It is my day of recollection and I am finally reading the unpublished and strictly confidential “Schema” of Dom André Louf on “Cistercian eremitism.” It is really a very careful and judicious study, and solid in theory, though I do not agree with his theoretical solution–which was doubtless tempered to be totally “safe” and acceptable to Dom Gabriel (which it was not). His solution is that since the Cistercians occupy a definite place in the ordo monasticus [monastic order] and should provide a quasi-solitude in community, an institutionally recognized eremitism on the margin of this life would be confusing and undesirable and therefore hermit vocations should transfer to the Camaldolese. This of course depends on whether the Cistercian community fulfills its proper function of providing a “quasi-eremitical solitude in community” by virtue of silence, poverty, seclusion, etc. In actual fact, with the uproar and activity, machines, etc., our monastery does not do this–as everyone realizes. Hence a marginal “eremitism”–which, however, is not serious or thorough–mostly a matter of walks in the woods alone. (But this is a real need and only thus can we meet something of our requirements.)
In my mind then the only solution here is–more of this “marginal” eremitism–and places where people can go for a day–even a week–alone. The “danger” is not terribly great. There are few who really want more than an afternoon’s solitude. André Louf is very good about the naive self-assurance of cenobitic declarations that “all the solitude you need is found right in our own Order.” He refers to St. Bernard and Blessed Guerric (already courageous enough!) but I am sure he meant Dom Gabriel who was utterly definite on this point. Later in the article he returns in practice to “marginal solitude”–“une grande souplesse sur le plan concret” [“a great flexibility in the concrete plan”]–and has very good suggestions all along the line. Father Prior, who spoke of this paper in Chapter when Dom James was gone (much to the latter’s irritation), omitted the second part which is the best–the practical part. The theory alone is misleading and can be “used” against those who need solitude.
Dom André brings out this criterion of a fully solitary vocation, in a Cistercian. “La fidelité soutenue du sujet à choisir spontanément, dans sa vie de céno-bite, toujours les situations qui l’établissent dans un grand dénuement matériel, intellectuel, ou spirituel, l’obligeant à une vie de foi de plus en plus pure, entièrement suspendue au bon volonté du Seigneur.” [“The sustained faithfulness of a person in choosing spontaneously, in his life as a monk, always the situations that establish him in great material, intellectual or spiritual destitution, compels him to a life of faith that is more and more pure, entirely dependent on the good will of the Lord.”]
How evident it is that this denudation has been lacking in my life. I have kept myself safely provided with lots of cushions (books, indulgences, etc.), yet I know that my way too is and must be a way of faith–I wish I had been more loyal to its graces! Yet in the long run I have tried to face contradictions and to let myself be caught in the seeming intolerable grip of conflicting opposites (to find there is no conflict when you face it!!). I have been slow and fearful, but God has kept pulling me in that direction nevertheless, and from time to time I see it! I will go on, with His grace. All the same, this accounts for a fantastic and humiliating ambiguity in my life, an ambiguity so great that I must forever give up trying to justify my course in the eyes of men, or even sometimes in my own. Sometimes I seem to be so wrong that it is frightening–yet there is always the realization that the apparently “right” course would in some mysterious way be even more wrong. And I cannot explain it. The only solution is, in all dread and humility, to accept not to be “right,” and leave the consequences in God’s hands.
André Louf has a fantastically accurate statement about the masked call to spiritual liberty that may go with a humiliating infirmity. One’s vocation, one’s incapacity becomes itself that liberty (it humiliates totally)–and we don’t have the courage to see and admit it. Then we deprive ourselves of our joy. He does not say all this–the conclusions are from my own experience. How good God has really been to me! And through fear I have been ungrateful.
February 22, 1964
Today is the twenty-second anniversary of my reception of the habit. And in all sobriety and honesty I must admit that the twenty-two years have not been well spent, at least as far as my part in them has been concerned, although from God there has been nothing but grace and mercy. Rather twenty-two years of relative confusion, often coming close to doubt and infidelity, agonized aspirations for “something better,” criticism of what I have, inexplicable inner suffering that is largely my own fault, insufficient efforts to overcome myself, inability to find my way, perhaps culpably straying off into things that do not concern me. Yet in the heart of it is a kind of standing aghast at the situation, the ambiguity, in which I find myself. In the depths of my heart I do embrace the Cross of Christ but I fear to verbalize about it, and wonder if this failure is a failure of faith…and so on. Nescio, Domine, Miserere mei! [I don’t know, Lord. Have mercy on me! ]
I do know this–that after the first half year or so (beginner’s consolations!) I ran into years of false fervor, asceticism, intransigence, intolerance, and this lasted more or less until I was ordained. I am trying to get back now to a little of the asceticism (how awfully little!) without the intolerance and uncharity, yet I am still not broad and warm as a monk this long in the monastery ought to be. All this, I know, is useless talk. Better to find refuge in the psalms, in the chanted office, the Liturgy. That is deep and real, and one thing I have learned to trust-though I am suspicious of the nonsense and “projects” that always surround it.
Yesterday there was a building committee meeting. We are about to move into the renewed South wing (temporary library on third floor). The new abbatial suite is nearly finished. In about a year I suppose the refectory will move there (temporarily) too. I do not like the concrete shaft that is supposed to run down the middle of the facade, but having had my say against it I have nothing more to do. The waterworks has been running for a couple of months, or rather for about six weeks. When was it–end of retreat?–that the water suddenly got good again.
Is [Joseph] Lortz too severe on Erasmus? Reading him after dinner today I wondered about this. Erasmus was “hardly a Christian,” etc. A scholar, an individualist, not enough sense of the Church, etc. Yet his piety is so clean, so simple and so real. It is a breath of fresh air after so much of the late M. G[ilmore]. In a way I like it even better than Thomas More’s “Moralism.” But was this not needed at this time? And it is completely Evangelical. Erasmus is perhaps one sided, perhaps lacking in the full Catholic spirit, was perhaps a danger in many ways, but how can one read him today without joy and agreement? Heis a splendid writer and to my mind a deeply pious one. And his satires, are they after all too bitter, too extreme? One feels that his Catholic critics almost begrudge him his fidelity to the Church, as if, to satisfy them, he ought to have apostatized and given them an open and shut case against him.
February 23, 1964
Brother Benet (Leo Denoncourt) is back. A professed brother who went on leave of absence to a seminary to study for the priesthood, came back to choir novitiate last summer for a few weeks, left for New Hampshire in confusion on six months leave of absence, returned here to give it another try last week, but lost all his desire for it on the way down. Now he is in the guest house, confused, small, thin, tired, anxious. I am sorry for him and do not know how to help him. If he came in now he would last three days. He has apparently lost everything. Yet he was a good and seemingly happy brother. How does one explain these things? He entered too young? And so on!
February 24, 1964
There is going to be revolution all over Latin America. This revolution is inevitable. It can be either violent or non-violent. It depends on the comprehension of the U.S. whether the revolution is non-violent, reasoned, democratic, gradual and effective. The U.S. must want and participate in the revo
lutionary reforms that are demanded. It must share the difficulty and the sacrifice. Is it capable of this? The Panama crisis (now quiet) makes me think not. There is a total lack of comprehension of our involvement in Latin America and of Latin American needs and grievances. Dire needs, just grievances. The high wages of U.S. industrial workers are due in part to low wages of South American miners and agricultural workers. The profits of U.S. business are due in great part to the captive economies of one-crop states in Latin America. Hence the probability that the U.S. will support military oligarchies that support the mine owners and landed gentry in South America. Hence the probability of violent revolution. It will be an American revolution, hemispheric–in which the U.S. as a whole will figure as an upper-class oppressor and antagonist class and national issues being thoroughly confused.
Today I said Mass for Latin America–not that the revolution should not happen, but that there may be a truly just social order, established not through chaos and violence, but solidly and in true equity. The Mass of the day was appropriate–especially the Lesson from Daniel 9. “Propter peccata nostra, et iniquitates patrum nostrorum, Jerusalem et populus tuus in opprobium sunt omnibus per circuitum nostrum” [“Because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and thy people are become a reproach to all that are about us”], etc.
February 25, 1964
An unpublished great monastic dialogue in the Missale Romanum for 1956 has fine things in it. About prayer the last question (31) says that when we have done an injustice to another, his grievance stands between our prayer and God and prevents it from reaching God. Apply this to the world today, and to our American Church: our fellow man cries out to God against the injustice our system is doing to him. We prosper at his expense. Our concern for him is well meant, but illusory. It cannot be efficacious. It can only be a gesture. Yet the communist power system is in many respects worse. This too is cried out against. Our prayer is not valid unless we are willing to work to change the systems we now have–as Mater et Magistra, Pacem in Terris [papal encyclicals] have plainly said.
February 29, 1964
[Rolf] Hochhuth’s The Deputy is in New York and everything explodes with it. Someone tucked under my napkin in refectory a couple of tearsheets from the Herald Tribune of last Sunday, by Hannah Arendt, on this play. (Probably Matt Scott.) The Commonweal is full of it (best article is by Friedrich Heer). Hochhuth apparently justifies his play as perfectly fair and not anti-Catholic because it is directed “only at Pius XII” and not at 260 other Popes. On the other hand it seems to me that this is precisely the injustice of the play. If there is responsibility, then the responsibility is the Church’s and is not to be laid at the door of one Pope.
Pius XII was a complex and perhaps tormented person (who knows?), but at any rate he was the captive of his own idea of the Papacy and that was the Church’s idea, the curial idea. Indeed he was prisoner of his own idea of the Church–even though he was the author of Mystici Corporis and Mediator Dei. Idea that the Church can by power politics and diplomacy achieve ends which are essentially charismatic! And this view unsensibly shades off to another: that the ends achieved by political means are in fact spiritual and sufficiently spiritual and for the good of all, for the glory of Christ, etc. Hence that political success in fact covers the neck of the Church and of souls in a critical situation. That which serves Papal policy is in fact the best for everybody and that which hinders it is evil.
But the Pope can see reality in political rather than in human and religious terms. He can favor people like Franco, Mussolini, even Hitler, and he can regard the Communists as the single incontrovertible menace to the Church, etc. In point of fact the fascist tendencies in the political thought of Pius XII enabled him even to neglect the Jews who had become Catholics and for whom he was responsible. Though of course he did try to intervene unofficially and non-politically for some Jews. Effect of the separatism of political reality from the rest of human reality.
Meanwhile the Church at large–Catholic Press, hierarchy, etc.–continues with much the same concept that dominated and guided Pius XII (it has not been radically changed even by the example of Pope John). Now that the question of the Jews has come up in the Council exactly the same roadblock is met with: one cannot go further because to defend the Jews even on religious and spiritual grounds has political implications that are disadvantageous!
The other day–a horrible afternoon. [James] Wygal was out here, it rained, we sat in the hermitage and made sandwiches for lunch, etc., wandered in the woods and I came home finally with flu. I felt that the whole thing had been a complete waste, an absurdity in which I had been pretending and had been untrue to myself, my life, my own vocation to solitude etc. [Four lines crossed out here.] I have nothing against consulting him once in a while and being on friendly terms in town, but something revolts in me when it comes to having him out here when no one else has such freedom. It is as if I were lying, as one often must in social life but for me there is no reason to do so, and no real excuse. [Four lines crossed out.]
I had somewhat the same feeling about Naomi Burton last summer. She is a good friend, too, and an old one, but she is not my sister or anything like that, and I got myself upset after acting more or less as if she were, when I knew I would not mean any such thing. I don’t like this business and don’t understand it. Perhaps largely a deficiency in myself, but in view of my situation, I think not, at least not altogether. There is more than a mere personal eccentricity here.
March 1, 1964
Returning to the problem of (useless) “social contacts,” what is wrong is not so much the fact that they are social but that they are not meaningfully social in the context of my monastic life. An empty conviviality with people not of my own community, or contacts not demanded by charity, do not signify the confusion of a life that is uncertain of its commitment. This is intolerable. (It is my Billy Cosgrove—Father Urban situation!)
March 2, 1964
Dom Damian, Superior of the Trappist Monastery in Japan, has been here. I had to translate for him in Chapter Saturday (his French is very hard to follow). Main thing that impressed me in his talk was his fear of the new Japanese religion Soka Gokkai–fanatical right-wing religio-political movement that is growing faster than any other movement in the world today. Someday it may cause a lot of trouble.
Stay with Chuang Tzu, [César] Vallejo, etc. Be true to your afternoon and learn poetry and experience.
March 3, 1964
I had been hoping to republish the few articles on nuclear war which had been permitted by Dom Gabriel–thinking that it was enough that he had permitted them once. Not so. The new General, Dom Ignace, dug into the files, held a meeting of definitors, and declared that there was to be no republication of these articles. Thus I am still not permitted to say what Pope John said in Pacem in Terris. Reason: “That is not the job of a monk, it is for the Bishops.” Certainly it has a basis in monastic tradition. “Monachi plangentis non docentis est officium.” [“The job of the monk is to weep, not to teach.”] But–with things here: our cheese business and all the other “plangent” functions we have undertaken, it seems strange that a monk should be forbidden to stand up for the truth, particularly when the truth (in this case) is disastrously neglected.
A grim insight into the stupor of the Church, in spite of all that has been attempted, all efforts to wake her up! It all falls into place. Pope Pius XII and the Jews, the Church in South America, the treatment of Negroes in the U.S., the Catholics on the French right in the Algerian affair, the German Catholics under Hitler. All this fits into one big picture and our contemplative recollection is not very impressive when it is seen only as another little piece fitted into the puzzle. The whole thing is too sad and too serious for bitterness. I have the impression that my education is beginning–only just beginning and that I have a lot more terrible things to learn before I can know the real meaning of hope.
There is no consolation, only futility, in
the idea that one is a kind of martyr for a cause. I am not a martyr for anything, I am afraid. I wanted to act like a reasonable, civilized, responsible Christian of my time. I am not allowed to do this, and I am told I have renounced this–fine. In favor of what? In favor of a silence which is deeply and completely in complicity with all the forces that carry out oppression, injustice, aggression, exploitation, war. In other words silent complicity is presented as a “greater good” than honest, conscientious protest–it is supposed to be part of my vowed life, is for the “glory of God.” Certainly I refuse complicity. My silence itself is a protest and those who know me are aware of this fact. I have at least been able to write enough to make that clear. Also I cannot leave here in order to protest since the meaning of any protest depends on my staying here. Anyway I am definitely silenced on the subject of nuclear war.
The letter [from Dom Ignace] also seemed to indicate that the whole book (Seeds of Destruction) was stopped, but this must be a mistake as the Black Revolution is appearing this month in France.
I have a splitting headache.
Later. In a way I am content. It certainly is a big step toward being less public. There is a great good in drying up and vanishing into the sand. Not into this kind of sand, however.
Instructed by Sartre. I know this is not an adventure, and it in no way has the mode of happening that belongs to an adventure. I too have never seriously had adventures or even “experiences,” that “happen,” that “arrive.” I don’t have the slightest objection to regard this prohibition on an “event” that has slowly “arrived” here from Rome and reached the point of happening as it were a puff of smoke, signalling the explosion of a non-lethal missile in my immediate neighborhood. (That is one of the things that most sickened me last Wednesday, Wygal’s conviction that we were having “a wonderful time” and that some kind of event was taking place, which gave life a meaning. What actually happened was meaninglessness in the shape of an “Event.”)
Dancing in the Water of Life Page 12