Above all I do not have to act as if the judgment of the current establishment were in anyway decisive or as if I even needed to explain myself – give an account of myself. There is just no more need to worry about that, as far as I can see. So why fuss about it?
Finally, the situation in the monastery. People continue to be upset by the unnecessary struggle with Dom James – who pretends to give with one hand and takes back with the other and is absolutely bent on making only superficial changes and offering tokens or meaningless symbolic concessions only.
Fr. Chrysogonus is now in a kind of crisis due to the fact that, having knocked himself out with work on chant, liturgy etc., he has realized that he has only been used for James’s political ends and not really for any authentic renewal. That it has not really “taken” and the community is suspicious, reserved, non-committal because everyone knows that unreserved commitment is merely a cult of the abbot’s ikon of his own ideas – and a defeat of real renewal, veneration of a parody.
The point is that in Dom J.’s book, the community serves him and his individual image – it is a business he is running successfully. Its main purpose is to be his success. He does not know this, I believe. But he is so completely a business operator (plus his own curious sado-masochistic mystique) that he can’t see anything else. He does not really give a damn for people and their ideals and needs except in so far as they can be fitted into his own going operation – in a word used by him. Certainly there is an air of altruism and disinterestedness in it sometimes, because that has to be part of the image. The place has to appear free, happy, “creative” and whatnot. This is part of the “success.” And this is what does not happen. The happiest people are those who have simply found a way of doing what they know they need to do, in spite of him and in spite of everything – but these remain more or less marginal types, or are in obvious opposition to him. They are respected for being so.
The others, who are stupid enough to be more purely and simply the Boss’s men, in all good faith, count for little. They are regarded with pity or contempt, or simply ignored. Yet they do serve his means and one realizes the danger of tangling with them – or better, of attracting their attention to what one happens to be doing. (They are his CIA.) In good faith they have accepted a distorted idea of monastic obedience, which puts them in a state of alienation; and this they regard as virtue. In a sense, perhaps, it is what they themselves prefer and seek, and they would be upset by everything else. But it is a pitiable condition.
Yesterday – corrected proof for “Day of a Stranger” for Hudson Review and wrote a brief statement on a loud, rebellious book by a Fr. [James] Kavanaugh (thoroughly angry, denouncing evident abuses and injustices in the Church, very shrill and a bit melodramatic). I gave him my support but I wonder if a book like this can accomplish much. I don’t know. But it is good for somebody to shout and bang on the table at this juncture I believe.
May 8, 1967
On being a Stranger.
I need more awareness of what it involves. And get some such awareness by the invitations I have to refuse. Helder Camara urged that I get to the Pacem in Terris conference in Geneva. Ping Ferry said the Center would pay my way. (He is starting today.) No use even asking Dom James. A few weeks ago – invitation to some conference in Curitiba, Brazil – some Catholic Book thing. They would pay my way etc. I refused first, then they applied to him and he refused. The other day, wrote refusing invitation to another meeting in Cuernavaca. Same again. Dan Berrigan will be there.
Being “out of the world” does not mean simply being out of Las Vegas – it means being not on the planes, not at the reunions, conferences etc. Not in Hong Kong today and Lima tomorrow, not in the credit-card expense-account talk circuit where you are paid to be everywhere, and this to make news – (because where you are paid to be, there the action is, since the action is that you are paid to be there).
The question is: do I really care? Do I resent being excluded from all this? Inevitably my being grounded in this corner of woods, unable to move, able only to speak half surreptitiously to a few who get through to me here, makes me a comic sort of intellectual. Inevitably I am a sort of reform-school kid who is punished by being taken off the street. And one who does not know the latest, is not perfectly attuned to the intonations and accents that convey the real message.
Is this a castrating maneuver of Dom James? Probably in part it is, and he is so irrational about it that it is annoying – but I am free of him, at least free enough not to care too much. However – if my yelling here is merely the yelling of a castrated and defeated being, it is of no use to anyone.
Certainly no point in mere resentment of modern society “bla bla.”
Nor trying to pretend I am after all superior.
Nevertheless, the situation has unique advantages. Much of the real germinating action in the world, the real leavening is among the immobilized, the outsiders (the vast majority who have no credit card and never step on a plane) the Negroes, the Latinos, etc. In a way I am on their level. (But I don’t have their grapevine!)
I know I do prefer solitude, and I want my solitude to be authentic. It is a sacrifice and a frustration to have to be so out of things when I could easily be “in.” I am convinced that there are real advantages I must understand and make use of.
Meanwhile next Sunday I have to concelebrate with the Archbishop at Dan Walsh’s ordination – a momentary illusion of being “in” something and, to me, confusing. I’ll try to make the best of it for Dan’s sake.
Yesterday the new Archbishop McDonough was here – I did not go to hear him speak. Ran into Raymond’s friend Alexis – the South African from Notre Dame – and Fr. [Henri] Nouwen (Dutch psychologist teaching at N[otre] D[ame]), had a good talk in the evening by the lake in Charlie O’Brien’s pasture (old name for St. Bernard’s field).
Formulating opinions – when the plague that will reduce them to absurdity is already raging – I do have a real sense of this, a real suspicion that this is what is perhaps going on at all those meetings (Camus – Plague – 35). Sour grapes? Perhaps.
May 10, 1967
Yesterday I had to go the allergist again – out in that God-forsaken St. Matthew’s far from a library or anything else of interest. Was in there nearly two hours getting needles stuck into me and contemplating a print of a fierce trotting race entitled “A Race for Blood.” He is a careful and interesting doctor, however.
I am reading the part about exile and separation in Camus’s Plague. “The incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.” Anguish of remembering the days with M. last May, as the light and weather inexorably bring the same settings back and ten times more lonely (because of the rainy weeks in late April).
Yesterday I called her from the airport (Dan Berrigan just left for NY) in a quiet booth down by the East end of the terminal away from the airline desks. She was sleepy and sweet in Cincinnati. Yes she is going to get married. In October. She does not think of it with a lot of joy. “But it is what I think I ought to do” and I agree with that. The boy seems to be a nice guy, good and reliable, and will probably be a devoted husband to her. I told her I thought she was perfectly right and that I understood. She said she worried about me, that I was still the one she really loved etc. It was sort of heart breaking. “Even after I am married you can still keep writing to me.” Yes but really I should not. But perhaps if we simply go on as good friends – and share what we can reasonably share of each other’s news etc. Probably won’t work out that way, though and I came home to lonely woods and desolation.
Dan Berrigan looked like a French worker priest in beret and black turtleneck windbreaker. A good uniform for a priest. He wants to go to Hanoi, but may get thrown out of the Jesuits for doing it. Jim Holloway came over from Berea.
Quiet cloudy evening: I sat on the porch watching 3 does quietly feeding in the field while dogs yelled across the valley. And a pileated
woodpecker made a lot of racket in the wood just east of me. I love the Towhees in their dapper plumage. If I were a bird I’d want to dress like that. Dan Walsh was in his black suit and Roman collar today sitting in the gatehouse reading (with difficulty) his Breviary. He was ordained deacon yesterday – is due for the priesthood Sunday and I am supposed to concelebrate. The new Archbishop McDonough came down Sunday but as I thought it was only a chapter talk I did not go. It turned out (Dan said) that he especially wanted to see me on some business. I was never told about it. Maybe Dom James did not know? Seems rather peculiar to me!
May 11, 1967
Finished (yesterday) a short piece on Malcolm X.12 I realize I don’t fully know what I am talking about. Perhaps I overestimate him. Perhaps his African experience was nothing more than a juvenile dazzlement at the native bourgeoisie. Perhaps already beginning to be corrupted in a new way. Saved by death – like Kennedy also, who would have been less likely to be enshrined if he had to carry on the Viet Nam war.
Implications of the racial and neo-colonial situation – for my own life. I realize more and more that I have no right whatever to make a romantic escape, under whatever pretext you like, to the Third World, to Latin America, to Asia. No matter how sincere the poetry of it might be, the act would be ambiguous – an infliction upon others of a false ideal image of my own – a “presentation,” ultimately, of a deceptive North American document: Christian concern and whatnot.
On the other hand – can a Russian, or a Chinese Marxist, do it any more honestly than I?
Anyway, I realize my “imprisonment” here on this hillside, while having its delights, also has a necessary, inescapable ignominy or is this judgment itself an unnecessary refinement? A novel luxury? A further ignominy?
My intention is that, though it may eventually be published, this Journal should be kept under wraps for twenty-five years after my death. However, I may experiment in reading parts of it on tape and then getting these transcribed and working them over for publication.
Meanwhile I have no intention of keeping the M. business entirely out of sight. I have always wanted to be completely open, both about my mistakes and about my effort to make sense out of my life. The affair with M. is an important part of it – and shows my limitations as well as a side of me that is – well, it needs to be known too, for it is part of me. My need for love, my loneliness, my inner division, the struggle in which solitude is at once a problem and a “solution.” And perhaps not a perfect solution either.
However, I think a lot of merely foolish stuff can be destroyed: most of the love letters are in this category. They were merely garrulous outpourings of feeling, and this is usually not magnificent, only routine sentiment. The true feeling is no doubt in the some of the poems. They really express it – at least they do so better than any letters.
May 13, 1967. Vigil of Pentecost
A rather foul, murky, damp day. I am making a sort of ½ day retreat in preparation for tomorrow. Another booklet on Garabandal came in. A lot of it is perhaps, somewhat questionable in detail, but the overall impression is moving, and once again I was stirred by it. Quite apart from the authenticity of the apparitions (and they seem for the most part genuine), I experience in myself a deep need of conversion and penance – a deep repentance, a real sense of having erred, gone wrong, got lost – and needing to get back on the right path. Needing to pray for forgiveness. Sense of revolt at my own foolishness and triviality. Shame and amazement at the way I have trifled with life and grace – how could I be so utterly stupid! A real sense of being flawed and of needing immense help, pardon – to recover some capacity to love God. Sense of the nearness and mercy of Mary.
At the same time I cannot help feeling a sense of decay in everything – I mean in the society I belong to and even in the Church, in the monastery. A much deeper and more serious sense, because there seems to be so little substance in the noisy agitation of progressives who claim to be renewing the Church and who are either riding some rather silly band-wagon or caught up in factional rivalries. As for the conservatives – they are utterly depressing in their tenacious clinging to meaningless symbols of dead power, their baroque inertia, their legalism. Disgust!
After some sympathetic interest in the “hippie movement” and a real compassion for their good intentions, I am a bit sickened by it. Not that I know enough to judge. But the whole thing seems so phoney, so pointless, so decadent. A false creativity, a half-dead freshness, kids who seem to be already senile in their tired bodies, thru LSD trips – a sense of overstimulation and of exhaustion. The gasping of a culture that is rotting in its own garbage – and yet has so many potentials! I know, all this is too pessimistic – I am trying to salvage something in myself by saying “I am not that, at least!” Yet I am part of it – and I must try to bring life back into it, along with the others.
May 14, 1967. Pentecost
Lightning, thunder and rain on and off all night, and now at dawn there is still more of it. The lovely grey-green valley, misty clouds sweeping low over the hills and forest out there in the South, iron dark clouds heavy above them. The rainy gloom full of pale-yellow irises and the cloudy white blossoming green masses of the rosehedge. I went out a while ago and a hawk flew fast away – it had been waiting on the cross or in the big poplar tree.
As I have been asked to do a piece on Paul the Hermit,13 I reread Jerome’s Vita today. A work of art, really. With plenty of monastic theology in its symbolism. A beautiful piece of writing, with deep mystical and psychological implications – so that whether or not it is “historical” is irrelevant. It awakens a kind of inner awareness of psychic possibilities which one so easily forgets and neglects. The return to unity, to the ground, the paradisial inner sacred space where the archetypal man dwells in peace and in God. The journey to that space, through a realm of aridity, dualism, dryness, death. The need of courage and of desire. Above all faith, praise, obedience to the inner voice of the Spirit, refusal to give up or to compromise.
What is “wrong” in my life is not so much a matter of “sin” (though it is sin too), but of unawareness, lostness, slackness, relaxation, dissipation of desire, lack of courage and of decision, so that I let myself be carried along and dictated to by an alien movement. The current of “the world,” which I know is not mine. I am always getting diverted into a way that is not my way and is not going where I am called to go. And only if I go where I must go can I be of any use to “the world.” I can serve the world best keeping my distance and my freedom.
In the Vita Antonii [Athanasius of Alexandria’s Life of Antony] – “Virtue” is within us not outside us, and we find it when we return to our “original nature,” our “natural state” – the state proper to ourselves, as we “came into being” – one might add our true identity in the mind of God. The soul, says Anthony “came into being fair and perfectly straight.” So true. – “Make straight your hearts unto the Lord God of Israel” [identified in margin as Josh. 24:23], and St. John [the Baptist] ([Matt.] 3:3), “Make straight your paths.”
“For the soul is said to be straight when its mind is in its natural state as when it was created. But when it swerves and is perverted from its natural condition that is called vice (kakía) of the soul.”
So the job is (as St. John of the Cross says) keeping the strength of the mind, of one’s thoughts and desires, for God.
“Having received the soul as something entrusted to us, let us guard it for the Lord that He may recognize His work as being the same as He made it.”
May 17, 1967
On Pentecost – drove in with Bernard and Rev. Father in the rain, found St. Thomas’ Seminary way out in the fields somewhere toward Cincinnati, walked in long halls this way and that and found a sacristy. And waited. And had pictures taken. The concelebration was fine though. A great enthusiasm filled the large bright chapel crowded with people, friends and students of Dan, including some former monks with their wives etc. Archbishop Floersh moved and moving. Dan n
ervous at one point. A great celebration though. Then we went to O’Callaghans (this time I with a carload of ex-monks). The day stayed grey but we could sit in the yard at metal tables, where I talked too much, drank too much champagne, and generally misbehaved, going against all I had in mind earlier Pentecost morning.
Then yesterday – Monday – another and much brighter day. I concelebrated with Dan at Church. A much more intimate and quiet Mass with the nuns all visible in their choir behind the open grille and singing very well. It was deeply moving, a sense of light and joy and of spiritual reality, a most beautiful Eucharist. One’s sense of the reality and value of Carmel was very strong. I was very happy about it – preached homily – later we had a half hour or so with the nuns in their speak room and again I talked too much, but everyone seemed very happy. I felt very purified and enlightened by this contact with them and Dan never stopped talking about it for the rest of the day. Lunch at Fords and met some of the young priests who teach philosophy at Bellarmine – some very alert guys. And Josephine Ford from N.D.
Later I went down to the Chancery and had a very good talk with the new Archbishop, McDonough, and I am happy about his attitude. He was very positive about certain things, encouraged the writing, thought I ought to go to Morocco and see people like Sidi Abdesalam, and so on. The Delegate apparently is in favor of a bit of my work and wants to come down and talk to me too. Perhaps something is cooking.
Learning To Love Page 30
