CISTERCIAN DIVERSION

MY PRESENT JOB IS - and perhaps I had it coming - an exercise in humility. It's been a while since I was as low on the totem pole. My later positions with newspapers suggested a certain amount of status - "senior writer," "political columnist" and what-not - and even when working for the (self-described) Crazy Fucking Frenchman, I was, whatever it was worth, defined as a "manager" or a "partner" and as such was the one in charge of whatever ill-fated project CFF dreamed up, be it a consignment furniture store in Prince George or a scheme to import and train African nurses to work in Alberta in return for donations to CFF's newly aquired orphanage in Burundi.

Even as a columnist for Western Standard, which, alas, never boasted much of a circulation, I was afforded the semblance of omniscience in being able to right the wrongs of the political world before an audience of forty or fifty thousand fellow rednecks. (Humility and punditry usually don't coexist - unless the pundit is talking about himself, where the tedious convention is for omniscience to give way to folksy self-depreciation.)

Now I'm working from 8 am to 5 pm at a jobsite where just about everyone else knows what they're doing and I don't. I get shit from a Grade 10 dropout ten years my junior (but already a grizzled veteran) who has to tell me how to properly hammer a nail or coil a power cord or rip plywood through a table saw because, in my occasional forays into home renovation over the years, I have always done it wrong. I'm constantly embarrassed by not knowing the very basic things: changing discs on a grinder, for example, or snapping a chalk line, or the proper care and use of a nail pick. Did you know that there is a something called a "rebar hickey" - a big pry bar that you use to bend down the rebar before the concrete is poured. A damned useful thing, I discovered, having spent a day bending down rebar. If, God forbid, I ever have another child, I might call it Rebar Hickey Dolphin. (Say it soft and it's almost like praying.) Am I humble? Damn right.

When I was writing for Ted Byfield's Christian history book, just before I took this carpenter's helper job, I encountered some of the big-time saints of Christendom - Augustine, Aquinas, Ambrose, Assisi, etc. A lot of these guys tended to have similar bios: sons of rich nobles, shunned careers as soldiers, tempted by (and sometimes succumbing to) carnal pleasures in their youth, threw it all over to pursue the love of God and write at great length on how to best do this. One of the common means to the divine end, was the practice of humility - an antidote to that greatest of the deadly sins, pride. Pride is the deadliest because it puts you above God and is therefore a sin that fertilizes the rest: we're greedy because we want to be better than the other guys, we're lustful because we want to screw more women than the other guy, we're envious because the other guy has attained something we, in our pride, believe we are more entitled to, etc. Primarily to beat down this most insidious of human inclinations - celebrated in the modern world as empowerment, self-esteem, or natural selection - the monastic orders were established. Although many of these orders inevitably went off the rails, they began as humble places where chastity, poverty and tough physical labour were practised with a view to imbuing the monks (or nuns) with the humility necessary to realize what absolute pieces of dreck they were in comparison to God.

One of the weirder of the monk-saints was Bernard of Clairvaux. Born in 1190 to predictable French nobility, Bernard was something of a mama's boy about whom much retrospective psychoanalysis might be possible were one so inclined. Mama, in this case, was a painfully pious creature who, while dad was off fighting in the wars that raged between various French duchies for much of the Middle Ages, raised and clothed her kids like monks, and paid special attention to Bernard, who she believed - presciently, as it turned out - to have a great future in the Church.

Mama died when Bernard was in his early teens, and the boy strove to live up to her expectations. When lusting after a pretty girl, so horrified was he by the resulting erection, that he jumped into a cold pond and stayed there for hours until the accursed thing subsided. (Erectile dysfunction has a different meaning to the saints.) On another occasion, some wanton creature - "possessed by the devil," says biographer William of Thierry - crawled naked into fair young Bernie's bed attempting seduction. He moved to the other side, went to sleep, and, when she woke him up, angrily shooed her away.

A married woman invited Bernard to a dinner party at her house, then in the middle of the night crept three times to his room in attempts to deflower him. Each time this happened, he cried, "Thief, thief!" waking the household, causing the woman to flee and hide, and receiving much ribbing from his buddies the next day.

"There really was a thief," said Bernard, according to the biographer, "and it was our hostess, who was trying to steal something very precious to me, the matchless treasure of my chastity.”

Today our - certainly my - initial reaction might be, "What a self-righteous little prig." But then I remember a friend of mine at high school in Cobourg, Ontario. Those being the sex-silly Seventies, most of us were sacrificing the matchless treasures of our chastities at every opportunity, but Mark held fast. Not only had he sworn off booze and dope, he was also very determined to remain a virgin until he married - and of course we enjoyed ribbing him for these afflictions. I remember once when we were walking along the beach, someone sniffed the fishy sea-weedy odor and said, "Smells like a bad woman, eh, Mark?" He was rendered uncharacteristically speechless and blushed more completely than I'd ever seen anyone blush.

But we by no means considered Mark to be a priggish freak. Although spectacled and a more serious student than most of us, he was witty, quick with a quip, and popular among the smart crowd with whom the rest of our group was not. He did not become a monk or a saint, but, after graduating with a BA from Queen's, joined his father's insurance agency, married his equally virginal Catholic sweetheart, and had four or five kids. (Much later in life, he would have a nervous breakdown and quit the business, but I don't attribute that to premarital chastity, rather his having to sell insurance.)

The point - for indeed there must be a point to justify this overblown tangent I've shot off on - is that Mark was a charming guy whose company we all enjoyed despite his not indulging in the vices practised by the rest of us. And the same was doubtless the case with Bernard of Clairvaux, who went on to kick-start the Cistercian order of monks - a recent and fearfully austere offshoot of the Benedictines - and make it an extremely popular outfit. He persuaded most of his family to join, along with those friends who'd kidded him about not getting laid. And he did all this on the strength of his charm, his charisma and his mesmerizing preaching style.

He rose to become a force in the Roman church sometimes more powerful than the Pope, to preach the Second (and worse than useless) Crusade, to take on and virtually ruin the iconoclastic theologian Peter Abelard, to heal a rift in the church brought about by the existence of two warring popes, and to introduce the worship of the Virgin Mary into the Catholic mainstream. (More oedipal speculation possible here, of course. The illumination at the top of this post shows the legend of Bernard being projectile-suckled by the VM at Speyer Cathedral. I call it "Bernie and the Jet.") He also performed the miracles (healing the sick, usually) that are a prerequisite to canonization.

But for all his worldly success and influence, Bernard swore he preferred the austerities of his Cistercian Abbey at Clairvaux. The Cistercians shunned all luxury and pleasure save the ultimate pleasure that Bernard insisted is derived from loving God. No reading, other than the Bible, no artistic pursuit, no decoration of the abbey, no meat or wine. At Clairvaux Bernard's humilities bordered on the obsessive. Although physically slight, he worked himself like an ox in the fields. He shunned all food that could be considered pleasurable, in favour of some sort of tasteless gruel. He often forgot to eat at all, and became emaciated and developed severe gastrointestinal problems. A special receptacle was built in choir into which the Holy Abbot vomited. For this reason St. Bernard is the patron saint of bulimics (I'm kidding - I think.) Perhaps he suffered from what the modern clergy – aka the psychiatric profession - are this week calling "bipolar disorder" (the disorder formerly known as manic-depression.) William of Thierry writes:

All the time there is a conflict in his heart between his great desire for souls and his great desire to remain hidden from the attention of the world, for sometimes in his humility and low esteem of himself he confesses that he is not worthy to produce any fruitful increase for the church, whilst at other times his desire knows no bounds and burns so strongly within him that it seems that nothing can satisfy it, but the salvation of all mankind.

Putting aside for another day my pet theory that everyone is bipolar, Bernard certainly sounds like he might have it. What is it that drives a powerful man like him, a man who could easily have become pope, to take so obsessively to the rough and self-punishing life of a humble monk in the humblest of all the orders? I think it is another manifestation of pride.

My former colleague CFF has a net worth of between 40 and 50 million, but when he goes traveling, he always stays in the shittiest of hotels andd, where possible, hangs out with the poorest of the residents. When he took his seven-year-old twin girls with him last summer to visit his orphanage, the Frenchman did not book a room for them in the three-star hotel in nearby Bujumbura, but rather had them all stay for a full month in the bare, insect-infested rooms at the orphanage, without air-conditioning or even fans, let alone TV or the internet. I asked the brighter of the two daughters what it had been like. “It was hell,” she said, without hesitation, mouthing a favorite locution of her father’s. CFF, who could never be called a humble man, takes great pride in describing the hardships of his journeys, partly by way of boasting how much money he has saved (like many self-made multimillionaires, he’s a penny-pincher), but partly to be perceived as a kind of Global Everyman who can mingle with the masses. In other words, CFF takes pride in his humility.

I think Bernard, who was sometimes accused of phariseeism by the Benedictines, took pride in his humility too. The extreme privations might well have been the pathological manifestations of an obsession. His mother, who, from the little we are told, seems to have ruled her family like the Mother Superior from hell, probably had a posthumous effect.

CFF’s mother, according to CFF, was “zee bitch from ‘ell.” She was – and still is – an intellectual Catholic. CFF, assertively atheist, calls her “God crazy” and uses this same disdainful adjective for anyone religious. Once when he was a young man, CFF told me, his mother announced to him, “I don’t like you. I don’t think I ever did.” She entrusted much of CFF’s raising to a grandmother. His father, some sort of roving playboy, was never around. I believe CFF’s life to have been a fruitless search for mother love denied. Having been a multi-millionaire for thirty years, it has been virtually impossible for him to identify true love among the various large-breasted girlfriends and ex-wives who have come and gone. I’d like to think I’d still be friends with CFF if he were poor, but I’m not absolutely sure I would.

Anyway, humility; we were talking about humility. And the point being made was … what? That humility is generally a sheep’s mask on a prideful wolf, or something brought on by an obsessive need for love from the nasty bitch one calls Mom. (And why on earth hasn’t Hallmark identified this niche for Mother’s Day? What about deadbeat dads on Father’s Day? If any one wants to send me a sample verse for this line of greeting cards, feel free. Could be a business opportunity here.)

My mother was and still is a sweet and loving woman who’d walk over fire for her children, and is only religious in the sense that she attends the United Church (which this week, I believe, is celebrating its trans-gendered families with a vegan potlatch.) So I don’t have the evil-mother excuse, but still I’m drawn towards the humility of menial labour and it’s got nothing to do with loving God, either, for God does not exist.
(I'm almost positive of that.) What then is the appeal? Let me think about it some more ...