March 26, 1964. Holy Thursday
“All the moral wretchedness as we see it about us is our wretchedness and our weakness,” says Hromadka, in a powerful article about the Christian’s concern for the (godless) man of today. From such a one I am willing to learn. He says the obligation of the Christian in socialist society is first to understand that society, to love it and serve its spiritual needs, and to bring up children in truthfulness and reliability for the sake of helping in the task of building a new world. “Not with groaning but with joyful love for the man of this modern world of ours we want to bring a service which no one can bring in our stead.”
March 27, 1964. Good Friday
Came up to the hermitage at 4 a.m. The moon poured down silence over the woods, and the frosty grass sparkled faintly. More than two hours of prayer in firelight. The sun appeared and rose at 6:45. Sweet pungent smell of hickory smoke, and silence, silence. But birds again–presence, awareness, sorry idiot life. Idiot existence, idiot not because it has to be but because it is not what it could be with a little more courage and care. In the end it all comes down to renunciation, the “infinite bonding” without which one cannot begin to talk of freedom–but it must be renunciation, not mere resignation, abdication, “giving up.” There is no simple answer, least of all in the community. The ordinary answers tend to be confusing and to hide the truth, for which one must struggle in loneliness–but why in desperation? This is not necessary.
March 28, 1964. Holy Saturday
Nimis amara [exceedingly bitter]–these two words jumped out at me from the Improperia on Good Friday afternoon. We have all been a most bitter inheritance to our God! (The shameful injustices of South America, especially Northeastern Brazil!) More and more I see that we in the Church are deluded and complacent about ourselves. How much there is in our Liturgy that puts all the blame on the Jews–so that we ourselves enter the universal guilt without realizing it. But the improperia are clearly addressed to us. And yet St. Paul says this: “What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means: Let God be true though every man be false!” (Romans 3:3–4).
My bitterness is the savor of my own falsity, but my falsity cannot change the fidelity of God to me and to His Church. Hence I must forget my bitterness and love His fidelity, in compassion and concern for all who are, without knowing it, gall and bitterness in His world that His joy may change us all and awaken us to His truth. And that we may live His truth in fidelity and eliminate injustice and violence from the earth. If we seek this, at any rate, He will live in us. The results are not in our hands.
April 4, 1964
Saturday in Easter Week. The Hammers were coming but did not. Just as well, for it is cold, dark, windy, threatening. Last Thursday workmen began on the sunporch for infirmary and novitiate and there is much noise around there. Hats, pipes, sweaters, striding around in the center of unassembled concrete forms. The foundation is poured.
I have been reading [Konstantin] Paustovsky with pleasure [The Story of a Life, 1963]. It is a great book with wonderful warmth and reality. But Kafka is now read, I hear, in Russia and the official people don’t know what to make of him now that they understand it is bad form to call him decadent. Formally and aggressively accused China of selling out the revolution (which must, when all the chips are down, be a violent one). The Russians drift home toward the west. Paustovsky is thoroughly European (he loved Latin and you would be hard put to it to find anyone in America so willing to admit it!). Yet Russian too.
Have borrowed [Henry Robert] McAdoo on Caroline Moral Theology [The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology, 1949] from Rev. [William K.) Hubbell (Episcopalian) in Lexington. I like it.
Yesterday under some pressure finished a piece on mercy which Abbé [Alphonse] Göettmann requested for a Festschrift to Albert Schweitzer.23
April 10, 1964
Sun, warmth, quiet, very distant diesel train (other side of New Haven), wind in the pine branches. Dogwood buds fatten and open a little (purple edges of their tiny smile) preparing to open. The visitation closed today. Some of my eccentricities were complained of, but I am officially established in my present offbeat schedule (for instance instead of going to Vigils I take some traction to get the kinks out of my neck and then go, about 2:45, to novitiate chapel for an hour of mental prayer and then Lauds. As long as the back does not get in good shape, this would seem to be the thing to do).
Dom Columban wrote a good card fairly well clarifying the situation of the Brothers–in transit to the “unified status,” etc. I think this will bring relative peace. But elsewhere in the Order there is so far only question of the novices (brothers) being in white.
Trouble brewing with Farrar, Straus, I feel it coming–over the unfortunate situation with Seeds of Destruction. I will be glad and relieved to get away from them. Still have to get one more book to them. The manuscript of the Liturgy book24 is typed and waiting for corrections. I am certainly going to write less, at least less in the way of formal essays and articles, less preaching, perhaps more creatively, though the Collectanea (Father Charles Dumont) wants me to do the “Chronique” of Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, etc. monasticism (is there such a thing as Sufi monasticism??). That will be a chore, but profitable. In truth and above all it is good to do something on the home team. Meanwhile I am glad at the official approval–unsought–which steers me a little more in the direction of solitude here. Now it is a matter of taking better advantage of it. Less scattered “secular” reading, fewer curiosities, a deeper and more eschatological outlook. Who knows?
April 11, 1964
The time has probably come to go back on all that I have said about one’s “real self,” etc., etc. And show that there is after all no hidden mysterious “real self” other than or “hiding behind” the self that one is, but what all the thinking does is to observe what is there or to objectify it and thus falsify it. The “real self” is not an object, but I have betrayed it by seeming to promise a possibility of knowing it somewhere, sometimes as a reward for astuteness, fidelity, and a quick-witted ability to stay one jump ahead of reality. However, the empirical self is not to be taken as fully “real.” Here is where the illusion begins.
April 13, 1964
This would be the fiftieth birthday of the Worker Priest Henri Perrin if he were alive. The publishers have sent me proofs of his autobiography (actually a collection of fragments of letters) [Priest and Worker: Autobiography of Fr. Henri Perrin, 1964]. The fact is that he was driven to despair by the stolid conservatism of the Church–her refusal to become detached from sterile commitment to a society that is finished. As a matter of fact the whole question is perhaps less complicated than it may seem. So much of the class consciousness–(left wing or right wing)–in France is just bourgeois anyway. The guilt at not being a worker is a bourgeois guilt. Henri Perrin very impressed by this solidarity of workers as a class, and everywhere the underlying idea of the book is his need for a “real” solidarity (such as that of the workers, or what he believes to be that of the workers) as opposed to the largely fictitious solidarity of bourgeois Catholics. One gets the impression that he is less concerned with saving the worker by bringing him to the Church than with saving the Church by bringing her to the worker. But isn’t this because he has to a great extent accepted a myth about “The Worker”? On the other hand there is no question that the Church cannot live in a hothouse of comfortable and inane prosperity.
Note exactly the same torment of conscience in Sartre’s preface to Aden Arabie. A long querulous self-examination and confession, based on the fact that Aden Arabie (by Paul Nizan) is itself another version of the same confession. Finally I have received a book about a Jesuit who was brainwashed in China and I have no trouble in imagining what he confessed (or did not confess)–that he too was a bourgeois and still a worker. Meanwhile out of Detroit come some curious and lively documents, from Negro workers, with a whole new slant. That, with automation work is going to becom
e an anachronism. Then the worker will have the joy of bourgeois confession too! All this does not alter the fact that Perrin was a brave and serious man, honest and frank about the difficulties of life and honest about the failings of the Church. And of course quite right.
April 17, 1964
This week–second week after Easter–Gospel of the Good Shepherd, bright warm days, productive work. On Tuesday I wrote seventeen pages about Gandhi (for the little New Directions book)25 and then had a kind of hemorrhage in the throat. Which did not matter or mean anything and it was a beautiful day! Finished the Gandhi piece on Wednesday afternoon and went over it writing corrections and additions Thursday (yesterday).
Today Marie Tadié26 called from Paris–it was the first time I had ever made a transatlantic phone call and one could hear better than on some of the calls from one department to another in the monastery. The Black Revolution [La Revolution noire, 1964] is out in France and is doing well, apparently, as people in Italy and Spain already want it.
Yesterday the relic of Benedict Joseph Labre was exposed (his feast!). Also there was a building committee meeting in which the front of the South wing was saved from the indignities that had been planned for it. The new abbatial suite is nearly finished but the machines in the kitchens are creating a problem of noise.
Reading [Vasilii] Rozanov–a new selection has come out in French. He is an important and dire voice, shocking and deeply convincing, completely opposed to the current optimisms and “humanisms,” and one cannot help listening seriously to his warnings about structures which are without reservation. True, when he condemns the cosmic Joy of Dostoievsky’s Zossima one need not entirely agree–and yet there is [a] point in what he says. Curious how convincing he is, how he compels assent–at least my assent–even though what he says is outrageous and exactly contrary to all the plans of Christians who have decided to convince the world that we are “nice people.” Monks would go to the theater if only the plays were “a little better”?! He shows this to be completely ludicrous. There is real originality here and a deep religious Spirit–even though one does not accept all his perspectives, or all the consequences of what he says: do there have to be Inquisitions?
April 20, 1964
Tomorrow, St. Anselm. It is quite hot. The work on the infirmary sun porch is getting into its second stage–an elevator is being set up to raise the cement to the second and third floors and pour slabs there. Dogwood and redbud everywhere. Especially beautiful dogwoods among the dark pines in the grove by St. Edmund’s field yesterday–a grey afternoon, with a few drops of rain now and again.
Tom Burns (of Burns and Oates)27 was here and I had some talks with him. The Hammers had also been over Saturday and I was a bit tired of talking (though it was nice sitting among the stones and wildflowers with Victor and Carolyn, and talking about various things–a letter from Ernst Jünger’s brother which Victor read in German and which I easily understood–reading Kittel has done me good).
Deeply impressed by Rozanov in the heat behind the woodshed. A magnificent piece of writing about [Mariano Cardinal] Rampola [del Tindaro] celebrating the offices of Good Friday in St. Peter’s. But above all this: “With the birth of Christ and the spread of the Gospel, all the fruits of the earth have become bitter…. It is impossible not to notice that one can become enthusiastic for art, for family, for politics or science only on condition that one does not look at Christ with full attention. Gogol looked attentively at Christ and threw away his pen and died.” How true and how heart-rending: yet with what art it is said. And it depends what you mean by politics. Tsarist careerism–perhaps, or any kind of Byzantine–or Washingtonian–officialism. Yet the great religious issues today turn out to be also political. To look attentively at Christ and not see Auschwitz? He would admit that with his shocking and altogether wrong “le Christ est le prince des cercueils!!!” [“Christ is the prince of coffins!!!”]. Yet his sense of the need to turn from the world to God is basically and perfectly right.
Letter of Dom [Jean] Leclercq about this today, too. Very good. He goes to Africa in May, meeting of representatives from all the monasteries.
April 21, 1964. St. Anselm
Considerable attention–too much in fact–is being given to the project of six monks of Achel who are planning to form a new kind of group to live as contemplatives in the world and as wage earners, on the ground that the well-established business life of the big monastery is contrary to the monastic ideal and creates too much pressure. What I regret most is that this has been made public before they have even been approved–and perhaps approval has been refused them. I do not know. The last thing they want is publicity anyway. It may in itself be a good idea. There is one ambiguity, if it is looked at in our American context. That now with automation the jobs are getting fewer and should a contemplative monk be taking a job that someone needs in order to support a family? The big question is–should a monk be a wage earner? In any event there has been a lot of discussion and Dom Ignace has certainly been more broad minded than Dom Gabriel would have been. The thing is out in the open in the Order (not here of course!!) and is freely discussed and there has been a meeting of Abbots, Bishops, etc.
I was talking to the novices and juniors on “revision de vie” [“revision of life”] which is not for us as we now are, I believe. Evidently these are people who have been in that sort of thing and are imitating the Little Brothers. There may be something there. But I think the real issue is this: the monk’s sense of his own reality, his own authenticity. The hunger to have a clear, satisfying idea of who he is and what he is and where he stands, e.g. his “place in the world.” But in the world the monk has no place. He is a stranger and wanderer on the earth. He cannot have the comfort of a clear and respectable identity. That is precisely the trouble and the joke of a place like Gethsemani. The best formula is still, I think, the small farm-community like Erlach.
April 23, 1964
Real Spring weather–these are the precise days when everything changes. All the trees are fast beginning to be in leaf and the first green freshness of a new summer is all over the hills. Irreplaceable purity of these few days chosen by God as His sign!
Mixture of heavenliness and anguish. Seeing “heavenliness” suddenly for instance in the pure, pure, white of the mature dogwood blossoms against the dark evergreens in the cloudy garden. “Heavenliness”. too of the song of the unknown bird that is perhaps here only for these days, passing through, a lovely, deep, simple song. Pure–no pathos, no statement, no desire, pure heavenly sound. Seized by this “heavenliness” as if I were a child–a child mind I have never done anything to deserve to have and which is my own part in the heavenly spring. Not of this world, or of my making. Born partly of physical anguish (which is really not there, though. It goes quickly). Sense that the “heavenliness” is the real nature of things not their nature, not en soi, but the fact they are a gift of love, and of freedom.
April 24, 1964
Heavenliness–again. For instance, walking up into the woods yesterday afternoon–as if my feet acquired a heavenly lightness from contact with the earth of the path. As though the earth itself were filled with an indescribable spirituality and lightness as if the true nature of the earth were to be heavenly, or rather as if all things, in truth, had a heavenly existence. As if existence itself were heavenliness. The same–at Mass, obviously. But with a new earthy and yet pure heavenliness of bread. The ikons, particularly of St. Elias and his great red globe of light, and the desert gold, the bird red of the mountain: all transformed!
Even in Rozanov: description of a small store in Moscow where everyone used to buy onions, dried fish, mushrooms on the first Monday of Lent.
Other things, simple, earthly and not heavenly, roosters crowing at Andy Boone’s in the middle of the afternoon. Large dogwood blossoms in the wood, too large, past their prime, like artificial flowers made out of linen.
The sharp, splendid, reasonable, human prose of Paul Nizan describing a m
an of action in Aden.
These things are good, but not heavenly.
Less quality–[Bernard] Berenson’s diary. I have only dipped into it. Diary of an old man for whom the world has made a kind of sense and who knows a lot of people. Barely earthly.
April 28, 1964
Bright, delightful day, washed clean of all smoke and dust by two days’ rain, brilliant sky, bird song, hills clothed in their green sweaters (brightness of the days and hills all clean, at the cottage, and Lax’s poem). There was a tanager singing like a drop of blood in the tall thin pines–against the dark pine foliage and the blue sky with the light green of the new leaves on the tulip poplar (brightness of the sunny hills between Marseilles and Cassis that February morning in 1933, when I strolled out to walk the coast. Thirty-one years ago!!).
The thought of traveling is perhaps going soon to be a real temptation, because soon it may happen that permission to travel may be given. (It could now, but Dom James is so afraid to let anyone out.) Hence I must decide and have decided against it. Instead of idly wishing, for instance, that I could visit the Cistercian sites in Wales. There are two serious invitations among others. (1) to Collegeville [St. John’s Abbey] in 1965, from Father Godfrey Diekmann. Douglas Steere mentioned this in a letter from Rome the other day. He said he had been talking to Father Häring about how “important” it was for me to come to this conference on the interior life. (2) to Cuernavaca, where I am invited now by Msgr. [Ivan] Illich for a retreat (to be given by René Voillaume), and a conference on Latin America. How tempting!!
Dancing in the Water of Life Page 14
