By Ryn Brierley
“Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. Then you will win favor and a good name
in the sight of God and man” (Prov. 3:3-4).
I realized I loved him one Sunday morning, as the final glorious reverberations of the organ receded into the ivory stone of the sanctuary walls and the Lord’s Prayer came to its conclusion.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil…
I could see him just behind the ambo: eyes closed, head down, reciting the words to himself, as if it were a secret utterance traveling from His lips to my ears. When we had finished, his eyes opened, and the congregation followed him to the narthex to receive his blessing.
I watched him go, his white robes catching the stale air as he passed. He was taller than the lectern made him appear, and clean-shaven, but the dark threat of new growth crept at his jaw. I couldn’t look away. His eyes—their warmth spread to the crowd as if he were the Prophet himself! He smiled and clasped their hands. “Peace be with you.”
I waited by the chancel, talking to some deacon or another, as the assembly began to clear out. Slowly, I made my way down the aisle. I wanted to capture his attention with a word or a movement—to tear those pale eyes from the straggling congregants. When I reached the end of the nave, his gaze lifted from the woman in front of him and settled on me, beginning at my white collar and rising to my face. He quickly released her with a blessing.
“Father Cillian,” he said. “It’s good to see you.” He didn’t smile.
“Perfect, as always, Father Pryor,” I said.
Something tugged at his eyes, and he took my hands. “You’ll find a way to make me pay for it next week, I’m sure. You always do.”
“I can’t let you get too comfortable. As you said, ‘We must always make an effort to improve our relationship with the Lord.’”
“You have an exceptional memory.”
He continued to stand there, just like that, looking at me. His hands lingered on mine. I did not pull away. He had not blessed me, although I felt no compulsion for him to do so. The purity of his presence had already reinvigorated my faith.
I heard a cough as a deacon approached.
He dropped my hands at once. The deacon slid in to continue a word on the ministry, and I retreated, humbly, from the sanctuary. As I went to descend the stairs to the foyer, I could hear the faintest whisper of Father Pryor’s voice pass through the entryway—soft and low, like a prayer. It sounded like, “Peace be with you.”
Almost a week later, I found myself wandering the monastery at an unfamiliarly early hour. I couldn’t sleep, and I began engaging in any sort of mental or physical preoccupation I could conjure to tire myself out. The exercise had almost succeeded when I reached a corridor, utterly saturated with the stinging scent of wine, and my nerves instantly reanimated.
I found Father Pryor in an adjacent room, siphoning a deep red wine from a large container into a bottle. He hardly noticed me come inside.
“You never told me you dabble in chemistry, Father Pryor,” I quipped.
“I’ve never seen you up this early, Father Cillian.” He remained unshaken. “Something bothering you?”
“Don’t worry about me. I enjoy walking the grounds at this hour.” I drew closer to his fermentary, running a hand over the glass carboy. “I’d condemn your choice of hobby, but I’m honestly rather impressed.”
“Oh, don’t be too pleased with yourself. It’s for the church. I’ve been making the sacramental wine for years.” He corked the bottle in one fluid motion and turned to me. “You can join me, if you’d like.”
I retracted my hand from the container. “I’d have no idea where to even begin.”
“I’ll show you.”
He moved aside and pulled open a cloth bag filled with beautiful red and purple grapes. I had never paid much mind to the contents of the garden behind the monastery, but I remembered then the lattice trellises, overgrown with vines, which canopy several portions of the dirt paths.
“You grow the grapes yourself?” I asked.
“Yes. Now just pluck them off the stem and put them in the water there.”
I followed his instruction until a teeming bowl of fresh, juicy grapes sat before us. With the berries cleaned, Pryor poured the lot into a wooden press and covered the top with a metal plate.
He looked at me. “Now, we press them into juice.”
“That’s so…violent,” I said. “I don’t think I have the strength to—”
“Don’t be nervous. Come, we’ll do it together.”
At this, Pryor placed my hands on the press lever and maneuvered himself behind me, settling his hands just beside my own. I could suddenly feel the light breath of his cassock brushing against my leg, and a tinge of sweat developed on the back of my neck. He instructed me to count upward to three, and I obeyed. Upon the third figure, he brought the bulk of his weight down on the lever, leaning closer against me and screwing the metal plate downward into the press. My hands followed, still firmly attached. I heard the unfortunate grapes being compressed and pulverized in the large wooden basin. The tart scent of the extracted juice crept up through the cracks.
We continued this motion, pushing as fiercely as we could, until we were both certain that hardly the trace of an unbroken berry remained. Father Pryor took his hands off the lever and withdrew from me. I felt the absence of his proximity immediately.
“Well, I think I can do the rest on my own,” he said, suddenly curt. “I’ll see you tomorrow at Mass.”
Tomorrow arrived. I delivered an admittedly rushed sermon on “Trust in the Lord,” a subject I had found at the bottom of a stack of papers on my desk. My lack of rest finally caught up to me, and my performance echoed the exhaustion languidly rolling through my veins. The congregation seemed to slump in one great wave as I spoke. Thoroughly embarrassed, I breezed through Psalm 56, then hurriedly left the pulpit, shutting myself in the vestry to catch my breath. The sanctuary seemed to me, in that moment, a den of wild dogs in wait of a filling supper. My heart thrashed about in my chest. I could not force myself to return.
A half hour later, I heard a knock on the door, and Father Pryor entered. He had replaced his outside clothing with the vestments I wore, clearly prepared to assume my role. I felt a dull sting like a deep wound in my stomach—shame. I stood, and my throat croaked when I attempted to speak.
I hardened myself for a rebuke of some form, but it never came. Instead, Father Pryor turned and revealed a chalice of wine and a brass bowl.
“You worked so hard to produce this yesterday, it’d be a sin if you never got to try any,” he said. “Mass is over. You did well.”
“Thou shalt not bear false witness,” I responded flatly.
“It isn’t a lie.”
He brought the relics closer, and I saw the fleeting remnants of communion wafers within the bowl, as well as the last sups of wine within the chalice. I realized now what he intended to do, and my shame became entwined with a terrible gratitude and respect for him. These passions congested me; the excess seeped from my eyes. He took no notice of it.
Father Pryor began the ritual, as he must have done only a short while before he arrived in this room. We were entirely alone, yet he omitted nothing. This private Communion seemed to him equal in sanctity to the one received among an entire congregation. He summarized the events of the Last Supper and, reverently speaking the words of our Lord Jesus, held out the bowl of sacramental bread.
“Take and eat. This is My body, given for you.”
Father Pryor took a single wafer from the bowl and approached me, expectantly. I met his eyes and bowed, never once losing sight of his face. I opened my mouth. Delicately and with no sign of unease, he placed the wafer on my tongue and pulled his hand back. I swallowed. A tear ran down my cheek.
“This is My blood, shed for you.”
He held the chalice out to me, and I received it. I tilted its lip to my lips and drank, although all that remained were the final drops of liquid. Still, those small drops were enough to quench my thirst. They slid heavily, acridly down my throat. When I returned the cup to Pryor, he wore an expression of total sincerity.
“Do this in remembrance of Me.”
We remained there for a long while.
The following day, I received a letter that had been passed under my door. Upon opening, I read this message:
You know, it’s my job to worry about you. – P.
Enclosed was a sermon, written by him for my consideration. He wrote with a tight, beautiful script, much like I’d imagined. The text itself was intimate and celebratory, calling upon God’s love through the words of Psalm 63. My eyes drifted along his words like a calm sea, but caught against rocks as I reached the verses he had quoted:
Earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water. I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory. Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you. (Psalm 63:1-3)
His letter roused my spirit and immediately provoked me to write. I unearthed a few verses (from Psalms, to match his) that I had read once before, stringing them into a formidable improvised sermon:
My heart is stirred by a noble theme as I recite my verses for the king; my tongue is the pen of a skillful writer. You are the most excellent of men and your lips have been anointed with grace, since God has blessed you forever. (Psalm 45:1-2)
When night fell, I slipped noiselessly through the hallways with my letter and at last found Father Pryor’s chamber. No light shone from under the doorway. I folded the paper into four even squares and slid it through the minuscule gap, careful not to make too much sound.
As I turned to return to my room, the hallway was suddenly dully illuminated by a streak of light passing through, beneath Pryor’s door. I hastened my retreat.
I dreamt that night that I was safely burrowed in a corner of Eden, destined, as Eve, to live forever in blissful ignorance of true life. I heard a voice calling out to me from the darkness, and I followed it, mesmerized by its smooth timbre. The voice led me to a tree, much taller than any tree I had ever beheld in my life. Nestled among the branches slithered the source of the voice: a shiny, black serpent of incredible size. It wriggled its way down the trunk of the tree and up my leg, producing a cluster of grapes from somewhere in its scaly body. It pressed a grape to my mouth and compelled me to eat, so I did. The fruit tasted good and sweet. I became so tired after eating that I fell into a deep sleep within my own dream.
When I opened my eyes again, the serpent had become Adam, and Adam was Pryor.
On the dawn of Shrove Tuesday, Father Pryor came to visit me. I stood agape when I saw him at my door; I feared our game had finally come to an end. He stepped into my room with evident tension in his body, but as soon as I closed the door, his shoulders fell. I did not understand what had him so uneasy, but before I could speak, he took my hand and guided me to the chair at my desk. He encouraged me to sit.
“Last night, I had the strangest dream.” He paced about the room. “You were…”
Pryor trailed off as though confronted with the absurdity of what he was going to say. Eventually, he salvaged his thoughts.
“You were Eve, and I was Adam,” he continued. “You gave me a piece of fruit, and I ate it, then I collapsed. I felt that I should be terrified, but somehow I felt…liberated. But when I awoke in my dream, we were still in the Garden.”
“I had a similar dream last night,” I said, and related my dream to him.
Pryor considered this for a moment, then shook his head. He pulled something out of his pocket and clutched it, hidden, in his hands. The disconcerting effect this gesture had on me was lost on him. What could he possibly have to hide from me?
“If you’ll allow me; I brought you a gift,” he said.
My agitation was only somewhat relieved. “What is it?”
He opened his palms and revealed a beaded rosary, wooden and imperfect—quite plain in appearance. I had never worn something like this myself, but its modesty charmed me. He reached for my hand, and I gave it to him freely. The beads were wrapped once, then twice, around my wrist, and he brought them up and around my fingers, gently lacing them through. The smooth, grainy pearls caressed my skin. My hands trembled, but he said nothing.
When he finished, he looked at me. “I thought you might want to have it.”
“Thank you,” I said, “Pryor.”
His eyes widened. “You’re welcome, Cillian.”
He imposed the ashes upon the congregants at Mass the subsequent day. They assembled into one long train and bowed as Father Pryor marked a cross on each of their foreheads. I stood at the end of the row, yet I could see the care and precision with which he employed each stroke. I had never seen Pryor look so stoic. He took his time ministering to everyone.
When I finally reached the front of the line, I had expected some softness to infiltrate his stare, but it remained as unwavering as ever. I continued to look at him, watching as he dipped his thumb into the cold, pasty ashes and then brought them to my forehead. He quickly traced a cross onto my skin, at no time abandoning the impassive look in his eyes. Their frigidity permeated through my blood, and I shivered.
At last, Pryor opened his mouth to speak, and I thought he might whisper some private word of tenderness as penance for this reserved exchange.
But all he said was, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
I’d made a mistake somewhere. For days, Pryor did not speak to me. I’d passed him at the monastery and seen him in the sanctuary, yet not a sound escaped his lips. He spared no glances toward me, as if I were erased from his world entirely. I thought of him often and began to believe that a kind of understanding had been reached between us. Had my judgment between reality and fantasy been distorted all along?
I was determined to find an answer, and visited the sanctuary early one morning. The sprawling rows of pews were utterly deserted, bathed in the soft, swelling glow of morning light dripping through the windows. As I carried myself down the center aisle, the crucifix above the altar grew before me, the corpus looming half-nakedly in its suffering. The light had not yet touched Him; He was still deep in slumber. I gazed upon Him and felt a passion, like anger, building in my chest. Here, alone, I could be open with Him and express every offense that had collected in my heart.
I chose a seat in the middle of the rows and knelt there. The weight of Pryor’s rosary fell on my wrist, and I clutched it in my hands, as he had shown me. I closed my eyes.
“Heavenly Father, I’m trying desperately to understand the challenge you’ve placed before me. You’ve granted me many joys these past few months, but now it seems you’ve taken them from me. I must have failed you in some way, and for that, I ask for your forgiveness.”
The sanctuary settled with a harsh crack. I continued.
“I’m worried I’ve frightened him, Lord. He will not look at me, he will not speak to me. I’m lost. It must be my fault. I must have done a terrible thing. I cannot trust the aching of my heart. I feel I’m—” I hesitated. “I feel I’m losing faith in you.”
The beads clacked against each other in my clasped palms, slick with sweat. A heat flashed through me and caught in my neck, awakening every inch of my body. It flared relentlessly, and my knees trembled, threatening to slip from the prayer bench. Anxiety flooded my senses for a fleeting moment, then gave way to a strange calm, like after a storm. I opened my eyes.
All at once, I was overwhelmed by the notion that I should not be concerned. God, it seemed, had given me this gift. This love. He had shown me. I did not have to be afraid anymore. That certainty shuddered through me from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet.
The light from the windows had reached Him now, where He floated above. The sanctuary awakened, and so had He, the corners of His head tilted upward, almost as if to meet my eyes. I saw Him, and He saw me. The entire world stilled in that silent recognition.
Today I presided over the Sacrament of Reconciliation. It had been weeks since Father Pryor had last acknowledged my existence, and the rejection had begun to take the most dreadful impact on my health. From behind the thin confessional screen, my eyes watered. My responses to the parishioners were caught in the back of my throat, ejecting them two octaves lower than anticipated. I could not recognize myself. Grief had mangled my spirit. Between each confession, I prayed for these lost souls and included a secret wish from my heart that I dared not speak aloud.
Just before the end of my session, a penitent entered the opposite booth. I awaited their confession, but it was quite some time before they spoke. I respected their silence.
At last, they began. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been four months since my last confession.”
The booth became silent again, and I waited.
“I accuse myself of the following sins: three months ago, I began to see a man with whom I serve God outside of our ordained practice,” he said. “It started in innocence, yet as we continued to meet, I found myself increasingly drawn to his presence.”
“I see no wrongdoing thus far,” I said.
“I began to desire him, emotionally and…physically, with a love that supplanted my fear of God.”
I said nothing.
He continued, “At the start of the Lenten season, I vowed that I would stop seeing him. I would not look at him, speak to him, or think about him. I’ve come to confess that I’ve failed, Father.”
“You have?”
“Yes. I thought of him vividly, and I failed. Truthfully, I failed on the first day, but I kept telling myself that it wasn’t real—that it didn’t matter. But it did matter. It does matter. He matters. To me.” Pryor paused for a long moment. “For these sins, I ask absolution.”
“You ask for absolution, yet you do not regret your actions.”
“No, I have no regrets. Only the regret that I did not tell him sooner, and instead drove him away.”
“Then you would return to him, if he would have you, and accept this love?”
“I would,” Pryor said, and his pale eyes suddenly appeared manifest through the gaps in the screen. “If he would have me.”
I smiled. “You are forgiven.”
Author Bio
Ryn Brierley is a multi-genre fiction writer from Peabody, Massachusetts. He is currently working toward a BFA in Creative Writing, with a minor in Dramatic Writing. Besides writing, he loves to play story-based video games and spoil his tortico cat, Kira.
You can find him on Instagram as @rynnie_boi
