Taking Out the Ink and Cleaning Up the Toilets

An essay

“You need to take the ink out of you,” said Fr. J—, “go start from cleaning the toilets here.” The word “ink” is often used in Korean as a figure of speech to describe people who are well read or their peculiar habits, often in a sarcastic tone. I was at a Discalced Carmelite monastery for a retreat, in preparation for my temporary profession as a Secular Carmelite.

God willing, I will make the profession next month, which boils down to the promises of chastity, poverty, and obedience that last for three years, in principle. The difference between the terms promise and vow is a delicate matter of the church jurisprudence: simply put, I will be required to live in the spirit of poverty as much as my personal conditions as a layman allow, but it does not mean that I am expected to suddenly give up everything I own and start begging for bread in the streets for the love of God. I do fantasize about becoming a dirt-poor nameless pilgrim on the road, like the narrator of The Way of a Pilgrim, but I am way too attached to reading, writing, and building fame as a writer, quite likely even more than to physical comforts.

It was my first time seeing Fr. J—. Fr. C—, who had been supposed to be in charge of the retreat, had had to leave for a monastery of cloistered nuns at the last minute. I was, accordingly, left in the hands of Fr. J—, along with S—, another aspirant preparing for the profession. Fr. J— was likable from the moment I saw him. These days, you rarely encounter priests who tell you it is hard to be saved (“without passing through the purgatory,” he hurried to add), life is short, there is no time to waste, the devil is at work on YouTube to keep people mindlessly glued to the screen and spiritually asleep, and so on. It is also hard to meet a retreat leader who says you should clean up the toilets, even though you paid for the retreat.

Fr. J— seemed to see through me well enough. It was quite impressive, considering that I barely said anything to him before he started talking about the need to take the “ink” out of me, and that he gave very different counsel for S—. He practically did not have any clue to figure out what kind of person I am. I do acknowledge that I am an “ink” type: when he asked S— and me if we had any questions regarding prayer life, the first thing that crossed my mind was the implied claim by St. Teresa of Jesus that approaching God is only possible through the person of Jesus in that Divinity is not directly accessible to human but Jesus is, as He is fully human.

Combined with her descriptions of mental prayer, where visual imagination is included, this appears to be in direct contradiction with hesychasm prevalent in the Christian East. Nevertheless, the Holy See recognizes the hesychasts Gregory Palamas and Seraphim of Sarov as saints or at least tolerates them to be venerated as such in sui iuris churches. In fact, Pope John Paul II mentioned St. Seraphim of Sarov as an exemplar figure who achieved the fullness of prayer together with none other than two Discalced Carmelite saints, St. Teresa of Jesus and St. John of the Cross. However, if the basic premises of St. Teresa on prayer are correct, will it not make the approach of St. Seraphim and alike wrong, and vice versa?

Funnily enough, Fr. J— did not allow me to throw the question, despite having first told us to ask him anything. Not giving me a chance to speak, he just looked at me and went on to talk about taking the ink out of me and cleaning the toilets. “All God cares about you is for you to become holy, and cleaning the toilets will let you become holy. You will find so much joy and happiness in being humbled and thus becoming holy. Growing up only in the head will not make you happy. You just become weird by it. Brother Michael, believe me.”

Michael is my baptismal name, or Mikael (pronounced Mee-ka-el), to romanize the Korean name of the archangel. Westerners often do not have separate baptismal names, since their first names are, as the now somewhat antiquated expression goes, Christian names already. In addition, it is customary for a Carmelite to add a religious title to his or her name, which makes my full religious name Michael of Pascha.

During the mass, Fr. J—’s homily specifically focused on the religious titles of S— and me. There were no pilgrims at the monastery other than us. He first spoke for S—, whose full religious name is S— of Obedience, and then moved his gaze to me. “Brother Michael, God gave you the name Pascha as a gift. Pascha was an event of liberation from slavery in Egypt. God, I believe, gave you the name because He wants to free you from everything that confines you. Walk the road to freedom well.”

Do I want to clean up the toilets? Do I want to be humbled? There definitely is something repulsive about toilets, but my dislike goes further than that. What I do not like about being humbled is in the judgment of others. I do not like being looked down on, obviously, but different types of reactions from others can be more intolerable. I imagined what S— would think of me if I started cleaning the toilets right away: he might believe that I am either on my way to sainthood or being a hypocrite, both of which made me frown just by imagining them. Somehow, they could make me feel extremely ashamed.

Ku Sang is the only Catholic Korean poet worth mentioning that I can think of, not as in that no other renowned Korean poet is catholic, but in the sense that what he wrote actually resonates with Catholicism. I think he was much better at being a thinker than a poet: many of his poems are rather stale, although there are some good ones. Anyhow, Ku Sang was brilliant when he observed that the sense of shame precedes anxiety in human existence. The first thing Adam and Eve did after taking the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was to sew fig leaves to make aprons, and when God called them out, they hid themselves because they perceived they were naked.

I believe Ku Sang could make such an observation because he was an East Asian. Mencius ascribed righteousness to the innate ability of knowing shame: a man can become righteous since he feels ashamed of being unrighteous. This, from the way I see it, has resulted in the ethical catastrophe unique to East Asia throughout history. The ethical schema from Mencius does not define what is righteous in itself. Consequently, we East Asians, deep down, act upon a negative principle. Our ethical code of conduct is not about striving to be righteous because it is the right thing to do; it is about avoiding what makes us feel ashamed.

The negative principle of avoiding shame often works fine on the societal level if only its results are to be taken into account, at least. Still, there are certain righteous deeds that need to be done despite the shame attached to them, as an act of personal determination, such as humbling oneself even if it entails appearing as a hypocrite. Why do I daydream of becoming a yurodivy, or a Fool for Christ, then? Possibly, it is because attaining that status might let me freely be whatever I want to be, even holy, without having to think about what others may think of me—oh, that homeless guy used to be smart, a lot of ink, but he’s out of his mind now, his head has run out of ink, so anything goes with him!

I wish I could finish this essay by writing that I cleaned the toilets at the monastery and felt good, not necessarily because I wholeheartedly believe it would have made me happy, but because it would have been a good resolution for my piece of writing. The truth is, I did not. I might have cleaned the toilets or done other humbling work if S— had not heard what Fr. J— told me, but the habits from Egypt do not go away overnight. It might take forty years, or longer.

Nonetheless, there still is a part from my stay at the monastery worth leaving on record. In the end, I did get to ask a question to Fr. J— later that has to do with some practical aspects of prayer. He did not give me a direct answer, as somewhat expected. He just gave me an old holy card, telling me to look at it while praying. It seemed he had kept it for years. A painting of Jesus Christ was on the card, now kept in a cell St. Teresa of Jesus occupied in Burgos. The painting is known to be based on the vision St. Teresa had when one of the nuns died. Before the nun passed away, Jesus appeared and held her head in his palms, and she could confidently commend her soul to Him.

I am once again looking at the holy card now. Christ is crowned with thorns, drops of blood are falling from his forehead, and his open palms show fresh wounds from nails. I wonder—why did He not appear in His glory after the Resurrection? Why did he appear in the middle of His Passion? In my head, I think the nun in question would have accepted death more comfortably if Jesus had appeared, let’s say, without much blood in sight.

To loosely quote him, St. Paul wrote: Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, which is foolishness to them. I would be lying if I said I truly understood Christ’s kenosis, which climaxed at the Crucifixion. I do not see the point of the omnipotent God going through all that for people like worms and maggots, not really. It does sound foolish. Looking again at the card, however, I recognize there is eerie consolation in the visualized bodily pain of the God-man. That is the best I can tell as of now, honestly.

Maybe the problem is too much ink within me, after all. Then may God split the sea of ink, so that I may walk away.

If you enjoyed my work, you can buy me a cup of tea. I am not a coffee person, by the way.