St. Maximus [the Confessor] says that he who “has sanctified his senses by looking with purity at all things” becomes like God. This is, I think, what the Zen masters tried to do. A letter from John Wu spoke of running into Suzuki at Honolulu last summer. They talked of my meeting with him in New York. Suzuki was going to ask me a question but didn’t. “If God created the world who created the Creator?” A good koan.
December 29, 1964. St. Thomas of Canterbury
On Christmas Day, in the afternoon, Brother Colman and I drove over into the hills behind New Hope, in the area where Edelin is giving the monastery land for hermitages. As there is no road near the west end of that land (or I think not) we got an idea of it from the next valley, where the old ridge road goes from New Hope to Howardstown. Then we explored other such valleys, following the back roads as far as they went. The hills that look like a solid mass from here are, of course, a labyrinth of deep, silent, wooded valleys, with farms in the bottom. A whole world of wonderful hidden places, some very lost and wild. I am planning to get over there some day and spend the day on foot exploring the area around Edelin’s and seeing where his land goes (if I can get any idea of the boundaries!).
There was a little sun Christmas afternoon but the rest of the time has been grey and dark. I can’t even remember what I did St. Stephen’s afternoon, when it was raining. Yesterday, Holy Innocents, Brother Joachim was looking the hermitage over to plan the wiring for lights and an electric cooking stove. I finished Von Durkheim, The Japanese Cult of Tranquillity. The best and most revealing part is the appendix from a Japanese master of swordsmanship speaking of the “sword that kills and gives life” in the tradition of Takuan. Actually the pinnacle of swordsmanship is not violence and killing but simply a “truth” against which the opponent can ruin himself or by which he can be enlightened. A fascinating concept. Only “the animal man” seeks to “win” (“prevail”). But the spiritual man is simply true and the law of truth has to “win” in him.
“Love comes from prayer and prayer from remaining in seclusion” (Isaac of Syria). Certainly the break in my more solitary routine (going down to monastery earlier without the long meditation, spending most of the day there, ceremonies, lectures, etc.) has created a kind of confusion, disturbance and laxity. But in the trouble itself and in the confusion I have had to struggle for deeper conviction and commitment. Solitude is not something to play with from time to time. It is going to be difficult to remain divided next year between hermitage and community, two tempos and two ways of life. And yet of course I still need a good part of common life, and will always need to maintain very definite contacts. But it is hard and confusing to be uprooted from peace every time you begin barely to get into it–or rather, not to be able to sink completely into unity and simplicity. There is peace too in community, of course, but it has a different and more active rhythm.
Yet in this solitude there must be, with the fiery substance of the eternal prophets, also the terse anger and irony and humor of the Latin American poets with whom I am united in bonds of warmth and empathy, for instance the Peruvian Blanca Varela (I must translate her, a poem or two), or Jorge Eduard Eielson!
At last there is light again. First there were some stars here and there, when I first got up at 2:15. Then a surprise–in an unexpected corner of woods, the thin last slice of leftover moon, the last moon of 1964. The sun came up at 8:05 (our time here is unnatural, as we are on Eastern standard). Then there was the extraordinary purity and stillness and calm of that moment of surprise and renewal. Peace of the woods and the valley, but there somewhere a heifer salutes the morning with enthusiastic lowing.
January 1, 1965
I woke up this morning with the vague feeling that something was walking around the hermitage: it was the rain again. So begins the imagined new year. Yet it is too well imagined, and the date 1965 on the new ordo confounds me. My Mass was fine and so was the thanksgiving afterward, and the last thing I read before going to bed in the “old year” was a letter of Peter Damian to two hermits (recently republished by Dom Leclercq). They wanted to be buried, when they died, at their hermitage and nowhere else. I can agree with that!
I got a fine letter from John Wu and a chapter of his book (in progress) on Zen [The Golden Age of Zen, 1967]–a good chapter on Hui Neng. Also a letter from Webster College, where they will want the exhibit of drawings in April. A card from the Polish Marxist who was here with the group from Indiana University–where was it? I had a long talk with Brother Basil (McMurry) who thinks he will leave here when his simple vows run out, and go to Mount Saviour. But on a special basis.
It seems to be a mistake to read in uninterrupted succession in the refectory one speech after another by Pope Paul, just as it was a mistake to try to read all the Council interventions. One becomes very oppressed with the jargon, the uniform tone of official optimism and “inspirationalism,” etc. Yet the Pope said good things both at Bombay and in his Christmas message, on Peace and the need for disarmament. And against nationalism and the arms race and stockpiling “overkill” weapons.
January 4, 1965
Worse than Council speeches in refectory–Archbishop O’Boyle’s “explanations” of the last two days of the Council. And then after that the Time story on the murder of hostages in Stanleyville (Congo) last November. A tragic thing but the true story, equally tragic, assumes fantastic perspective. No indication that anybody could possibly be wrong but the African rebels. And that the Tshombe-Belgian-American intervention is the only thing that could possibly be reasonable, human, etc. Were the hostages martyrs to a Red plot, or also to the greed of the people who want to hold on to the mines in Katanga? The trouble is that indignation and horror swept the community (and they should). But with them also a complete conviction that of course the implied judgment and interpretation of Time was completely satisfactory and final.
When you think that all over the country it is this way about Cuba, Viet Nam, the Congo etc.–what can possibly come of it but one dirty adventure on top of another. Use of torture in Viet Nam (by our side) is admitted without apology as something quite reasonable.
January 6, 1965
Yesterday was extraordinary. I had planned to take a whole day of recollection out in the knobs around Edelin’s hollow, to explore the place and get some idea of where it goes and what is around it. Fortunately old Edelin came along with Brother Colman, who drove me out in the Scout, to show me where one could get into his property from the top of the knobs on the west. It is wonderful wild country and I had a marvelous day. We left the monastery about 8:15, started back into the knobs to the southwest of New Hope, and climbed the narrow road that clings to the steep hillside above Old Coon Hollow. (Not to be confused, Edelin says, with Coon Hollow.) At the top of the rise we got onto a rolling table land of scrub oak and sassafras, with deep hollows biting into it. The old road runs along the watershed between the Rolling Fork valley and the other valley where Edelin’s house is. It is a magnificent wild, scrubby, lost road. The sun was bright, and the air was not too cold.
I got off near where the woods slope down (about a mile) into Edelin’s Hollow. At the top, amid the thick tangle of trees and wild grape is a collapsed house. In a half-cleared area there are still pear trees, and Edelin says the deer like to come and eat the pears. Here too, in a gully, is the spring which feeds the stream running through Edelin’s pasture (actually one of several streams that join there). So they left me there, and I went down to the spring, found it without trouble. Wonderful clear water pouring strongly out of a cleft in the mossy rock. I drank from it in my cupped hands and suddenly realized it was years, perhaps twenty-five or thirty years, since I had tasted such water: absolutely pure and clear, and sweet with the freshness of untouched water, no chemicals!! I looked up at the clear sky and the tops of the leafless trees shining in the sun and it was a moment of angelic lucidity. Said Tierce with great joy, overflowing joy, as if the land and woods and spring were all praising God through me. A
gain their sense of angelic transparency of everything, and of pure, simple and total light. The word that comes closest to pointing to it is simple. It was all simple. But a simplicity to which one seems to aspire, only seldom to attain it. A simplicity that is, and has, and says everything just because it is simple.
After that I scrambled around a bit on the steep, rocky hillside, in the sun to get oriented, and then started through the thick sassafras out on a long wooded space which, I guessed, would overlook the Hollow, and it did. After about half a mile through very thick brush, with vines and creepers and brambles and much young growth (bigger trees damaged by fire), I came to the end, and could see the hollow in haze against the sun. I could see the part of the pasture on a hillside a mile or so away where three walnut trees grow. And of course the other side of the valley and the country road. Most of the view was of knobs and woods, a sea of sun and haze and silence and trees. Sat there a long time, said Sext, read a letter from Milosz (an important one) and had a marvelous box lunch which Leone Gannon at the Ladies’ guest house got up for me. And as time went on I was more and more under the spell of the place until finally, about 12, the sky began to cloud over.
The SAC planes. I forgot to mention that while I was at the spring after Tierce, when I was about to go, the huge SAC plane announced its coming and immediately swooped exactly overhead not more than two or three hundred feet above the hilltops. It was fantastic, and sure enough I could see the trap door of the bomb bays. The whole thing was an awesome part of the “simplicity,” a sign and an “of course,” and it had a great deal to do with all the rest of the day. During the day, in fact, five SAC planes went over, not exactly over this particular hollow but all visible from it, i.e., very close, within a mile (otherwise one could not see them, flying so low, with so many hills around). Only the first and the last went directly over me. But directly so that I was looking right up at the H bomb!!! This was fantastic. Of course the mere concept of fear was utterly meaningless, out of the question. I felt only an intellectual and moral intuition, an “of course,” which seemed to be part of the whole day and its experience.
Speaking perhaps unwisely, yet soberly, the thing that I was left with was the most overwhelming conviction that I was called by God simply to live the rest of my life totally alone in that hollow where I would be morally and symbolically “under the bomb” and where also a hundred years ago slaves were living. It would mean real poverty, real solitude, real interiority, real renunciation, a silence that would break ties of identification with all movements monastic or otherwise, pacifist or otherwise, and yet also the possibility of being shot by some drunken neighbor who finally discovered that I was not in full accord with the time-honored principles of the South.
Near the collapsed house is a clearing with rubbish lying around. Beer cans with bullet holes in them, a pair of shoes, chewing gum wrappers, etc., etc. It was, said Edelin, a “dance hall.” A place where people from the hollows came up to get drunk and raise hell. It is near the spring but far from the hollow.
I went down a logging trail (many trees were cut this fall and winter), beautiful wet trail, into the hollow full of tall beech trees and other hardwoods (most of the mature oaks were cut), a lovely, silent walk, with streams full of clear water, and suddenly came out into Edelin’s pasture, at the bottom. The place just took my breath away. I had seen it before in September, but without this “angelic light” (now the sun was hidden and the sky overcast, but there was a sense of blessed silence, and a joy, and again that “simplicity”). But also the sense that here was the place for “the house.” I wandered up and down the hollow, in the empty pasture, tasting the silence and peace. Went up the hillside where the two knob hawks came out screaming and wheeled over to the other side of the valley. I found the old half burnt barn (belonging to one of Edelin’s neighbors) in a branch of the hollow. I began the office of Epiphany in the open space where there are still stones from the foundation of the slaves’ house (I could use them as foundation for “the house”). Went back to “my place.” Sat on a felled white oak and looked down the hollow until I had to go. The last SAC plane went over again, right overhead, the bomb pointed to the chosen place.
I read a beautiful blessing over the valley (a Benedictio Loci in the Breviary–the long one). Never has a written prayer meant so much. I know one day there will be hermits here, or men living alone. But I think the hollow is already blessed because of the slaves that were there (perhaps one of them was very holy!). So I went back up the logging trail and met Brother Colman and Edelin in the Scout coming along the old road at the top. Never was there such a day. On the way down we stopped and looked at a new log cabin, and Brother Colman is anxious to build one.
January 8, 1965
When I got back and calmed down the other evening, I realized I was being enthusiastic and unreasonable. All day Epiphany I had a sort of emotional hangover from that day in the woods. Sat at the top of the field looking down at the hermitage, tried to meditate sanely in the sun, came out quieter. And cooked myself some supper–a thin potato soup made out of dust in an envelope.
Then as the sun was setting I looked up at the end of the field where I had sat in the afternoon, and suddenly realized that there were beings there–deer. In the evening light they were hard to descry against the tall brown grass, but I could pick out at least five. They stood still looking at me, and I stood looking at them, a lovely moment that stretched into ten minutes perhaps! They did not run (though kids could be heard shouting somewhere down by the waterworks) but eventually walked quietly into the tall grass and bushes and for all I know slept there. When they walked they seemed to multiply so that in the end I thought there must be at least ten of them.
Yesterday I spoke to Reverend Father about Edelin’s valley and he said there could be no question of going there until the monastery had title to the land. And he is also thinking of buying other property next to Edelin’s so that the place will be protected. He seems intent on eventually having hermitages there. It is clearly not yet time to be thinking of moving there, and I have this place now that I have just begun to really “live” in. Brother Joachim is slowly getting it wired up for electric light, etc. and there is an old heat-up electric stove to cook my soup on, when it has current to work on.
As for the SAC, it is perfectly impartial. Yesterday afternoon as I was saying office on the walk below the novitiate, before seeing Reverend Father, the SAC plane swooped by right over the hermitage. I would say it was hardly 150 feet above the tree tops.
January 9, 1965
Again, last night in the warm dark, before the plentiful rain, the plane again (though perhaps smaller than the SAC) came right over the hermitage in the dark, a cross of the four lights, a technological swan.
La espesa rueda de la tierra
Su llanto hùmedo de olvido
Hace rodar, cortando el tiempo
En mitades inaccesibles.
[Its wet complaint of forgetting
Is what makes turn the world’s thick wheel.
Cutting time
Into inaccessible halves.]
([Pablo] Neruda)
Full of rice which I found a new good way of cooking. Peace. Silence.
Clayton Eshelman sent his translation of Residencia en la Tierra [by Pablo Neruda]. Some of it is very successful. On the whole a good translation.
January 10, 1965
Jaspers says (and this is analogous to a basic principle in Jacques Ellul also): “Once I envision world history or life’s entirety as a kind of finite totality I can act only on the basis of sham knowledge, in distortion of actual possibilities, far from reality, vague about facts, achieving nothing but confusion and advancing in directions altogether different from those I wanted” (Nietzsche and Christianity, p. 58). And this applies also to monastic reform.
“Whenever my knowledge is chained to total concepts, whenever my actions are based on a specific world-view, I am distracted from what I am really able to do. I am
cheated on the present…for the sake of something imagined (past or future) rather than real, which has not been actually lived and has never been realized” Ibid. p. 60. (Note that in “monastic ideals” this is precisely the problem. One assumes that the ideal was once fully real and actually lived, and then one has every “reason” for resentment at the unrealization of what cannot be, and never was real. In actual fact the true monks had a reality which was quite different, and accorded entirely and precisely with their own accepted circumstances.) “The man who keeps faith with reality wants to act truthfully in the here and now, not to derive a second hand here and now from a purpose” (p. 60).
Problem of false “Christian” historicism which sets up history as a unity that “can be comprehended.” Nietzsche did and did not see this danger (he may have fallen into it himself). But he said that because of this change of focus centered on history, “God was dead” and His death was the fault of Christianity. Nietzsche also made his classic analysis of Christian morality and the Christian will to truth being in the end self-destructive. The ultimate end of the Christian will to truth was to destroy even itself by doubt, said Nietzsche. (This Christianity ends in nihilism.) We certainly see something of this in monasticism today–with the breakdown of confidence in authority and the insatiable thirst for an “authentic” ideal, monks are becoming incapable of accepting and resting in anything–yet they do not really seek God, they seek a “perfect monasticism.”
All that Nietzsche said about Christianity immediately becomes true as soon as one puts anything else before God–whether it be history, or culture, or science, or contemplation, or liturgy, or reform, or “justice,” etc., etc. But Jaspers has a brilliant insight into the real possibility of Nietzsche–if “all is permitted” there is an alternative to the nihilism of despair. The nihilism of strength “drawn from the darkness of the encompassing and able to do without ties to supposedly finite objectives, maxims and laws” (p. 84). Is not this Christianity? “It needs no such ties because from the depths of the encompassing it will always come upon what is true and what is to be done. It will know historically and with the tranquillity of eternity,” etc.
Dancing in the Water of Life Page 25