Dancing in the Water of Life
Page 43
But what is the meaning of this space business? I am afraid I am still not too convinced there is point to it. If it is all a form of gigantic play, well and good. It is a bit expensive, no doubt. But what does it mean? I wonder if anyone really knows, or even asks. It is first something that has to be done because now we can do it. And there was a tiny bit of escalation in Viet Nam–because we can do that too. Bombing of power plant in Haiphong. They are getting closer to Hanoi. And what does this mean? Certainly not that we are “winning” or that in this way we can force anyone to negotiate on our own terms. As to all the marches and protests-they change nothing.
December 18, 1965
I seem to be living in a shower of boomerangs which I thoughtlessly threw out into space one, two, three years ago not knowing what they were. All of them have something to do with my writing about “the world” and my desire for witness and “engagement.” Purpose of the boomerangs–to convince me of the large part of illusion and myth there was in all this. For example now–the Eight Freedom Songs. Bad poems, written at the request of a young Negro singer [Robert Laurence Williams], for a fittingly idealistic project which was more or less improvised and without order. He brought in Alex Peloquin as a composer, then went himself to Ireland and instead of coming back to sing the songs stayed there to be a success in a show called “Gails of Laughter.” Alexander Peloquin, carrying the ball at high speed and telling no one (of us) about it went on to do a symphony for Eileen Farrell with the Eight Songs. Now Robert Williams is (rightly) disgusted at what has happened to his songs (which no longer have much to do with Negroes!) and blames me for betrayal, for cynically treating the sorrows of the Negro as something to exploit, etc. I did not know what Alexander Peloquin was doing. He came here in the summer, then left and has not written a word.
December 21, 1965. St. Thomas
While I was saying Mass, at my Communion, I heard the bells ring for an agony and guessed they were for Brother Gerard (they rang for thee!) and he died about an hour later. Father Amandus-Roger made me a sign, coming late to his dinner. Another of the old Brothers, the past dying. Brother Gerard was from Europe, was long a gardener, tailor, etc., and was said to have visions.
A distant relative sent an old snapshot taken when he and his wife visited Douglaston thirty years ago. It shows them with Bonnemaman [Martha Jenkins]10 and myself–and the back porch of the house, and the birch tree. There is Bonnemaman as I remember her–within two years of dying. And there am I: it shakes me! I am the young rugby player, the lad from Cambridge, vigorous, light, vain, alive, obviously making a joke of some sort. The thing that shakes me: I can see that that was a different body from the one I have now–one entirely young and healthy, one that did not know sickness, weakness, anguish, tension, fatigue–a body totally assured of itself and without care, perfectly relaxed, ready for enjoyment. What a change since that day! If I were wiser, I would not mind but I am not so sure I am wiser: I have been through more, I have endured a lot of things, perhaps fruitlessly. I do not entirely think that–but it is possible. What shakes me is that–I wish I were that rugby player, vain, vigorous, etc. and could start over again!! And yet how absurd. What would I ever do? The other thing is that those were, no matter how you look at it, better times! There were things we had not heard of–Auschwitz, the Bomb, etc. (Yet it was all beginning, nevertheless.)
And now what kind of a body! An arthritic hip; a case of chronic dermatitis on my hands for a year and a half (so that I have to wear gloves); sinusitis, chronic ever since I came to Kentucky; lungs always showing up some funny shadow or other on ex-rays (though not lately); perpetual diarrhea and a bleeding anus; most of my teeth gone; most of my hair gone; a chewed-up vertebra in my neck which causes my hands to go numb and my shoulder to ache–and for which I sometimes need traction; when you write it down it looks like something, and it is true, there is no moment any more when I am not aware that I have something wrong with me and have to be careful! What an existence! But I have grown used to it–something which thirty years ago would have been simply incredible.
December 25, 1965. Christmas Day
Yesterday was too much like spring-warm, sunny, windy. I felt torpid in the afternoon, but forced myself to write a few letters, to try and make some inroads on the enormous pile, which I will not try to dispose of! The mail situation is one I accept as impossible to handle. Besides, Brother Dunstan, my typist, seems to have got himself steamed up spiritually and is having a breakdown-so he will not be able to work on the manuscript I have been busy with in the last few days–“Redeeming the Time”–on the Constitution about the Church in the world. The Constitution itself is not bad. Good chapter on war.
Last night when I woke up to go down for Midnight Mass, I found it storming with rain and huge winds in the dark woods. The walk down was exciting. Coming back the rain had stopped. I came up through the field and was glad to get into the silence of the hermitage which made more sense than ever. I made my thanksgiving quietly, said Lauds and had a snack and some wine (the last of what Brother Clement gave me a couple of months ago) and so went back to bed for a couple of hours. Got up again, said Prime and read E[dwin] A[rcher] Burtt’s book [In Search of Philosophic Understanding, 1966] which he sent. It is clear and informative. And Schlier. Now I am going to get back to Rilke (volumes to be returned to University of Kentucky in a few days). It is the kind of day I like, and like Christmas to be too: dark, cloudy, windy, cold with light rain blowing now and then. I have had wonderful Christmases (Christmas weeks) here with this kind of winter weather, unforgettable. Days not too bad for walking out on the wooded knobs, cold and lonelier than ever and full of apparent meaning. They talk to me of my vocation.
The midnight Mass, concelebrated, was decent, and I was glad to be there (we shouted a great carol as recessional hymn). I felt the community was fully in it. Really the only reason I went was for the Community and for the Sacrament, not for any joy or light I would get out of such a ceremony. It is hard to hear the reading of the Word, we are behind the reader and the acoustics are bad. The singing is O.K. but too much of the same–all is by Father Chrysogonus and too many solos by Brother Chrysostom, who seems tired. They always overdo a good thing. And the whole community celebration is still spoiled for me by the sense of a certain falsity and willfulness (instead of faith) which some infect into it. As if there were a kind of perverse and intense determination to make certain self-deceptions come true and as if that were faith. (This of course in conjunction with, supported by, real faith. The parasitism of willful consolation and self-imposed meanings, forced upon simple faith. Monstrous, or potentially monstrous, mental gavottes.) Yet at the same time, I was moved by the simplicity and sincerity of Brother Cuthbert kneeling before the crib.
But anyway I did not get the awful depression that I have had a couple of times at Christmas in recent years. Thank God for that! Perhaps this comes from my thinking about death that has opened out with the last days of Advent–seeing death as built into my life and accepting it in and with life (not trying to push it out of life, keep it away from contaminating a life supposedly completely other than it. Death is flowering in my life as a part and fulfillment of it–its term, its final chord).
Second time in bed I had a curious, somewhat sexual dream about Naomi [Burton Stone], which says something of my ambivalence toward her perhaps and my sense of her ambivalence toward me. In a way I guess we love each other, and we are both so complicated–and so devout, maybe (or she is anyway) that it gets funny, and is very inhibited, or rather not. I feel it and bear it as another bloody nuisance, like my psychosomatic sickness.
December 30, 1965
End of a year. Should one have something to say about a “year”? I have no need to be obsessed with time here, though I don’t pretend to be lost in eternity either. Days go by. The moon of Ramadan which was new on Christmas Eve is growing fat, and I will save the fasting till after New Year–a token fast with the Moslems. Must write to Abdul Aziz.
Renounce accusations and excuses.
Brother Alberic is to type the manuscript on the Council Constitution on Church and World since Brother Dunstan got himself steamed up spiritually and had better rest.
I continue with Rilke, seeing his greatness and his limitations. His poetic solitude is not what I am here for, but it says something too. So he is no mystic. But he is a poet. Is that a small thing?
To work quietly and intelligently for peace. And above all to pray.
December 31, 1965
7 a.m.–still completely dark. Heavy rain clouds, warm wind waving the forest and loud in the pines. To the south–not east–a thin red line along the top of the ridge. In the east all is blocked with heavy weather.
Night. 7 p.m. Rain beginning to fall. Dark and warm all day. Year ends.
Things I am especially thankful for–
Chapter decree permitting hermitage, and my official move to hermitage.
Finishing Chuang Tzu book.
End of the Council. Pope Paul’s visit to the U.N.
Victor Hammer better and able to come over again.
Other events.
Sickness in the spring and early summer. My stomach is a bit better finally.
Selma–demonstrations etc. Viet Nam worse.
Difficulty over the Catholic Peace Fellowship–settled now.
Concelebrations began–then whole new schedule (after I moved out to hermitage).
What will next year bring? I expect perhaps more sickness. More trouble in Asia (escalation of the war?). Less writing–more thought–more meditation and reading. Conjectures should come out in the summer, Mystics and Zen Masters before that. I want to go now and prepare a good book on prayer. But I have no real plans, except to live and free the reality of my life and be ready when it ends and I am called to God. Whenever that may be!
Deus misereatur nostri et benedicat nobis! [God have mercy on us and bless us! ]
APPENDIX
Some Personal Notes
End of 1965
To ask for no more books, writings, etc. for at least three months–even from monastic library. To get through what I have first and get it off the shelves (did not keep this for more than three or four weeks!). I.e., to cut down on the ceaseless movement of books back and forth, mail coming in, magazines half read and passed on, etc., etc.
I come here to die and love. I come here to be created by the Spirit in Christ.
I am called here to grow. “Death” is a critical point of growth, or transition to a new mode of being, to maturity and fruitfulness that I do not know (they are in Christ and in His Kingdom). The child in the womb does not know what will come after birth. He must be born in order to live. I am here to learn to face death as my birth.
This solitude–a refuge under His wings, a place to hide myself in His Name, therefore a sanctuary, where the grace of Baptism remains a conscious, living, active reality, valid not only for me but for the whole Church. Here, planted as a seed in the cosmos, I will be a Christ seed, and bring fruit for other men. Death and rising in Christ.
Relics–St. Mary of Carmel Hermitage
St. Theresa of Avila
–
Oct. 15
St. Paul
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June 30
Charbel Makhlouf
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Dec. 24
St. Peter Damian
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Feb.
St. John of the Cross
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Nov. 24
St. Bede
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May 26
St. Romuald
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Feb. 11
St. Gregory Nazianzus
St. Louis
–
Aug. 25
St. Nicholas of Flue
Need to be “confirmed” in vocation by the Spirit (speaking through the Church, i.e., the abbot and community = council at least). This ordains me to be the person I am and to have the particular place and function I have, to be myself in the sense of choosing to tend toward what God wants me to be, and to orient my whole life to being the person He loves. Too often I have been simply the person, or the individual, who is indifferent to His love, and who therefore in practice ignores it as the great option and possibility for each man. (We are all “loved in general,” but we have to personally accept a special love of God for ourselves.)
Now is the time to see what great strength comes out of silence–and not without struggle.
Obedience to God means first of all waiting, having to wait, sustine Dominum [waiting for the Lord]. The first thing then is to accept the fact that one will have to wait. Otherwise obedience is undermined by an implicit condition that destroys it.
To say I am a child of God is to say, before everything else, that I grow. That I begin. A child who does not grow becomes a monster. The idea “Child of God” is therefore one of living growth, becoming, possibiility, risk, and joy in the negotiation of risk. In this God is pleased: that His child grows in wisdom and grace.
God is the Father who fights to defend and rescue His child. The life of the Child of God is not in the “development of spirituality” but in obedience to the Good Shepherd who seeks him, knowing he is lost. It is in solitude that we recognize, with a shock, how lost we have been, and that now we are found, rescued, recovering conscience, returning to ourselves, to Truth, carried by Him who has sought and found us.
I can see how weak and disorganized I have been. Though God has often given me understanding, I have not been able to act on it with the full force of my being, because I have been too dispersed, too occupied, too “clever,” and too much engaged in conflict and self-defense in a matter that was, certainly, not propitious for real depth and seriousness (at least in my case). Now it all becomes abundantly clear!
Therefore, clear necessity for one task above all now: collection and direction of inner strength upon what I know of God’s will, to let it move me completely, and to move with it. (If there is any confusion of motives this is impossible.)
“Christ is risen, my joy!” In this way St. Seraphim of Sarov greeted those who came to him. The whole sense of this new life, life in the Spirit, is here! Encounter–Truth–the Joy of the Spirit, the presence of the Risen Kyrios.
The Lord was crushed under the weight of my sins, so I must now also consent to feel their burden, and console Him by the belief that in this “death” the Holy Spirit will miraculously transform my death into His life.
Adam was tempted to believe in himself as individual. He believed. And so became an “ego” confronting himself as stranger in millions of other isolated “egos.” Each ego was enclosed in itself and condemned to struggle in vain again
st an inevitable death, while trying to affirm itself as immortal. Seeing there is no solution to this conflict, Adam, the ego, forgets it in work and fun. What is the key to this mystery? The self-affirmation of the ego means loss of the Holy Spirit. In the Spirit we are fully persons, become fully related to God and man in love. Without the Spirit, the possibility of true love and freedom is not realized and we are pseudo-persons (individuals).
In the community I prepared for solitude. Now in solitude I realize at once that my true preparation is for the transfigured common life of the Kingdom of God. In the Spirit, no man is alone. Unfortunately, human community often stifles the Spirit and keeps men isolated in their individuality, while claiming to produce transcendent unity.
Correspondence: examine the question of “false intimacy”–temptation to answer “sincere” fan mail which presents, in all simplicity, a confident and a seemingly authentic bid for friendship. But conditions do not permit the realization of a true intimacy. (Yet not altogether false either.) I have always avoided this kind of correspondence, with very few exceptions (some of which have turned out well, e.g., the Olmsteads. I am very fond of them).
Trials and difficulties in the life change nothing of the facts. To remain in solitude is to remain in love and freedom of direct obedience to God and not return to safety and security of a tissue of “works” and conventions (and conveniences!). When one has the vocation, then one becomes confronted with a choice equivalent to that of Grace vs. Law in Galatians.