Meanwhile, I am impatient of all desires. May the Holy Ghost bring me to true freedom!!
September 1, 1965
September has come in a great downpour of rain. It began about supper time last evening, and has continued on and off all night, especially heavy around 4:15, when I went out and looked at it and listened to it. Rain creates a double isolation and peace in the hermitage. The noise of it and the thickness of it walls you off from the rest of the world. You know that no one is going to walk up through the woods with all this coming down! Sunday evening Brother Clement, the cellerar, showed up and brought a six-pack of beer. An act in the noblest tradition of monastic cellerars. (It was left over from the visit of Dom Vital’s brother from Germany.) I think Brother Clement is quite fascinated by the hermitage; kept talking about the woods, the quiet, the stars, etc. Actually he came to talk about the monastery and its problems. I had previously decided there was to be no beer up here, but it was better to accept his gift. Did not drink with him as his ulcer prevents him from drinking. So I take one can each evening at supper. The first was delightful–I ate supper, drank Falstaff, and read the introduction to John of Salisbury’s letters. Last night the same, except I read Jean Leclercq’s offprint from the second Athos Volume on relations between Oriental and Occidental monasticism in the High Middle Ages. It is fascinating, but it reminds me of my resentment concerning Dom James’ phobia against my traveling. As a matter of fact I am now pretty sure that the chief reason why I got in the hermitage so soon is that it was his best excuse to keep me from going to the meeting of the Collectanea board of editors at Chimay, to which I had been rather urgently summoned (end of September).
One would think an Abbot would have a little breadth of view in such matters as this. But there are all sorts of reasons why he has to be this way with me (again, the absurd attitude he took about the novice masters meeting: would not let me attend one anywhere but here). He is probably not aware of them all! Certainly one of them is a form of unconscious jealousy. I did not arrive at such a judgment myself–more than one other has expressed it to me. However, it is precisely for this kind of situation that I have a vow of obedience, and intend to keep it. But the irrationality remains. He does not see that it is because of his narrowness and wrong-headedness that he loses so many good monks. For instance Brother Sean, who left a couple of weeks ago. One of the best monks in the place, in simple vows (they expired). He simply could not put up with the spirit of the house under Dom James–or it boiled down to that, so I am told.
I don’t know what news comes from Asia–certainly the war goes on and will go on. Johnson is listening to the Pentagon crowd, and his stubbornness and vanity will harden him against criticism or differences of opinion. I deeply regret having voted for him; but the landslide was significant. We got the president we deserved–and, I suppose, wanted. He is doing what Goldwater would have done, but in a manner that most people can accept: without moralizing too much, acting as a shrewd operator, vulgar, self-indulgent, an American Khrushchev.
A big synthetic rubber plant blew up in Louisville–that was a week ago. Saw pictures on the little Cloister board yesterday.
I am trying to write the new edition of the Postulants’ guide for which Dom James asked when he sent me up here. I am afraid I don’t have much taste for it, and the work goes slowly and hard. It will probably be awful. Fine letter from Cardenal about his ordination and first Masses and all the joy. His “project” (of a contemplative monastery) is bound to go slow and will meet more opposition than he expects. He hopes to come here.
The saddest thing about our monastery–Dom James is an efficient administrator and I see no one who is likely to equal him now in the community in this respect. But his organization is uncreative and restrictive, and he has done nothing, nothing, to foster a real spiritual life, even though he has tried earnestly to do this and speaks of it all the time, makes a definite ideal of it. But the whole thing is negative and his (strong) positive incitements to “personal love of Jesus” are in fact totally unconvincing and uninspiring, though he himself seems to be convinced and inspired by them. Actually, the only way in which he effectively communicates in spiritual matters is by restriction, and discouragement and suppression. In fact, his whole approach to the hermitage has been characterized by this. All the things I should not do! Yet he has been hesitant and has not dared to put upon me all the restrictions he would have liked. Because of a certain sado-masochism in his character, he associates love with negation and suppression, with “captivity.” His mind circles around the idea of power and authority the capacity to possess and be possessed. As Abbot he cannot believe in himself unless he feels that in some sense he owns the hearts of the monks. But they do not love him. His efforts to gain love and to show it are pitiful and embarrassing (those awful letters he writes when away on visitation!). He is a complex extraordinary man, not one of great character, but a kind of sign of the times and a mystery of judgment, as we have in politics today: one who comes to the top because what is mysterious and perhaps false in everyone is somehow embodied in him. But he has force, this one has to admit. A perplexity, smooth and unbending will, more a passion than a volition. A passion for a certain kind of disguised self-affirmation-in-restriction.
All this having been said–and I suppose on examination it would be found substantially true (with inevitable errors of perspective!!)–it proves nothing but my own lack of liberty, my own vulnerability, my own weakness. That I should still let myself be interiorly defeated to the point of having to justify myself is a sign of my own dread of the necessary loss of self: and if I dread it, there is good reason, for since I am weak I still see that in this situation, with this kind of abbot, I am likely to allow myself to be merely suppressed and destroyed (which is his unconscious but serious aim, I feel) rather than doing as I ought–making it a death and resurrection. But I can. I have the strength in Christ and solitude has been given me so that I may face this, get used to it, and live up to it!
Evening: this afternoon I finished the postulants’ guide, after having discarded all that I wrote yesterday, but utilizing about half the old one, which seems satisfactory. It was written in 1957, the best time for it, when we had most vocations (during my time as novice master). The work upset my stomach. It was a relief to get it over with, go out and say psalms and look across the valley at the hills.
September 2, 1965
The sun rose in mist like a Turner painting over the reservoir as I went down early (6:30) this morning to say Mass at 7 and go to the Dentist in Lebanon. Fortunately there was not much to be done but a priest from St. Mary’s had an awful time there with a wisdom tooth. Poor man! The ride back was beautiful–bright September day–and we got home for dinner. I came in just as Newman was dying, or had died, and the second volume of the Trevor biography ended. It was one of the best books we have had and I did not get tired of it. They then began H. Fesquet’s Wit and Wisdom of [Good] Pope John.
In the paper I saw that Pakistan and India were nearly at war, which would certainly be tragic. But surely it is avoidable!! Another matter, perhaps more significant: on the back page of the first section–a report that an Indian in Arizona or New Mexico had died of bubonic plague, and that there were other cases! I thought immediately of Camus’ novels. It is just possible that something like this might unexpectedly get out of control (that is the irony of the novel), and it would be so appropriate as an expression of the sickness of the country’s spirit. But am I looking at it like Camus, or like his Jesuit, Paneloux? If the plague should sweep India, it would be a plague. But if it swept this country it would surely be an Apocalyptic judgment!
Judgments of mine, however, are fruitless. The plain fact is that these things are unthinkable, and the unthinkable is what sometimes has to happen.
September 6, 1965
Magenta mist outside the windows. A cock crows over at Boone’s. Last evening when the moon was rising saw the warm burning soft red of a doe in the field.
It was still light enough so I got the field glasses and watched her. Presently a stag came out, and then I saw a second doe and, briefly, another stag. They were not afraid. Looked at me from time to time. I watched their beautiful running, grazing. Everything, every movement was completely lovely, but there is a kind of gaucheness about them sometimes that makes them even lovelier. The thing that struck me most: one sees, looking at them directly in movement, just what the cave painters saw–something that I have never seen in a photograph. It is an awe-inspiring thing–the Muntu or “spirit” shown in the running of the deer, the “deerness” that sums up everything and is saved and marvelous. A contemplative intuition! Yet perfectly ordinary, everyday seeing. The deer reveals to me something essential in myself! Something beyond the trivialities of my everyday being, and my individuality. The stags much darker, mouse-grey, or rather a warm grey brown like a flying squirrel. I could sense the softness of their coat and longed to touch them.
I am reading Beryl Smalley’s Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. A very delightful book–in which for the first time I have managed to get a little information on Anselm of Laon. He emerges as a rather attractive scholar type with a very important circle of disciples, and doubtless had a considerable impact on the first Cistercians, his contemporaries.
All of Pope Paul’s weekly allocutions to general audiences are read in refectory, along with some of his other more popular statements. He has occasionally had excellent things to say elsewhere, but in these one gets an impression of an official cheerfulness in issuing useful directives and the total result is: a mediocre job of public relations. The Pope has become the number-one propaganda medium of the Church as organization and institution. But because his ideology is not linked with sufficiently cataclysmic actions (he does not create international crises and then resolve them) it ends by being a more or less otiose exercise–almost an irritant and no more. It is true that the air of crisis has been somewhat successfully maintained by the conflict of liberals and conservatives in the Council, and that makes everyone still expect something dramatic from the Pope-(Pope John was at times given to dramatic interventions, and not at all as a means of adding excitement to propaganda!). Hence there is some excitement about the Fourth Session which everyone expects to be “dramatic,” and this has been brought about by the fact that it is the last chance of all the Bishops and no one quite knows what will happen. No doubt a lot of important questions will be simply unresolved.
September 10, 1965
Last night, at moonrise (the moon is full) a doe was out in the field again. She has become quite used to me. I walked about saying Compline in front of the hermitage and she was not disturbed, even came down the field towards me! Yet this is heartbreaking, because soon the hunters will be out after them (I don’t know when deer season begins). I only hope this tameness is wisely confined to one association–with the white hermitage and the monk in white and black, without a rifle.
The other day Will Campbell and Jim Holloway, of the Committee of Southern Churchmen, were here. There has been much more trouble (race riots) in many cities I had heard nothing about. Consciously or unconsciously I think the riots are in some sense being provoked by the police. Not as a deliberate plot, but as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Violence is so constantly expected by them that their tenseness, aggressivity and “brutality” provoke it in the end. And doubtless they feel so menaced that they think they are not being brutal at all.
The peace of the hermitage: after three weeks I am settling completely into it, and far from missing the community I find the artificiality of the community life almost incredible, from the perspective of my solitude. Sunday, Day of Recollection, I went down to pray before the Blessed Sacrament and stayed in the Brothers’ choir for vespers–it was really a bit sad, almost embarrassing. No wonder people are having as much trouble. Not that the community life as such is unreal, or that the men in it are not excellent (the young especially!) but the mentality, the rigidity and suppression of all freedom, which is the conservative policy and that of Dom James, simply stifles genuine life. There is little sense of the reality of Christ in all this, only discipline and observance for their own sakes and a formal, monumental “front” of liturgy and witness–which, I am afraid, are not convincing. We are trying to be much “more” than we really are, or at any rate other than we are.
There is no question that I really feel I am living a saner and better life. I would not exchange this for anything even though for four days a snake was living in the jakes–(I finally persuaded him to go elsewhere I hope!). In spite of the hornets, the noise of machines in the fields, the dogs and hunters, etc. All this is plain ordinary reality without any need of ideology or explanation. It is. That is enough. In the monastery everything has to be justified because everything is very seriously under question. Here only I am under question, and it is right for me to face the doubt which is my own empirical self, myself as question, knowing that in myself I also have Christ as answer.
For the rest–I love the night silence, the early meditation and the moon, the reading and breakfast coffee (or good tea!), sawing wood after sunrise, washing up, tired, as the sun begins to grow warm and the Atlanta plane goes over. Mass in the library chapel is fine, dinner in the infirm[ary] refectory is sometimes a trial and the heat of the day, coming up after dinner, is oppressive. Afternoon meditation slow–then work on the book (Conjectures)–office in the late afternoon, quiet supper, reading, walking, looking at the hills, the silence, the moon, the does, darkness, prayer, bed.
Father Prior told me India and Pakistan were officially at war. It is absurd!
September 11, 1965
In a sense, a very true and solitary sense, coming to the hermitage has been a “return to the world,” not a return to the cities, but a return to direct and humble contact with God’s world, His creation, and the world of poor men who work. Andy Boone is, physically, more my neighbor than the monastery. It is his sawmill I hear, not the monastery machines. His rooster crows in my morning, his cows low in the evening, and I just heard him give a guttural yell at some animal (again, another one, while the first bell for Prime rings at the monastery and a flycatcher squeals happily in the poplar tree).
I do not have the official “space”–sanctified, juridically defined, hedged in with elaborate customs–of the monastery as my milieu. To be out of that is a great blessing. It is a space rich with delusions and with the tyranny of willful fabrication. My space is the world created and redeemed by God, and God is in this true world, not “only” and restrictively a prisoner in the monastery. It is most important to see this, and I think that what those who are leaving see, often, is this. It is crucially important for the monastery to abandon the myth of itself as a purely sacred space–it is a disaster for its real “sacredness.” Curiously, the thing is getting out in rumors, and though the situation is partly understood and partly not, it is interpreted with shock as “leaving the monastery.” And this is true. The general reproach is then that I am not clinging, in spite of reason, grace, and everything else, to something God no longer wills for me: clinging to it just because society expects me to do so! My life is a salutary scandal, and that is another proof of the reality of my vocation, I believe. Here I see my task is to get rid of the last vestiges of a pharisaical division between the sacred and secular, and to see that the whole world is reconciled to God in Christ, not just the monastery, nor only the convents, the churches, and the good Catholic schools.
Late afternoon–a good rainstorm began before supper and it is going on now as darkness falls. A moment ago there was a hawk up there flying against the wind in the dark and in the rain, with big black clouds flying and the pines bending. A beautiful storm, and it has filled my buckets with water for washing, and the house with cool winds. It is good and comforting to sit in a storm with all the winds in the woods outside and rain on the roof, and sit in a little circle of light and read and hear the clock tick on the table. And tomorrow’s Gospel is the
one about not serving two Masters, and letting the Lord provide. That is what I must do.
“They have a good foundation,” saith Love, “and high edification that resteth them of the things. Such creatures they can no more speak of God, no more than they can say where God is. For whatsoever it be that speaketh of God, when he will, and to whom he will, and where he will, he may doubt.” The Mirror of Simple Souls, III, 220
September 14, 1965. Exaltation of the Holy Cross
The Fourth and last Session of the Council is opening today.
A very funny satire on our choir observances came in yesterday from Father Anselm at Conyers–sent to me as a member of the editorial board of Collectanea (as if I edited anything!). It is very hep, very American, very outspoken and would give all the abbots, and especially the people at Monte Cistello, apoplexy. The thing is, though, that it is very representative of the way people feel and think in our monasteries in this country. And the result is very extremely negative, as far as the present shape of our life is concerned. I know Dom James is very scared by this (especially as regards Conyers) but there is nothing he can do about it–he has neither the imagination nor the understanding that it takes. The other abbots, too, are “open” (more than Dom James for the most part) but helpless.
Dancing in the Water of Life Page 38
