Hausherr brings out the fact that Athonite Hesychasm precisely bears on solitude and anachoresis as essential for inner quiet: that the belief that one can preserve hesychia in crowds and action is reproved.
Question – of “monotrophy” – having one goal, one tendency – to “perfect love for God.” Problem is not in the goal, but in the way of conceiving the means, the nature of the pursuit, one’s concept of one’s relation to the goal. A prioristic and abstract ascesis based on idea of God as an “object to be attained” is useless today. The unity and “monotrophy” have to be seen as dialectical, in movement, in “becoming.” And emerging into a state of oneness. That is the “ground” of all becoming. No – that expression does not quite work. Not a willed and forced security based on stubborn insistence upon one predetermined idea, one arbitrary course of action which is conceived to be uniquely and everywhere Right – in black capitals.
April 8, 1967
“They hope, by means of the dreams they keep telling each other, to make my people forget my name just as their fathers forgot my name in favor of Baal.” Jerem. 23:27.
Cooler last night. I was happy to have a quiet day yesterday and get a little work done. The review of Camus for Sewanee Review is about half finished (first draft). The valley is as beautiful as it can be in spring. Redbuds still blooming and Dogwoods coming out into full bloom like constellations in the green gloom of pines.
Hesychasm again. A letter came from Archbishop Helder Camara full of exhortations to get up and go – mainly after reading Nhat Hanh’s book (and he praised Fide e Violenza). Wants me to “encourage” Maritain not to be pessimistic and frightened. To write to the Pope. To write to Cardinal Maurice Roy:
“Aidez-le à comprendre qu’on n’a pas le droit de transformer dans un bluff les plus belles espérances de l’beure actuelle.” [“Help him to understand that one does not have the right to change into a bluff the most beautiful hopes of the present moment.”]
(I don’t know what Roy has done – or what the “hope” is). And can [Robert] Hutchins be persuaded to invite me to the 2nd Pacem in Terris conference? He already has – not officially but I know they want me to come. But there is no point in bringing the matter up. Would never get permission and would only cause a storm.
Can I say I really “would like” to go? No. I would be scared of simply making a fool of myself and accomplishing nothing. There is no question that my twenty-five years here have for better or worse, left me essentially outside the age of traveling by jet to conferences everywhere. I just do not belong any more in that world. Maybe I should belong in it – maybe I have made a mistake. I don’t know. But the fact is that I belong in these woods.
In so far as my own doubts and conflicts get into the game, it is foolish to pass judgment on a kind of life that is simply not for me, or to seem to pass judgment. And I certainly don’t mean to condemn everything in sight. I watch the jets go over my trees. They are pretty. I admire Dan Berrigan for his perfect acclimatization in all this (his seven fables in the new Critic are superb). What I do not accept is this world’s particular evaluation of itself.
Probably the best thing to do is to avoid all noises about it and also to avoid any attempt to get myself sent out somehow, somewhere, just because I may happen to feel uneasy about not belonging, or even guilty.
Carleton Smith was here (before Slate – on the day Bro. John was buried – Tuesday) and I was talking about Card[inal Franz] Koenig coming to the country, and about Maritain etc, etc. And going places. I seem to get this from every side now (Sy Freedgood especially. As I expected, he had pumped Slate full of propaganda about getting me out).
Last night I dreamed of M. Today, again, I realize how confused I have been – not just because of her but in general because of my slackness, my imprudence, my inconsistency, my frivolity. I suppose also my laziness. It is certainly true that a great deal has gone wrong in my life. Yet I do not know precisely how or where, and I can hardly pin it on any one symptom. My falling in love so badly was not a cause but an effect, and I think really it all comes from roots that had simply lain dormant since I entered the monastery. So too in my writing, my persistent desire to be somebody, which is really so stupid. I know I don’t really need it or want it, and yet I keep going after it. Not that I should stop writing or publishing – but I should not let myself be flattered and cajoled into the business, letting myself be used, making statements and declarations, “being there,” “appearing.” Pictures appear (without any desire of mine, to tell the truth) and I am ashamed of myself.
At the root – an attraction for this kind of publicity nevertheless. Or rather, I would like to be known, loved, admired, and yet not in this cheap and silly way. But is there any other way? In my case, if I were more serious about remaining unknown I would not be so quick to accept what eventually shames me.
April 9, 1967. Good Shepherd Sunday
Hesychia: but there was nothing idyllic about the golden age of Egyptian monasticism. Violence, turbulence, confusion in the crisis at the end of the fourth century. Largely because Theophilus of Alexandria decided to use the monks in the political struggle: against Pelagianism, against the more primitive up-river Copts, against Constantinople and then against the Origenists he had formerly favored.
Riots of monks in Nitria and Scete as well as in Alexandria.
Departures of large groups of monks for Palestine and Constantinople (the Tall Brothers with 300 followers).
Finally, devastation by barbarians (407–408).
Pessimism – from lack of silence (in my own life). Having to talk about the world (or thinking I have to) I put myself in a relationship to it which is false – the relationship of one called upon to judge it, which I am not. And since I feel it to be false, I feel my footing is unsteady. But why judge? Yes, the times are perhaps terrible (though for me they are not so terrible. I have it good). But do I believe “in silence and hope shall your thoughts be”? Well, “the world” does not believe it. That is not my business. Do I have to convince everybody? No. But if I am myself a more hopeful person I can be of more service to them than I can by reminding them that they are (we are) in a mess.
All my talk, all my sass, all my running around are not a “freedom of the spirit,” but just damned laxity and irresponsibility. And I have to face it, because again and again the burning and embarrassment of conscience are intolerable. True the other evening with Slate at Bellarmine etc. – was something I decided against my own wishes because it was necessary for him to see the collection at B. – how it was kept etc. As for the Luau room, that was my idea and perhaps a bit too far out. The rest – was just a question of trying to get Slate home once he had started drinking. At least I rejected the idea of dropping in on the Willetts. That is a place where I don’t belong, even though Thompson and Virginia are good lovable people.
Quiet collected photo of Suzuki standing around some laurels. Winston King brought it the other day. It is a comforting presence on the table before me.
Grey morning, but not yet rain and I need it. So short of water that I can’t afford to use my coffee percolator (as I would need twice as much water for dish washing if I had to clean that). Outside there is multiflora rose hedge which is now huge – in places seven or eight feet tall. All beautiful with new green foliage and full of nesting birds.
April 10, 1967
Rain finally. After a few flashes of lightening over the NW. It came during meditation.
Yesterday I had a lovely hesychastic afternoon! Walked up and around by the lake, past the Derby Day picnic place. I am able to go by there now without being all torn up by emotion. Then quietly around under the pines and up to that hidden pond with all the pines around it, and a little open patch of dry shale. There I took my shirt off and got the warm sun on my back and looked at the pine tops and the sunny clouds. What a change since the last time I sat there in May last year (on May 16). That Sunday [ … ] I was literally shaken and disturbed – knowing clearly tha
t I was all wrong, that I was going against everything that made sense in my life, going against all that was true and authentic in my vocation, going against the grace and love of God. Struggling desperately in my heart and knowing I was helpless, that things were moving in a certain direction and I had gone too far to turn back. After that, only the grace of God saved us from a really terrible mess. It was fortunate that we were simply not able to see each other when we wanted to. And finally it was a good thing that we were stopped altogether, though it ought to have been done differently.
Anyway, yesterday was utterly different. Once again the old freedom, the peace of being without care, of not being at odds with the real sense of my own existence and with God’s grace to me. Far better and deeper than any consolation of eros. A sense of stability and substantiality – of not being deceived. Though I know there was much good in our love, I also see clearly how deceptive it was and how it made me continually lie to myself. How we both loved each other and lied to each other at the same time. How difficult it must be to keep going in truth in a marriage. Heroic! For me the other truth is better: the truth of simply getting along without eros and resting in silence with “what is.” The deep inner sustaining power of silence. When I taste this again, so surely, after so long, I know what it means to repent of my infidelity and foolishness: yet at the same time I do not try to build up again anything that was properly torn down. It was good that I (we) went through the storm: it was the only way to learn a truth that was otherwise inaccessible.
Wrote to Carleton Smith yesterday. Letter last week from Meg Randall in Mexico about Cuba – and poems from Cuba. She is happy about the people there and I believe her: at least they are free from the deadly helplessness of life under a completely static and corrupt system that sought only to keep people down in order that a few crooks might make a bit of money.
April 15, 1967
A lovely day. Everything is two or three weeks ahead this year. The trees are almost in leaf. The redbuds are gone, the dogwoods are going. Bright sun. Bright, pure, little clouds. Deep blue sky. I was going to do some work on the “Rite for Ejection of Lepers,” but took off to the woods instead – same place – by the hidden pond. All the old desires, the deep ones, the ones that are truly mine, come back now. Desire of silence, peace, depth, light. I see I have been foolish to let myself be so influenced by the current trends, though they perhaps have their point. On the other hand I know where my roots really are – in the mystical tradition, not in the active and anxious secular city business. Not that I don’t have any obligation to society. Etc. But – [am] reading Mircea Eliade and a book on Ibn al Arabi, and the Book of the Poor in Spirit again. This evening on the porch I sang the alleluias and Introit of tomorrow (Latin) Mass (which won’t be sung in community). III Sunday after Easter. Modicum again! The one that moves me so deeply.
Big Peace demonstration today, but demonstrations do no good. Dan Berrigan is in a kind of crisis with his Superiors again – over the question of aid to War victims in both North and South Vietnam. Is to be sent on a symbolic visit to N.V. and his Superiors won’t allow it. He will probably go anyway. And then?
Up by the lake I ran into Raymond with a carload of nuns – who turned out to be from Sister K.’s community at Newport. I wrote a note to her. The light and weather and foliage etc. at the lake was exactly as it was on Derby Day last year. I could almost see M. This was painful for a while but I am getting so I resist it. It is useless. All I can do is pray for her and go about my business, my real business. So I stripped off my shirt and got the sun on my back and arm and watched the tadpoles in the brown water and the clouds beyond the tall pines – and sought what I seek. A magazine of the psychedelic people got to me by devious ways. Very interesting: they are all caught up in it as I was when I was a novice. But they are caught up in it. And probably much more than we monks are. Socially the prospect is discouraging. On the one hand gangsters exploiting the appetite for vision and on the other laws made against the drugs so that in the end the kids who turn on will be preyed on both by gangsters and police. I feel very sorry for them.
The Gullicks were here Tuesday (from Oxford). I was glad to meet them and talk about Etta’s ms. On Benet of Canfield (which is an ungainly thing but good material). They were only here a day. I kept the rest of the week free. Finished the Camus review for the Sewanee. It is being typed. Heard from Ed Rice today. Had a nice letter from Rosemary yesterday – about going to the Episcopalian parish etc. She is R.C., a lot of new things happening: She had a good article on divorce in a recent Commonweal.
Slate’s wallet (which he had lost) was found in the Hertz car in Louisville. Very strange. A good thing he lost it because if he had had it, he would have gone on a long drunk in Bardstown after leaving me off at the Abbey. We both looked in the car. The [indecipherable] must have shoved it under one of the seats.
John Pauker will exhibit some of my drawings in Washington. He is starting up the Lugano Review again, with Jim Fitzsimmons apparently. A good magazine but it went bankrupt. I wrote to Anne Freedgood the other day about possibly publishing some of Kusano Shimpei in this country. (Whom I read at the height of the frog season a month or so ago – appropriately.)
McDonnell’s interview – the final draft – was sent down to me this week and I returned it. I think it’s good – it is going to Motive [October, 1967]. Not to the Pax!
April 16, 1967. III Sunday after Easter
Jubilate Deo! [Rejoice in God!] Clean green hills, lovely freshness of the morning, long spearhead of hard, consistent cirrus clouds pressing into the east where the sun is partly hidden. Bell-like resonance of the calves’ lowing down at the barn. O my sweet valley! Gregorian comes naturally out of this earth and this spring. Yet I see the time has come to live without it (except such as I myself may sing). But they do not yet have a music for the cities, for the corporations.
To fight the corporate mind.
To sharpen the meaning and push of revolt even though it is far out of sight and perhaps has no point. At least this is less part of the same general fabric of alienation and consent than the long-haired movements (with which I nevertheless sympathize).
The feminization of articulate revolt – its cheerfulness, its sweetness, its despair (among all the kids who take drugs).
Another bright hot afternoon. Sat in a field, read some Eliade, gave conferences – and at Supper Fr. Augustine handed me an illustrated booklet on the apparitions at Garabandal in the Basque country of Spain. Pictures of the little girls looking really sweet in ecstasy – and one, Maria Cruz, obviously not turned on like the others. (She has since denied that she saw anything.) Message – disappointed everyone. (Do penance!) After 1963 Conchita [Gonzales] was the only one who kept getting visions and revelations (the biggest and most determined girl) and she got a few “specials,” one of which is a conservative pronouncement on priests and eucharist – a little anti-Vatican II, maybe! This one was in 1965 and I guess by that time she had been pretty thoroughly got at by the clergy. The first ecstasies may well have been quite genuine. Two things yet to come: a “big warning” and a “big miracle.” Meanwhile all the girls except Cruz are tucked away in convents, and Conchita has been to Rome to talk it all over with the Holy Office, and be photographed in the Colosseum with her pastor and Princess Cécile de Bourbon, who is a real sweetheart. So much for the pictures. But in my heart there is a deep longing for the first part of it at least to have been real, especially because of the angels and all the laughing that went on – and those kids so simply crazy with joy. I need to know Mary is still close to us and need her to be very close to me here, always. My heart breaks with need of vision and help for the world.
April 19, 1967
“The prophet who prophesies peace can only be recognized as one truly sent by Yahweh when his word comes true.” (Jeremiah 28:9)
Especially when Pres. Johnson [and] the “prophets” announce peace and escalate the war. Johnson apparently not sent by Yahweh ([Fran
cis] Cardinal Spellman to the contrary).
The sense that this country is obsessed, alienated, driven by its own mythical destruction, and that my first duty to the country and the people is to extricate myself from the general obsession and contribute nothing to it. But people like [Norman] Mailer, intelligent as their intuitions may be, do not completely extricate themselves (are not born) and do contribute to the chaotic suffering. Is it a birth? Is this country really trying to bring something forth? I can still believe that it is. But what? Perhaps a monster? I still have hopes it will be something new and alive and basically good. Where the good may come from is perhaps where evil is feared. The streets. The ghettoes. But that too is only part of the obsession. (Or is one obsessed by the very fact of believing, one ought to be totally outside the obsession and utterly delivered?)
[Pierre] Dommergues’ book [Saul Bellow (Paris, 1967)] came yesterday from Paris. Very interesting. I like the mosaic technique. Lots of information. I still have not read Bellow.
Naomi Burton coming today. I hope we don’t fight over anything. Maybe since she has been living in Maine she is different – perhaps more wound up in some other way. But I love her, and she cares for me, with that damned mothering care.
Dan Walsh preparing for his ordination. Archbishop John Floersh on his own initiative decided this, got all the necessary dispensations (from seminary, interstices etc. etc.) and the ordination is to be at St. Thomas’ Seminary Pentecost Sunday. Dan is dazed. Everyone is astounded.
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