law told him only days after the death that she was praying to their brother (in-law) already? It looked to him like they had a saint in the family.
His thoughts transitioned to Brother Benedict. He took comfort in knowing that Sister Jane would take care of things in his absence. He smiled as he remembered her creative way of inviting the door-to-door religious converters not to come by so frequently.
Earphones on and Zen player powered up, Brother Francis lost himself in China. He quietly mouthed the words as he thought them in his mind: peng2you3,qie2zi, lao3shi1, yi1sheng1, friend, eggplant, teacher, doctor. He had started studying Chinese about six weeks prior, Mandarin Chinese to be specific. The Chinese medicine doctor knew some Chinese words, mostly body parts and diagnostic terms in Traditional Chinese Medicine, but he was far from being able to hold even a simple conversation.
The monk could mimic the sounds of words and sentences well enough, and was beginning to be able to form sentences for himself. He actually had a dream about Sister Rose Therese, his first grade teacher over fifty years before, who had only recently died. There she was in the front of the classroom with what appeared to little Francis an enormous reading book which was held upright by a black cardboard stand perched on the edge of the stage.
The end of the stage in the school auditorium encroached just a few feet into the classroom, which had no door. The walls of all the classrooms around the main body of the first floor auditorium could be rolled up (if one were a weightlifter) to create an even larger meeting room for the student body.
“See Jane run. See Spot run. See Dick run.” Sister Rose Therese read on and prompted the children to repeat what she said as she pointed to the words in the reader with her black tipped wooden pointer. Here he was at sixty plus doing the same thing again but this time in Chinese.
If little kids can learn this, so can I.
A few more words floated into his ears—two he liked the best—Jia1na2da3 and ka1fei1. These were words that had at least a little resemblance to their English counterparts “Canada” and “coffee.” He wondered if there were any other sound alike words but knew that they were almost nonexistent.
If only I didn’t have to say the syllables with their appropriate tones, or sounds. There were symbols for each of the four tones in spoken Chinese, and no symbol was placed over words that were in a neutral tone. The monk had learned the symbols but was also learning to transpose them as numbers because many computers do not provide Chinese fonts and the numbers, on a good day, work just about as well as the tone markings. His teacher told him that the tones could be thought of as music, but the Abbot wasn’t buying it.
He checked his watch. How many minutes to Anne Murray and then an audio-book? The monk always did business before pleasure. There was a certain pleasure in his Chinese lessons but it exhausted him. It also strained his throat. Brother Francis was trying to stop his head from bobbing up and down and his arm from waving as he concentrated on the four tones, plus neutral, in which Mandarin was spoken. The movements happened automatically and he thought others might think him possessed by an evil spirit or something. More than likely he simply came across like a bobble-head doll or an orchestra conductor with an imaginary orchestra. He often encouraged people to rise above what people thought. Here was a good opportunity to practice what he preached.
It’s like trying to play the piano with both hands, this think about the meaning of the word and the tone at the same time. It’s getting a little better and I’m finding Chinese easier to study than French for some curious reason that escapes me. Maybe age and better study skills have something to do with it.
Brother Francis mouthed the Chinese sounds in response to the voice in his earphones trying not to disturb the person next to him. Fortunately he was in a window seat so the student could turn his head toward the window while speaking, as if he were enjoying the blue and white swirls beyond the plane window.
The middle-aged lady next to him did sneak a few looks his way but Brother Francis made believe that he didn’t notice. Was it his imagination? Did she seem relieved when their plane arrived in Chicago and she could escape this man in a blue monk’s cowl and short gray tunic and pants? Here was another opportunity for the monk to rise above what others thought of him. He long believed that the freest people of all are those who are not overly concerned with what others think about them.
His nose led him through the terminal at O’Hare International Airport—directly to a Cinnabon store. The Abbot’s blood sugar rose just smelling the sugar and carbohydrate delight. He ordered a Cinnabon and decaf coffee in place of his usual green tea. He asked the girl at the cash register for a side of insulin but she didn’t seem to get the joke.
The Abbot smiled as he remembered being stranded in Detroit between planes when returning from a meeting of the Fellowship of Emerging Religious Communities, an organization for small monasteries. A young woman on the van back and forth to the motel where all of the stranded travelers were put up for the night was a cardiology resident on her way back to her hospital in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
The next morning he and the cardiology student doctor were walking through the airport and she said that she would take him to the perfect breakfast place if the monk would swear never to tell that a cardiology resident had taken him there. He agreed. They wound up at Cinnabon!
The next plane awaited the traveler. He boarded with the taste of Cinnabon still on his vowed lips. Chinese studies completed on the earlier plane ride of his journey, he fastened his seatbelt and drifted off to “Just a Little Good News” being sung by Anne Murray. He loved not only the sound of the music but also the lyrics. The song longed for a world where there was less suffering and violence--and so did he.