Making Sense of a Search for Spiritual Life in a Monastery

“If you wish to become a monk, you must prepare yourself for a life that is not always peaceful,” warns the novice master in Remy Rougeau’s pensive first novel, “All We Know of Heaven.” In this warning lies delicious foreshadowing of the deep yet quiet tale that follows.

The main character, Paul, arrives at St. Norbert’s Abbey in rural Canada to start his journey as a monk in the Cistercian order, a lifestyle in which the men pass much of their time in silence, communicate primarily with hand signals and join in formal prayer eight times a day. In between, they tend crops, milk cows, make cheese, prepare meals and care for the sick among them. Paul has come to the monastery hoping to make sense of his life, to find some definitive answer on spirituality, and to seize hold of peace. Somewhere in that process, he hopes to make himself perfect.

Written by a first-time author who is himself a cloistered monk, “All We Know of Heaven” resonates with the timbre of paradoxical truth. For the narrator Paul, it’s perfectly logical that the things he so desires--contentment, black-and-white answers to spiritual conundrums, and a sense of lasting significance regarding his life’s endeavors--are attainable, especially if he shunts himself away at the abbey, determined to make these attributes manifest.

Slowly, though, over the course of the novel, Paul transforms into Brother Antoine--there’s already a Brother Paul in the order, so he’s renamed in a somewhat arbitrary manner, undercutting his desire for religious life to make perfect sense--and his heavenly aspirations come to terms with earthly constraints. His awakening to the messy nature of life and the sins that plague even the most pious occurs with the accretion of time and experience, following more than a few false starts.

Early on, when Brother Antoine butts up against the more human aspects of religious life, for example, he is disillusioned. “All the while he had believed that these austere-looking monks, shaved and scrubbed as they were, would draw him up a ladder of monastic discipline that led to perfection. . . . And why had that not happened?” He comes to the only conclusion he can at that point: that the men he lives with are not the genuine article. “Real monks do not scratch in odd places when they assemble to hear their abbot speak,” he’s certain. “Real monks do not belch in choir. Real monks do not shovel food into their mouths in the refectory. Real monks have manners.”

As the novel ripens, the perspective shifts from that of an outsider looking in, pining for the spiritual greener grass that the abbey seems to offer, to that of one man in communion with others, an integral part of this particular human brotherhood with all the failings and warts such humanity entails. In a series of delightful, often comic and yet poignant vignettes, Brother Antoine discovers difficult truths. The monks aren’t saints. They bicker and hold long-standing grudges; one is even a pyromaniac. And Brother Antoine himself isn’t exactly the spiritual giant he’d hoped to be, a fact he confronts in a painful episode of unexpected, overwhelming sexual desire. Brother Antoine is stuck with a bunch of authentic humans--himself included--and not the purified angelic beings he’d hope to find.

Early in the tale, when he first considers entering the monastic order, Paul looks for a sign from God that his vocational choice is the right one. When a small meteorite burns itself out at his feet, he takes this happening as a divinely inspired occurrence: God said yes. This kind of easy thinking about spiritual matters slowly erodes until, ultimately, Brother Antoine sees that signs, like miracles and many of our predisposed ideas about religion, are simply what we make of them.

“Miracles were often so ambiguous” he considers. “A wedding at Cana: The assembly was obviously unaware how the wine kept coming; it just did. Miracles can as easily be credited to a natural cause as to a divine one, as if out of consideration for delicate human sensibilities, one is given a choice, whether to believe or not.”

Years pass. Tragedies occur. Monks die. Cows are milked. Cheese is made. Prayers are said. And peace with the rumpled nature of life amasses. Brother Antoine begins to view his vocation as “neither the abstraction of a holy life nor the rootedness of mucking out animal stalls, but both of these.” The project of living, he decides, is “to discover his weight as a human being.”

Rougeau’s novel succeeds brilliantly by illuminating the slow pace of monastic life and the little variances that spark growth, confrontation and the quiet locus of spiritual enlightenment. It’s as if Rougeau has taken the loud cacophony of urban life and turned down the volume to a hush until both the narrator and reader can hear the small, still voice of God--a voice, Brother Antoine finds, that often masquerades in words spoken by his imperfect fellow monks.

Bernadette Murphy is the author of “Zen and the Art of Knitting,” a book of literary essays to be published next year by Adams Media.