Prince of Peace

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

AFTERWORD

First Mariner Books edition 1998

Copyright © 1984 by James Carroll
Afterword copyright © 1998 by James Carroll

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

The author gratefully acknowledges the following
for permission to reprint previously copyrighted material:
"Recuerdo" from
Collected Poems,
Harper & Row.
Copyright 1922, 1950 by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Reprinted by permission.
Excerpts from "The Waste Land" in
Collected Poems 1909–1962
by T. S. Eliot.
Copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; Copyright © 1963, 1964
by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
and Faber and Faber Publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN
0-395-92619-
X

Printed in the United States of America
QUM
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For My Son Patrick

 

I
N
M
EMORY
O
F
P
ATRICK
H
UGHES

N
OT
many miles from the hill on which I stood they were prying great chunks of concrete off the mangled bodies of children. They were picking up corpses from ditches but leaving severed limbs to rot in the vicious August sun. And suddenly they were dropping from the sky again in their flashing Phantoms, blowing balconies off tall buildings, twisting minarets and smokestacks apart and stripping the trees of branches. They were pumping rounds of fire at targets picked off maps at random; their long-range guns were almost never silent.

But I didn't hear them. And usually I did not think about Beirut. I had not concerned myself with Lebanon, though everyone in Israel, even the brothers there at our remote priory, had thought of little else all summer.

I pulled the hood of my cowl forward for shelter against the sun. The desert wind snapped at the worn gray fabric of my habit.

Yes, to my ever-increasing surprise, what those words—priory, cowl, habit—indicate is true. I was a monk.

As in monk's bread? you ask.

As in jam. We were a small herd of bull-nuns, though the canonical constitution preferred to call us English Benedictines. We were a teaching order, centered at Downside Abbey in England. My priory, Holy Cross, was our contemplative outpost in the Holy Land. Our angels' island, as it were. The monks came there from sister monasteries in Britain and the United States. They came for three months, six, a year; for retreat or sabbatical; to renew their vows or—and alas, these fellows were always better company—to finalize their decisions to breach them.

I was one of the seven brothers who were there permanently. As the monastic argot had it, I was a lay brother, which phrase had always called to mind, forgive me, the interrogatory—"Lay, brother?"—of a hustling Eighth Avenue pimp. You, of course, are thinking, since you know your Benedictine history, Ah, poor lame-brained bastard! Lay brothers were the enlisted men of monasticism, the serfs, the Little Johns, who praised the Lord in meniality—Scoop that slop! Knead that dough! Stomp those grapes!—while the tonsured, the clerical officer class, aired their manicures, thumbed their breviaries and their noses. In the new Church, lay brothers were to be treated with all the dignity due the sons of God, a return to Benedict who brought democracy to the West. Monks were all equal in the Lord,
n'est-ce pas?
Still, some were more equal than others. The shit-work always fell to us.

Myself, I did not complain. But then I didn't harvest olives in the sun or scrape the cistern free of algae on my knees. I served as librarian and sacristan; no heavy lifting, inside work, a desk of my own.

The care of books remained, in my opinion, a noble function. Even those books. The bulk of my library consisted of outdated tomes, manuals of Scholastic philosophy mainly, and commentaries on canon law. You would not believe the dry-rot, the trivia, the efflorescent casuistry. Dust rose off every page. Papa John flung open his famous
aggiornamento
window, I'm convinced, less to let fresh air in than to throw such volumes out. The Church was entombed in their heartless formulations.

We Benedictines did not believe in destroying books, any books; we invented them, after all, in our
scriptoria.
Books were our sacred totems, our sacraments. And so Brother Librarians in England and America, on the theory that desert monks would read any old shit, sent us their mush-spined copies of the
Codex,
the
Devotio Moderna,
the
Imitatio,
the
Summa,
the
Oxoniense,
the
Moralia
and the
Etcetera.
Monk librarians on two continents knew of Brother Francis, bibliophile, fool and scholar
manqué,
who would receive each book gratefully, wipe it carefully and fondle it for a moment, even if for all the monk's bread in the world, he would never read it.

My duties as sacristan were less sacred. In fact they were mainly a matter of laundry. In the civilized world the sacristy, which is in effect the department of props and costumes, was always entrusted to Brother Swish, some monastic Edith Head. Not there. Me, I was an aesthetic minimalist. It was the desert after all, not Canterbury, and not Fire Island either. My simple responsibility was to see that Father Prior and each visiting priest had what they needed to concelebrate the daily liturgies. I spent much of my time therefore—this seems like an admission and would once have humiliated me to make it—ironing linens and vestments like a putzfrau. It would have humiliated me even more to confess, as I do now, that I had come rather to like it. There was a certain visceral satisfaction, one I could never have imagined in my previous life, in folding a Purificator precisely in thirds and creasing it with half one's weight on the old iron, transforming a balled, wrinkled cloth into a sacramental crisp and white enough to be worthy of the Sacred Species. As every housewife of the old school knew, and every confessor too, nothing pleases like making what was filthy clean.

"Ah, Durkin, you old fart!" I could hear my former colleagues bleating from the poker table in the faculty lounge, "And you hadn't even booze to blame it on!"

To which I'd have replied, better break your elbow than your knee. Better waste your liver than your soul. Ah, dear reader, what you'd never believe is that over those years at Holy Cross my gratitude at being there moved me more than once to tears. Of course it wasn't the
laborare
that did that, the menial work. I had not lost my mind. It had been an act of profound selfpreservation when I took a lifelong vow of Stability to the Priory of the Holy Cross near the village of Tantur on the West Bank of the Jordan River. Once I'd had a thousand problems. But there I had only three: poverty, chastity and obedience.

You see, all I have to do is begin to sketch this story and I resort to self-sealing irreverence, the fake cynicism we came to expect of each other when the subject at hand was serious. But it can't be helped. My story begins in that monastery, and my own impulse, now, to be chagrined by that, is absolute. Still, I refuse it.

To put it as forthrightly as I can, I, together with my brothers there, had accepted the call to build, day in and day out, a living edifice of prayer.

"Come, come, Durkin!"

Let me say it, for my sake if not yours. My life's meaning had become, despite itself—what else to call it?—holiness. Shrinks say "wholeness" but miss by a mile what I'm talking of: prayer, the desert life, spiritual existence, the Eucharist and a strict observance of the monastic hours, from Matins to Compline. How can I describe the life to you and not sound addled, inane or, worse, sincere? Words fail me perhaps because in that setting and throughout my years in it we didn't use them much. Except for Sundays and feast days we continually maintained the Great Silence. In
lingua
that's
Magnum Silentium,
which sounds like a weapon, and of course it is.
Silentium
is the great enemy of
Sardonius.

So there I was, in a monastery. And, offered with some embarrassment but no apology, here is the meaning I began to uncover there, but only on that day which would be, though I didn't know it yet, my last.

 

It distracted enormously when events outside our enclosure intruded. Like, if you will, the war between Israel and the Palestinians. Not a week had passed that summer in which one monk or another hadn't homilized about it at liturgy, and every day someone prayed for peace with justice if he was for the Palestinians, or for the survival of God's Chosen People if he was for the Jews. I was known to pray for help in bearing with special burdens, by which my quibbling brothers no doubt knew I meant them.

A mere distraction? you say. That vicious, unending conflict? That slaughter? Yes. For me, I admit it, until then. But then, suddenly, for once it was not "distracting" me. It was obsessing me. I had the eye all at once of a worried parent in time of war, and I didn't miss a thing.

I saw, especially, Beirut. It was a city without windows. I imagined all that glass in shards, a crop of blades, sprouting underfoot. I imagined all those panicked sleepers running from their tin bungalows without sandals, slicing flesh from bone, dancing on the streets, not in them. In the howl of wind that afternoon, for a change, I did hear them, wailers, gunners, dive bombers. I saw children. I saw girls. I saw one in particular pressing her entrails back into her stomach, but her wound was like the mouth of a shrieking Arab. And whom should she have hated? That wily devil Arafat, hiding in his sewer until the river of babies' blood overspilled a gutter on cue for television? Or should she have hated our own beloved Begin, more popular than ever, leader at last of the cossack charge of his dreams? Would he have known a pogrom if he was the one who ordered it?

I lived in Israel, but I was not a Jew; among Englishmen, but I was an American; as a monk, but I was not ordained. Once a scholar of some repute, I was the custodian of cast-off books and I did laundry. Therefore my opinions were so much sand in the brain. I tried to live without them, but on that day the war had begun to frighten me, and I knew why.

The sun was setting. The shadow of evening had already fallen across the distant desert valley. Beyond, on a butte just visible in the east, was the ruin of Herod's palace—Antipas, the Herod who beheaded John because his daughter asked him to. The ruin sat on a lonely pinnacle from which its privilege was to bathe in the golden light some moments longer.

I understood Herod better than the celibate exigetes did because, before I was a laundress-monk hidden in Judea I'd had my measure of prominence too, and more to the point I'd had a daughter of my own. I'd held her in my arms before her mother did. Those few moments after her birth—a tough cesarean; I'd thought they both were dying—remained for me the very definition of happiness, wholeness, peace. As she'd grown older and of necessity away from me, my devotion to her had only intensified. If she had asked for some crazed prophet's head on a plate and I could have given it to her, I might have once. Why then, you might well ask, had I abandoned her more than a decade before when she was seven years old and needed me more than ever? It will take all these pages to explain, and in a way they are addressed, first, to her, the long and complicated confession of a parent who lost his way. Let me say now only that she was the last of my loves whom I betrayed.

 

I faced the thing itself, the sun, and stared at it, which one never did in the desert, even at that moment when its lower edge was slicing into the earth like a saw blade into pulp. I turned slightly and faced Bethlehem two miles to the south. Behind me, eight miles north of a line of hills, lay Jerusalem. I was desolate but still pompous, and made much of that geography; a monastery between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, between birth and death, between the beginning and the end. As if it were the vision Jesus had from a hill like that—or from
that
hill—I had seen in that plain a literal army massing during the Yom Kippur War; hundreds of tanks, thousands of soldiers and in the darkness the blinking light of countless campfires spread across the valley like a reflection of the stars. It had become every army to me, a permanent vision, as the Arabs had become the Jews, permanent victims, and I had become inured to every plight but Herod's—who couldn't refuse his daughter.
His
Salome wasn't a seven-year-old; all my child wanted was her Daddy.