constant contact with beauty ever present.

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Our stemma in one of the panels on the floor of a cell.

There is a form of laus perennis 

which does not require an army of monks,

which is open to each individual to realize:

it is secret prayer, attention to God 

and the things of God, the attitude of submission and love, 

a certain constant contact with Beauty ever present.  

                                                     Abbè Paul Delatte

 I am writing from a cell at the Sacro Eremo of Camaldoli now. I suppose I don’t even realize it ‘til I am gone from there––I have just not been myself in Rome! All the noise, all the dirty streets, even the crowd gathered at the Congress of Abbots feels raucous to me now, on top of the heat and humidity. Alessandro and I didn’t leave until after 7 last night, stopped for dinner somewhere outside of Orvieto and so didn’t arrive here until after 11. I excused myself from the mattutina (vigils) even though hearing the bells go off at 5:15 and woke to such deep darkness and perfect silence, perfectly content. After Lauds and a lively greeting from the brothers––especially a long talk with our young German monk Axel who recently spent four months studying yoga in India and met several folks along the way that I also know––I got back to my cell and thought to myself, “This is the first time I have felt al mio agio–at my ease not only this trip but maybe in months. All things being equal (and they seldom are) I feel like this place is the heart of our charism, and for all my support and encouragement of the triplex bonum–threefold good, this is what drew me to Camaldoli, the hermit cell, from the first days of my postulancy. Here, even at the common prayer, you get a sense of the simplicity, the quiet listening to the Word in common prayer which one takes back to the cell for ruminatio.

Friday morning we had a wonderful conference by Prior Alois of Taizè, what a treat! He also spoke about community becoming communion in three steps: communion with God, communion with others which then becomes communion as mission. He was the chosen successor of the famous Frere Roger of Taizè (who was murdered, if you recall) and spoke a lot about Roger’s vision, that the beauty and simplicity of the liturgy and the chapel and the chant were all designed to lead to a personal communion with God (a little different starting point from Ab. Bernard earlier last week). But he emphasized that this cannot happen without some kind of asceticism, just as celibacy cannot happen with out praise––“even poor praise,” he said––the stripping of our material goods, then of our will, and even of our spirituality. Blessed are the poor. (I remembered how Fr. Bede spoke about Jesus on the cross quoting Ps. 22: ‘My God, why have you abandoned me?’, as a moment even of his spiritual poverty.)

I liked hearing this too: “We can never tire of starting again!” As I age, finding the inspiration to pick myself up, dust myself off and start from what feels like zero, seems harder and harder. I suppose that’s why I am cherishing these few hours here at Camaldoli; I feel some of the initial fervor and remember who I am, who I have wanted to be, the heart of our charism. But then that communion with God must––must must must must!––resolve itself in the new commandment of Jesus, in mutual love, in whatever form that takes, and surely that takes different forms depending on the grouping of people. This is the point that we solitaries must always remember, the relationship of, and the trajectory, from autonomy to abandonment. I think that the drive toward generative autonomy (Bruno’s phrase) at some point becomes kind of remedial, as the ascetical life is about re-establishing right relationship (or establishing it for the first time), but then there is another step. Perhaps real knowledge of self doesn’t happen until we can actually let the “self” go, and part of the letting go is abandonment to the greater Good, abandoning self to the All and thereby discovering oneself as part of that All and coming to our own fullness.

Ab. Jeremy Driscoll gave the response, which was a perfect choice, because his own theme that struck me deeply three years ago at the Abbot’s and Priors Workshop in Alabama was similar to Prior Alois’: our very life is an evangelizing word, and so Prior Alois says our communion itself is our missionary activity, our living sign, our inclusivity. This was one of the founding principles of Frere Roger too, as Taizè was started right after World War II, with all the damage done physically, psychologically and spiritually to Europe, to be a sign of people of different faiths living together, praising together, praying together. Our monastic life––this was a phrase that really resonated with many of the men gathered––is a “parable: like a parable it doesn’t propose or enforce anything but opens up to inexhaustible meaning, fraternity as a sign, living out the search for unity and reconciliation. What an ideal!

In our discussion by language group afterward, I brought up my image of New Camaldoli as a village––with the prior as a cross between a bishop and a mayor, or janitor, or a Sherpa!––and the inspiration I’ve drawn from the ashram model, concentric circles of involvement. I doubt that anyone on our staff is reading this, but I was thinking of Rich and Alicia and Michael Richards and Brendon and all the folks who live with us for the long term or for a short time, our village. The question remains: what kind of city do people build as they are seeking God and after they have had some kind of experience of union with God? How does that change the way we live, the way we treat each other, our notions of justice and solidarity? Our welcoming of the stranger?

Abbot Primate Gregory Polan of Missouri.

Friday afternoon we had the praevium scrutinium for the new Abbot Primate, but first we had a process by which, as I understood it, we voted to see if we were ready to vote. And then we had the vote, which was actually what we would call a straw vote. There was adoration of the Blessed Sacrament ongoing throughout this time. We returned yesterday morning to find out that there were several candidates who made it onto the ballot. After all the discussions none of the candidates outside of Abbot Gregory had received very many votes in the praevanium; Gregory was ahead of everyone by about a hundred, though Abbot Bernard had more support than I thought he would as did Abbot Giuseppe Cassetta of Vallombrosia, with Abbot Richard of Yeo falling way behind with the other “also rans.” There was a long roll call of every man present––we each had to stand, raise our hand and call out, ‘Ad sum!’ or ‘Ad sum procurator’ if you held someone’s proxy. That was pretty impressive. At the first vote both of the above two mentioned had a pretty strong showing and Gregory fell one vote shy of a quorum. At the break I learned that many of the Italians had decided to use the first vote to make the point that it doesn’t always have to be an American or a German (!) and so had cast the lot in with Ab. Cassetta for the most part, which accounted for his strong showing, but they were not ready to support Gregory. When we counted the second ballots the number was off; unbeknownst to us two extra abbots had slipped in! So we had to do the whole roll call again. This time Gregory was well over two hundred, so the bells rang, we sang the Te Deum, he was acknowledged, greeted and “installed,” and he read his profession of faith and we had a grand pranzo.

I see why all that was important, but from this vantage point––at the Sacro Eremo––it all seems to be in its proper perspective. All that organization and shoring up the superstructure and higher education and raising funds is important, but it is all in the service of this, this moment of communion with God from which grows communion with one another and our living sign, our prophetic witness, our mission, our little village on the hill.

After a festive lunch, complete with a huge torta di frutta and lots of Asti, I was suddenly surprised to realize that we were having workshops in the same afternoon of the election. (My suspicion is that a lot of Italians didn’t show up. Several of them expressed their perplexity to me. It suddenly occurred to me that we were almost all visitors here. The Italians would never dream of scheduling something like that.) There will be two other days of workshops as well, next Tuesday and Wednesday. I want to take full advantage of those, especially to get a little bit of a global perspective on things.

My first workshop, the one I was mostly looking forward to, “A Benedictine Response to Global Warming,” was offered by Abbess Andrea Savage, a Glaswegian from the famous Stanbrook Abbey. I knew the nuns of Stanbrook had moved from the old monastery to a new one; what I didn’t know, and what was the subject of her workshop, is they had been intentional about building in a sustainable ecologically sensitive way, with wood chip boilers, solar heated water, reed bed sewage, rain water harvesting, sedum roofs, deciduous plants for shade, natural ventilation and even locally sourced stone. We were treated to a Powerpoint and each given a booklet of the new monastery. It is not the most beautiful place from the outside, but offers vast vistas from the interior, bringing Nature in.

Ab. Andrea told about how the windows in the old monastery were built so high from the floor that you couldn’t see out! It reminded me, and I shared the story with them, about our own tall fences around the cells at New Camaldoli and also of Br. Anthony’s cabin in the woods in which the huge plate glass windows were totally covered with Styrofoam panels and thick curtains––“I got God in here,” he told me, “Why do I need to see the ocean out there?” A whole different mindset. One abbot and I touched a bit on the idea of a new anthropology and a new cosmology that must underlie our inspiration for doing things differently, though when he and I spoke at the end privately, he wasn’t willing to go as far as I was with that topic. I spoke to openly about being evangelized by the pagans at Esalen instead of evangelizing them; he was suspicious of how much influence the Asian religions had had on them, with emphases that “aren’t Christian,” he said. Of course I was “loaded for bear,” having just the night before read this in Panikkar:

… the conception of God has always been intimately connected with the reigning worldview of a particular epoch. Cosmology was a part of theology as long as the cosmos was believed to be God’s creation or the Divine intrinsically related to the universe. In a parallel manner, anthropology was a theological chapter studying “the image and likeness of God,” while cosmology was another chapter studying the divine energia in the universe. (Rhythm, 186)

Alessandro would have liked to leave for Camaldoli a bit earlier, and I would have conceded to that except for the fact that I was scheduled to be a respondent at the next workshop, offered by Ab. Phillip of Clear Creek Abbey in Oklahoma, a very traditional monastery of the Solesmes Congregation, on “Liturgy and Continual Prayer.” It was a topic I know well, and my response was partly drawn from the conferences I have been offering to the brothers at New Camaldoli recently on liturgical spirituality. As I understand it, for monastic spirituality the ideal is that it’s a seamless garment, the flow between public liturgy and private prayer or devotion. (I learned a new Italian word yesterday, by the way––cucitura, “seam”; Non c’è cucitura!) Our private praxis is formed by and flows back into the prayer of the Church. The thing that I was able to add, which Ab Phillip thought would take us too far off topic, was how things such a Centering Prayer and other contemporary contemplative movements play into this. I asserted that it could be specifically the role of the monastic tradition to both make sure that these movements stay rooted in the prayer of the Church and that the prayer of the Church stay open to our liturgical prayer resolving itself in meditation.

It was interesting to hear the other abbots speak of all this, especially since I was in the room with both the abbots of Kergonan in France and Prinknash in England in other words, the abbeys of Abhishiktananda and Bede Griffiths, who in some way got this whole thing started, at least my whole thing. I wondered how much they care about the legacy of those two who are so important to us, to me. I enjoyed that moment very much and savored it, since they both wanted to renew the contemplative life of the church by opening it to wisdom other than Western European, whereas Benedictine monasticism remains frightfully Western European to this day, even though there are many yellow, brown and black faces in our midst.

The bells are dancing. Off to Sunday Eucharist.

nella Sala Clementina

7 settembre

Today we had our audience with the Holy Father. It was quite an affair, first of all we gathered at the statue at the bottom of the Avventine Hill for a photo, and then we boarded 4 buses to take us across town to the Vatican. After a pretty long wait in the piazza and then going through security (like in the airport at TSA, I was lucky that I did not have a pectoral cross or a ring) we were ushered in through the bronze doors. I did not understand the significance of this until we were there. Those are the great doors that lead into the Apostolic Palace, guarded by the Swiss Guard. What a majestic building, I must say. There was beautiful statuary everywhere (the one I noted closely was a bronze by Salvador Dalì of St George slaying the dragon). Then up huge flights of stairs to the Clementine Hall (Sala Clementina), which of course is the famous place for smaller receptions; also where the deceased pope’s body is laid in state until it is ushered in to the basilica. We had to wait another half and hour or so, while several young men in grey tuxedos, ushers of some sort I assumed, looked around and went in and out of doors. Then the photographers came in and we knew we were close.

Suddenly the lights came on and Pope Francis came in from the right. What a beautiful face, and a smile and eyes that could light up a whole room. He seemed very relaxed and spry. He greeted Abbot Notker warmly and they spoke for some time. Notker gave a little speech and then the Holy Father spoke as well from a prepared text. It was hard to make out all the Italian, but there was nothing really new or startling that either one said, though I was happy to hear both of them mention interreligious dialogue and how it was entrusted to the monks. The pope was flanked by the ubiquitous Archbishop Georg Ganswein, his secretary and Benedict XVI’s too, and another archbishop the entire time. The presidents of the various congregations were all in the front row, along with several Benedictine women. And we assumed that they were going to be the only ones to greet him personally, but to my surprise the ushers kept going back row-by-row and just kept going. Each and every one of us got to greet him. I thought that was extraordinary. We were at least 250 and it took almost 45 minutes. I just said, “Saluti della California. Ti volgiamo bene––Greetings from California. We love you.” And he said to me, simply, in English, “Pray for me.” When I met John Paul II and shook his hand the thing I noted was his watch (why did he need to wear a watch?) and his loafers. The thing that I noted about Francis was how small and soft his hands seemed to be, and his beautiful eyes.

Toward the end there was a tense moment with some younger man in what seemed to be a home made black habit with all kinds of accoutrements, including a large black zucchetto. When he got to the pope he immediately put his left hand on the pope’s shoulder and bent down very close to him and started talking, as if he was praying over him. Everybody got nervous and several guys around me asked, “Is he part of our meeting?” No one had ever seen him before. After a half a minute or so, the archbishops were giving him waving signs to move on, and then the ushers started closing in and one of them grabbed his elbow, but still he persisted. Finally someone got him to move on but instead of leaving he went up to Msgr. Gaswein and started talking to him for a good while as well. Georg was smiling at the end but with a bit of an exasperated look on his face. I suppose we will find out who he was tomorrow.

Then back down the long staircases and into the Court of Damasus. Abbot Jeremy made me stand for a picture there and then had me take one of him as well, telling me not many people get to be there. (I think that may be where the Holy Father does donuts with his little Ford Escort.) From there we were looking right up at the papal apartments, which are right next to the Sala Clementina, but of course are unused now, Francis instead getting driven back to the Casa Santa Marta for his pranzo. I’m told the morning is for official audiences such as ours, but in the afternoon he still keeps his own calendar and has private meetings over there.

Such majesty I have never seen before, impressive as history and architecture, surely, but nothing was as impressive as his smile, his warmth and charisma. He seemed perfectly at home in himself and for all the world from now on that is exactly what a pope looks like to me.

I must admit I keep hearing this paragraph from Bruno’s Future of Wisdom in my head, which Jeff Pickerill and I lip-synched along with when it was quoted at the Wisdom symposium in early July: at least sometimes the Church seems...

... too exalted in an artificial (and obviously human) rather than a spiritual way. The church often seems a kind of intermediate world of institutional pseudo-reality, sometimes even a solemn out-of-date world of clerical artificiality, tediously mediating between two realities which are already one: God and humanity.  It is this church which is not real but a comic fantasy; the reality is the body of Christ.

The papal apartments from the Court of Damasus.

And the same can apply to monasticism. During our meetings yesterday and again today in the Sala Clementina I kept thinking of Romuald making a cell in the swamps, going back to the inspiration of the desert fathers, or Francis showing up in his beggar’s rags. And I wondered if our ersatz young Benedictine saw himself as one of those prophets. It can be a slippery slope just to sit in judgment on the institution too, rather than just “walk the other way” as they did.

They were serving lunch up at Sant’Anselmo but I didn’t want to walk back up there and it was too late for pranzo here at San Gregorio and it’s a Roman gorgeous day, sunny but not too hot, so I slipped into some shorts and a T-shirt and took my longest excursion yet, the Metro up to the Spanish steps where I treated myself to a big slice of pizza, a caffe lungo and a cannolo, and then walked all the way back to San Gregorio, only getting (as Daniel Boone would say) “bewildered” once.

Please pray for the brothers back in Big Sur. My biggest concern may come true: there is still a chance that the monks will be evacuated within the next ten days, unless CalFire can hold the fire line.

from community to communion

Where does the Divine dwell?

The answer is unambiguous: inside and outside.

The Divine is immanent and transcendent.

Many mystics will say God wanders,

between us, inside and outside,

goes in and out, appears and disappears,

strays, dwells.

                        Raimon Panikkar

The weather has remained mercifully cooler. We even had a little more rain yesterday afternoon, and I even slept with my windows closed to the cool breeze––and the sound of traffic circumabulating the Foro Romano 24/7.

Abbot Bernard is also the author of two books.

We had a keynote address yesterday, our first real spiritual conference. I had heard of this monk before, Abbot Bernard Bonowitz, OCSO, who was born a Jew, converted to Catholicism as a late teenager, baptized at the Trappist monastery in Genesee, NY, joined and professed as a Jesuit, and then entered the same Genesee only a few years later. He was then sent to Brazil, where he has spent the past 20 years. (Yesterday was also Brazil’s Independence Day from Portugal. I’m not sure if it was planned this way but besides Ab. Bernard we also had the Brazilian Joao Cardinal Braz de Aviz, head of the Congregation of Religious at the Vatican as our principal celebrant at Mass yesterday.)

Ab. Bernard’s main emphasis was on moving from “community to communion” and, at that, “communion enlightened by the Word of God.” As he spoke I kept thinking that he was very much coming from a Trappist approach. I remember one of my friends back at St. Meinrad who was infatuated with the Trappists leafing through a photo book about their life and repeating over and over again the caption, “In community––always in community.” Ab. Bernard emphasized over and over again that the monk’s personal identity can never be detached from koinonia, the single corporate identity, even before family ties, and that our deep responsibility for one another is the real Opus Dei, the real road back––as the Rule emphasizes our return to God from whom we have strayed. His allusions and citations were wonderful, also drawing on his own Jewish background and knowledge of Scripture, Bernard of Clairvaux and William of St. Thierry. He spoke about very practical issues in the monastery, men who are “Thessalonians” (those who eat but do not work), men who submarine and try to live like hermits (ouch!), and those who cringe when the smallest favor is asked of them. He also said at one point that he tells his monks, “If this is not the place you want to spend the rest of your life––in this place with these people–– then leave now while there is still time!”

He spoke a lot about the Word of God, and perhaps this was a particularly Jewish thrust: he said that like the Book of the Covenant the Word’s main task was building and sanctifying a People; God doesn’t speak to make mystics and build a “particular friendship” with us; God speaks to make us prophets and judges. He also noted that the rabbis considered the Song of Songs a sacred text because it spoke of G-d’s relationship with Israel. (I later asked him, but wasn’t it your own Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux who was the first one to write so eloquently about the Song being addressed to the individual soul? He answered, yes, but only in second place. Still…) One image that stayed with me was the two edged sword from the Letter to the Hebrews: the way the Word exits us is just as important as the way it enters us, how the Word empowers us, what it orders. It reminded me of the way I always talk about how the love of God poured into our hearts has to be complemented by stream of living water that flows out of the believer’s heart.

I must admit that I found him a little harsh. In the end he spoke about the joy being greater than that risk, but I didn’t find a lot of joy in his words, more a kind of old Trappist dura et aspera. Of course I had a specific optic as well, being from a hermit tradition and the prior of a hermitage. One of my main emphases has been to ensure all those above things as the basis for our solitude and to fill out our charism, the three-fold good. But I must admit I do not find our Saint Romuald to be a very good model when it comes to community and communion: he never stayed anywhere long, so it is hard to imagine him really giving himself to any community, nor his heart to any place in the broadest sense of the word.

We broke up into language groups then; the English-speaking group was so big that we broke up again into four smaller groups. That was very good, very interesting, to hear abbots speak from their own experience about the difficulties of being an abbot, and of holding communities together and guiding them through tough times. There was a lot of talk about the sexual abuse crisis, which has now hit England and Ireland broadside, and how that was all tied into some kind of real lacuna in formation. Several of them spoke about the problem of monks trying to live like hermits in their communities, and that being a problem with the Trappists as well, at one time their having an accent on “hermits living together,” concerned only for their own spiritual growth. I recalled the late Francis Kline’s notion that the Trappists were built on a faulty ecclesiology.

I’m still looking for the prophetic edge in this gathering, even here. I read through Panikkar’s Blessed Simplicity with a friend of mine this past year, and while I am here I keep thinking about his idea of integration rather than renunciation being the way of the new monasticism. And I am currently reading his Rhythm of Being, which is mind blowing, by the way, while I am traveling now; and it’s hard to see how any of that has infiltrated this. New wineskins. I’m still looking for and hoping for a new depth anthropology.

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managers and prophets

Nourish yourself internally

in peace, tranquility and perfect emptiness.

The original hidden light will shine

illuminating the entire body.

Close and lock the mouth

to reinforce the mysterious pearl.

Search for it and you will not be able to find it,

and yet it is nearby and easy to grasp.

                                            Tsan-tung-chi

A big wind blew through Rome last night and brought with it thunder, lightening and a good little rainstorm. The breeze has not stopped blowing all day, thanks be to God, so things have cooled down considerably. We got let out early today so I just had another long walk around the Forum and up Via Cavour to the Church of St. Mary of the Martyrs and Angels again, and then around, finding new alleys and ways back home.

My usual daily walk. The big blue dot is San Gregorio.

This was the first official day of the Congress. We are about 300 in all, I think. I saw a lot of familiar faces today, the abbots and priors from America for the most part. Our meeting space in the church felt even more like the Second Vatican Council, with all the simultaneous translators set up in their booths and the Book of the Gospels enshrined in the middle of the nave. Abbot Primate Notker Wolf began the day, after we sang Terce together (we never miss any of the canonical hours, and wow, is it ever an impressive sound, a chorus of men well-acquainted with the Gregorian chants). He spoke for almost an hour, a review of his mandate, the challenges and the accomplishments. He is very much and can-do kind of guy. I think he has been criticized for not being enough of a spiritual leader (I have heard that myself), and he must have been addressing that head-on when he said that his spirituality was nel fare–in doing. Nevertheless he has been very popular, very well travelled and very well conversant in several languages. As a matter of fact he delivered his short homily at Mass today in five languages!

Then the rest of the day was given to reports from the various congregations. That was interesting, to actually get a first hand acquaintance with the congregations from all over the world. We Camaldolese are not the smallest, by the way: the Slavic Congregation has only 30 monks! Every congregation was asked to prepare 3 questions (which somehow never made it to the American Camaldolese…): the five desired qualities of the next Abbot Primate, the five challenges and the five ways we can help him. Most of the answers were similar and what one might expect: ease with languages, capacity with finances (which came up a lot!), leadership, support of Sant’Anselmo, unity of the confederation, the challenge of diminishing numbers and fragile communities. I was impressed to hear that AIM and MID came up often––Alliance for International Monasticism, which aids monastics in developing countries (our Emanuele Bargellini, now in Brazil, is active with them) and Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, on whose board I have served for five years now.

One abbot from South America said two things that were very interesting. He said that he had heard from an Italian about Pope Francis that “He speaks Italian in a way that only Spanish speakers understand,” and he didn’t mean linguistically, but culturally. I assume he was referring specifically to the southern hemisphere. He also said, “The Holy Spirit has already chosen a new Abbot Primate. We must now discern who that is.” But my favorite intervento came from our own Prior General Alessandro, who was among the last few to speak. (Some of the monks around me thought he was an Olivetan and I quickly disabused them of that mistake. The Olivetan Abbot General, Diego, for some reason, was actually not here. I really wanted to meet him since we are in an agreement with him over the Monastery of the Risen Christ.) Alessandro said that all the qualities mentioned were fine, but we need more than a “manager.” (He used the English word.) We need a profeta–a prophet. Much like what he said to us when he was in California in May, he said it is important for monasticism to be significativo nella vita della Chiesa–meaningful in the life of the Church again. He and Gianni Giacomelli from Fonte Avellana and I had only spoken briefly before, but both Gianni and I had mentioned the situation with migration, and inter-cultural and well as inter-religious dialogue (“welcoming the stranger”), both of which Alessandro also mentioned. He spoke about having a charismatic leader in the New Testament sense, and of us needing a grande trasformazione. We nominated Abbot Gregory Polan of Conception in Missouri, who was the only one to get nominated by every single speaker, and Abbot Bernard Lorin of Maredsou in Belgium, who I do not know but of whom Gianni and Alessandro speak highly. I hope to meet him tomorrow. The smart money is on Gregory, who is a good friend of ours. Abbot Richard Yeo of the EBC also got several nominations, as did Elias Lorenzo from New Jersey, the newly elected president of the American Cassinese Congregation. I was surprised by the latter not realizing he was so well known and highly regarded. At the very end a Benedictine woman from the CIB (the confederation of Benedictine women, consisting of 14,000) spoke. Though not voting members, the Abbot Primate is also theirs and it was mentioned many times how important it was to keep alive a strong bond with the women. She was an American and spoke with what I think of as a typical American frankness; she ended by saying, “We did not come up the name of any woman or man that we would like to nominate for the office of Abbot Primate,” which took a while to translate and decipher, but did get a pretty good reception.

Another sculpture from the Certosa.

I turned to Abbot Lawrence of Shawnee Oklahoma after Alessandro spoke and said, “That’s my boy!” I think he really got peoples’ attention. During my afternoon walk I thought over and over again what it might mean for Christian monasticism to be prophetic. I will continue to ponder it, I suppose, but I came up with these things: simplicity of life in a counter-cultural sort of way, including a proper relationship to consumerism and technology; I do believe the inter-religious and inter-cultural elements are of prime importance; tapping into the great desire for contemplative practice and its transformative power; our relationship to the environment, global warming and stewardship of earths riches; and of course I want to add into that integral spirituality, the new asceticism that goes with a new depth anthropology.

Sometimes I must admit that with my role in administration at New Camaldoli I feel as if even my energy for those things is low, and that saddens me, but I am praying for a boost, an inspiration. I certainly don’t want to be merely a functionary keeping the bills paid and the trains running on time. We don’t need more managers; we need prophets! Our very life ought to be a prophetic witness.

Now, off to meditate. Good place to start the transformation.

saluti da Roma

The brothers back home were gracious enough to allow me a six-week mini-sabbatical working vacation, a little pause at the midpoint of my six year term as prior. From here I will be traveling to New Zealand, Australia, Singapore/Malaysia, mostly doing a few retreats and a little retreating myself. I’ve got just a bit of a yen to write again since I am on the road, so I’ve found my old blog (I had forgotten the address!), and we shall see what happens.

Saturday, 3 Sept.

I arrived safe and sound in Rome Friday morning. I was relayed by Jordan to San Jose where my friend John brought me the rest of the way up to my Euro hotel in Redwood City Wednesday PM. It was a very cool little inexpensive place, but I don't think I slept a wink all night. I’m not sure if it was the excitement about the trip or too much tea. At any rate, that plus not sleeping very much during the 16+ hours of flying, it was almost like a trip to India: I was so tired when I got here that I slept all through the night (nine hours!) and hoped that I had already overcome the jet lag. (I hadn’t quite.)

I had a good long walk Friday afternoon and another this morning, picked up all my supplies (my favorite Italian magazine, a book on Taoism in Italian, new sunglasses and a new shirt––yes, its grey but it’s a polo (Favored style of my Italian confreres), not a T-shirt, that shows some creativity, no?), and then just hung out at Roma Termini for a while just because I like it there. It feels so good just be on my own for a few weeks. I stopped in at the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri (Saint Mary of the Angels and Martyrs) on my way home. I thought I had never seen it before but afterward I remember my friend Stefano Rossi taking me there some years ago, his favorite spot. It’s a former Certosa-Charterhouse of the Carthusians near the historic baths of Diocletian. The church itself is rather typical Roman, but its unique feature is a small pinhole in the roof, whose light falls on a big zodiac calendar each day to mark the dates in the floor.  Besides the famous painting of St. Sebastian that is there, there were a few beautiful modern paintings and sculptures, one striking one of the head of John the Baptist.

 

It’s hot hot hot here in Rome still (feragosto-the summer break time, though there are lots of tourists) and sticky, especially up here on the top floor of San Gregorio, where I am staying. Our monastery shares space with the Missionaries of Charity––soon-to-be-Saint Teresa of Calcutta’s congregation––so there has been a steady crowd of people outside, and they are expecting a over 100,000 people in St Peter's Square tomorrow for the canonization.

* * *

I had to check in to the Congress of Abbots already Saturday night, an early session for newcomers. (Even though three years a prior, this is my first Congress.) I have not spent much time at Sant’Anselmo, the Benedictine University where the Congress is being held, on the Aventine right up from our Camaldolese nuns’ monastery, Sant’Antonio, and the ancient beautiful Dominican church of Santa Sabina. It’s a beautiful very clean and well-ordered campus. I was put somewhat at my own ease to realize that for many of us this would be our first real experience both of Sant’Anselmo and the Congress, so I was not the only one feeling a little spaesato (out of place). It certainly was fascinating to see and meet monks from literally all over the world, many Asians and Africans as well as from all over Europe and the southern hemisphere of the Americas. It is jarring sometimes to note just how informal we Camaldolese are in regards to a lot of the OSB world. (Our monks are the only students here, for instance, who don’t wear their habit to classes.) After aperitifs we had Vespers, all in Latin, Gregorian chant, and then an ample dinner was served. They are undoubtedly accustomed to feeding large crowds with much to choose from. And that was the end of it. I enjoy the walk to and fro; it only takes about twenty minutes across the bustling Circo Massimo and may be the only real exercise I get during these weeks.

Sunday was a bigger day. Departing at 7:30 AM from Sant’Anselmo we were taken for a day at Monte Cassino. It is close to Naples, about a two-hour bus ride. It is a massive impressive place that has a storied history. I’ll quote here from my homily (if I may) of this last Feast of Benedict: “There were several pivotal moments in the life of Saint Benedict. The way Saint Gregory the Great lays it out, one significant one was when Benedict left the remote Anio Valley where he had lived as a hermit for three years in the sacro speco near Subiaco and also had his first experiences as an abbot, and moved up to Monte Cassino, a plateau that can be seen from very far away.” I think I’ll re-post that homily here on this site (it’s on the Hermitage blog already, it will appear before this one). It is interesting for me even to look back on it now after having been to Monte Cassino and now attending the Congress.

The ancient part of the story is wonderful and I obviously learned more about the place being there. Benedict found and old temple to Apollo there, which he didn’t destroy but in a sense “baptized.” There was also an old Roman tower which is where Benedict had his cell and from which he had his famous vision which Gregory the Great writes about in his Dialogues. (Gregory actually mentions it twice, once in the life of Benedict and another time in Dialogue 4). This is right after his twin sister Scholastica has died, and both times Gregory mentions it, it is in connection with the death of Germanus the bishop of Capua.

In the dead of the night he suddenly beheld a flood of light shining down from above more brilliant than the sun, and with it every trace of darkness cleared away… According to his own description, the whole world was gathered up before his eyes in what appeared to be a single ray of light.

Part of our tour was to go down into the depths of existing structure and see everything that has been excavated, particularly after the destruction during World War II.

Monte Cassino after the bombing.

And that, of course, is the other part of the place’s history that is perhaps even better known in this day and age––the famous Battle of Monte Cassino of 1944. The Americans, mistakenly as it turned out, thought that the Germans were encamped there and bombed it to almost total destruction. The sad irony was that the Germans were able to occupy the ruins after the bombing, and the spot was only secured later by the Polish army, thousands of whom died and are buried there near the abbey.

I forget how much (perhaps especially in Europe? In Italy?) Benedictine monasticism gets associated with Gregorian chant and “traditional” liturgy. The first thing on our program was Mass. It was quite high church, Abbot Donato presiding in magnificent vesture, almost all in Latin except for the readings and homily. The Eucharistic Prayer as done facing “in the same direction as the people” (ad orientes). The music (again Gregorian) for the most part was executed by two monks and the exceptional organist. Those of us who chose not to be vested were seated in the choir, which was behind the high altar and so could see or hear almost nothing. It was all done very well, but my gosh, what a different world from Big Sur!

There are only eight monks there (at least as I counted) though it is a huge monastery. They treated us to a wonderful pranzo in the enormous refectory, and somehow I got places at the Abbot’s table (though on the very end). He speaks beautiful English (Oxford educated, I believe). And then we had a tour of the museum, sang Vespers with the monks and headed back home, not arriving back in Rome until 7:00. I was glad to get home to San Gregorio. By this time Don Alessandro had arrived and they were just sitting down to dinner, so I was greeted warmly and very happy to be back in the warm environs of a Camaldolese community. After dinner I couldn’t wait to get my habit off, throw on my shorts and go for a long walk (and some gelato) in the cool Roman evening.

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Today was our first morning of real conferences, four of them, all held in nave of the church at Sant’Anselmo, chairs set up on either side in choir style. (It reminded me vaguely of Vatican II!) There are also booths set up for simultaneous translators––English, French, German, French, Italian, Spanish. It must have been easier when everyone knew, or faked their way through, Latin. The first three sessions were pretty informative, Abbot Richard Yeo, who is one of the candidates for the next Abbot Primate, explained the Benedictine Confederation. I learned that we Camaldolese along with the Vallombrosians, the Sylvestrines and the Olivetans were the last congregations to join the Confederation, and that the Camaldolese of Monte Corona along with the Cistercians and the Reformed Cistercians were the only ones was not to accept the invitation to join. Then the outgoing prior of Sant’Anselmo, Elias Lorenzo, who is also a possible candidate but was just elected Abbot President of the American Cassinese Congregation, gave us a good explanation of Sant’Anselmo itself. It is made up of three distinct but interwoven communities––the Benedictine Curia, the community of students and faculty (the College) and the university itself (the Athenaeum). Then Abbot Placid Solari gave us quite a good history of the Athenaeum itself, starting with its inception as a school for the monks of San Paulo Fuori Muri–St. Paul Outside-the-Walls back in 1687, its demise after the Napoleonic Suppression and its resurrection under Leo XIII, who also mandated the Benedictine Confederation. The last talk was painful, all about juridical rights and finances, and I felt sorry for poor Abbot Bruno Malfer, who spoke in German to have to deliver it last after a long morning. (He also is a candidate, I’m told, but a bit of a dark horse.) I listened to his conference in the Italian translation just to keep myself entertained.

That’s all for now. We begin in earnest tomorrow and we shall see if I have anything fit to share.

Benedict: From the Valley to the High Plateau

This is a reprint and a slight re-working of a homily I gave for the feast of St. Benedict this year, July 11, that seemed apropos to re-offer as I head into this Congress of Abbots.

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I’d probably shouldn’t say (or write) this in public, but I feel like we Camaldolese, especially we American Camaldolese, have always had a sort of ambivalent relationship with the Benedictine Confederation to which we belong now since 1964 (as one untimely born, as St. Paul might say) though we have been under the Rule since our origins. This is also in spite of the fact that we are the oldest surviving Benedictine reform and congregation. (We are, I am told, the only congregation who dared to add extra initials to the sacred OSB––OSB Cam., indeed!) And because of that ambivalence, I feel like we unfortunately sometimes only have a kind of grudging respect for the great Saint Benedict, patriarch of Western monasticism. Since my time as prior, while recognizing the uniqueness of the Camaldolese charism and particularly of a Camaldolese hermitage such as New Camaldoli, I have tried to emphasize the universal evangelical monastic values that are embedded in Benedict’s Rule for Monks, and use those underlying values to understand why our Holy Father Romuald left us securely with the Benedictine container to hold our Camaldolese energy.

There were several pivotal moments in the life of Saint Benedict. The way Saint Gregory the Great lays it out, one significant one was when Benedict left the remote Anio Valley where he had lived as a hermit for three years in the sacro speco near Subiaco and also had his first experiences as an abbot, and moved up to Monte Cassino, a plateau that can be seen from very far away. Some would suggest that this move from the valley to the high plateau had a symbolic character. As Pope Emeritus Benedict wrote, in his wonderful essay on his namesake, a hidden monastic life has its own reason for existence (it’s own raison d’etre), but a monastery, a monastic community, has another one, a more public purpose both for and in the life of the Church, and for and in society, the purpose of giving “visibility to the faith as a force of life.” As Abbot Jeremy Driscoll says, this is our evangelization as monks––our life itself is an evangelizing word. And that’s what the Rule is, and the Benedictine heritage in general: faith as a full force of life: “I believe this and so I live like this.”

Take a quick look at the late fifth/early sixth centuries: the Roman Empire had officially come to an end when Romulus, the last emperor, was deposed in 476 by the barbarian leader, Odoacer, who himself was later overthrown by Theodoric the king of the Ostrogoths. And now Benedict (who is born around 478) is watching the collapse of the entire Roman civilization as the barbarian tribes begin to dismember an empire that was “already seriously weakened from within by misgovernment and oppressive taxation, and scourged by famine and pestilence.” In Gaul, the northern provinces are being sacked by barbarian invaders; the Vandals are spreading pillage and terror in Africa; Italy is prey to the Goths, the Huns and the Vandals.[i] Monastic life in various forms is holding on, extant throughout Italy and other parts of Europe, including a widespread hermit tradition. Fortunately the breakdown of order in society and all the pillage and destruction didn’t destroy monastic life. On the contrary, what it tended to do instead was draw monks out of their isolation and drew them to band together more in communities. There were still lots of hermits, but this is when more communal (cenobitic) life grew in popularity.[ii] It’s not much different 50 years after Benedict’s death when Gregory the Great is writing his Life and setting up Saint Benedict as a model. The Roman Empire was in the last stages of collapsing by then, the Emperor had abdicated, Rome was infected with famine and pestilence, floods and earthquakes, and the Greeks and barbarians were invading.

In some way Pope Benedict did something similar to what Pope Gregory the Great did in his “Life of Benedict” in the Dialogues: he set Benedict up as a paradigm, someone with a solution for what he saw as troubled times in Europe. Pope Benedict’s memory of course is such that he speaks with the authority of someone having had a front row seat in history. He is speaking of Europe only recently emerged from “a century that was deeply wounded by two world wars and the collapse of the great ideologies, [which were] now revealed as tragic utopias.” He wrote, “Europe today is in search of its own identity. Of course, in order to create new and lasting unity, political, economic, and juridical instruments are important; but it is also necessary to awaken an ethical and spiritual renewal that draws on the Christian roots of the continent.” Without this “vital sap,” he says––without ethical and spiritual renewal––we are exposed to the danger of succumbing to the ancient temptation of seeking to redeem ourselves by ourselves.[iii]

The ancient temptation of seeking to redeem ourselves by ourselves… This is the problem with ideologies and even of philosophies: they can give a rational outline of what we think should be, but in some way, just like the Law itself, as St. Paul rails against it, philosophies and ideologies do not have any power. As Etienne Gilson wrote about Saint Augustine and his being influenced by the Neo-Platonist Plotinus, for instance, we shouldn’t confuse adhesion with conversion, that is adhesion to a philosophy versus conversion to spiritual renewal. “That Plotinus should advise us to rise above sense, to rule our passions, and to adhere to God, that is all well and good! But will Plotinus give us the strength to follow this excellent advice?”[iv] And he appeals to Romans 7: We do not do what we want but what we hate––in this case, we do not always, we can’t always follow what we think is the right thing to do, the way to live; we can’t count on our ideologies and philosophies to save us. There has to be something more to give us the strength. And so we heard the famous phrase from John 15 as our Gospel passage on the feast of Saint Benedict: ‘Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in me, neither can you unless you abide in me.’ And so St. Paul says, Who will save me? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

And so for Benedict: the experience of God came first; without an experience of God we may have the knowledge but we do not have the strength. Philosophers and idealogues rationally figure things out and then hope to climb that ladder to union with God or some other utopia. But monastic life isn’t based on an ideology or a philosophy. Monks start out with union with God and then try to make sense of it; but even more importantly monks at their best build a life around that experience of the Divine, to protect it, to nurture it, to deepen that experience, then to pass it on and share it. What Robert Taft says about ritual applies here: Our life is ideology and experience in action. Our philosophy is the way we live. I think of the desert fathers; their response to a query might very well be, “Come and live with me, see what I do, see how I live.” Or Gandhi: the story I heard was that he was trying to keep silence during his journeys from place to place when he visited England, but the reporters kept chasing him, even as he boarded the train. One of them yelled to him, “Mr. Gandhi, what is your message?” And Gandhi-ji wrote on a little piece of paper and held it up to the window of the train, “My life is my message.”

From the valley of Anio to the high plateau… “Benedict’s spirituality was not an interiority [that was] removed from reality. In the midst of all the anxiety and confusion of his day, he lived under God’s gaze and in this very way never lost sight of the duties of daily life” and the duties of the human person with his or her very practical needs. Seeing God, Benedict understood the reality of the human person and humanity’s mission.[v] That’s why he said that his monastery was a “school of charity.”

There is one place where I respectfully disagree with the great Thomas Merton; during that last conference he gave in Bangkok, Merton told a story about a Tibetan lama who escaped his country to save his life. Before leaving, when still faced with the decision of whether or not to go, he sent a message to an abbot friend, asking: “What do we do?” The answer that came back was: “From now on, Brother, everyone stands on his own feet.” That doesn’t completely work for me. If he meant that we can’t rely on social, political, economic forces to shore us up, that’s fine. But if there is anything we have to model in the name of Jesus it’s that, just as the monks gathered in communities as the Roman Empire collapsed and offered an alternative society, from now on we have to take care of each other.

And so, what are we facing now in 2016, and what is our response, our solution, what is the alternative that we are proposing? In the face of domestic and foreign terrorism––from Columbine and Sandy Hook through 9/11 and ISIS; in a day and age of “Black Lives Matter” and policemen being gunned down; in a political arena that is as ideologically polarized as anything we’ve ever seen and an election cycle that one Republican senator described the other day as “a dumpster fire”; with a global immigration crisis due to warring states... Political, economic, and juridical instruments are important; but it is also necessary to awaken an ethical and spiritual renewal. That’s the vital sap. We sons of Benedict and Romuald have been placed on a high plateau, a city built on a hill, responding to the call of the Gospel and being an evangelizing word by how we live individually and communally, offering an example of faith as a full force of life.

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[i] RB 80, 65-66.

[ii] RB 80, 67.

[iii] Great Christian Thinkers, 129.

[iv] The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, 30.

[v] Great Christian Thinkers, 127.

the four oratories

The true servants of God sits in the midst of their fellows,

and rise and eat and sleep and marry

and buy and sell and give and take in bazaars

and spend the days with other people,

and yet never forget God even for a single moment.

(Abu Sa’id Ibn Abi’l-Khayr)

For some years now, inspired by Fr Bede Griffiths’ teaching about the spirit, soul and body, and by Sri Aurobindo of India and more recently folks like Ken Wilber, I’ve been interested in trying to articulate a Christian version of what is called “integral spirituality,” a spirituality that reverences and develops the whole person: the body––the physical being; the soul––the intellectual, creative and emotional aspects; as well as the so-called spiritual side of the person. Yesterday we celebrated the feast of Saint John Bosco, an 18^th century priest who dedicated his life to ministering to poor and homeless boys. (In this day and age of so much breach of fiduciary trust, it’s consoling to remember that some Catholic priests got it right.) He is also the founder of the congregation of Salesians, who run a grade school and high school up in Santa Cruz County near where I lived the past ten years. I had many occasions to work for and with them; as a matter of fact some of my best friends are from those schools, and so I grew to love Don Bosco and his unique approach to education. But one of the things that I like the best about Don Bosco is his teaching about “the four oratories,” the four places of prayer––cortile, casa, scuola, chiesa–playground, home, school, and church––which winds up being a pretty good example of exactly what I have been after. He taught the not just the church, but also the playground, the home and the classroom should all be considered to be oratories, places of prayer. I was thinking how much everyone (even, maybe especially, monks!) could take a lesson from this beautiful teaching.

Cortile really means a “courtyard.” In the Piedmontese region especially, I’m told, where John Bosco was from, houses are built with a kind of an open-air quadrangle court in the middle. But the word usually comes to be translated as “playground.” The playground as oratory; I like that a lot! I gave a talk once at Notre Dame on this same topic, “integral spirituality” from a Christian perspective, but I wanted to give it the subtitle, especially since it was at Notre Dame, “Why is it so far from the gym to the church?” What I mean is that what I have experienced of what competitive sports has become in the West––the behavior, the language, the attitude––the whole ecosystem is pretty different from the kind of environment one hopes to cultivate in a spiritual setting, let alone an oratory. One of the reasons I have been so fascinated with Asian traditions, whether it be from the martial arts or from Yoga or the various Buddhist physical disciplines, is that there usually tends to be a certain attitude of a spiritual presence, or at least a mindful concentration on the unity of the body and mind involved in physical activities, even athletic ones. What would it be like if all our physical activities––even taking a walk, exercise, lifting weights, running––were seen as part of our spiritual practice? Carl Jung thought a new yoga would arise in the West and that it would come specifically out of Christianity. The bigger issue of course is what would it be like if we really understood that caring for our physical being is also an important part of the spiritual life? Since we are an incarnational religion…

I like also that the cortile is outside, because we need to recover more and more our relationship to nature, and understand how symbiotically we are tied to it, and how much our own evolution and survival is tied to that of greater nature. And that this too is an integral part of our spirituality, if for no other reason than that we are stewards, servants of creation.

Between cortile and casa, there is also the issue of work. When I was a young monk I had a tendency to think that my work was something I had to get done so that I could get back to my cell and pray. But at some point my postulant master reminded me that I was supposed to be praying constantly; that’s the goal of the monastic life. This is what we learn from the best of the monastic tradition, or from someone like Bro Laurence of the Resurrection, finding God amid the pots and pans as he wrote about in his classic work The Practice of the Presence of God. Not only ought we pray while work; our work is also meant to be a prayer, and even the laundry room, the kitchen, the garage are all oratories. (I think of our old Bro Emmanuel sprinkling holy water on the tractor.) That’s why in his Rule for Monks St Benedict says that all the tools of the monastery should be treated like the vessels for the altar.

The casa–the home, means to me our emotional and interpersonal development. (This applies to monks and other religious, too. There is a communal aspect of our life and a relational aspect to being human. Our former prior general Don Benedetto, of happy memory, used to say, “Before a man can be a monk, he must be a man!”) There’s a phenomenon spoke of often in contemporary spiritual circles called “spiritual bypassing.” What spiritual bypassing means is that because we are outwardly “spiritual,” we might have the tendency to think we can skip all that messy work of psychological and emotional (i.e., human) development, and just be like angels floating above it all. It doesn’t work that way! We’re not made that way. What if we were to understand that our interpersonal skills, and our emotional and psychosexual growth were all a part of our spiritual life, just as important as saying our prayers? I think this is why even the marriage bed in a Christian tradition is supposed to be viewed as a holy place. We only grow through, with and in relationship––even hermit monks! That’s how God made us.

Of course scuola–school is a symbol of the intellectual life. I love the title of Jean le Clerq’s famous book, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. It’s one of those book titles that contain the whole message of the book, and that is the monastic tradition at its best. Learning not just for the sake of learning, not for the sake of a degree that will get you a better job, not just to show how smart you are, and certainly not as an escape from the real world, but learning as a valid path to knowledge of God. Yoga calls this jnana marga­–the path of knowledge. The whole person needs to be developed. We don’t leave our intellect behind either, but we reverence it as a part of the ecosystem.

And then finally chiesa­–the church, what we think of as the proper place of prayer. All that has gone before is what we bring to worship; everything from the cortile and the casa and the scuola is what gets collected and offered up in our prayer; everything from the playground, home and school is what is symbolized in the bread and wine that we offer; and everything of our physical, emotional, and intellectual beings is what gets accepted and changed into the Body of Christ, the fullness of the one who fills all in all.

They say that St Romuald wished that he could turn the whole world into a hermitage. In a similar vein, let’s hope that one day we could see the whole world as our oratory.