smackenzie (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
smackenzie) wrote2014-11-01 05:41 pm
smackenzie) wrote2014-11-01 05:41 pm
Entry tags:
i don't know what i'm doing and you can tell, but hey, day one!
When Peire is five years old, his mother dies of a fever. He has no brothers or sisters and his father spends his days working in the fields for the lord who owns the land and the village, and even though he is old enough to go to the tiny church school for a couple of hours a day, and even though he is also old enough to have started to make friends among other boys in the village, his mother is pretty much his entire world, and he is distraught when she dies. All through her fever, he stayed with a neighbor family to avoid the mist of sickness that clung to her. His father doesn't know what to do with him, so Peire spends his days with neighbors and his nights in his father's small, very quiet house.
People die all the time in this world. Death is just another part of life. In another family, Peire might have younger siblings to take care of, or older siblings who might take care of him, but he was a hard enough birth and his mother wasn't able to conceive another child after him, so it's just him and his father, and at five years old he's still a little young to be out in the fields without someone to keep an eye on him. Peire's father, who loves him, doesn't know how to be responsible for him, and as soon as the appropriate mourning period is over, his father starts looking around for another wife, someone to care for his son and maybe even give him another.
Peire is left a little adrift after his mother's death, but the village priest, Father Ancelmetz, keeps an eye on him and looks after him. Father Ancelmetz came to the village as a mendicant friar decades earlier, before even Peire's father was born, and when he learned that the village was without a priest, he decided to stay. He teaches Peire how to read and write – not well, because Father Ancelmetz has never had much practice writing and most of what he knows, he knows through memorization and habit – and how to do rudimentary sums, but more importantly, he teaches Peire about his former order. He was a Gray Friar, a follower of the order of St Austor, and it doesn't take long – or take much – before Peire wants to join the order as well. Father Ancelmetz is good to him, after all, and takes care of him in a way his father can't, and Peire needs the kind of structure in his life that his mother used to give him, the kind of structure that a holy order can offer.
Besides, he's always been aware of God, always known about Him – Peire has spent his five years in a village of faithful people, and his mother would take him to the little village church to worship once a week. Sometimes even his father would come with them. They didn't have the money or goods to spare to contribute much to the upkeep of the little church and the priest, and they had even less to spare to send to the Mother Church, but lived lives of faith, more or less, and it isn't too surprising to Father Ancelmetz when Peire, at age six, announces that he wants to take holy orders when he gets older, and dedicate his life to God.
He hears the call, he'll tell people later.
His father, who only has the one son to care for him in his old age, is less than happy with this development. Father Ancelmetz counsels him to wait it out, because sometimes children change their minds.
"I can impress upon him the importance of staying here, working the land for Ser Savaric, marrying and fathering children, and caring for you in your old age," the priest offers, although privately he doesn't think Peire is going to change his mind.
Father Ancelmetz is right. Seven years later, when Peire is thirteen, the priest sends to the Gray Friars for a replacement, because he's old and infirm and doesn't want the village to be left without a priest when he dies, and there's no one in the village who really wants the job. A month after the new priest arrives, Peire says goodbye to his father – who still isn't happy but knows he has no say in this, because how do you say no to God, and besides, he has a second wife who has already given him two more children – and travels with Father Ancelmetz to Montagui, where the good father took his orders so many years ago, and where the Gray Friars have agreed to take Peire as an acolyte.
(Father Ancelmetz stays with the Gray Friars for a week before traveling on to the town where he was born and where his parents and brothers are buried, so he can be buried next to them. His family minded much less than Peire's father when he took holy orders, but his mother asked that he come home eventually to be buried in the same churchyard where they planned to be. She wanted them all in Heaven together. And Father Ancelmetz loved his mother and said he would.)
At thirteen Peire becomes an acolyte of the Gray Friars, the Order of St Austor, and spends his days fetching and carrying and doing things for the abbot and the brothers, helping in the kitchen and the refectory and the small school and the gardens and sometimes even the chapel, assisting the brothers in their travels around the city ministering to the housebound and following the rules that St Austor set down for them centuries ago. He learns the order of the services and the prayers and chants and rituals, the holy days and festival days, why the friars take the vows they do. He learns about the life of St Austor. He learns the many benefits of taking to the road and becoming a wandering friar, and he learns the many benefits of staying in one place. He learns that the friary in Montagui is not quite self-sufficient and depends on the city for support, and he learns that the difference between monks and friars is mostly that monks live in holy communities separate from the laity, but friars live in towns and cities among the people. The friar orders, he is told, are entwined more closely with the life of the lay community. He learns more general things as well – reading and writing (and here he thanks Father Ancelmetz for his rudimentary lessons) and simple mathematics, gardening, cooking, the care of the sick. He learns to serve God according to the rules of St Austor and the Mother Church, and he throws himself completely into this religious life.
At seventeen he takes holy orders, swearing in front of the abbot that he will live a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience to his order and his God. He doesn't think any of that will be a problem – the Gray Friars, at least in Montagui, are not an especially wealthy order, he's never felt much of an attraction to women, and ever since he was six, all he's ever wanted to do was serve God.
The Gray Friars give him the purpose and the structure he wants. He is Brother Peire now, and he loves his brother friars and his God and his work, and he's happy.
Montagui is also home to a community of Black Friars, followers of the Order of St Othon, and to churches and small religious houses who owe direct allegiance to the bishop and the Mother Church. (Friars ultimately owe their allegiance to the Mother Church as well, but that's always filtered through their loyalty to their order. But at the same time, if a conflict arises between someone's loyalty to their order and their loyalty to the Mother Church, the Church takes precedence.) Brother Peire is not very political and is content to let other brothers worry about the order's position in the city. At the end of the day, all that matters to him is that the people of Montagui continue to support the Gray Friars, and that the Gray Friars continue to pray for them and minister to them.
But as with any large city, in and among all the adherents to the Mother Church are those who don't agree with her teachings and don't follow her religious leaders. The last large outbreak of heresy was nearly fifty years ago, but the heretics never really left, and there's always work for the Mother Church's inquisitors and heresy-hunters. Sometimes the Gray Friars have discussions among themselves as to how these heretics should be treated, but no one ever suggests that they should be allowed to live with their heresies. Brother Peire isn't sure what to do with them – torturing them to recant seems wrong, because the Gray Friars are a peaceful, generally non-violent order and sometimes that torture can lead to death, but how else can a man see the error of his ways? Sometimes appealing to his reason works, or reminding him (or her, as women seem just as susceptible to heresy as men) that he won't go to Heaven when he dies and won't be reunited with his loved ones in the afterlife, and in any case torture is a perfectly acceptable way to make the guilty confess their wrongs and give up the names of other secret heretics and apostates.
"They believe they're right," he muses one day, working in the kitchen gardens after a particularly lively discussion brought on by the abbot's sermon during the midday service. "Their beliefs give them comfort, the same that ours do. How can you take a man's comfort away from him?"
"Because those beliefs are wrong," counters Brother Gueri, the friar working with him today. "Wouldn't they be so much more comforted if they were brought back to the right way to live?"
"Well, yes, but - "
"But you know we're right."
Brother Peire can't argue with him. He doesn't like to argue with Brother Gueri anyway. They're friends. Brother Gueri is blond and square-faced and solidly built, and he was a wandering friar before he came to Montagui. He'd taken ill on the road and was near death when a merchant caravan found him and brought him into the city. The Gray Friars nursed him back to health and even though he'd taken his vows in a chapter of the Order that believed a friar should spend as much of his time as possible wandering the countryside preaching the good word and relying on people's charity to survive, once he was better he realized he liked staying put. And because he was already a follower of the Order of St Austor, he could.
He was born and had trained in towns farther north, and speaks with a heavier accent than most people in Montagui. But Brother Peire can always understand him.
To be honest, despite his occasional need to try and see the heretics' side of things, Brother Peire can't understand why they can't see the beauty of his faith. Why don't they see the glory and perfection of the teachings of the Mother Church? Can they not see that this is what God wants of His people, to follow His laws as set down by the bishops and as expressed through the work of His various holy orders? Are they not content? Why do they have to invent things for themselves that run counter to natural law? Don't they know they'll die unabsolved and unconsecrated, and they'll never get to experience God's eternal glory? He's never actually met a heretic, although he has met one or two people who recanted their heterodoxy and were accepted back, so he can't say whether or not they're defying the Mother Church out of immature defiance or because they really do believe something else.
And if they really do believe something else, why?
Every so often he wonders if he'll ever get to have this conversation with someone besides his brother friars. But what are the chances he'll be in the same room with a heretic, and can ask them why they believe what they do? And what are the chances that the heretic would tell him? The Gray Friars don't spend a great deal of time hunting for active non-believers, preferring to proselytize to those who don't have any particular faith and to minister to anyone who needs them, and in any case the Mother Church's inquisitors – and sometimes the Black Friars – always seem to find the heretics first. Brother Peire has to content himself with talking to his brother friars about what to do about heresies and how to handle the people preaching them.
words: 2156
People die all the time in this world. Death is just another part of life. In another family, Peire might have younger siblings to take care of, or older siblings who might take care of him, but he was a hard enough birth and his mother wasn't able to conceive another child after him, so it's just him and his father, and at five years old he's still a little young to be out in the fields without someone to keep an eye on him. Peire's father, who loves him, doesn't know how to be responsible for him, and as soon as the appropriate mourning period is over, his father starts looking around for another wife, someone to care for his son and maybe even give him another.
Peire is left a little adrift after his mother's death, but the village priest, Father Ancelmetz, keeps an eye on him and looks after him. Father Ancelmetz came to the village as a mendicant friar decades earlier, before even Peire's father was born, and when he learned that the village was without a priest, he decided to stay. He teaches Peire how to read and write – not well, because Father Ancelmetz has never had much practice writing and most of what he knows, he knows through memorization and habit – and how to do rudimentary sums, but more importantly, he teaches Peire about his former order. He was a Gray Friar, a follower of the order of St Austor, and it doesn't take long – or take much – before Peire wants to join the order as well. Father Ancelmetz is good to him, after all, and takes care of him in a way his father can't, and Peire needs the kind of structure in his life that his mother used to give him, the kind of structure that a holy order can offer.
Besides, he's always been aware of God, always known about Him – Peire has spent his five years in a village of faithful people, and his mother would take him to the little village church to worship once a week. Sometimes even his father would come with them. They didn't have the money or goods to spare to contribute much to the upkeep of the little church and the priest, and they had even less to spare to send to the Mother Church, but lived lives of faith, more or less, and it isn't too surprising to Father Ancelmetz when Peire, at age six, announces that he wants to take holy orders when he gets older, and dedicate his life to God.
He hears the call, he'll tell people later.
His father, who only has the one son to care for him in his old age, is less than happy with this development. Father Ancelmetz counsels him to wait it out, because sometimes children change their minds.
"I can impress upon him the importance of staying here, working the land for Ser Savaric, marrying and fathering children, and caring for you in your old age," the priest offers, although privately he doesn't think Peire is going to change his mind.
Father Ancelmetz is right. Seven years later, when Peire is thirteen, the priest sends to the Gray Friars for a replacement, because he's old and infirm and doesn't want the village to be left without a priest when he dies, and there's no one in the village who really wants the job. A month after the new priest arrives, Peire says goodbye to his father – who still isn't happy but knows he has no say in this, because how do you say no to God, and besides, he has a second wife who has already given him two more children – and travels with Father Ancelmetz to Montagui, where the good father took his orders so many years ago, and where the Gray Friars have agreed to take Peire as an acolyte.
(Father Ancelmetz stays with the Gray Friars for a week before traveling on to the town where he was born and where his parents and brothers are buried, so he can be buried next to them. His family minded much less than Peire's father when he took holy orders, but his mother asked that he come home eventually to be buried in the same churchyard where they planned to be. She wanted them all in Heaven together. And Father Ancelmetz loved his mother and said he would.)
At thirteen Peire becomes an acolyte of the Gray Friars, the Order of St Austor, and spends his days fetching and carrying and doing things for the abbot and the brothers, helping in the kitchen and the refectory and the small school and the gardens and sometimes even the chapel, assisting the brothers in their travels around the city ministering to the housebound and following the rules that St Austor set down for them centuries ago. He learns the order of the services and the prayers and chants and rituals, the holy days and festival days, why the friars take the vows they do. He learns about the life of St Austor. He learns the many benefits of taking to the road and becoming a wandering friar, and he learns the many benefits of staying in one place. He learns that the friary in Montagui is not quite self-sufficient and depends on the city for support, and he learns that the difference between monks and friars is mostly that monks live in holy communities separate from the laity, but friars live in towns and cities among the people. The friar orders, he is told, are entwined more closely with the life of the lay community. He learns more general things as well – reading and writing (and here he thanks Father Ancelmetz for his rudimentary lessons) and simple mathematics, gardening, cooking, the care of the sick. He learns to serve God according to the rules of St Austor and the Mother Church, and he throws himself completely into this religious life.
At seventeen he takes holy orders, swearing in front of the abbot that he will live a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience to his order and his God. He doesn't think any of that will be a problem – the Gray Friars, at least in Montagui, are not an especially wealthy order, he's never felt much of an attraction to women, and ever since he was six, all he's ever wanted to do was serve God.
The Gray Friars give him the purpose and the structure he wants. He is Brother Peire now, and he loves his brother friars and his God and his work, and he's happy.
Montagui is also home to a community of Black Friars, followers of the Order of St Othon, and to churches and small religious houses who owe direct allegiance to the bishop and the Mother Church. (Friars ultimately owe their allegiance to the Mother Church as well, but that's always filtered through their loyalty to their order. But at the same time, if a conflict arises between someone's loyalty to their order and their loyalty to the Mother Church, the Church takes precedence.) Brother Peire is not very political and is content to let other brothers worry about the order's position in the city. At the end of the day, all that matters to him is that the people of Montagui continue to support the Gray Friars, and that the Gray Friars continue to pray for them and minister to them.
But as with any large city, in and among all the adherents to the Mother Church are those who don't agree with her teachings and don't follow her religious leaders. The last large outbreak of heresy was nearly fifty years ago, but the heretics never really left, and there's always work for the Mother Church's inquisitors and heresy-hunters. Sometimes the Gray Friars have discussions among themselves as to how these heretics should be treated, but no one ever suggests that they should be allowed to live with their heresies. Brother Peire isn't sure what to do with them – torturing them to recant seems wrong, because the Gray Friars are a peaceful, generally non-violent order and sometimes that torture can lead to death, but how else can a man see the error of his ways? Sometimes appealing to his reason works, or reminding him (or her, as women seem just as susceptible to heresy as men) that he won't go to Heaven when he dies and won't be reunited with his loved ones in the afterlife, and in any case torture is a perfectly acceptable way to make the guilty confess their wrongs and give up the names of other secret heretics and apostates.
"They believe they're right," he muses one day, working in the kitchen gardens after a particularly lively discussion brought on by the abbot's sermon during the midday service. "Their beliefs give them comfort, the same that ours do. How can you take a man's comfort away from him?"
"Because those beliefs are wrong," counters Brother Gueri, the friar working with him today. "Wouldn't they be so much more comforted if they were brought back to the right way to live?"
"Well, yes, but - "
"But you know we're right."
Brother Peire can't argue with him. He doesn't like to argue with Brother Gueri anyway. They're friends. Brother Gueri is blond and square-faced and solidly built, and he was a wandering friar before he came to Montagui. He'd taken ill on the road and was near death when a merchant caravan found him and brought him into the city. The Gray Friars nursed him back to health and even though he'd taken his vows in a chapter of the Order that believed a friar should spend as much of his time as possible wandering the countryside preaching the good word and relying on people's charity to survive, once he was better he realized he liked staying put. And because he was already a follower of the Order of St Austor, he could.
He was born and had trained in towns farther north, and speaks with a heavier accent than most people in Montagui. But Brother Peire can always understand him.
To be honest, despite his occasional need to try and see the heretics' side of things, Brother Peire can't understand why they can't see the beauty of his faith. Why don't they see the glory and perfection of the teachings of the Mother Church? Can they not see that this is what God wants of His people, to follow His laws as set down by the bishops and as expressed through the work of His various holy orders? Are they not content? Why do they have to invent things for themselves that run counter to natural law? Don't they know they'll die unabsolved and unconsecrated, and they'll never get to experience God's eternal glory? He's never actually met a heretic, although he has met one or two people who recanted their heterodoxy and were accepted back, so he can't say whether or not they're defying the Mother Church out of immature defiance or because they really do believe something else.
And if they really do believe something else, why?
Every so often he wonders if he'll ever get to have this conversation with someone besides his brother friars. But what are the chances he'll be in the same room with a heretic, and can ask them why they believe what they do? And what are the chances that the heretic would tell him? The Gray Friars don't spend a great deal of time hunting for active non-believers, preferring to proselytize to those who don't have any particular faith and to minister to anyone who needs them, and in any case the Mother Church's inquisitors – and sometimes the Black Friars – always seem to find the heretics first. Brother Peire has to content himself with talking to his brother friars about what to do about heresies and how to handle the people preaching them.
words: 2156