20 October 2024, Oxford, England
I have finished up my first official stay in Rome now and I’m on to the next and last phase of this sabbatical year, though obviously it has turned out to be quite different from what I had originally planned.
As I mentioned before, the retreat I was supposed to do at Poppi got canceled and so I headed straight back to Rome for two reasons. One, to help my brothers provide music for morning prayer at the Synod, and two, to take possession of my room at San Gregorio.
Being at the Synod again was like old hat and I fell right in step with what was going on, pretty much the same music as last year, our psalms in English and Italian. Since I was there, they wanted to exploit the guitar a little more, so I lugged the guitar over every day this time. The very first day I was there they happened to be highlighting Asia, so I was asked to do one of the Indian pieces as a meditation, which I just happened to be ready for anyway. (“He Prabhu.”) There was also a young sister from the Pie Discepoli who was an excellent violinist. Last year the sisters did the music for Mass each morning and we helped them, and Sr. Miriam played the cetra often, both to accompany the psalms and for some of the musical meditations that we did after the reading of the Gospel each day. This year, the sisters sang the psalms with us, which was nice, to have women’s voices leading instead of all men. So we were able to have some very nice combinations of organ, guitar, violin, and cetra which the folks seemed to really appreciate.
It seemed as if the Holy Father was there more often this time and like last year he was very generous with his time. One of the participants told me that he often came early, and there was always a line of people waiting to talk with him, take their picture with him, at one point he even signed an excuse for one of the young participants to get out of class. A real pastor.
I understood something about this synod more clearly than I did last year. This synod is an extraordinary one, to discuss and try to implement synodality itself across the Church. And this is the last time it will meet for this purpose. (I was worried that I would have to say no to coming next year because I am already booked for other work.) I suppose from here on out they will go back to having simply the Synod of Bishops. But, as the same participant told me, Pope Francis is preparing them to be missionaries of synodality, to bring this spirit of open conversation out to the rest of the Church, even to demand it of the pastors and bishops. We shall see. I don’t know how the bishop and cardinal participants feel about it all, but I know that the lay people are really charged up. Interesting enough, I had a conversation with the young Anglican chaplain at Trinity College last night. They of course have the synodality process with three different houses, like Parliament––the bishops, the clergy, and the laity. According to him, it is the laity who are often the most conservative and resistant to change. I wonder if that is the case with Catholicism.
It was a pleasant experience setting up my room at San Gregorio. Not much to it of course, but I did invest in a water boiler so I can make my morning tea without risking setting off the alarm in the kitchen, which in any case is about a half mile walk! I don’t want to set up a bachelor pad in my cell, but I did get myself a nice tea strainer-cup, honey, tea, and biscotti (integrale, whole grain, of course, ricco di fibra–“rich in fiber!”) to keep me entertained in the wee hours of the morning. I am in search of a nice little rotary fan. Even this time of year the room gets pretty stuffy and warm already in the morning. It’s going to be a challenge in the late summer if this year was any indication.
There are now four students there from Camaldoli and Shantivanam, plus the four regular monks, plus four (or so?) long-term boarders. Plus me. Matteo has been there all month because of the Synod but he also has been coming with some regularity. It seems that he wants to be more hands-on as official prior of the place, more than past priors general. He holds house meetings and is not afraid to scold the brothers for some lack of decorum. And as might be expected, there is a constant stream of visitors, folks dropping in for lunch, monks passing through from our other houses. And every now and then a dignitary of sorts, especially now since Matteo is so well-known in Rome. Most days we are about 10 in choir and the singing is really robust. I am still trying to figure out the culture of the place, fit in and maybe contribute something positive as well. There were moments when I felt like I was back in high school, having just moved to a new town, not understanding the jokes, not knowing where the bathrooms were.
I’ve decided for the most part not to take the evening meal with the brothers, for several reasons, mainly because I am so used to having nothing to do but go to my cell after evening prayers. And evening prayers (with Mass most days) doesn’t end until nearly 8 o’clock. Basta! Besides that, as hard as it is to hear in the refectory anyway, by that time of day I am usually tired of struggling with Italian. The other reason is that I really want to watch my intake of food. The cheeses and pastas are all too tempting. I am impressed that several of the young guys are very careful with their diets, often skipping the pasta dish at pranzo, filling up on salad and leaning toward the veggies. As a matter of fact, at least one other monk in the house is a pescatarian.
So I think I have a sense of what my days will be like. This new job is going to require of me a lot of travel and also a lot of time on the computer between writing conferences and answering emails. And my room so far has been a fine place to work, and then break in the late afternoon to practice the guitar. (No one has complained about the noise yet…)
I had one big day of meetings up at Sant’Anselmo, the Benedictine University where my “boss,” the Abbot Primate, lives. Another place that has its own culture, an even older and denser one than San Gregorio, with well over 100 monks living there and a very strict schedule and hierarchy, much more formal than anything I have ever lived in. They were all very gracious. I first met with Fr. Geraldo, the Brazilian who is the economo for the Confederation and also holds a number of other posts. Besides discussing my DIMMID budget, he was very helpful in helping me understand out the protocols of Sant’Anselmo. I had a quick meeting with my old friend Paolo Trianni, who teaches there and at the Gregorianum in the area of interreligious dialogue. We had first met at Shantivanam in 2009 at the Abhishiktananda centenary. I had midday prayer in choir with the monks and then lunch with them as well. After lunch Gerardo introduced me to a monk from America named Eusebius, ostensibly to have Eusebius explain to me the process for getting an extended visa to stay in Italy. (The process has changed, and no one told me!) In the course of meeting each other I find out that Eusebius is from Marion Abbey, right down the road from where I grew up in Illinois, and was actually a priest of my diocese, Joliet, before becoming a monk. We knew so many people in common, including two of his cousins who were my classmates in high school. That led to him inviting me to teach for one week at Sant’Anselmo’s summer institute, five days for five hours day, which I’m pretty excited about. We talked for an hour non-stop and then it was time for my meeting with the rector, Austrian Fr. Bernhard. Actually, the rettore magnifico, as he is known there officially, to be exact.
Bernhard came well-recommended by our young monks, and I found him very affable and engaging. He also knows Br. David Steindl-Rast well and has spent time on the Big Sur coast. He is very keen on getting dialogue back in circulation there at Sant’Anselmo, and we were exploring different ways we could collaborate. For one thing he wants me just to be present there a few days a week, for liturgies and meals, which I think is a great idea. My thought was to come up a few days a week, work in the library and stay for midday prayer and lunch. That will also depend on the new prior who starts his mandate in January.
And then the big meeting (Thanks be to God these were all in English!) with Abbot Primate Jeremias. I thought that he was going to have a full agenda for me, and I was prepared with a long list of items to discuss with him, eleven to be exact. Well, he didn’t really have an agenda at all, so I carried the meeting. And we got on just fine. To both him and Bernhard I kept apologizing for talking too much, I got so excited telling them about all my ideas. They did not seem to need the apology. About Jeremias took lots of notes as I went along (“Wait, what was your eighth point?!”) and then at the end mentioned a few ideas that he had, asked a few questions, and gave me a few ideas of where he’d like me to focus––the relationship with the Vatican Dicastery, the dialogue with Islam, and also a conference that he would like me to attend in India in February. One of our items, at least in my mind, was to discuss the length of the term which had never been set. He seemed not too concerned about it at all and said that, like with his personal secretary (another American, from Clear Creek, OK), he would prefer it to be simply ad nutum, which means sort of like “at will.” That shifted something in me: open-ended. Okay. Let’s get to work.
So, now I am in England, at Oxford with our old friend Aaron Maniam from Singapore. He now teaches in the school of government here and has a cozy two-bedroom apartment in the heart of things. Another friend of his is here too, Amil, a very bright young man who works for a consulting firm in Singapore with branches here in the UK. The three of us have already had some amazing conversations, and it’s an entertaining experience for the three of us to share this little space like post-grads, propping our computers on our laps, negotiating bathroom times and figuring out how to share meals. We’ve also started meditating together, which is especially nice. Amil has also been involved in dialogue work, his own background, not atypical for Singapore, being a mixture of Islam and Christianity, though he identifies much more with his Vipassana practice now.
I did my first event last evening at evensong at Trinity College, followed by high supper at the head table. Talk about walking into a different culture! The language of the Anglican liturgy, the formality of evensong, the way of dressing. I had a ten-minute sermon ready on love ready to go, and then was to sing a song—“Compassionate and Wise.” I exited my doored choir stall to go the front where there was an altar rial and two steps, my guitar tucked around the corner. I turned around to go the podium and immediately tripped on one of the stairs in front of the pulpit, knocking my guitar against the marble step, making quite a clamor. Nothing like a pratfall to break the ice! I made a light-hearted comment about almost losing me and my guitar. (No response.) I recovered quickly and launched in. It was hard to read my “audience” and of course I walked in with little idea about who would be there. They were young, not all Christians, not what I was expecting. But it went very well, I think, and the contrast between their four-part organ and choir anthems and my little guitar and voice at the end worked pretty well. I had several lovely conversations with students afterward, as well as a lively conversation with Rev. Josh and two other faculty members at the high table during the very noisy but delicious formal dinner.
From here, lots of little engagements this week, and I shall give you a full report. For now, from a lovely café called Vaults and Gardens under a large Victorian edifice, I send you warmest regards from Oxford.
