Chapter 21
Meditation was very difficult the next morning after the Office of Vigils. Everyone in the community seemed to be somewhat distracted and on edge. All were keeping the Grand Silence but still each knew that the rest of the community members were restless. The events of the past week were just beginning to fit together and the collective mind of the community was working overtime.
The mystery team reconvened after breakfast in the monastery library. Detective Gold, Dr. Chantal Fleur, Hester Von Kiel, and the abbot studied the anonymous letter encased in a plastic bag. Hester took one look at the scrawled message, slid right off of her chair in a faint that took her down to the floor with a loud thud. Thank you Jesus for carpet!
“Good heavens, Hester, I thought you were lightening up,” mumbled the abbot. What Francis seemed to dismiss as a momentary emotional display, David saw as very important. When the dramatics were over, Dave very quietly asked Hester if the note held any special significance for her.
One approach to psychotherapy is called “Gestalt” therapy, named after the German world for pattern. In this approach to psychological healing, the doctor encourages the patient to trigger an old pattern or context in which a certain attitude or emotion was learned so that he or she can change it, or “unlearn it” by re-visiting the context of the original learning. Sometimes this may take the form of talking to an empty chair as if there were a person in it. This imaginary person, for example, might be someone the patient is trying to make friends with, or get over a feeling about. The patient then moves to the empty chair and talks as if he or she were that imaginary person responding back to the patient. The emotional response to this kind of therapy is very powerful and can trigger a sudden “gestalt” or pattern in the feelings in the patient. At that moment of blinding insight, everything comes together and an emotional shift can occur in the psyche of the person being treated.
Various pieces of the present adventures in Hester’s life, for example the disappearance of Brother Matthew, her discovery of the body of Christi Simko on the hill behind the monastery grounds, her sleuthing around and discovering Brother Matthew’s book and the empty Cheez Twists bag, and the anonymous note, all coalesced together into a blinding gestalt which was too overwhelming for Hester to tolerate so suddenly. Thus, she fainted. It was the note that triggered the pieces into a unified and understandable pattern or gestalt.
Hester righted herself, and tried to straighten out her short graying hair a little. Once she thought that she looked proper enough, but not too proper for the new Hester, she explained: “The person who wrote that note is my old boyfriend; I am convinced of it. I’d recognize that writing anywhere. He wanted to marry me. I didn’t marry him because he had such an undisciplined brain. He used to say that he was dumb, but that was just an excuse not to think things through thoroughly. No one is dumb; we all have different gifts. He was more interested in himself than in avoiding the disruptions that his lack of thinking and mental discipline would produce.
“The words of the Buddha, found in the book containing his saying called the Dhammapada, sum Jeff and this whole situation up perfectly: “Just as rain breaks through an ill-thatched house, so passion penetrates an undeveloped mind.”
“I knew that,” whispered Dave under his breath as he rolled his prominent brown eyes upward and then visually connected with Francis and Chantal.
“Jeff loved Cheez Twists. I couldn’t consciously bring myself to think of him as a kidnapper but I grabbed that empty Cheez Twits bag as evidence just as soon as I saw it. Jeff would never harm anyone but would probably not think through a caper like this, seeing it more as a game than as a crime. He is somehow behind the disappearance of Brother Matthew. His lazy, illogical mind, probably decided that Brother Matthew and I were not available for him and Christi so he kidnapped Brother Matthew prior to the day on which our novice was to take his monastic vows.”
Hester read the note aloud to the group: “If we can’t have them, neither can yous.”
“See how the writer uses the pseudo-word ‘yous’ for the plural of ‘you?’ People from Philadelphia do that a lot, and Jeff is originally from there. It has nothing to do with intelligence; it is simply a local custom. Detective Gold shifted his body, which was now less overweight due to the taxing month he had just been through, and thanks also to his healthier lifestyle. “Do you think he’s capable of murder?”
“Not in the least. Jeff is essentially a kind man—mentally lazy, but kind.”