If I am going to tell you this story, though, I suppose I should begin by telling you a few things.  Every story has a context, a setting, like a house has a setting.  The setting is what frames it, and gives it sense. The setting for the Listener House of Studies, for example, is what strikes you first about it, that and the story the setting itself tells you about the place.  

I saw if first, complete, in the spring and recall it best that way.  It is spring again as I tell you this story. 

The house is set next to Our Lady of Refuge monastery in the Blue Ridge Mountains in West Virginia.  Joined, the two, monastics and Listeners, have created a self-contained community, for as St. Benedict said, each monastery should be as self-contained as possible, so that the brethren should have no reason to go into the world which is in no way good for them.  Separated by the enclosure walls they are also self-contained worlds within the community.  The monastery is Clem’s and the nuns, the House is ours.

If you were to find us and turn up the drive, what you’d see is the dual monastery but not the House, and the road curving around to the front and beyond, through the enclosure wall.  Visitors are admitted to the parlorsto visit with one of the monks or nuns, and in the church where they are welcome for the Offices and mass or simply to pray.  It is a very rare occurrence for a stranger to penetrate beyond into the enclosure unless entering the community and even rarer past the enclosure to the House.  That usually requires an invitation and an escort.

From the outside the House, as most call it in varying tones, does not nestle into the landscape.  Instead it embraces it, as though the walls around it had decided to gather the land inward.  The high, blank exterior of the walls, strangely, make it seem no more inviting of entrance than suggestive of rejection.  There is the patina of age, of an oldness that goes beyond elapsed time.  That is the stone.  It was already weathered and old when we cut it. You sense the presence of roots, deep roots going into the ground and branches reaching to the sky.  It belongs here you think when you see it, right in this place because it has proclaimed itself its protector.  It seems, as well, to tender an offer of protection or even sanctuary in its oldest sense for those who are allowed to enter.  It makes you want go inside, but wonder if you should unless you truly have a need or a reason. 

Even before you enter you realize that there is clearly an enclave inside these walls, a self-contained community, even though there are no buildings visible from the gate, just the roof of the house.   The stone walls that run a long distance before turning the corner, suggest you should find a door to knock on, but the gate…and there is only one in the high walls you can not see over…stands open.  There is no guard at the gate, though you instinctively look both left, right and ahead in search of someone to let you inside.  You have the vague urge to request authorization, present an invitation, find a place to sign in and accept a visitor’s pass from the non-existent security guard. 

Once inside, that impression fades as you round the drive and approach the entrance to what is obviously the heart of the place.  Like a cathedral close or the old walled cities, there are many buildings within, but one stands out from pride of place, drawing the eye like a perfectly set jewel, dominating the setting like a cathedral or castle would.  Built of stone that matches the walls that enclose it, it is covered in green from the climbing ivy and shrubbery that stand at its foundations.  Splashes of floral color only serve to intensify the green accenting the stark stone.  It is set in the center of a lawn that is clearly someone’s pride and joy.  On the other side of the drive that passes the front of the building is more lawn with trees and flowerbeds reaching back to the walls.  The interior of the wall is also covered in green, of the same ivy and fronted with shrubbery.  Whatever the weather in Washington D.C. that day it is not winter here, at least not today or in my memories.  The fountain, completing the setting absolutely, is set fore square and opposite the building.  It is pristine, of three-tiered stone sharp against its background, the water splashing happily and sparkling bright.

This building does nestle into its landscape.  It’s set into it like a stone in an engagement ring, shaded by mature trees and flanked by smaller buildings to the side and even the rear, one assumes, though the rear is clearly not visible from this vantage point.  The discreet brass sign, echoing the discreet look of the entrance, and set next to the front door, identifies this building as the Listener House of Studies.  The doorbell below it insists on being used.  This is not a building, in spite of its warmth, that encourages the informal entry of a visitor. 

In spite of that, the sense of rootedness, of safe harbor, is stronger, perhaps because of the shimmer of sunlight on the greenery, or the flash of the water.  Perhaps it’s the longevity suggested in the setting, the clarity that someone has labored long and hard here, to create this landscape of lawn and garden, lavishing it with love and care and attention.  It might be the age of the stone that remains so solid looking where it shows between the ivy.  It might be the faintest glimpse of rooms behind the glass windows whose curtains have been opened to let in the day.  It might be the bird feeders placed with such care, or the corn for the small creatures that must come here regularly.   It might even be the stillness, the waiting, and the slight sorrow while waiting of a place so obviously poised to give of itself. Whatever it is, it draws you forward, saying that the doorbell is there to be rung, hoping to be rung, wanting to sing out a call to who ever is behind the door that hospitality is requested for, of course, a welcome requested is a welcome already granted.  Hospitality is a sacred duty.

I live in the House, as do a few of the others.  Most live outside it, but still on the grounds.  Very few Listeners do not live within these walls, in fact, and those who don’t probably would rather they did.  I don’t know about that though.  I am just guessing. 

We do it, live there that is, I have always suspected, in order to be at hand, close by when trouble comes.  Because looking back now, I somehow always expected trouble of some sort, though not the sort we got.  But I always believed I lived there because I am at heart a monk, and monks live in community, which is what the House is…a community of Listeners and New Ones in transit and a few Awakened who are no longer under our care but whom Stephen has asked to stay.  Stephen asking you to stay is the only way anyone becomes a resident. 

It all comes back to what being a Listener really means, which is one of the first things I need to tell you.  Being a Listener is a function of many things, not the least of which is a physical ability to hear a New One emerging.  It is also about the compulsion to respond to that sound…a sound like keening that tears at the soul, a weeping ofinconsolablegrief that makes you need to weep in counter-point and a pleading for comfort and ease from an unimaginable hell of loneliness.  It is about a cellular requirement to respond to the need of it, the need in it because that is your need, more compelling that breathing.

One other thing it is is an organization of people who Listen and then teach those they have heard and Stephen created that organization.  He runs it, answers for it, protects it and nurtures it along a twisting path towards goals far beyond the Listeners that even I don’t see clearly and probably Doni never did either, because they are forbidden to us.  In many ways there were Listeners as a community and a vocation because there was first a Stephen. 

To give the Awakened Listeners, Stephen made many promises.  To gather us together into a community he had to create assurances that we would not become a power base or broker.  Back then All Awakened were emergent and gifted.  Now that is only true of the Listeners.  Some of the New Ones even come to us without all the –pathic gifts.  Something has changed.  None of us know what.  Do you see, then, how dangerous we could be, even to our own kind even before the Changes started?  So he gathered the Listeners together and into a place apart.  That’s why he built the House.  That’s why we submit to the Elders and maintain and enforce the Covenant for them here on Earth. 

But Stephen has a dream and is determined to realize it.  He dreams of a world of Awakened who live in sunlight without hiding; a world where The Charlie Parker Problem would never have happened or rather, been a problem.  But I digress.

Being a Listener is also a lot like being a monk, because it is a monkish thing to understand that when work is a vocation there is no leaving it at the office at the end of the day.  It may be, as well, that it’s a monkish thing to think that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.  A monk is expected to pray always, and everything he does is a prayer because prayer is his work and his vocation.  He is taught to pray unceasingly so that every bit of his day, no matter how mundane, monumental or personal, becomes prayer.  

Listening the way we do it is definitely a vocation.  A vocation is given by God.  They are gifts not talents or abilities.  If you want to Listen you have to be willing to wait for the sounds to form and be emitted.  You can anticipate, but usually you wait.  Listeners have been Listening for centuries.  We Listen unceasingly.  But for us, I think, it’s a penance or an act of reparation.  There is sometimes joy in it, at least for me, but often is just brings with it another measure poured into the collective pool of our sorrow and grief.  Charlie Palmer made the pool overflow. 

I wasn’t there for all of it, but I know it happened the way I’m telling it.  That’s not my gift, just my hobby.  I’m the Listener historian.  I record our history for the retelling and for the understanding of others someday, hopefully, using primary sources.  I didn’t start out as an historian.  One of the Recorders would do a much better job, I’m sure.  Doing this just got to be an itch that required scratching.  But whatever gods decided to make me a Listener…and trust me, we’re made, not born…decided that I would be that as well.  There’s no arguing with the gods, I have found, even if you can argue with God.

I’ve tried both, and so have all of us who find ourselves in the same boat with Charlie.  It’s just that Charlie went further than arguing.  He took action and God listened, no pun intended.  It just took longer for the gods to adjust to the result.  We thought, you know, that we had it all figured out.  We believed, after centuries of success, that we were right and could force that rightness down the throat of a person who’d looked death in the face and fought it to better than a draw in order to save something outside of himself.  And, usually, something more than that. Maybe that’s why, I sometimes think, God sent us Charlie Palmer.  Charlie, who had something tangible to fight for, see, because they were there, not an unbridgeable gap away.  And maybe God sent The Reverend, who was a more understandable sort of messenger just to be sure we got the point.  We could have done without The Reverend. 

Only it didn’t start with Charlie and the accident.  The table needs setting before dinner is served.  This particular table was set long before Charlie even met Shelly.  It was set, I think, when Doni met Stephen.  Or maybe when Doni’s whole sorry history began years before that.  That was when the table was made, that’s for sure.

When Doni came to us she was already a healer, though not like she became.  Then it was herbs and potions and simple first aid.  That was who women in her family were.  I can still see her the way she looked that day.  She was all colors, it seemed.  The colors she herself wore, and the colors of power, the power of the Awakened and the emergent Listener. The earth-brown hair that hung, shining with light and begging to be touched, tangled and thick to her hips where it had come undone.  The burnt-wood eyes that were stricken with horror and loathing.  The livid bruising that had purpled the red of her straight slash of a mouth.  The whiteness of the rest of her face.  And the scarlet that covered her clothes. 

It was late summer and early evening, a golden evening in England, of warmth and gentle light.  The light seemed to have picked her out, kneeling in the courtyard, as needing illumination, like some obscene Pieta, because it seemed everything around her was in shadows looking pale grey and cold. But here was this woman, who wore warmth and light, even as she keened a lament like a bard and needed no words to do so.  She owned the eye of all of us, Stephen in particular.  He’s never looked away since.   Not even after she died.

The scent of that summer twilight felt heavy in the air and somehow overlaid the other scents that were more expected.  Blood, see, smells distinctive and there was, as usual, a lot of that around.  More blood than usual, in fact, because four people were dead.  Slaughtered, really, because calling them dead doesn’t do justice to the truth.  And my curse, as an historian, is the truth.  Doni’s curse was life and Stephen’s is…well, I’ll let you decide. 

But as I said, Doni’s was life, to go on living, which may explain what happened later, I don’t know. And I can’t ask.  Even I can’t follow the dead.  But I digress again.  When Doni lost the baby and died for Lily’s children, Stephen changed in a way that made all of this perfectly logical.  But I didn’t know that then or the other things Stephen was starting to guess based on what the Elders did to Lily’s children and what Doni did about it.  So, the fact that Baylee all those years later had just recovered from her own loss was simply the straw, the last and one too many straw.

It started with Doni on that summer evening in England when she killed to save three lives and ended up with four dead.  She was even then a powerful healer, and the power of her changing gift was all around her, glittering silver and gold in its desperation.  Had she gathered the bodies of her children to her or had they died in that tableau?  I have never asked.  But she held them close, her hands moving ceaselessly over them searching for a means of resurrection, while she sang their souls into eternity and blood dripped from her fingers and the tears ran pink off her chin.  She was all color that evening.  It’s how I see her still.

Kneeling next to Charlie Palmer with Baylee, after Stephen had slowed time to the motion of glass, it was her I saw again in the brown and scarlet, and silver and gold.  But the brown hair falling forward and hiding the hands that skimmed Charlie’s leg, stopping the blood-flow weren’t hers.  And the shimmer of the whiteness of power, mimicking the snowfall that merged with Thea’s as they ended Charlie’s connection with Shelly for the last time wasn’t either.  The explosion of rage-fuelled black as Charlie fought back. The copper and bronze fireworks as Baylee realized what Charlie had been doing.  Those weren’t her either.

All of that is a permanent painting in my mind but for me, at the time, it was a backdrop to the other thing.  A backdrop to The Reverend who should have been immobilized in the stopped clock of time just like everyone else there.  Only he wasn’t.  I could hear him praying, the Latin prayers for the dead that I hadn’t heard in Latin, true ecclesial, liturgical Latin, in a very long time.  I found myself joining him, automatically, like being in the chapel and praying the Office… which made it even more surreal.  He was unaffected by what Stephen had wrought.  He was with us. Seeing and experiencing everything even as we did.  And he shouldn’t have been. 

But to explain all that I have to back up a bit.  And I need to tell you a few other things first.  I have to tell you about the Awakened and the Listeners.  Only I am not a scientist, or an expert in physiology, neurochemistry or psychology.  And even they don’t really know what happens to us at that moment of change or even why it happens.  They speculate that the flood of neurochemicals, adrenalin and the sheer power of human need to save one loved beyond self or life are the key factors.  They think there might be a genetic precursor.  But, in the end, they don’t really know the facts.  Nor do I.  But I know what happens, because it happened to me.  How do you describe it to someone who’s never experienced it?