Victor Hammer is critically ill in the hospital, partially paralyzed, in an oxygen tent, dying. Have thought very much about him all the time. Death is shocking in anyone, but most shocking in the case of someone of real genius and quality and someone you know and love well. The blunt fact is that it is just not conceivable that Victor Hammer should cease to exist. This is a basic absurdity which Camus confronted, and which religious explanations may perhaps help us only to evade. Instead of facing the inscrutable fact that the dead are no longer there, and that we don’t know what happens to them, we affirm that they are there, somewhere, and we know … But we don’t know, and our act of faith should be less facile; it should be rooted in our unknowing, not just a further construction of a kind of instinctive feeling for survival. Yet what is man that his life instinct should translate itself into a conviction that he cannot really altogether die? Where is it illusory and where not? To my mind this is a great and pertinent question and one worth while exploring metaphysically – not by abstractions but by contemplative discipline and by a kind of mystical “pragmatism” if you like. One can to some extent sort out various forms of experience of the ground of being which gives us clues to what is fundamental in us. Obviously these cannot be “objective.” Hence they can’t be scientifically proved. But they can be “checked” against the same quality of experience in other subjects who have undergone similar discipline and are “enlightened.” Such experience seems to show that the individual consciousness is rooted in something much deeper. We do not know how the ego is “united” with this deeper consciousness, but we know it tends to arrogate to itself what belongs to the ground which both is and is not the self (both permanent and transcendent). Can this be explored in language relevant to modern man? In any case, don’t assume he is not concerned! He is very much concerned to find out who he really is and what his true capacities are.
I offered Mass for Victor on Thursday, saying the Collect for the dying. He is not interested in receiving the Sacraments, though I understand Carolyn got a priest to see him. Curiously enough I understand his willingness, and know that he does believe in God and that his mistrust of the Church is somehow part of a deeper belief. This is an experience in modern man that we have to face, and come to terms with. Yet I think Carolyn would like him to receive the Sacraments (she is not Catholic). To me, also, obviously, it would be much more “satisfactory” – I do feel it would be more consistent with his whole life and his work, not just a concession to convention or something – perhaps I am wrong but I think it would be consistent with his most authentic desires. But can I presume to settle someone else’s conscience for him? I know most priests would disapprove, but I have a deep repugnance for the Catholic idea that at all costs you have to so to speak “enforce” the Sacraments when someone is dying, taking advantage of their condition, as if God could not save them without our fuss, as if we had to overcome their conscience in order to make it right. Who knows? It might be the surest way to make it wrong.
Yesterday, with an empty stomach, I read with indifference and incomprehension about the starvation in Kabylie in Camus’ article of 1939. Today with good coffee and a cooked breakfast of eggs – read the same with understanding and indignation! So the luxury of being articulate depends on a certain detachment, disinvolvement. Is it better to participate in the stupor of hunger and have nothing to say? Both are necessary: hunger and silence, nourishment and speech. Finding the right alternation – and being ready to be reduced to silence and hunger by no choice of one’s own, if necessary. The dangerous assumption of an absolute right to be fed and articulate when the majority starve and are tongue-tied. Illusory dignity of the well-fed spokesman who justifies himself by diagnosis, planning and exhortation: the vicious circle of political life.
July 13, 1967
Fasting again but this time drank some tea, which makes all the difference in so far as keeping one’s mind alive goes. A bright, clear morning after days of rain. Monday morning was a deluge. As the light began to grow and the valley became discernible, I saw the bottom-fields had all become one big lake. Walked out in the lull of the hard rain and saw through the trees the rushing flood water – an old tire riding by very fast on muddy waves. I was afraid Buck Murfield was flooded out and would have to stop work on the altar. Went over to Athertonville Tuesday, and sure enough the floods had been there, 31E had been closed off by water and there were still houses that had water up to the front porch. But Buck and his wife were planing away in their shop which was full of the sweet smell of cedar. I still have hopes of getting the altar in time for Sunday.
Victor Hammer died on Monday, while we were flooded here. I heard about it Tuesday morning and said Mass for him. A great loss. I don’t know if he finally received the Sacraments – I suspect he did not and respect his reasons. There is no question that to him it would have been an empty formality that did not correspond to his own particular kind of faith. And the problem in my own mind is that, much as I would have wanted to do anything I could, I felt somehow that any aggressiveness about it would have meant forcing upon him some sign that, instead of affirming our friendship and understanding – a religious and spiritual and Christian understanding – would in some sense have violated it: not because of the idea of Sacraments, but because of the “official” meaning that Sacraments have unfortunately acquired.
There is such a problem about the social meaning of certain signs, ways of participating in worship, etc. I still feel there is a great deal of uncertainty about the meaning of the new Liturgy for instance, because of the gap between the theological statements about what it ought to be and the actuality of what it is. The theologians declare that the Liturgy is the place of God’s power and visible presence: but is that what one “sees”? I admit that when one believes, then the Liturgy is a place of holiness and sharing in God’s presence and in His peace. But for me this was even more true in the old Liturgy – though also true of concelebration, true of my own Mass – I can’t seem to find the differences that are declared to be so important.
True, there is a lot of ambivalence in me because I am a non-liturgical type, and because, isolated as I am, I am very little aware of what is really going on and sense that I do the new things badly, confusedly, that I don’t take easily to the priestly role, the office of celebrant, the leader of the people at prayer. Yet in my heart of hearts I don’t mind, I don’t feel it is a handicap really, except insofar as the official life of the Church goes – about which I really don’t care.
Ed Rice wrote that he had sold Jubilee to Herder & Herder. Notre Dame Press will probably publish Faith and Violence as a paperback. The commentary on Camus’ Plague is ready to go off to Seabury Press. I have had too little time to do real work – still seeing too many people. To have to spend an afternoon with a visitor twice a week is far too much for me. Once would be too much. I’d like to get it down to once or twice a month. But there are people you have to see. Jim Wygal was out yesterday. Tomorrow Pat W. from the library – there is work to do! Which is OK. But just visiting and socializing is not OK. Especially if I sit around drinking.
July 14, 1967
No matter what else I get involved in, and no matter how many mistakes I make, I am more and more convinced that my task is here in the woods (or some woods somewhere). I have said this so often that the words to express it are loose and have no grip on it. The reality is changing, and is not something I really understand at all. In a way I seem to have less footing. Certainly I know it is not simple and that my own estimate of the situation has been pretty crude. The whole question of my relationship to the community is something I can’t formulate and I’ll just let it go for the moment – except that the community to me is a curious, sometimes funny, sometimes crazy phenomenon which does not even understand itself. It bewilders me, and yet I am so much part of it. And that is frustrating too, for I am involved in and identified with something so wacky and pathetic, so full of ambivalences, all those guys, some solid, mostly half wits I think, who
are nevertheless good, well-meaning people and honest in their way, and many of whom are here on account of me – so that their madness is now mixed up with my own madness and I am part of it.
For example – yesterday in the bushes to the west of me, beyond “my” long field – red-bearded Bro. Odilo, solemn in a white sun helmet, and old Trappist work robe, erecting a weird wood and plastic squatter hermitage … Fantastic. Beyond all George Price cartoons! But obviously this is partly my fault.
And the Abbot, his elaborate little game of pretending he wants to retire (as a dream it is sincere, but is it more than a velleity? He has to indulge himself in something!). Actually he can’t and won’t let go of his power. Goes around telling everyone it is now his “duty” to stay and help watch over the new changes – and precisely what we need, if we are to have any real renewal, is for him to retire. So he will stay in office in order to prevent real change, and that will be his excuse for not embracing a solitary life he really doesn’t want. Blame it all on God!
Part of the game now is to go around getting opinions on it and getting people to plead with him not to resign – or else to discuss the joys of the hermit life which, alas, God’s will and duty prevent him from enjoying.
I can see how Dom James is cheating: but so what? What good does that do me? And what good can I do him? The more important thing is that I too am cheating and perhaps more than the others. Perhaps monstrously. For instance – the collection at Bellarmine, the collection of Sister Thérèse [Lentfoehr] – and all the business of filing and cataloguing every little slip of paper I ever wrote on! What a comedy! But I like it and cooperate whole-heartedly because I imagine it is for real. That I will last. That I will be a person, studied and commented on … This is a problem, man. So today Pat Welsh is coming and Mrs. Schumann and we will settle “problems” of cataloguing maybe. On the other hand it will be fun to see Pat again (last time was when Slate and I took her and Fr. John [Loftus] to the Luau Room).
Fouled up community living. Always trying to wangle a special community for myself on my own terms. The more suitable companions. Bad? I don’t know. But it doesn’t work either. And the hippies – so pathetic and unhappy in many ways.
July 16, 1967
Today, patronal Feast of my hermitage, first Mass here (after nearly seven years). Went over to Athertonville Saturday after dinner to get the altar, sweet smelling, in Buck Murfield’s dark shop. Some of the fields still under water from the floods the other day. Saturday was bright and glorious – exceptionally cool dry weather, lovely white clouds dry and full of sun, clean, pure. Set up in the hermitage, with ikons over it, the altar is just right (but I need curtains for front windows for privacy and to help the slick ikons from glaring with reflected light).
Said Mass (at hermitage) this morning (though Sunday) – Mass of Our Lady of Carmel. Epikeia,16 Dom James concurring (approved by Fr. Chrysogonus!). The most official Epikeia you ever saw! So official it is no longer an act of virtue perhaps.
Mass about 4:30 or 4:45. Said it slowly, even sang some parts (of Gregorian Kyrie, Gloria, Preface, and other bits). It was a beautiful Mass and I now see that having the altar there is a great step forward and a huge help. I wish I had done this before, but Dom James was always against it and I did not push until I learned Fr. Flavian was going to get approval in August to say Mass in his hermitage when his first year is up. So I decided to ask. In the past Dom James objected that it would be inconvenient for a server to come. Now he said, “Well of course you won’t need a server.”
Saying Mass up here changes the shape of the day, and eating dinner up here makes it completely leisurely. The best Sunday I can remember in a very long time. The morning was perfect. Eventually, after reading, I went for a walk to the Gethsemani statues in the Grove (the Jon Daniels statues) – brilliant sun, and everything very quiet in the late morning.
I have to give an evening conference – spoiled the day for me. I am tired of these performances, these Sunday amusements, entertainments of the bored. And when I get tense out of resistance to the chore, I insist too much, and say more than I mean. It is futile. I will have to try again to give these talks up. Is the fact that “people like them” a good enough reason? I feel the whole business is a bit phony. I am no longer in touch with the community or very much in sympathy with it. Or able to understand what it is trying to do in its desperation. Does charity demand that I be involved in affairs I can do nothing to remedy? Certainly my talks (now on Sufism) have little to do with current monastic problems – directly – but I make ironic observations that are no help! The whole thing embarrasses me. It is false.
July 18, 1967
Just finished reading in manuscript a series of letters to Clervaux from Dom Leclercq on his recent trip to Asia. A fantastic document. India, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia and then back. As he flew back to Europe his plane was rerouted to Athens instead of Cairo and he did not know he was flying over a war! I had an interesting letter from him written in Manila, about Vietnam, and another when he got back.
It was a monastic journey above all – to give retreats in contemplative monasteries mostly. Could be expanded into a very good book, vivid impressions of the Church in Asia – stupidity, ugliness, incomprehension, activism, pomposity, yet also holiness, simplicity, beginning of openness, some good monastic beginnings. Yet all in all I get a feeling that the Church in Asia is clinging to the worst of Westernism and too identified with western power. Yet the best he found was in monasteries that have some connection with the Cistercian line, official or not, like Kurisumala (P. Francis [Acharya of Scourmont] and Dom Bede Griffiths), or the Pierre-qui-Vire foundations and the Cistercians of Vietnam, the Trappists of Indonesia. This was encouraging at least.
Fantastic impression of crowds, heat, misery, with the wealth and comfort of the western places, the corruption of America in Vietnam, the hatred of Americans – and oppressive sense of my own immobility. What to make of it? Do I care? (The quiet of the morning here, the singing birds, irreplaceable.) But the fact of not being able to go anywhere at a moment when everybody is on planes, means that I am inevitably out of touch with the full reality of my time. Or does it? Everybody on planes? Millions go nowhere – and those monks in Asian monasteries, where do they go? Perhaps going nowhere is better. I don’t know. But I feel it, am galled by the rope that ties me up.
Yesterday Fr. Hilarion – who is becoming a hermit out of desperation and fed up with the community – (a bad motive!) – came to talk to me and discuss his situation. He is intelligent, lucid, and bitter, though not wildly so. He sees completely through Dom James – as lucidly as anyone here, but he also knows how many in the community are either taken in by Dom J. or cowtow to let him be boss in any way he pleases. We both agreed that J. has no real intention of retiring – that the longer he stays in office the worse it will be – harder for the monastery when he eventually does die or retire. He makes it harder and harder for his successor. There will be an explosion and God knows how the next man will be able to get the pieces back together again. Another one is leaving – Bro. Jude. The Visitation that is coming in a couple of weeks will of course be no help at all, for in these Visitations no one does anything but listen to complaints, jolly people along, and end with a fine speech that compliments the Abbot on having a lovely community and the community on having a splendid Abbot and all continues as before. There is no recourse. It is a system that has ceased to work except to keep itself in existence – and to ensure that everyone works for the system.
July 20, 1967
Letter from P. Charles Dumont, who has been continually ill. I don’t know how he still manages to get out the Collectanea. He resigned from the commission working on the revision of the Constitutions – and that is a good thing. A thankless and useless task, which could only grind him down for nothing.
Weather cool and misty. I am working on Camus’s Réflexions sur la guillotine [Reflections on the Guillotine] – a powerful and s
ubtle piece of work and very important for a real understanding of his novels. Perhaps the real key to them. Yesterday I corrected and sent back proofs of the review article on Camus to the Sewanee Review.
Yesterday afternoon Dom James came up to [the] hermitage on an “official” visit. Don’t quite know what he was at – you never do. We conversed for about ½ hour without really communicating anything except the fact that we don’t use the same language. Yet I decided to talk to him about his own desire (?) to retire and be a hermit, encouraging him to do this, and saying I did not think he had a “duty” to remain in command of this monastery. I doubt if he really can give up that command – and I doubt he really wants to be a hermit. Also I think he may hold this against me in some subtle way – because I have questioned his present position of “I-want-to-resign-but-duty-forbids” etc. (which I think is merely an evasion). Of course I did not tell him that outright. He is a man who cannot be direct and with whom directness is impossible. One must suggest everything obliquely in the midst of banalities. Which is also what he does. (Snide remark about the “activism” of the IHM Nuns – Corita – to whom Anselm Steinke preached a conservative retreat.)
July 22, 1967. St. Mary Magdalen
I will no longer worry (and haven’t really worried much so far) about being a somewhat disruptive influence in the monastery. I do not have to rock the boat, but I think it is good to do so anyway. I think I really do the community a service by keeping many people unsettled, and raising dangerous questions. Also by being something of a temptation and a scandal. What I do regret is having led others unconsciously into a kind of trap – raising profound and pathetic hopes and then delivering them up to the mercies of a monastic institution by which those hopes are systematically frustrated.
Learning To Love Page 34
