This morning I wrote a short, perhaps ill-considered preface to Ludovico Silva’s poem on the Bomb18 (for publication in Caracas). In the afternoon began to get together some material from this Journal which Illtud Evans has asked for several times for Blackfriars.
March 27, 1965
The moon is out, and the sky is clearing at last. The air is drier and fresher. There is a very thin film of ice on the water buckets. Last end of the old moon. The next moon will be that of Easter!
March 29, 1965
The hope of better, dryer weather, died quickly yesterday. The sky darkened, and at night there was thunder, lightning, heavy rain beating down, and half awake I remembered I had left my rubber boots down at the house and thought of my cold which gets no better. Fortunately I had a raincoat up at the hermitage. A fire alarm went off about 5:30 and the rain abated, so I went down (false alarm–water got into the warning system!). Yet it kept on raining all morning.
Then an anonymous letter from Alabama from a reader who desired to prove her sincerity by saying she was a mother and a grandmother, and who said my book Seeds of Destruction was “appauling” (sic). Some clippings from the Alabama papers were enclosed–nothing but righteous indignation and outrage! In fact, the same irrationality, the same ferocity that one saw in the Nazi press. One theme only. That some degraded and entirely despicable people (“outside agitators”) were simply defiling, insulting and gratuitously provoking the good people of Alabama. That such things were simply beyond comprehension and beyond pardon. That the thought of considering any apparent reason behind them was totally unacceptable. That Alabama had done and could do no wrong, etc., etc. Complete failure to face reality. Another murder took place last week after the Montgomery march.19
March 31, 1965
Better weather yesterday. My big distraction these days is Andy Boone, who extracted from me a vague agreement that he ought to cut down and sell some oaks at the top of the field east of the hermitage and whose sons have been out there with chainsaws making a frightful racket and sending the biggest white oaks (naturally) crashing down one on top of the other. By last evening the woods were in a fine mess with one big tree hung up in another and a third hanging on the one that is hung up. I persuaded him yesterday to direct his attention elsewhere and clean up the dead trees around the spring so that we can get in there and open it up. But my cold is better and I am trying to get back into some serious meditation. Serious–not part hanging around quietly. Here too there is a spring to be cleared, and I am not going deep enough these days!
A collection of poems [Poemas Nuevos] by Alfonso Cortes came, sent by his sister. It looks very interesting. With all his insanity there remains a great wholeness and real penetration in his work, and sometimes a really startling picture of intuition. I do not find much mere incoherence and posturing or mere vociferation–indeed I find less in him than in many who are “sane.” Strange to find this sense of economy preserved, as it is in his verse. Yesterday morning finished Nishida Kitaro’s Study of Good except for the appendix. One of the most remarkably helpful things I have read in a long time-and apart from his pantheistic concept of God, very close to home.
April 3, 1965
This morning I finished the appendix which gives some idea of the full scope of Nishida’s thought. It is most satisfying. Happily there is at least one other of his books in English. The Study of Good is his first. The development from here is not linear but a spiral deepening of his basic intuition of pure experience which becomes “absolute nothingness as the place of existence,” and “eschatological everyday life” in which the person, as a focus of absolute contradiction (our very existence opening on to death is a contradiction), can say with Rinzai “wherever I stand is all the truth.” This hit me with great force. My meditation had been building up to this (awareness for instance that “doubt” arises from projection of the self into the future, or from retrospection, and not grasping the present. He who grasps the present does not doubt). To be open to the nothingness which I am is to grasp the all, in whom I am! I have already written my review of Nishida.20
Some copies of the (early) Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander have been run off. Only a few. There is some nonsense in it. What I said about political life is belied by the very authentic political life displayed in the civil rights movement.
Yesterday, on orders from Brother Clement and Reverend Father, marked the trees Andy Boone is to cut, down in the hollow behind the hermitage, where the spring is. What a tangle of brush, saplings, vines, fallen trees, honey suckle, etc.! Marks of deer everywhere. A fire in there would be awful. I hope we can get a space of an acre or so good and clear between here and the spring, and keep it clear. And I can use the spring, for I need it. All this is the geographical unconscious of my hermitage. Out in front the “conscious mind,” the ordered fields, the wide valley, tame woods. Behind, the “unconscious”–this lush tangle of life and death, full of danger, yet where beautiful beings move, the deer, and where there is a spring of sweet, pure water–buried!
April 4, 1965. Passion Sunday
Light rain all night. The need to keep working at meditation–going to the root. Mere passivity won’t do at this point. But activism won’t do either. A time of wordless deepening, to grasp the inner reality of my nothingness in Him who is. Talking about it in these terms is absurd. Nothing to do with the concrete reality that is to be grasped. My prayer is peace and struggle in silence, to be aware and true, beyond myself. To go outside the door of myself, not because I will it but because I am called and must respond.
Joy in the Masses of the past week, especially some of the second tone melodies–the introit “Laetitur cor quaerentium Dominum” [“Let the heart of those who seek the Lord rejoice”]–seriousness, humility and hope. Will these things ever be equalled? And of course I was again deeply moved by the Vexilla Regis at Vespers last night. Everything that I love about the world I grew up in came back: Romanesque churches, the landscape of Raverque, Languedoc, etc., etc. Useless to cling to all that, but I am humanly rooted in it.
April 6, 1965. Tuesday in Passion Week
A rainy, humid, stuffy day, as warm as summer. Had to go to town to see the eye doctor. My eye is still injured by the blow I got from the branch in the woods on St. Joseph’s day. Saw Dr. [Jeremiah] Flowers–the first time I have been in the new Medical Tower, near all those new hospitals which have so transformed Gray Street from the lazy southern street it was ten years ago. The windows of the Presbyterian seminary are boarded up. They have moved out of the old false-Gothic building (South-Victorian-Tudor, or something!). So I sweated, and read copies of Life magazine, one more tedious than the other. There is great emphasis on the farce in Viet Nam, trying to make it look good, honest, reasonable, etc., which it is not. Senator Cooper gave a good speech in the Senate against extending the war and I got a letter from him in reply to one I had written about it. He seems serious and sane about it. Meanwhile, according to the papers, air raids against North Viet Nam bases have been constant in the last few weeks, in spite of the protests in this country. But the majority of people are apathetic.
Had lunch with Jim Wygal, who is tired and out of sorts (with the bug that everyone has, I suppose) and I bought a loaf of fine Bohemian rye bread at Linker’s in Market Street–which I enjoyed for supper in the hermitage. So good to return to the silence. With eye drops and ointments and pills.
April 7, 1965
The other day was brought up short by a line in my poem “The Captives” (it has been set to music by R. Feliciano, a composer in Detroit and I read it in his program). “Blessed is the army that will one day crush you, city/ Like a golden spider….” It is a bitter and uncomprehending thought about the world–Babylon–yet still it must be said that the Bible does not have too many kind thoughts in it about “Babylon.” I still have to rethink a lot of things about “the world.” The poem belongs to a superficial and arrogant period–my early years in the monastery (up to ordination, when deeper suf
fering began and a different outlook came with it). In the days when I kept all the rules without exception and fasted mightily and was an energy in the choir, I had this simple contemptus mundi [contempt for the world] (no doubt traditional!!). The world was bad, the monastery was good: The world was Babylon, the monastery Jerusalem, etc. (though in “The Captives” the division was more subtle and there was Babylon in the monastery too!).
This kind of view ends in pharisaism: I am good, they are bad. And of course any such view of the world is intolerable. My present view–provisionally–
A. “The world,” in the sense of collective myths and aspirations of contemporary society, is not to be unconditionally accepted or rejected, because whether we like it or not we are all part of it and there is a sense in which it has to be accepted.
B. But I refuse an optimism which blesses all these myths and aspirations as “temporal values” and accepts all the projects of man’s society as good, progressive and laudable efforts in which all are to cooperate. Here one certainly has to distinguish. War in Viet Nam no, civil rights yes, and a huge area of uncertainties, official projects dressed up in approved inanities = Alliance for Progress–in which there are a few good ideas and perhaps many bad applications of them.
C. I am convinced of the sickness of American affluent society. To bless that sickness as a “temporal value” is something I absolutely refuse. Love of “the world” in this case means understanding and love of the millions of people afflicted by the sickness and suffering from it in various ways: compassion for them, desire to liberate them from their obsessions (how can anyone do it? We are all afflicted) to give them some measure of sanity and authenticity-
D. The error is in rejecting the sick and condemning them along with the sickness.
E. The only right way–to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about his world.
April 9, 1965. Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. Friday in Passion Week
Dawn is beginning (5:30) on a mild spring morning. Holy Week is about to begin and I was never more conscious of its solemnity and its importance. I am a Christian, and a member of a Christian community. I and my brothers are to put aside everything else and recognize that we belong not to ourselves but to God in Christ. That we have vowed obedience that is intended to unite us to Christ “obedient unto death–even the death of the cross.” That without our listening and attention and submission, in total self-renunciation and love for the Father’s will, in union with Christ, our life is false and without meaning. But in so far as we desire, with Christ, that the Father’s will may be done in us as it is in heaven and in Christ, then even the smallest and most ordinary things are made holy and great. And then in all things the love of God opens and flowers, and our lives are transformed. This transformation is a manifestation and advent of God in the world.
It is unfortunate that so much of monastic obedience has become formal and trivial. No use in lamenting it, but nevertheless renewal in this area must mean above all a recovery of the sense of obedience to God in all things, and not just–obedience to rules and Superiors where demanded, and after that go woolgathering where you may! A sad thing: that formal obedience or non-disobedience is an expedient which, in practice, justifies us in self-will in harmless and futile matters. (Thus our lives in fact become totally absorbed in the futilities which are “licit” and which are not subject to formal control.) Instead of “imitating” Christ, we are content to parody Him.
One of the fruits of the solitary life is a sense of the absolute importance of obeying God–a sense of the need to obey and to seek His will, to choose freely to see and accept what comes from Him, not as a last resort, but as one’s “daily superstantial bread.” Liberation from automatic obedience into the seriousness and gravity of free choice to submit. But it is not easy to see always where and how!
April 13, 1965. Tuesday in Holy Week
On Palm Sunday–everything was going well and I was getting into the chants of the Mass when suddenly the Passion, instead of being solemnly sung on the ancient tone in Latin, was read in the extremely trite and pedestrian English version that has been approved by the American bishops. The effect was, to my mind, disastrous. Total lack of nobility, solemnity, or even of any style whatever. A trivial act–liturgical vaudeville. I could not get away from the impression of a blasphemous comedy. Not that English is not capable of serious liturgical use–but the total lack of imagination, of creativity, of a sense of worship! Yet many in the community were delighted, including Father Felix, the professor of liturgy who, I must confess, is not famous for imagination!
In the evening I talked foolishly of Angela of Foligno, then back to Philoxenus of Mabbugh. After supper and direction (Brother Eric has just got out of infirmary) I went up to bed in the hermitage feeling unwell. Woke up after an hour’s sleep, with violent diarrhea and vomiting which went on for most of the night. Fortunately the night was warm and moonlit. It is a flu bug that has been attacking the community. Weak and nauseated all yesterday, I began to feel better in the evening and took a little supper. Slept last night in the infirmary and slept well too! Had a good breakfast, fried eggs and coffee!! Felt a little weak this morning but on the whole I seem to have got off easy unless it starts again which I suppose it might! While it lasted it was a miserable experience.
April 15, 1965. Holy Thursday
Obedient unto death…Perhaps the most crucial aspect of Christian obedience to God today concerns the responsibility of the Christian in technological society toward God’s creation and God’s will for His creation. Obedience to God’s will for nature and for man–respect for nature and love for man–in the awareness of our power to frustrate God’s designs for nature and for man–to radically corrupt and destroy natural goods by misuse and blind exploitation, especially by criminal waste. The problem of nuclear war is only one facet of an immense, complex and unified problem.
K. V. Truhlar, a disciple of [Karl] Rahner, writes: “It is the duty of the Christian to lead the world of nature to its natural perfection” and this is true in a sense, but it is written with a tone and implications that are perhaps quite misleading: the assumption that technology is obviously doing something to perfect nature (instead of squandering it in the most irresponsible and criminal fashion!). There are then very grave problems in the implications of certain kinds of Christian outlook on “the world.” The crux of the matter seems to be to what extent a Christian thinker can preserve his independence from obsessive modes of thought about secular progress. (Behind which always is the anxiety for us and for the Church to be “acceptable” in a society that is leaving us behind in a cloud of dust.) In other words, where is our hope? If in fact our hope is in a temporal and secular humanism of technological and political progress, we will find ourselves, in the name of Christ, joining in the stupidity and barbarism of those who are despoiling His creation in order to make money or get power for themselves. But our hope must be in God. And he who hopes in God will find himself sooner or later making apparently hopeless and useless protests against this barbarism of power.
Is there not a false eschatology of the “new heaven and new earth” which places its hope in the power of science to transform earth and heaven into places of happiness and bliss? (With God or without Him for that matter.) Is the true prospect rather that the stupidity and pride of man will ruin the earth, and that God will restore it through the charity and tears of the poor, the “remnant” and the saints? I am not saying this false eschatology is in Truklar’s article, which has excellent things in it–but theologians occupied with the Christian and the world are not sufficiently aware of what technology is doing to the world and in failing to make distinctions, they tend to embrace all manifestations of progress without question in “turning to the world” and “in Christian temporal action.” Hence inevitably we get Christians in the U.S. supporting a criminally stupid military adventure in Viet Nam.
Yesterday I got
out of the infirmary at my own request, perhaps too soon, but I felt better and I wanted to get back to the hermitage, though it tires me to come out here. Last night I was restless and feverish, sweating a lot, and had to change my shirt three or four times. At the end of the night I had some rather beautiful dreams and got up at 3. My meditation wasn’t much good as I was feeling sick, but some superb tea Jack Ford gave me (Twining’s Lapsang Souchong!) made me feel much better. It is the most effective medicine I have taken in all this–and is a marvelous tea. That with a little slice of lemon and a couple of pieces of rye toast (the last of the Bohemian loaf) made a fine frustulum and after reading a bit I am very alert and alive. But as heavy rain began about 4:30 I did not go down to the monastery for Chapter and mandatum of the poor. The rain is slowing down now (7:15). The valley is dark and beautifully wet and you can almost see the grass growing and the leaves pushing out of the poplars. There are small flowers on my redbuds and the dogwood buds are beginning to swell.
There is no question for me that my one job as monk is to live the hermit life in simple direct contact with nature, primitively, quietly, doing some writing, maintaining such contacts as are willed by God, and bearing witness to the value and goodness of simple things and ways, and loving God in it all. I am more convinced of this than of anything contingent on my life and I am sure it is what He asks of me. Yet I do not always respond with simplicity.
April 16, 1965. Good Friday
Today God disputes with His people. One of the rare times when He argues with Man, enters the court and pleads His own cause. “O my People, what have I done to you…?” Man blames God for evil. But it turns out that all the evil in the world has been done, through man, by the mysterious Adversary of God. And all the evil has been done to God. He who need not have taken it upon Himself has done so, in order to save man from evil and from the Adversary. The Adversary (and man allied with him) makes himself “be” by declaring himself to be real and God less real, or unreal. Reducing Him to Nothing on the Cross. But God, the Abyss of Being, beyond the dichotomy of Being and Nothingness, can neither be made to be nor reduced to nothing. The Judgment: those who have turned their hate against God have in reality destroyed themselves in striving, in this manner, to assert themselves. The way to being is then the way of non-assertion, which is God’s way (not that He has a “way” in Himself, but it is the Way He has revealed); revealing Himself as the way, “I am the Way” said Christ last night, and we went out of the Chapter into the Church for concelebration.
Dancing in the Water of Life Page 30
