“Il s’agit pour l’âme d’assumer et racheter dans l’amour des choses aussi lourdes que le désespoir et la révolte qui habitent tant d’hommes et spécialement ces hommes auxquels un Petit Frère s’est consacré en particulier.” [“It is the soul’s job to assume and redeem in love things as heavy as the despair and revolt that inhabit man and especially those men to whom a Little Brother has consecrated himself in particular.”]
(But not merely to exorcise it in a way that produces mere negative resignation and inertia.)
In a way Camus was groping for this kind of solution. Rieux in La Peste is precisely portrayed as closer to this than Paneloux, who is inhibited by a special doctrine and by a set of fixed, rigid mental attitudes which get between him and human reality. He cannot “assume” the suffering and revolt of others, he can only explain it, judge it, at best try to explain it away with a suggested change of mind and mentality that will make it less difficult. (Resignation! Don’t fight it.) In the concrete circumstances what he is doing is in fact refusing to take up the burden and simply adjusting it on the shoulders of the sufferer.
Jacques M. says to the Little Brothers:
“Ça vous nuit, pour racheter leur désespoir et leur révolte par le sang de Jésus, parmi ceux qui, sans chanter pour cela l’Internationale, et en un sens beaucoup plus profond, on peut appeler les damnés de la terre. [“That disturbs you, in order to redeem their despair and their revolt by Jesus’ blood, among those who, without in any event singing l’Internationale, in a deeper sense, one can call the earth’s damned.”]
“Des hommes qui tout en faisant rien d’extérieur … ont entrepris cette tâche là du fond de leur coeur, il est clair qu’ils ont besoin de donner toute leur âme à la contemplation.” [“Men who, all the while doing nothing on the outside … have undertaken that task from the bottom of their heart, it is clear that they need to give their whole soul to contemplation.”]
Great question: does the sheltered “contemplative life” behind our walls here, sheltered by many observances, defended against the life and thought of ordinary men, not in the end make us afraid of the damned? And isolate us only in a purely imaginary communion with imaginary and edifying “poor” who are “friends of Jesus” in a merely pious and fictitious sense? What would we do with those who would hate and insult us? Seek refuge from those with the Grace Line, huh?
September 21, 1966
A dream. I know that M. is swimming alone in one of our lakes. I am near there but I have refrained from joining her for fear of the consequences. But now I approach the lake and see her wading in the water over there by the shore (it is no recognizable lake here – what is it like?). She looks so disconsolate and alone, as if she had wasted her afternoon there to no purpose, since I have not come. I go down toward the lake dressed in my habit, and wave to her that I am coming. She still looks disconsolate, unbelieving. I wish to join her, I think, even if I have to swim naked. There appears to be no one around. But as I go to her along the bank I find one of the monks sitting there in my way. I cannot get to her. At this I wake up in great distress.
Sunday on my way back from my walk I found a jacket of a monk’s work outfit lying in the grass by the gate on the main road, at the end of the sheep barn road. It was left there by Bro. Ralph who left secretly Friday before dawn, with no money apparently, dressed in work pants and sweat shirt. Last anyone knew of him he had hitched a ride to Bardstown with a man who worked for us and did not recognize him.
Fog all around the hermitage this morning (pre-dawn). I have a new coffee percolator that seems to work well.
September 22, 1966
My reading and study of Camus continues very fruitful. Have now read enough of him and on him so that everything begins to click with everything else. He is an easy man to study because everything he says is said in images and all belong to a living pattern of suggestions and allusions and “myths,” easy to spell out. This probably makes him a little corny (his figures tend to be artificial and almost allegorical at times).
Today – great impact of Le Malentendu [The Misunderstanding]. Not the odious Chas. [Charles] Addams figures of Martha and the Mother, but the wisdom of love in Maria and the stupidity of Jan’s absurd project which leads to his destruction. The question of language and communication treated as though in a morality play. But effectively (perhaps not as drama I don’t know, but at least as a “morality,” a “parable”). The point: when one insists on “leaving a message,” one has also to have a “role” as messenger, and one has to worry about “looking for the right words” and correctly analyzing the situation, and viewing others objectively … etc. etc. And it all turns out to be nonsense. Maria says “don’t go in and tell them who you are.” Jan can’t do this. Too tied up in figments about duty, law, right and wrong, responsibility, Fatherland, brotherhood, etc. Innocence receives its reward. But in this play, though, it seems also a formal rejection of God, this absurdity is laid not on Him but on man. The absurd situation is created by Jan’s attitude, style, thinking. God is repudiated by Martha – who is, however, a nihilist and is therefore repudiated by Camus. It is Maria who speaks for C.
I thought of M.!!
In a sense, I see I am caught in a stubbornly wrong pattern. Once the machinery of rationalization starts, one can churn out no end of inanities about obligation, duty, solitude, and so on. But also about love, freedom, life, etc.
If it were possible just to forget everything and love M., that would be the obvious thing to do. Then the truth would be found. But … in my own history and as a result of past choices it is not possible. Where I am now, nothing unambiguous is possible. In a certain sense I have to be wrong up to a point, and what I am trying to learn is how to be at least simple and honest about it, and not try to say I am right, and not try to whitewash myself in terms of something or someone I cannot be. I am neither a good monk nor a good lover. Nor am I really “myself,” unambiguously. Nor can I pretend to be wholly loyal, truthful, “in order.” I am in a situation in which it is not fully possible for me to be “en règle [in order].” (Oh of course I could easily fix that exteriorly, but at the price of another bit of double-dealing.) A certain (I hope harmless, “innocent”) duplicity is unavoidable. And – to what extent excusable? I don’t know. God’s mercy is the only answer to that.
The point is not to take on a false role and speak a mere “part” – one that I neither need nor believe. One that has no point anyway.
(Note – Camus himself is caught in so many ambiguities. His vain attempt to resolve them in “La Pierre qui pousse” [“The Growing Stone”] – an absurd ending really: a pat, moral conclusion carrying no conviction. Yet one can see what he might have wanted to say – about love. He just hadn’t got there yet. Neither have I.)
A letter came today from Julien Green – about my notes on Chaque homme dans sa Nuit. “Your remarks about my novels do throw a light on the strange world my characters live in. No one, to my knowledge, has ever said what you say about the meaning of my books (shall we say the ‘hidden meaning’? I don’t like to sound mysterious but, after all, you do hint at something of the kind).”
But then he complains that I have damned the hero of Chaque homme, “the only one of my novels in which I clearly indicate that the hero is saved” and indicates how. W. forgives his murder, and the “puritan husband” (Green protests against my calling him “horrid”) sees him “as if observing us from a region of light.”1
I must have read the ending carelessly – it was so exciting I rushed through it.
September 23, 1966
“The doctrine of justification (Luther’s) tells me that God, by forgiving me and making me his child, opens up a new future for me …. God cancels our hopelessly stranded history and in its place puts his history” ([Helmut] Thielicke). If one adds the Catholic idea of grace and does not make justification only this, then it is a very acceptable and deep statement. Camus’ disgust with “History” (in the Hegelian sense) – organi
zed illusion and despair.
China is in the thick of another artificially staged “cultural revolution” – getting ready for the next strong man after Mao disappears – and for the big war that seems to be coming. The U.S. is apparently getting ready to invade North Vietnam (as if they did not have enough trouble in the South!). It is building up all the time. That fool Johnson! For that is all he is: a fool, in foreign politics and in domestic politics a crafty operator.
Wrote a statement today for a collection of statements from authors all over the world, on the Vietnam war – and tried to frame it in such a way as to be really for peace and for the people of Vietnam, as against both Washington and Peking. The Chinese of course want the war to continue even more than the Pentagon does. Everybody is happy as long as someone else is getting killed. And the Vietnamese have been getting killed for twenty-five years – so they must be used to it. Let them continue, and a few Americans. Peking has no objection to that either! What a world full of bastards!
Sweeping danger in the “cultural revolution” in China. “Develop Prestige Street” has been changed to “Fight Revisionism Street.” True, the upheaval is no joke and a lot of people are suffering, but it is anything but a revolution. Just more of the same. A tightening of the same screws by a lot of kids who are just being given their first taste of power – the kids who have grown up since the Reds took over. They imagine they are “new.” They are as old as the Chinese wall. More and more of the same.
September 26, 1966
Yesterday was grey, rainy, foggy. My elbow is bad. I had to go to Dr. Mitchell for a cortisone shot which was painful. Then to the U. of L. Tried several times to call S. (M.’s friend) at her home – finally got her at the hospital. It was nice to talk to her but she had no real news except that M. has to compete with some other new nurse in the hospital – I don’t understand this situation. Later called M. from Bardstown in the rain (George was driving and picked up Dan Walsh at Bellarmine). M. is depressed about her job because it is all paper work and not the nursing she wants. “It is not the work I was trained for – I’d be better off as an aide.” She was off Sunday and was writing me and thinking of me, she said (all that day I was happy and felt very close to her). She wants to see me – but how? Got my letter via Dan B[errigan] and a photo from the Hammers. Liked the poem about the other call (from that same booth). N. is safe in Vietnam – landed in the jungle and got back to his own side. She worried about him getting brainwashed. She worried about me “in all that rain.” Was S. surprised when I called her. And so on. It may have been my last chance to call M. like that. I am bound to be driving with Bernard and then it will be impossible. Besides we will be coming earlier. She does not get home until 4:30 or 5.
In the U. of L. – read Montaigne’s “On Solitude.” I usually find him a bit disappointing. This was nice writing – but not much more. Glanced into Chateaubriand’s Vie de Rancé which I must certainly read. (It must be around here somewhere.) Could not find much poetry. Looked up [Ruben] Darío’s poem on Whitman [“Walt Whitman”]. Glanced through a book by Albert Caraco which I had never heard of and did not quite know what to make of it, but it seemed to have possibilities. In the poetry room, read hastily [John] Berryman’s “[Homage to] Mistress Bradstreet” which is a fine poem, and hard. Looked at some Charles Olson and made a real discovery – Laurie Lee – whom I like tremendously.
In [Henri de] Montherlant’s Va jouer avec cette poussière; carnets 1958–1964 [Paris, 1966] – a note on a mistress called M. who lay with her fists over her eyes “et jouait des reins [and was playing games of the loins]” got me in a turmoil over M. And I was sad for a little, and randy in my sleep when I got home. But this does not much disturb me. The fact that I love her with my whole being is simply to be accepted and coped with: and she loves me as I love her. It is beautiful and difficult, full of pain and joy, and since it is real love it is rewarding and irreplaceable. And there is no human hope for natural fulfillment.
Also in Montherlant – a procession (funeral?) for Briand. One man marches carrying a sign “Ligne des Braves gens [Line of the Good Old Guys].” He is all alone!
October 4, 1966. St. Francis
Tom Cornell is on trial today for burning his draft card. Bro. Paul died the other night and is being buried today – I will go down to concelebrate at the funeral Mass before dawn in a little while. Bro. Martin de Porres was up here yesterday morning to see about giving me a gas heater as I can no longer cut much wood without my back hurting or my bursitis flaring up.
In the last week – I finished the article on “Three Saviors”2 in Camus and did some work on “Edifying Cables”3 which at no point satisfies me. It remains hollow. But I have to pursue this line apparently beyond the point where I am tired of its futility. Do I still hope something can come of it? Perhaps.
Camus says “comment vivre sans quelques bonnes raisons de désespérer [how to live without some good reasons to despair]!” and I would add “comment écrire [how to write]…?”
I also read Char, at times inspired by him and at times weary of his idiom, his meta-language or para-language, which is nevertheless solid and pretty consistently brilliant. But in all these things there is the lack of an essential dimension, a central core, a real ground.
Have finished Douglas Bush’s excellent little book on Milton [John Milton: A Sketch of His Life and Writings (New York, 1964)], have been seriously reading Paradise Lost for the first time in my life. Here the “ground” is much more truly and deeply present – even though the movement is so like a movie scenario. And that is all right. But a basic restlessness (metaphysical I mean). Beneath Camus, Char and even Milton is a metaphysical current which is unthinkable in Dante. Yet Dante builds a Cathedral. And we are no longer in the age of Cathedrals. Milton’s movie is more like us.
A really beautiful letter from M. came last week. Sweet and warm and loving – with a complete and total love. “The happiest I have ever been is when I took care of you in the hospital …. Being without you isn’t the hardest thing – it’s not being able to give you anything except thoughts and prayers …. You keep me, you guard me, you protect me in all my ways …. We have been given each other to love, to love totally without having to hold back a thing with complete abandon. There are no fears, no pretenses, just knowing that somewhere you exist and are loving me as I love you sustains me ….” The sweetness and warmth of her heart simply overcome me, and I see that this love of ours is and remains such an overwhelming reality, such a true value. I cannot explain how I can love her and be a hermit – it seems to make me more solitary. More detached from “the world” and more completely independent of it, alien to it. Our love’s out of that world – out of its fictions and confusions – yet in its deepest natural reality, in its life, its aspiration to continue, its hope of fulfillment. And yet out of that and above it too. Transcendence has to be related to this kind of reality, otherwise it is just abstraction, which is no transcendence at all. But what to do? I am so fed up and hampered by this life – each letter is a kind of major operation. She has to come to Louisville on the 20th and wants to see me – and yet she will be taking exams during the time I can be in town. What then?
“If we had real humility and goodness we would see far more marvels of goodness in the Church. But because we are selfish ourselves we are only ready to see good, good brought about by God where it suits our advantage, our need for esteem, or our view of the Church.”
(K. Rabner – [The] Dynamic Element in the Church [Freiburg, 1964], p. 65)
Since my retreat I have been reading this very good book on and off. More off than on I am afraid. But this statement, read this morning, clicks with what I have been realizing lately. Sunday afternoon, out walking in the sun and looking at the monastery without its phony and pretentious ancient steeple, and thinking of all that has been going on there, I realized how much good there really is in this community – not only in so many individuals (this I have never doubted or questioned), b
ut in the community itself as it is organized. I know this is a “good community” and a fortunate place in which to be today. A place where there is real spiritual life, and hope and charity and love for God. An honest monastery, with all its shortcomings and failings and for some of the failings, I am perhaps myself to some extent responsible. But I count myself lucky to be here. There is really no other place in the Church now where I would rather be. I see so evidently that my hermitage is my true place in the Church. And I owe this to my community. Also, let’s face it, to my Abbot, of whom I am so easily critical.
I have learned to mistrust my ideas and my sometimes exorbitantly “pure” demands. It is sobering to realize how badly I am myself measuring up to the grace of solitude that has been given me.
K. Rahner shows why the Church is justified in being suspicious of those who claim charismatic privileges:
“She knows that only too often, as far as we can see, ultimate fulfillment and maturity is denied to such charismatic enthusiasm, that the holy venture of voluntary poverty, of a holy renunciation of earthly fulfillment, of contemplation in silence and obscurity is only blessed with meager fruits ….” p. 60–61
This is a passage where he defends the Church’s right to “administer” the charismata and set bounds on claims to exercise them.
Learning To Love Page 19
