The Mouse Monk
Now it is winter. You are not a moth anymore, the moths are hibernating in crevices. Now you are a mouse. A careful mouse because there is a cloister’s cat that the monks feed and it sleeps on the stone bench on a piece of folded cloth. From your perch on a carved flower, you see the young monk lead the old monk to a work bench in a corner of the cloisters. There is a treacherous wind which lifts the monks’ robes exposing cold feet. The young monk places a blanket around the knees of the old monk and with his own hand, he lifts the hand on which the veins stand out and places it on the block of wood. The old man feels for the chisels on the table and selects the one he wants by groping. The young monk leaves him now and pads away down the stone pathway and in through a door into the cathedral. The old monk smiles as he begins chipping the wood, forming a creature, a little animal he knows by heart.
It is a long time now since Brother Thomas lost his sight. At first a stone chip lodged in one eye and then an infection festered and then the infirmity of great age clouded both eyes, the bad and the good, with a layer of milky opaqueness through which no light could penetrate. But his hands do not need eyes to see to carve. He uses fruit wood and makes small things he feels into shape with his fingers. Since his blindness he mostly carves mice. His pet mouse is long gone but for ever he knows the structure of its bones, the lie of its ears, the way its tail hones to a point, and the proportion of tail to body. He remembers the friendliness of his particular mouse and how it liked to be stroked. He strokes with the chisel and brings each new mouse to life till he can feel the heart racing in the rib cage and the breath of his lungs in and out. All round this cathedral, his mice are placed, on screens, hidden away on misericords, on a reredos. They amuse the observant and cause a smile. And you too, time traveller, hiding in the carved rose that Brother Thomas carved in his youth, one of a thousand such carvings made to praise God, you too smile. For this cathedral is not just to the Glory of God. It celebrates the tiniest and humblest of His creatures and all because of the mouse monk.
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