Ora et Labora

Prayer

My head is thundering, absolutely thundering, there are drums and cannons inside; the department meeting is winding down, my phone has been vibrating like an angry insect for twenty minutes, I’m thinking of St. Benedict in the mountains.

Anthony is talking about his research for his book on Teresa of Avila. There’s a pile of work waiting for me in my office that I have to finish before the winter break - the papers that need grading, the recommendations that need writing. The December light is weak even at two in the afternoon, and outside the windows there’s rain dripping from the few leaves left on the trees. I’m dying for a cup of tea. My vision is blurring and there’s a blinding pain inside my head, behind my left eye. My doctor has told me that the migraines are stress-related, that I need to take time off and drink more water. The whole time I was talking to him Moritz was texting me to ask if I could pick up Marie early because of a thesis defense that ran late. And now my phone is buzzing with a notification, and I turn it face-down on the table.

Anthony finishes, and I clear my throat. 

“Unless anyone else has any business…” I say. 

A hand shoots up from the corner. The person it belongs to is hidden by the bodies occupying the table, but I know instinctively that it’s Theo. The pink shirt cuffs, the long fingers and careful nails, the golden retriever energy. He’s waving his hand left and right to be seen. My phone buzzes again, insistently, vibrating against my pen, and it's like my phone is inside my skull, buzzing against the bone.

“Yes, Professor Hagen?”

Theo leans in, breaking the circle of older men. He’s only in his mid-thirties, and he’s frequently forced to brush his curly hair from his forehead. In conversation he stares at you so intensely that he seems to go slightly cross eyed. He’s slightly over six feet tall and I admire and resent how thoughtlessly he claims space.

“I was hoping to borrow some of your time this afternoon,” he says. I see Anthony whisper something to his neighbor and laugh. Theo continues, unphased. “I’d like your thoughts on Martha Marchina’s veneration of St. Agatha.”

My phone buzzes again, the light leaking out from around the frame like a reproach, and I glance down to check my messages. Moritz has texted three times now. The last simple reads “PICK UP MARIE? SICK.” My head is exploding, I fear I am experiencing the rapture.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to run, but you have my number. Text me tonight.” More murmuring. I immediately realize I shouldn’t have said that. “Everyone else, have a restful break.”

St. Benedict, founder of Christian monasticism, on whose work I have built my career, contemplated how to serve God together, as a community, working as one for sacred purpose. The monks he led tried to poison him twice; his survival ranks among his first miracles. I think of this often - of how we in this university are serving God together, how we are joined in purpose. I think of the difficulties in being the leader of a group of individuals, all driven by fiery passion. I think of how I sometimes hope the other professors will eat arsenic and die.

I was in Theo’s apartment once. I went over when he first started to deliver some paperwork and welcome him to the faculty. He lived in a third-floor walkup. I trudged up the three flights of stairs and knocked on his door, and he opened it, sweating and dressed in nothing but a pair of track pants. I was panting and nearly doubled over, and suddenly very aware that the professor we’d hired from the University of Leiden was both very angular and nearly a decade younger than me.

“Shit!” he said, and ran inside. I heard him from further down the hall. “I thought you were here to deliver the rest of the furniture. Please come in, I’ll be right out.”

I walked inside and closed the door behind me. There was, indeed, no furniture, except for a collection of orange crates stacked into shelves in the hallway holding his collection of books - books on religion, philosophy, history; books in Dutch, English, French, and German; academic publications and textbooks; and a dozen books of fiction scattered on top, along with a single piano exercise book. Otherwise the apartment seemed to be empty. The living room was large and contained only an office chair and a single white portable folding table.

For a moment I thought of the apartment I’d shared with Moritz in Berlin when we were absolutely broke and spent all our time lying in bed together studying and writing. We thought it was so romantic being poor back then. Moritz's mother once offered to buy him a new motorcycle to make the commute to school easier, and he'd stormed off, leaving breakfast in a huff. I found him irresistable.

Then Moritz got the tenure-track job in America, and suddenly we had a house, and to host dinner parties we needed a bigger table and more dishes, and to get them we needed a car, and of course then Marie came. Necessity begets necessity.

When Theo returned wearing a red sweater and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses I was still lost in the memory. He asked if I’d like some coffee and I said I would. When he brought it and handed it to me, he leaned in and blew over the top of my mug to cool it, and suddenly I was very aware that he was very handsome in an eager sort of way, and that we were not just alone in his apartment, but in fact the only things in it - the entirety of the space was a blank around us. For a moment we stood there very silently drinking coffee together, looking into each other's eyes. 

I was aware that I was also responsible for his future career, and that he might be eager purely on that basis - but still, I thought. Still. Benedict had to shape his church. I have my responsibilities. But surely our work merits some kind of reward in this life.

The department meeting breaks up, all of the other professors begin gathering their things. I start walking to the parking lot. Anthony hurries to catch up with me, drawing up alongside me just as I step into the elevator.

"Be careful, Uli," he says, stepping in with me. 

My head is breaking apart like an egg. "Not now, Tony. I can barely see."

"I'm just saying," he says, pressing the button for the parking lot. "He worships you a little. And he's not bad looking."

Work

Marie started school two months after her fifth birthday. She began vomiting every afternoon three days later.

I’d always thought she was a healthy child, with the occasional colds and bruised knees but generally robust. But the third day she spent at kindergarten the school called and asked that she be picked up. Apparently she’d spent most of the morning complaining that her stomach hurt, and then vomited on her own shoes and those of another child first thing after lunch. 

I asked what was wrong when she got in the car. She shrugged. “My tummy didn’t feel good all morning.”

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier, sweet thing?” I asked.

“It felt ok before,” she said. “It didn’t start hurting until I got to school.”

It continued like that. Every morning, everything felt fine. Every afternoon, she’d leave her lunch and most of her breakfast on the sidewalk. (And once in a potted plant.) Moritz has trouble keeping schedules straight, and I've always ended up in charge of logistics. So I’d drive over, mop up her face, and drive her back home, where she’d spend the rest of the afternoon coloring and watching Peppa Pig. 

That’s when the migraines started. I’d set up a little work table in the living room where I could keep an eye on Marie, but that also meant I was working with Peppa Pig in the background. One day I was halfway through reading a sentence when a white light appeared out of the corner of my left eye. It started growing and growing, and I realized my hands were shaking. I barely made it upstairs to the bedroom before my legs gave out - I don’t remember, but Moritz said he found me in bed, half out of my clothes.

In my second book I talked about St. Benedict’s life in Rome, and how the city’s excesses eventually drove him into the wilderness, into a hermit’s life in a cave in the mountains near Subiaco, where he could live a godly life away from distraction. 

For the first year Marie was in school, before we could afford to pay a graduate student to look after her two afternoons each week, I barely published at all. I felt like I’d get her up and dressed in the mornings, and by the time I sat down at my computer the school was calling me to come pick her up. Then as soon as I sat her in front of the computer my eyes would start watering and I’d have to spend the rest of the day staring out the window, glassy-eyed and unfocused. I desperately wanted to work, but I could barely hold onto my job. After the winter break, the university suggested I take a leave of absence until the end of the year, and I grudgingly had to accept.

I was thinking of this in Theo’s apartment - the empty space was not just something to be shaped, but also something to leave be. 

A cave in the mountains.

Study

On Thursdays Moritz and I see a marriage counselor named Dina. Dina is vaguely Levantine and wears a black blazer every session, accented by brightly colored blouses. She has extremely large hair and severe, thick-rimmed forest green glasses. I often wish I were married to Dina.

She gives us little homework assignments between sessions, and then checks up on how we're doing. Moritz is supposed to make dinner two nights per week, and I am supposed to practice a set of breathing exercises and keep a gratitude journal.

Sometimes she’ll start a session by asking how we’re doing on our homework. The irony of asking this of two college professors is lost on no one. Moritz will tell her how many times he’s made dinner and what he’s learned. And I’ll list five things I’m grateful for. The sessions go more smoothly if I include Moritz in that list.

But then we’ll get out of a session and not speak in the parking lot at all. Depending on our days, we might even silently get into our own cars to drive home. And in my car I’ll do breathing exercises for ten minutes while I watch the traffic lights change. I'll say to myself, red, green, yellow, red. And I'll dig my fingernails into my palms, sometimes so hard I break the skin.

I know - I have come to know - that there are things Moritz simply cannot do, no matter how much and how desperately I ask. Asking him to organize his time, to take Marie to school, to be responsible for chores - I am begging him for a miracle that he cannot accomplish.

St. Benedict lived as a hermit for three years, completely alone in his cave. I often wonder if that was a burden or a blessing. I wonder if you're meant to have help in your service. I wonder if you're meant to have to carry the weight of others with you - if that's meant to be your cross. 

Since Theo started at the university I've found myself driving in his direction after these sessions. I never go very far, just a block or two towards his apartment, then I turn back. I don't know what I would even want if I went to visit.

Hospitality

Marie's teacher says she threw up on her desk a little while after lunch.

"I'm so sorry about this," I say as I gather her soggy books together in an empty classroom and put them in a plastic bag. "I thought we were doing better."

Marie's teacher is in his late 20s and deeply earnest. He bikes to work and talks a lot about pedagogy.

"I think it's mostly nerves," he says. "I think being social really makes her anxious. Maybe more than the other kids."

I've heard this before and I know where it's going.

"We have a really great occupational therapist if you'd be interested in scheduling an appointment."

"Thank you," I say and hoist the bag onto my shoulder. I can smell undigested peanut butter sandwich. "I'll talk it over with her father. We'll certainly think about it."

Marie was crying when I went to pick her up from the nurse, her little body shaking with silent sobs. In the car ride home she sits in the passenger seat with her face pressed against the window, and I smoothe her hair as I drive and tell her it's okay and wonder how anyone even survives being a child in the world. I text Theo to say I had to run after the meeting, but he can come join for dinner if he wants to talk through his research. I'd normally feel a little thrill of impropriety, but I'm already thinking of how I'll make time to comfort Marie at home and go get groceries in time.

But I see Moritz's car in the driveway, and when I walk into the house I smell lemongrass and ginger. Moritz is standing over the stove stirring a pot, and he smiles when he sees me.

"My meetings ended early," he says, and takes the bag of vomitty textbooks from me. "I thought you could use a hand."

I want to cry. He goes back to the stove and starts humming to himself. My legs feel weak.

I take Marie upstairs and clean her up, then read her a story about bears who live in a tree and talk a lot about sharing. Midway through she's starting to fall asleep, so I tuck her in and close the door behind me.

I have time to work. For what feels like the first time in days, I have time to work.

By the time dinner is ready I've written three recommendations I'd been putting off, and I'm halfway through making edits to an article. I've made little notes about what I have to do for the coming weekend. I can see a world where I am reading for pleasure for at least some of Sunday afternoon. 

I feel unburdened, and I go to find Moritz in the kitchen. Something is simmering pleasantly on the stove, and there's rice that's almost done in the Instant Pot, and he's still humming and reading a book over the sink, holding a wooden spoon in one hand that he sometimes flourishes like a conductor. I come up behind him and wrap my arms around him. He doesn't stop humming, and the vibrations travel from his body into mine, and it feels like a cat purring against my chest. Like we are vibrating together, two monks serving God in harmony in a cave in the wilderness. He turns around and smiles down at me. The bell rings, Theo's arrived, we bring dinner to the dining room table.

Renewal

Moritz and Theo and I sit down to eat. I sometimes forget how charming Moritz can be - how engaged he is when he's listening. Theo is talking about St. Agatha, and this should be boring to anyone not immediately involved in the field - but here's Moritz, talking about Roman economics in the third century, and the position of women in the ancient world, and the philosophical significance of martyrdom. I'm eating bites of yellow curry and looking back and forth between the two, and feeling almost jealous at the attention Theo is paying to Moritz, even as I worry that I've lured my husband into some sort of very suburban academic cuckoldry.

By ten we’ve worked our way through three bottles of wine, and I’m going to fetch a fourth. When I come back Moritz stands up and rubs his eyes behind his circular glasses. He says he needs to turn in for the night, but tells us not to end the evening on his account. He shakes hands vigorously with Theo. Just as I'd forgotten how charming he can be, I'd also forgotten how formal he can become when he's unsure of a social cue. I tell him we'll only be a little longer, and he goes upstairs.

"Should we call it a night?" Theo asks me. "I don't want to overstay my welcome."

I recognize that he is, in fact, the one making the invitation. And for a moment I hesitate. I know that Moritz and Marie are serving God as best they can, and that it's the task of each one of us to till the soil we're given. I know, too, that I am at least on paper Theo's boss, even though a part of me thinks that that's a distinction that surely doesn't matter right now.

But I think also of what I'm owed, the measure of grace and ecstasy that I've surely earned.

I put my hand on Theo's arm, and he looks very seriously into my eyes in a way that reminds me how young he still is.

"Let's keep talking in my office," I say. And I don't feel any revelation, but I feel like it's a small blessing I'm giving myself, in my wilderness in this world.