My shoulder is a little better today, but I am to go to Louisville tomorrow and see a doctor about it.
Spent an hour or more on Baker’s Inner Life of Dame Gertrude carefully reading the chapters on “Divine Inspiration” (or part of them). I can see clearly how much I have failed in this attention where my active life is concerned–especially in my eagerness to publish, to make contacts, to spread messages. How wrong I have been! No matter how good the cause may be, I realize that my own silence and interior life come first, no matter how much anyone may say, no matter how good the results may appear to be. True, there is no essential conflict between interior prayer and exterior action: but more interior prayer is God’s will for me and not so much exterior action. If I try to obey–and do not succeed in everything, that is another matter.
September 19, 1963
I have been in St. Joseph’s Infirmary for a week with a cervical disk, and other problems, arthritis, etc. There has been some permanent injury to the vertebrae of my neck, but apparently I can escape an operation. I hope so. Have had a certain amount of pain, especially at night. Daytime–lying in traction or going for massage–lately as I get better I can sit up and read.
Last Sunday was a terrible day in the South. A church was bombed in Birmingham and four Negro children were killed, and later two other Negroes were murdered in “rioting.” It now seems that the racists in the deep South are trying to provoke violence so as to not have a general slaughter. It is quite evident that this was intended to provoke violent reactions. The Governor [George Wallace] seems to be expecting it with eagerness–rushing troops to the scene, etc. As if it had all been planned! And the poor people who are made to suffer from all this. It is utterly sickening and tragic. It is to me an awful symptom of the emptiness, nihilism and confusion of so much of American society.
We are perhaps going to have to face the same kind of decisions so many failed to face in Nazi Germany! What an awful and ironic commentary on our claims to be the chief apostle of democracy and freedom in the world!
In the hospital there were quite a few Negro nurses and tray-girls and I am happy to see them. They are lovely people. In Louisville we are better off. It is the best city in the south, for integration.
September 20, 1963
Still in hospital. Slow improvement. Effects of the disk still very noticeable in the left arm.
I have been able to do a lot of reading. Some on Barth’s view of St. Anselm (very penetrating explanation of Anselm’s religious sense of God in “the argument”).
Wasted my time reading Morris West’s Shoes of the Fisherman. Superficial and naive. A Ukranian Pope falls in love with Teilhard de Chardin! They talk earnestly. Teilhard de Chardin says: “You know, Holy Father, I think we are no longer reaching people!!” etc. Actually, this book is a nonentity. A pious, baseless hope for a renewal that would be comprehensible to Time magazine, and which indeed has already been dreamed of by it. Is this the best the Church can hope for? This folksy myth with its soap opera characters and its changes that change nothing. Here is the kind of prophecy that glorifies the status quo, and works only for a little glory in the Vatican.
Sartre’s Literature and Existentialism on the other hand is powerful and convincing, though his historical synopsis is contrived and pontifical as are his pseudo-marxist conclusions.
Iris Origo’s life of [Giacomo] Leopardi [Leopardi: A Study in Solitude, 1935] was a fascinating discovery (not new!). Leopardi is one of the few Romantics I really like. Victor Hammer wants me to translate a few of his poems.
Finally–[Yevgeny] Yevtushenko’s autobiography [A Precocious Autobiography, 1963]. Unquestionably good, lively, powerful. Here is real newness of life. Wonderfully encouraging in its sincerity. A powerfully moving description of the publication of “Babi Yar” in the Literary Gazette with the typesetter offering him vodka.
Some reflections–after recollection this evening.
1. I am going to be slowed down by this sickness. There is a permanent injury in the vertebrae of my neck, besides this disk. My arm is still very stiff and sore in spite of improvement. I will not be able to do a very great deal of writing and will have to be conservative in projects with the novices.
2. On writing and contacts:
I think it important to stick to–poetry, translations of poetry, contacts with poets especially in Latin America–not only [Ernesto] Cardenal, [Pablo Antonio] Cuadra, etc. but especially those like [Cintio] Vitier–also perhaps [Miguel] Grinberg and perhaps even El Corno Emplumado [a journal published in Mexico City].
Monastic articles and essays–but not an unlimited number of revisions.
My own creative work, whatever that may be.
3. For the rest the most important thing is the deepening of my grasp on spiritual reality. The renunciation of self in quest of freedom. More complete submission to the Spirit. In this I feel far from having begun to do what may be asked of me, and the final perspectives (if any) have not yet been opened up. I so easily let myself be bogged down in the “accepted” and the status quo–perhaps even in looking for futile reassurances from others, not explicit, but still gestures of acceptance. I am still too involved in the trivialities of my “place” and surroundings. Yet this must obviously be accepted, but I have not yet managed to do it rightly.
4. Cut down on the more superficial type of ecumenical contacts and especially on time-consuming palaver, and many visits.
September 23, 1963
Getting better.
Yesterday, sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, I said Mass for the children killed in Birmingham, announced it to the few nuns and nurses and workers for the hospital who were in chapel and applied a few words from the Gospel to the situation.
The unreal enormous breakfast in the priests’ dining room, and after that the banality of the Sunday paper and the far worse banality of Our Sunday Visitor.
In contrast I skimmed through Sartre’s Age of Reason which at first (the other day) I had decided not to read at all beyond the first few chapters. But it is an important and well-written novel, and the theme is inescapable: the question of giving one’s life a meaning by accepting the meaning of definitive commitments and not always evading them. It is a subtle and true study of the moral inanity of bourgeois life. But this is no guarantee that “socialist” life is any less inane. Quite the contrary! It is not social programs that give life the meaning it demands. The ending of the book is very effective.
In the evening Cliff Shaw and Mary Frances Dunne came and sang some songs in the Auditorium and I enjoyed it though my shoulder was hurting. Especially liked his arrangements of folk songs.
Last evening, too, in the quiet dusk, walked up and down under the trees along the fence of the deserted school playground, and looked at the last light of day beyond the school, over the low wooden houses. The sky suggested all the vast flat emptiness of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys! And trains going westward. A legendary America that sometimes comes back to enchant me though it no longer exists.
To accept my life in this context. Not to try to force Louisville into some arbitrary meaning or pattern. It is just that I am now in Louisville and last night I was under those trees, and I do not have to make sense out of it, still less to force it to “make sense,” which would in fact be to insist on an illusion.
Two lighted planes, rising from Standiford Field [Louisville airport], came up low over the hospital and swung into the west.
Tonight at the grotto, after saying office, read some of the fabulous chapters of [St. Anselm’s] Cur Deus Homo? (End of Book I, beginning of Book II). Now this is what seems to me to fit best the patterns of my life–that I should love such theological harmonies. Yet perhaps objectively this is less significant than I think. The rectitudo [rectitude] which I am capable of seeing in my life is far from being that which images in me the freedom of that divine mercy which is His iustitia [justice]. His fidelity to the reality which is His creation and reflects His hidden Being.
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sp; Proofs of Guigo’s Letter on the Solitary Life reached me here from Stanbrook [Abbey] and they are handsome.
Read some new poems of Leopardi. He was at home with his anima.
September 28, 1963
Came home to the monastery Wednesday, shoulder hurting but glad to get back, especially to the novices. This is surely a much more rational life than anything to be found outside. Here at least there is a kind of order and tranquillity, and though there is plenty of noise, still in the novitiate everything is quiet and serene. And there is a real joy in the novices, a real peace. The goodness of the place is so evident–much more than ever before. It is certainly the best place in which for me to try to get well: I sleep in the infirmary when I need rest, have traction on the bed and a heat pad. Otherwise am in the novitiate. Not going to choir yet.
Sent some calligraphic abstractions to El Corno Emplumado.
Yesterday went up to the hermitage and sat on the grass and in the tall trees. The house quiet and cool. A few birds. And nothing. Who would want to live in any other way?
Today started conferences on Cîteaux and Cluny and was happy that everyone really seemed so glad to have me back. And probably they were so because they could see I was glad to be back with them.
September 30, 1963. St. Jerome
A magnificent line from Karl Barth. “Everyone who has to contend with unbelief should be advised that he ought not to take his own unbelief too seriously. Only faith is to be taken seriously, and if we have faith as a grain of mustard seed, that suffices for the devil to have lost his game” (Dogmatics in Outline, p. 20). What stupendous implications in that!
Always the old trouble, that the devil and our nature try to persuade us that before we can begin to believe we must be perfect in everything. Faith is not important as it is “in us.” Our faith is “in God,” and with even a very little of it, God is in us. “To believe is the freedom to trust in Him quite alone” (and to be independent of any other reliance) and to rely on Him in everything that concerns us.
October 2, 1963
Yesterday afternoon I finished a remarkable book [Martin Lings, A Moslem Saint of the Twentieth Century, 1961]–the biography of Shaikh Ahmad al’Alawi, who died in Algeria in 1934. One of the greatest religious figures of this century, a perfect example of the Sufi tradition in all its fullness and energy. This is one book that I want to read again. The excerpts from his writings are most impressive and I know I have not begun to appreciate their content.
Today (and all week) the frightful racket of the earth-moving machinery around the new waterworks. Impossible to stay in an infirmary room, and the novitiate is uninhabitable. Fortunately it is a brilliant sunny day and I can get to the woods.
I got off to a slow false start—a tape was played in the novitiate–some of Dan Berrigan’s poems and then some Brahms. I was definitely in no mood for Brahms and seldom am. I could not listen receptively to the poems, though they were good. Yet there is something in the common run of Catholic feeling which is also ingrained in Dan Berrigan, a kind of facile and unserious eloquence…it spoils everything, though he’s certainly trying to get away from it. But I was in no mood. And he’s certainly by no means the worst offender. He just has that tone, which all have. The Irish Catholic pathos.
And I worked at the material I have to go over for the Liturgy book [Seasons of Celebration]. That too is unserious, it seems. What can I do with it? Is it even worth revising? I know I “must” try to revise it. Why? Because I expect myself to, and I am expected to. Is this honorable?
My shoulder still hurts. There has been small improvement in the week since I came back from the hospital, yet one thing I know: I am better off than if I had stayed in the hospital. I at least am not in a room where I can be trapped by visitors.
Read a little of the script of Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander which I dropped a couple of years ago (or perhaps in the spring of 1962). Most embarrassing. Such triviality and lack of perspective, though some parts (the least political) are lively. I begin dimly to be aware of my need to avoid (and very seriously!) this kind of trifling. One must be concerned about the events of one’s time, yet there is a way of being so that is pure trifling, even though in some ways it may seem to be relatively serious, for the moment.
Yesterday there were eight woodpeckers at one rime on the grass in front of the hermitage, playing and feeding–apparently at this season they feed very much on the ground. Six flew up when I went past now to get a T-shirt drying in the sun.
October 4, 1963
Two minds more different than those of Karl Barth and Frithjof Schuon would be hard to imagine, yet I am reading them both. Barth with his insistence on “God in the highest”: completely unattainable by any human tradition and Schuon with his philosophia humanis [humanistic philosophy] (am reading his excellent book on Islam [Comprendre l’Islam, 1961]). True, Barth is a greater mind and there is an austere beauty in his Evangelical absolutism (closer to Islam than one would think!!) but there is another side to him–his love of St. Anselm and of Mozart.
Schuon naturally oversimplifies his “contrast” between Islam and Christianity. One has to know what he’s really doing! I wrote this morning to Marco Pallis (who sent the Schuon book) about his Way and the Mountain (the other night I dreamed about the way).
I went to choir for High Mass today and my shoulder and arm are a lot better.
October 6, 1963
Dreamt last night of Italian Cathedrals (not real ones, dream ones). First I am with others of the community in a crowded Cathedral at “Siena.” Confusion. I am trying to pray, turned toward a stonelike tabernacle beyond the crowd. (Is it the tabernacle?) I think of going to the “Shrine of St. Catherine.” Then I am in another spacious well-lighted Cathedral “nearer home” and I am trying to “remember” the name of the city which should be very familiar. (Mantua?) I am struck and appeased by the airiness and spaciousness of the cathedral, the high shadowy vaults with paintings. A Nazareth nun walks through the cathedral and I am afraid she will recognize me. I pray. I cannot quite remember the name of the place where I am, a city perhaps beginning with “C”? Or “Mantua” perhaps? But no, Mantua is in the “North of Italy” and I am more in the center.
October 7, 1963
For some reason this day has been happy and rather exhilarated. Feast of the Holy Rosary, for one thing. Had a fairly good night’s sleep, for another, and the shoulder seems to get better.
Read a good article on monastic silence by Dom Salmon in the Mélanges Benedictines (put out at St. Wandrille in 1947–good!). Yesterday began Ida (Göerres’ diaries which are very lovely. She is one of the most alert and honest Catholic minds, not at all conformist, and very true. I am glad of course that she likes The Sign of Jonas.
Letter from Joel Orent with the usual about Hassidism, Yoga, etc., but this time also about a Susquehanna Indian “plot” to get back the land stolen from them.
Am planning to have enlargements made of some of my photos of Shakertown and Dant Station, and for some reason this is very satisfying.
Fine pages in Barth about God not being “pure power” in the sense of unbridled and arbitrary potentia–for this is really the power of nothing. God is potestas. The power of love and of truth, not an infinite and unbridled will purely arbitrary in itself and without responsibility to a creative plan. “Absolute power” is purely and simply the program of the devil. Strangely enough some excellent pages in Schuon’s book on Islam say exactly the same thing.
The magnificent address of Pope Paul VI at the opening of the Second Session of the Council is being read in the refectory now. Certainly one of the greatest things of its kind, equal to that of Pope John last year and going beyond it (thanks to Pope John himself and to the first session).
October 8, 1963
Exciting news from France: not about de Gaulle or nuclear weapons, but about a man living in a village near Cordes in “my country,” who has been discovering, unearthing and exploring the underground cult
ic labyrinths of the Albigenses. Places arranged in mysterious circles centered upon some town or hamlet, where the “perfect” fasted to death in the indura [endurance], where neophytes were initiated, where the fasters were cremated upon their death. The great and tantalizing thing about them: their silence. Even if what it hides may perhaps be trivial (will it ever be known?) the silence itself has its own question.
Other news: a “Freedom Now” party is being formed for positive political action by Negroes and it will undoubtedly become a force, and quickly so. May even seriously affect the 1964 presidential election. But in view of the non-entity and fatuousness of the existing two parties, there is no other way. This should have been done long ago.
Day after day bright and dry, hot afternoons over the bronze hills. We need rain to cut down the danger of fires.
Brother Denis is working this afternoon on the review of David Knowles’ new book [The Benedictines: A Digest for Moderns, 1963] for Monastic Studies. This is something new and it gives joy to my heart. I hope he will do many such things well. Brother Basil has written good articles too, one of which is to appear in the Collectanea [Cisterciensia].
When Schuon writes about Mohammed, one wonders to what extent he is surreptitiously using ideas suggested by the dogma of the Incarnation. For instance this: “Mohammed c’est la forme humaine orientée vers l’Essence divine” (127). “C’est Mohammed qui incarné ‘actuellement’ et ‘définitivement’ la Révélation” (p. 131). [“Mohammed is the human form directed towards the divine Essence,” Comprendre l’Islam, p. 127. “It is Mohammed who ‘actually’ and ‘definitively’ incarnates Revelation,” p. 131.]
October 9, 1963
Barth’s concept of evil–that to which God has denied existence, and which we affirm by our choice. The world is grace, resting entirely in the word of grace which is creation. The world as the theater of God’s glory (Calvin–from Augustine). Man as the witness of God’s acts. “He has to express what he has seen.”
Dancing in the Water of Life Page 4
