1 December 2024, 1st Sunday of Advent, from Quezon City, Manila, the Philippines
Okay, this time I can honestly admit: there has been a lot of work to do these last days between the events I had already committed to and the extras that got added on with the new position.
Perth, as you may know, is the most isolated major city in the world, so I am told. We Americans tend to forget how big Australia is: it was a three-hour flight from Melbourne. (And the factoid is oft reported that it is closer to Jakarta, Indonesia than to any other Australian city.) The city has grown incredibly since I was last there, now up to 4 million inhabitants and growing by the day, it seems, faster that its infrastructure can keep up with.
My host there was Meath Conlan. He is an extraordinary guy, a retired diocesan priest from a diocese “out in the bush,” who did labor jobs while he was serving in a parish to earn enough money to buy a ticket to India and meet Bede Griffiths, and wound up becoming a disciple, you might say, as well as friend and confidante, and an original member of the Bede Griffiths Trust. He is also the one who had arranged for Bede to go to Australia twice, big events that were broadcast on the ABC, and also arranged for the elegant film “The Human Search” to be filmed before Bede died. He is also a polymath, knowledgable in so many areas, a writer and teacher himself, now immersed very deeply in the Christian Zen tradition under the tutelage of Jesuit Fr. Amasamy in Tamil Nadu. Meath had brought me there to Perth another time, back in 2009, arranging a series of well-attended events at the Uniting Church and with the WCCM.
One of the extras that got added on was a visit to the Abbey of New Norcia about two hours north of Perth, which we left for the day after I arrived. I had met their Abbot John Herbert at the Congress in Rome and, of course, when I mentioned that I was going to be in Australia he immediately issued an invitation that was right up my alley, to come and give a day of recollection for the community and their oblates on interreligious dialogue. I took it as an excuse to expand on what I am thinking of as my “stump speech.” (He had asked for four conferences.) I mined my notes. (Oh, thanks God for the magic silver box made by Apple and the iCloud that stores everything.) I had done a whole series of chapter talks on the topic for the brothers at the Hermitage over the course of a year and was able to purloin material from there with the addition of new material. And it turned out quite well, I’m happy to say.
New Norcia is quite an interesting place. It was founded by Spanish monks in 1847, how and why they chose a place so far from the developed population centers is beyond me, especially in the mid-19th century before any of the modern technology that we have. But they wound up inspiring an entire village to grow up around them instead, and are known as “the only Benedictine town in Australia.” They have olive groves and are famous for both their oil and their bakery. But they are especially famous––now unfortunately infamous––for the fact that the monks founded a mission and schools for Aboriginal children, and then a series of “colleges” (that basically means boarding schools in Australia) that became St Benedict’s College. Unfortunately the former were hit hard by the movement to redress the “lost generation” of Aboriginal children who were taken forcibly from their families, and the latter is notorious for the sexual abuse accusations from the 1960s and ‘70s. Poor Abbot John told me that since he took over 15 years ago his main occupation has been dealing with the financial aspects of all that, which led the community to selling off thousands of acres of farmland. I feel for him.
The community is now only six active members, but they have what seems to be a thriving community of oblates, several of whom drove all the way out from Perth to spend the day with us for the conferences. They were all quite receptive and, as I say, I was very glad to get a chance to do it, as well as of course buoyed up by their very warm reception of the material. It did wind up being a good mixture of facts, dates and personages, as well as a spiritual ferverino about what we can and ought to learn from the exploration of universal wisdom. I have great sympathy for teachers; four conferences in one day is a load. Imagine doing it five days a week!
(I’m actually preparing for something bigger as well. I have been asked to lead a program entitled “Monasticism, Catholicism and Non-Christian Religions” for the International Monastic Summer Studium at Sant’Anselmo July 14-18, which will be five hours a day for five days. I am hoping with the combination of music, lectio on non-Christian texts and maybe a few field trips, I am well on my way to being ready for it. I’m kind of excited about it. It may be the closest I ever get to actually teaching at Sant’Anselmo, being short of a doctorate.)
The extra added feature is that we stayed on at New Norcia for an extra day with absolutely nothing to do. Meath and the monks let me take it pretty much as a desert day in my cell. The community was very warm and welcoming and treated us like visiting royalty.
Then back to Perth and I had a string of things to do: a performance for a small crowd at a charming Anglican Church (I did get to try my new piece out for the first time, “People of the Book,” with the Arabic verse from the Qur’an. I’m quite happy with it.) Then I gave two retreat days at a Catholic retreat center, one day on the Trinity as a means for interreligious dialogue (à la Panikkar, Bruno and my last book) and one on kenosis as the heart of Christian spirituality (using the same conferences I have used many times now). Both again for only a handful of people, but once you get going it hardly matters: the same amount of work (maybe more with fewer people) and the same enthusiasm!
I then had a scrumptious visit with old friends Hans and Ruth Christiansen who live on the campus of an Anglican formation center within breathing distance of the ocean. I had stayed with them as well in 2016 when they lived in Melbourne. Hans, an ordained Anglican priest, was at the time chaplain of a boarding school there and was also the head of our oblates Down Under at the time. We’d known each other since the retreat I gave in Tasmania in 2009, and had had a very strong connection over everything spiritual, musical, and otherwise, and have kept in touch over the years. It is also one of the friendships with which you pick up right where you left off no matter how many years go by, and so it was. The three of us first took a long walk on the crowded beach––it felt like full-on summer by then––and then they treated me to fish and chips before we went home and prayed and meditated together, which we did several times over the next 36 hours. That is one of the surest marks of familiarity, to be able to “practice” together. The next day we all had a lazy day lounging ‘round the house except for a seven-mile walk through the woods and to the beach again first thing in the morning.
Hans is now the auxiliary bishop of that region and we mused quite a bit about the ironies of history. He and Ruth had met in India a mere 25 years ago when Hans was a wandering barefoot hippie from Denmark with a flute over his shoulder, and now he wears the royal purple to work. Of course, even the contrast of him walking with us on the beach in his shorts and tank top with that was enough to amuse. Needless to say, endless conversations ensued along with very healthy meals that would not have been out of place in Santa Cruz. We’re plotting a pilgrimage to the Gomukh together.
And then on Tuesday it was back to Singapore, my hub, and to the treasure of a hotel that we found near the airport. I actually had scheduled three video calls and two phone calls for Wednesday, so having a clean private room somewhere that also had a really well-equipped gym and a laundromat, plus a hawker stand and shops nearby, was like Paradise and well worth the reasonable price. I slept like a log both nights. And then the short flight to the Philippines.
The main impetus for coming was through my long-time friend and collaborator Joe Hebert, the ‘cellist who has played for and with me for over 30 years. His lady friend Grace wanted to bring him to encounter her home country and meet her family, and she has a sister who is a religious sister of the Mission Congregation of the Sister Servants of the Holy Spirit, an international congregation that has their provincial house for Southeast Asia here in Quezon City, which abuts Manila. And since I was going to be in the region… We were originally going to do a concert and while I was here would I do a retreat day for the sisters? That wound up getting turned inside out: there was no concert and I wound up doing two retreat days, one for the contemplative branch of the congregation, the so-called “pink sisters” (yes, they really do wear a pink habit) who are dedicated to Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration in the heart of the city and another day for the active branch at another location.
Grace’s sister, Sr. Joy, met me at Ninoy Aquino Airport with their driver and whisked me off across Manila to Quezon City. According to my GPS it is only twelve miles from the airport in the south of Manila to Quezon City in the north, but it took us nearly two hours. For the past two days I have been saying to myself, “This is almost India.” (Which is my next stop anyway.) That evening I had a rare treat. I had been corresponding with a young former seminarian from here named Leogen for the past three years who is interested in East-West spirituality and has studied various forms of Buddhism (Rinzai, Tibetan and lately Chinese Ch’an). When we figured out that I was going to be in the area we made plans to get together that one evening that he was available. He arrived at the sisters’ residence before I did and then took me off in a taxi for a fine meal and dessert, and a good long conversation about lo’ these many things.
And then the day for the Pink Sisters on Friday, actually only two sessions in an air-conditioned room above the large open church, at the front of which is a grilled area where the sisters sing, pray, and adore. Lots of people coming and going in the church itself, as a matter of fact they were arranging for a Eucharistic Congress that was about to take place the following day, setting up what seemed like hundreds of chairs and watering stations. In the midst of all that the sisters live their tightly cloistered quiet life of prayer and adoration.
The next day was not so cloistered and quiet. Sisters from all over the region came to their large provincial house, like a grand reunion for them, 97 in all. The majority were Filipinas, but there were a quite a few Chinese and Vietnamese, a handful of sisters from Africa (mostly Togo, I think) and some Europeans. They are quite a dynamic group, a congregation that is literally all over the world, serving in every possible ministry from caring for HIV patients to education and everything in between. In a sense the two talks for the Pink Sisters were a warm-up for that main event on Saturday. I had my feathers a little ruffled when Joy had written me telling me what my theme was going to be (i.e., not asking me)––“Prayer and Compassion: Advent recollection,” but I got over that when I realized that I had three old conferences from an Advent retreat that I did years ago in Santa Cruz. Well, as these things go, once I looked closely at the conferences, I realized further that what I wrote in 2004 did not ring true in 2024. Even that in and of itself was interesting, to see how my own “voice” has changed. As I set about re-working the conferences, the writer in me got really inspired (carried away?) and I wound up basically writing three new conferences based on the primary material. The talks were based on Second and Third Isaiah, the Book of the Consolation of Israel and the vision of a new heavens and a new earth. It was notable how often references to the “last political season in America” came up, asking who and how we followers of Jesus are supposed to be in the world, and what is our message.
Of course in addition to the talks, since they had paid to bring Joe over too from the other side of the world, they wanted lots of music to be part of the day as well. I, being the perfectionist that I am, didn’t want to just do any old songs, but instead to do songs that really fit the subject matter. Which meant that Joe lugged half of his “Cyprian file” with him only to have me choose five out of the six songs that we did be things he had never played before. (If he were reading, John Pennington would be nodding knowingly…) But it really blended nicely into the day and the sisters loved it. I got to perform, with them, for the first time the “Olam Chesed Yibaneh” (you can look it up) that I had learned from Rabbi Paula years ago and have been wanting to add into the repertoire, but this time with the addition of the refrain in Arabic as available on YouTube with the Jerusalem Youth Choir. That was the favorite piece of the day for the sisters, and at the end while they were thanking us they kept interspersing their remarks with (“la-dai-dai, dai-dai, la-dai…”) But I also got to hear two other new pieces, “Bread for the Journey” and “New Heavens and A New Earth,” for the first time with ‘cello (or any other instrument for that matter). And Joe is such a pro and so long-suffering, he made it sound as if we had been playing them together for years. And then two other songs that I have not played for years as well, “Here Is My Servant” and “Let Us Climb the Lord’s Mountain.” That made it a lot more fun for me, and made the music an integral part of the day. We ended the day with just a gratuitous piece of beauty, Joe’s favorite of our repertoire, John and my setting of Wendell Berry’s poem that we call “Circle Song,” which never fails to soar.
I did not know these sisters, their level of education nor their place on the conservative-progressive scale, at all, so I had some trepidation that I might be stretching them too far, especially when I launched into the whole topic of evolution of consciousness and universal care and rights (à la Carol Jenkins and Ken Wilber) in the third conference. But not at all: they tracked the whole way and several remarked to me privately afterward that particularly the idea of transformation of consciousness was exactly what they feel they need to concentrate on in the next years. I was also concerned about leaving the elderly sisters behind, many of whom were in attendance, but they were among the most appreciative. I have always been impressed by women religious in the Church, and these women are no exception. They are the front lines of Christian compassion, in 46 countries. When I spoke about developing a sense of global citizenship, they were and are already there. It was really a marvelous day.
This morning I had Mass with the 20 or so sisters in formation staying at the formation house where we have been staying––for the 1st Sunday of Advent! Joe and Grace have moved on and I have had a great day to myself in my upstairs room with the fan comfortably blowing around the cool tropical air. I will move over to Our Lady of Montserrat Benedictine Abbey tomorrow for a visit with the monks and one final event before I head back to Singapore on Wednesday.
As always so much more to fill in on the details but that’s all for now, Happy new (liturgical) year!
