Here? The profoundest and happiest times of my life have been in and around Gethsemani—and also some of the most terrible. But mostly the happy moments were in the woods and fields, alone, with the sky and the sun–and up here at the hermitage. And with the novices (afternoons at work). But good moments too with Protestants coming here, especially with the Hammers of course (and one or two visits to Lexington), good visits with J. Laughlin, Ping Ferry–Good days in Louisville with Jim Wygal–lunch at Cunningham’s, etc. But the deepest happiness has always been when I was alone, either here in the hermitage (best of all) or in the Novice Master’s room (that wonderful summer of the gardenias and Plato!) or simply out in the fields. Of course there was the old vault, too, and I must mention many happy moments with the students when I was their Father Master. Also a couple of good days in the hospital when I was well enough to go out and walk about near the grotto.
I could fill another page just with names of people I have loved to be with and love to hear from–Lax above all, and Mark Van Doren and all the old friends, and Reinhardt and so on, and Naomi [Burton Stone], and Bob Giroux, and all my Latin American friends like Ernesto Cardenal and Pablo Antonio [Cuadra]…. So many students and novices, especially for some reason the group that came in 1960–61. (Brothers Cuthbert, Denis, Basil, etc.) And so many that have left–Father John of the Cross!…Why go on? Deo gratias [thank God] for all of them.
January 31, 1965
“Intrans in domum meam, conquiescam cum illa: non enim habet amaritudinem conversatio illius, nec taedium convictus illus, sed laetitiam et gaudium.” [“When I go home I shall take my ease with her, for nothing is bitter in her company, when life is shared with her there is no pain, nothing but pleasure and joy.”]
(Sapientia [ Wisdom] 8:16)
On this day I could set these words to very sweet music if I really knew how! I can imagine no greater cause for gratitude on my fiftieth birthday, than that on it I woke up in a hermitage!
Fierce cold all night, certainly down to zero (I have no outdoor thermometer) and inside the house almost to freezing, though embers still glowed under the ashes in the fireplace. The cold woke me up at one point but I adjusted the blankets and went back to sleep.
But what more do I seek than this silence, this simplicity, this “living together with wisdom”? For me there is nothing else. C’est le comble! [It is the pinnacle! ] And to think I have had the grace to taste a little of what all men really seek without realizing it. All the more obligation to have compassion and love and pray for them. Last night, before going to bed, realized momentarily what solitude really means: When the ropes are cast off and the skiff is no longer tied to land, but heads out to sea without ties, without restraints! Not the sea of passion, on the contrary, the sea of purity and love that is without care. That loves God alone immediately and directly in Himself as the All (and the seeming Nothing that is all). The unutterable confusion of those who think that God is a mental object and that to love “God alone” is to exclude all other objects to concentrate on this one! Fatal. Yet that is why so many misunderstand the meaning of contemplation and solitude, and condemn it. But I see too that I no longer have the slightest need to argue with them. I have nothing to justify and nothing to defend: I need only defend this vast simple emptiness from my own self, and the rest is clear. (Through the cold and darkness I hear the angelus ringing at the monastery.) The beautiful jeweled shining of honey in the lamplight. Festival!
A thought that came to me during meditation: The error of racism is the logical consequence of an essentialist style of thought. Finding out what a man is and then nailing him to a definition so that there can be no change. A White Man is a White Man, and that is it. A Negro, even though he is three parts white is “A Negro” with all that our rigid definition predicates of a Negro. And so the logical machine can devour him because of his essence. Do you think that in an era of existentialism this will get better? On the contrary: definitions, more and more schematic, are fed into computers. The machines are meditating on the most arbitrary and rudimentary of essences, punched into IBM cards, and defining you and me forever without appeal. “A priest,” “A Negro,” “A Jew,” “A Socialist,” etc.
(Problem of the Mexican intellectual and editor Garcia Torres, and his passport trouble because some idiot in an embassy office punched his card as “Red.”)
February 2, 1965
Again very cold. On the 31st it was about four below, this morning it is almost down to zero. Yesterday it was warmer (about twenty-eight) and there was more snow. A great deal of the wood I have for the fire is wet or not sufficiently seasoned to burn well–though finally this morning I got a pretty hot fire going with a big cedar log on top of it. This is some of the coldest weather we have had in the twenty-three years I have been here. But sleeping was O.K. No worse than anywhere else. In fact very snug, with a lot of blankets.
It is hard but good to live according to nature with a primitive technology of wood chopping and fires, rather than according to the mature technology which has supplanted nature, creating its own weather, etc., etc. Yet there are advantages too, in a warmed house and a self-stoking furnace. No need to pledge allegiance to either one. Get warm in any way you can, and love God and pray.
I see more and more that now I must desire nothing else than to be “poured out as a libation,” to give and surrender my being without concern. The cold woods make this more real. And the loneliness, coming up last night at the time of a very cold sunset, with two little birds still picking at crumbs I had thrown for them on the frozen porch. Everywhere else, snow. In the morning, coming down: all tracks covered by snow blown over the path by the wind except tracks of the cat that hunts around the old sheepbarn. Solitude = being aware that you are one man in this snow where there has been no one but one cat.
February 4, 1965
The cold weather finally let up a bit today–the first time in about a week that it had been above freezing. Zero nights, or ten above. Very cold, sometimes even cold in bed. Had the night watch last night and came back through the frozen woods to a very cold cottage. But today the snow melted, in fact, and ran loquaciously–the bucket I had collected last time was nearly finished. I am burning in the fireplace shelves from the old library. Not the chestnut shelves but the sides–(poplar?)–They are dry and quickly make a good hot blaze. Quickly cut the cold early this morning.
The new library officially opened in the former brothers’ novitiate building–on Sunday, my birthday. I was very happy with it. The stacks are well lighted, a big pleasant room with desks (formerly a dormitory) and the reading room upstairs is pleasant. It is too far for me to go often, but I am glad of the change.
Last night I had a curious and moving dream about a “Black Mother.” I was in a place (where? somewhere I had been as a child, but also there seemed to be some connection with the valley over at Edelin’s) and I realized that I had come there for a reunion with a Negro foster mother whom I had loved in my childhood. Indeed, I owed, it seemed, my life to her love so that it was she really and not my natural mother, who had given me life. As if from her had come a new life and there she was. Her face was ugly and severe, and yet a great warmth came from her to me, and we embraced with great love (and I with much gratitude) and what I recognized was not her face but the warmth of her embrace and of her heart so to speak. We danced a little together, I and my Black Mother, and then I had to continue the journey I was on. I cannot remember more about this journey and many incidents connected with it. Comings and goings, and turning back, etc.
Today, besides a good letter from Gordon Zahn and other pleasant things in the mail, came a fantastic present from Suzuki-a scroll with his calligraphy: superbly done. And the scroll too, in its perfect little box, the whole thing was utterly splendid, I never saw anything so excellent. It will be wonderful in the hermitage–but no clue as to what the characters say!! Also, there was a letter from John Pick saying he wanted my drawings for exhibit at Marquette [University]
(they are now at Xavier University in New Orleans).
February 9, 1965
I must admit I am much moved by Horace-as for instance a quote from the Second Epode which I ran across by chance when leafing through the Liber Comfortatorius of Goscelin (11th century letter to a Recluse). The structure and clarity and music of Horace are great and he is not trite. There is, it seems to me, real depth there, and this is shown by the sustained purity and strength of his tone and this is I think really untranslatable.
Rereading the issue of La Vie spirituelle on solitude (in 1952) I am struck by the evident progress that has been made. In those days the tone was not one of real hope–simply a statement of the deplorable fact that the hermit life had practically ceased to exist. And that religious superiors could not be brought to see its meaning and relevance. Now on the contrary it is once again a fact and we are moving beyond the stage where it was thought necessary for a monk to get exclaustrated in order to be a solitary (in order to fulfill his monastic vocation!!). I am working on a paper about this for a meeting of canonists (to which I will certainly not be going) at New Melleray this spring.
February 11, 1965
Depressing news from Viet Nam. Because of the successful guerrilla attacks of the Viet Cong on American bases in South Viet Nam, there has been bombing of towns and bases in North Viet Nam and signs today are going around the monastery that there was a “big bombing,” evidently of a city, by “our” planes. Perhaps Hanoi has been bombed. All I can feel is disgust and hopelessness. Have people no understanding left and not even a memory? Haven’t they enough imagination to see how totally useless and absurd the whole thing is, even if they lack the moral sense to see the injustice of it? The whole effect of this will be to make America more hated, just as the Russians were hated after the Hungary business in 1956. There is no better way than this to promote Communism in Asia. We are driving people to it, instead of “liberating” them.
Today I finished the first draft of the paper on eremitism.11 Rain all day. Did not get back to the hermitage until after supper. It seems that everything looks favorable for my moving up here when Father Callistus gets back from Rome. But now there is doubt about Father Flavian taking the novice master’s job, he wants to go to the Camaldolese, of all things, which sounds foolish to me. If he is in that kind of mood, he may not even be stable in the hermitage here, which he will certainly be able to be in if he wants it.
Nightfall. Wind from the west. The porch shines with rain and low dark rags of cloud blow over the valley. The rain becomes more furious and the air is filled with voices, and with what might sound like confused radio music in another building, but there is no other building. And the song seems to be coming to a brassy crescendo and ending, but it does not end.
Also the jet planes. High in the storm are jet planes. Today I got the censor’s approval for “Rain and the Rhinoceros” (written in December). The rain is different this time, more serious, less peaceful, more talkative. A very great deal of talk.
February 12, 1965
Whatever is actually happening in Viet Nam I don’t know except that the American policy there is proving itself to be a very stupid failure and they are now perhaps seeking a solution by “escalation” of the war in North Viet Nam. My guess is there is a real possibility that the military are doing this on their own because they are afraid that Johnson means to pull out of there altogether as soon as he gracefully can. They may succeed in making this impossible.
In Viet Nam as in China and Latin America, the same mistake has been made.
1. We send in people who have no understanding whatever of the people, the country, the culture, etc.
2. In order to get along they deal with “operators” who give them a falsified or distorted picture of things. These westernized Asians see their way to power and wealth, establish themselves in a strong and lucrative position, convince the Americans that everyone else is a communist, and try to “keep order” by force. And they get rich on American aid.
3. Instead of encouraging real political reform and genuine democracy, the Americans simply support these operators, pay them to “keep things quiet.” Every attempt at protest, at reform, is labeled “communist revolution.” Those who really want liberty are driven to unite with the Communists, or are treated as Communists (v.g., the Viet Nam Buddhists).
4. Against these people, military force is useless. But coercion and force provide guerrilla resistance which is all the more effective when the force marshalled against it is useless and unwieldy. However, the only answer the westerners know is bigger and more destructive weapons…a spiral.
The cruel and ruthless–and pointless–destruction of towns in North Viet Nam can become a potent argument for Communism, and Asia will despair of getting America to make sense…a dismal prospect: yet it could have been foreseen with a little intelligence. But no…our mass media take up the story given out by the “operators” we favor, and the whole country imagines we are Galahads engaged in a crusade against Communism. Actually, we are doing more than anyone else, China included, to make Asia effectively Communist.
February 14, 1965. Septuagesima
The other day a letter came from Godfrey Diekmann asking me to participate in an ecumenical meeting, together with Father Häring, Dom Leclercq, Father Barnabas Ahern, etc. and on the other side Douglas Steere and nine others. Asked Father Abbot, and this permission which, in the circumstances I think any other Superior would have granted, was refused. It is not that I had my heart set on going. About that I can be indifferent. I would have liked to go, and think it would have done me good. I would have learned a bit, would have the grace of having done something for the Church, participated in a dialogue that would be evidently blessed, etc.
There was no discussion of why I should not go: just emotion on the part of the Abbot; that look compounded of suffering and stubbornness, interpretable in many ways, but which on this occasion made him look as if he thought I was stealing something from him–the key to his office for example. In a word a look of vulnerability and defiance: a man threatened in his belly or somewhere. With the determination that I should never get away with it. Thus the confused motives (“it is not our vocation to travel and attend meetings”) become clear in ways other than by words (after all, Father Chrysogonus is traveling all over the place, attending all kinds of things, and his stay in Europe has already been prolonged twice). Dom James regards this as a personal threat to himself, to his prestige, to his very existence as Father–image and ikon. (If he were invited he would certainly attend! After refusing the Japanese permission he took off himself for Norway!)
I am sure he is not aware of this himself. It appears to him only in the most acceptable terms: that my humility would be deflowered by this meeting with Dom Leclercq, etc. (He detests Leclercq, Winandy, Damasus Winzen, all of them.) But I have to learn to accept this without resentment. Certainly not easy to do! So far I have hardly tried and to tell the truth it angers and distracts me. So that is the vow of obedience: you submit yourself also to somebody else’s prejudices, and to his myths, and to the worship of his fetishes!! Well, I have made the vow, and will keep it, and will see why I keep it, and will try at the same time not to let myself be involved in the real harm that can come from a wrong kind of submission (and there are several wrong kinds, and the right kind is hard to find!).
February 16, 1965
I must admit that over Sunday I was troubled by the whole business of that refused permission. Reverend Father preached a long impassioned sermon on vanity, ambition, using one’s gifts for one’s glory, etc., etc. on Sunday morning, and I could see he was upset in it-there was emotion, his voice was trembling in the beginning, his breathing was not altogether under control and so on. I could only infer that it had something to do with my request, and I thought it was quite unfair if it was, but anyway I was troubled and irritated-and finally depressed. Feeling of powerlessness and frustration, and most of all, humiliation over the fact that I should fe
el it so much and be forced by my feeling to think about it all day! How absurd. And yet the efforts I made to see it rationally as something trifling and laughable would not come off. Nor did the religious arguments and the repeated acceptance of it as a cross and humiliation. Nothing seemed to make any difference and finally I lay awake half the night–the first time this has happened in the hermitage.
At last I wrote a note to Reverend Father saying I was sorry I had offended him and that his sermon had made me miserable, but that my writing, etc. was not pure ambition and vanity, though obviously there was some vanity involved in it. And that I wished he would accept me realistically and not expect me to be something I cannot be. He replied that the sermon had had nothing to do with me, that he had no intention of hurting me, was most concerned, etc. So maybe it was all an illusion, but anyway, there it was. I was relieved that it was all settled. A tantrum. I am surely old enough to be beyond that!!
Yesterday in the morning when I went out for a breath of air before my novice conference I saw men working on the hillside beyond the sheepbarn. At last the electric line is coming! All day they were working on holes, digging and blasting the rock with small charges, young men in yellow helmets, good, eager hard-working guys with machines. I was glad of them and of American technology pitching in to bring me light as they would for any farmer in the district. It was good to feel part of this, which is not to be despised, but admirable. (Which does not mean that I hold any brief for the excess of useless developments in technology.)
Dancing in the Water of Life Page 27