Warm Water

The celibacy wasn’t the hard part. The big things are easier to accommodate. Close the door and lock it, stash the key on a high hook, and it’s done. But the trivial things nagged like itches. Mattresses made sleep a grave indulgence, instead of a practical necessity, and were therefore forbidden. Likewise, socks underneath shoes. And only the drinking of warm water was allowed, cold water having been declared a luxury "intended for kings and noble savages." They were neither; they were members of the Order of Saint Anselm, and so cold water, mattresses, socks, and a host of other comforts were banished.

Cooped up in gray brick dormitories, shuffled to Reflection or Meal (silent, always silent, except for the scrape of insolent silverware), carted off to Devotion (five miles away in equally isolated Calley). Life in the Order was stiff as the starched choir robes.

There were few opportunities to be tempted away from celibacy, but the warm water! The furtive comedians of the dorms knew that warm water was only meant for "bathing and baptizing" and that "where warm is the norm, ice is the vice." It was surprising how stubbornly warm water and sockless feet could wear away at a person. This was a slow, pricking torture, all the more frustrating for the small footprints of its agony. No one ever died of flies, either, but waving an arm again and again and again to clear the air around a face led to its own kind of illness. A wasting of the spirit. A feeling that if God intends life to be this routine of tedium and discomfort, then maybe Someone has the wrong idea.

Some members took the strictures as evidence for their own weakness. If defiance weren’t so deeply rooted within them, if such minor inconvenience didn’t gnaw at their souls, they wouldn’t be at Saint Anselm’s in the first place.