April 23, 1968
Sunday I went down late and did not concelebrate. Left a note for “the Woman” at the Gatehouse saying I could absolutely not see her, and went off to the other end of the farm—bright sun, green fields, dogwoods, black birds, quail—I felt a little guilty for being so negative but it was the only thing to do. In the evening—at my conference, talked about some poems of J. D. de Dadelsen whom I have just discovered. Good for this purpose. After supper, went over to the Guesthouse to see Dom Damasus Winzen and Br. David Steindl-Rast from Mt. Saviour. Br. David is the one who is at Columbia and studying Zen at the N.Y. Zenda. Spoke of Panikkar, of his idea of a Study Center for various religious (Hindu-Buddhist-Christian). The magazine Monastic Studies will probably expand to include articles by Buddhists, etc.
Yesterday (Monday) afternoon I had a long and good talk with Dom Damasus. Mostly about changes in the Church, the unsettled state of “the young ones,” the “loss of center” and of depth, etc. It was good to get his viewpoint: he is one of the few with a real monastic sense in this country. He does not seem at all optimistic about American monasticism and says Fr. Aelred, the Superior of Christ in the Desert, is almost in despair over it. Yet Christ in the Desert is one of the “best” places in the country. (I hope to see something of it on the way back from California.) Main point: the lack of any real depth in the monks—they are either immature or unsettled (and will leave) or they have “adjusted” by narrowing themselves down to some petty limits and restrictions they think they can “handle” so that in effect they live peacefully in little worlds of their own. I agreed with this. It is sad.
Yesterday one of the men came and put a coat of paint on the inside of the new wing. Today, nobody; nothing. They have been on this since February. It has taken them longer to build this wing than the whole rest of the house! The fault is probably that of the plumbers, who almost never show up at all. A small wing, 14 × 20, with two rooms in it-one a shower-toilet.
Friday, early, I wrote a response to an article by [Michael) Novak on “The Secular Saint” to be in the magazine of the Center at Santa Barbara. I had some doubts about writing it. More and more doubts about getting involved in this sort of opinion-mongering which is so fruitless.
While I was thinking up my response to Novak, full of strong breakfast coffee, there was a heavy thunderstorm and downpour of rain-before dawn. The day remained hot and stuffy. I find this kind of weather makes me more and more weary, and I seem to have trouble breathing. I called T.]. Smith, the allergist, about it and am supposed to see him Monday. All afternoon it was hot. Thunderheads piled up in the South, sun hid from time to time. About suppertime a storm passed by in the South but we only got a little of the edge of it. Now (7 p.m.) it is clear and cool. The last of the parade of distant thunderheads East over Tennessee an hour ago.
April 25, 1968
A beautiful spring day—one of those than which no more beautiful is possible. Everything green and cool (a light frost in the early morning). Bright sun, clear sky, almost everything now fully in leaf except that some of the oaks are still silver rather than green.
But I went down to the mail box and got terrible news. A rolled-up newspaper from New Zealand (I don’t know who sent it) tells of a shipwreck, a “giant ferry” sunk in the entrance to Wellington Harbor. All the pictures and headlines and then, on the last page, in the list of the dead: Agnes Gertrude Merton, 79, Christchurch.
Poor Aunt Kit! It happened April 10, two weeks ago, Wednesday in Holy Week. And no one had told me about it. I said Mass for her—the Mass of the Holy Cross.
Off and on, kept wondering if it were really true. Perhaps there was some mistake.
In the afternoon, the workmen were here. They finished painting, putting in doors. I did a minimum of necessary work and went out to mourn quietly, walking in the bottoms. The need to lament, to express and offer up sorrow and loss. Finally, after the workmen had gone, I sat down and read everything in the paper-a supplement of the Sunday Dominion-Times or whatever it is. It was awful. All kinds of doubletalk, covering complete mystery and confusion. No one really knows what happened. This ship was caught in a storm and though it had “the latest” in all equipment, nothing worked, much of the life-saving equipment was inadequate, the people were constantly reassured there was “no danger.” Then suddenly they had to abandon ship, life rafts capsized or were dashed against the rocks, etc. A frightful mess. And in the middle of it all, poor, sweet Aunt Kit, old and without strength to fight a cold, wild sea! I look at the sweater she knitted me to protect me against “the cold” and the whole thing is unbearable.
What can be said about such things? Nothing will do. Absurdity won’t. An awful sense that somehow it had to be this way because it was, and no one can say why, really. And yet “what did she ever do to deserve it?” Such a question does not make sense, and the God I believe in is not one who can be “blamed,” for it is he who suffers this incomprehensibility in me more than I do myself. But there is a stark absence of all relatedness between the quiet, gentle, unselfish courage of Aunt Kit’s life and this dreadful, violent death. What have these waves and currents to do with her?
In the end—one gets poetic and wonders if somehow they became “worthy” of her, but there is still no proportion—none whatever.
And, I suppose, that is what death really is for everyone. But it is usually made so comportable—so faked. When it is naked and terrible we remember what death really is.
Perhaps that is it: no faked death for Aunt Kit-the real thing, with face unveiled. But still it is not easy for love to bear it! Or even possible. May God grant her peace, light and rest in Christ. My poor dear.
And now winter comes to her little garden on Repton Street, and that is the end of it. It does not have another spring.
I had hoped, if I went to Bangkok, to visit her in December. I don’t know if I’ll go to visit the others—or even if! will go to Bangkok at all.
Meanwhile “the woman (??)” sent me one of her scrolls, in excellent Chinese characters—perhaps in her own blood—and cryptic messages translated. They add up to the information that I am not done with her (or was this someone else??).
The rest of the mail was good. Good letter from Anselm Hollo. I can use his [Pentti] Saarikoski translations in Monks Pond; better still from Richard Chi who likes my piece on Shen Hui. Yesterday I talked briefly to a Mary-knoll missionary who knows Dumoulin and Enomiye [Lasalle] in Japan.
April 30, 1968. (Tuesday)
Another bright, sunny morning. My chapel was finished Friday (Feast of Our Lady of Good Counsel). Worked late cleaning out, putting up the ikons, etc. and said Mass there Saturday morning, Sunday (II after Easter—Good Shepherd [Gospel]), etc. John H. Griffin was here Friday, briefly, talking of the wicked situation in the cities, has a theory of white extremists provoking violence, and it is certainly true that the people killed in riots are mostly black. We went to take pictures of the distillery and then he left with a fever (he is not supposed to walk around much).
My chapel is plain, bright, white-walled, bright warm red of ikons, simplicity, light, peace.
Makes a great difference having a chapel, a place for prayer only (oratorium hoc sit quod dictus [let the oratory be what its name implies]).18 The altar next to the fireplace and bookcase in the front room was never satisfactory—and gas heater popping and banging two feet away. So I am glad of the chapel, say most of the hours of the Office there, and this is good.
Sunday I said Mass here and did not go down to concelebration. Tried also to get caught up on letters. A fine, quiet, sunny morning. Spent several hours with Ping Ferry who came through Saturday having been in Berea. Had some sandwiches in the hermitage and then drove around taking pictures.
May 4, 1968. (Derby Day)
A lovely day—just like Derby Day two years ago. And another picnic—this time with John and Rena Niles and Bob and Hanna Shepherd. We ate our salads by the monuments (alias the Watts lowers), the old spires off the
Church Steeple, set up in the woods. A very pleasant place. John filled the woods with shouts of Ber-tha-a-a! And I hoped no monks were around to hear him. He has set ten poems, from Emblems [of a Season of Fury], to music. Not all mine—some are my translations of Cortes and Cuadra. I’d like to hear them, and may perhaps some time in June.
Today the plumbers finished installing bathroom fixtures, but they don’t work yet—no septic tank. The white irises are beginning to bloom. The grass is deep and green.
Had a discussion yesterday with Fr. Flavian, who just returned from Chile, about the invitation to go to the meeting of the Superior Generals of Active Congregations of Nuns that are thinking of having “Houses of Prayer” (or communities where people can go for more or less long retreats). I don’t especially want to go, but they keep pressing, got a couple of bishops to support them. Even then, he doesn’t see it. To him it is only a nuisance and a distraction. He does not see it as something one might be concerned about. If I thought very strongly I ought to go, I guess I could: but I don’t want to override his own preference. I don’t know for sure if I could do any good. But it is strange, this almost complete insensitivity, on his part, to their real need.
However, I am supposed to leave Monday for California—the convent at Whitethorn—for a series of conferences and seminars or what have you—discussions. As the French say “with broken batons.” I am on the whole glad to be going and look forward to it. Even if they don’t get anything out of it, I probably will. One thing to talk about will be the curious question of the “contemplative mystique”—and its relation with the cloistered feminine mystique, the pure victim souls shut away from the world and praying for it. There is so much hokum in this idea! And yet we do have to be serious about solitude, discipline, prayer.
Got a new vaccine from the allergist. Don’t know if it will help. Some splendid poems of Anselm Hollo came in the mail.
This afternoon I cleaned up a bit, burned a big pile of brush and trash behind the hermitage—the cartons that the bathroom fixtures came in and a lot of other junk with pine branches brought down in the blizzard at the end of Lent. Tomorrow is already the III Sunday after Easter. “A little while and you shall see me, yet a little while and you shall not see me—because I go to the Father” [John 16:17]. Which reminds me that I got a lovely card from Nhat Hanh the other day—he must leave the country June 15 when his visa expires. Meanwhile the war goes on and Johnson’s peace gesture was obviously another phoney.
PART II
Woods, Shore, Desert
A Notebook, May 1968
Prelude
“I have written out of my own book which was opened in me.”
(Boehme)
“…And Palmers for to seke strange strondes.”
(Chaucer)
“Where are we really going? Always home.”
(Novalis)
“For our goal was not only the East or rather the East was not only a country and something geographical but it was the home and youth of the soul.”
(H. Hesse)
“Whether he lives a life of action or withdraws from the world, the ignorant man does not find spiritual peace.”
(Astavakra Gita)1
Points for “Monastic Vocation.”
“The wise man who has known the truth of the self plays the game of life and there is no similarity between his way of living and the deluded who live in the world as mere beasts of burden.”
(Astavakra Gita)
“Where there is I, there is bondage. Where there is no I, there is release. Neither reject nor accept anything.”
(Astavakra Gita)
“Orthodoxy is the principle of absolute freedom….”
(Yelchaninov)2
The fear of placing rules, thoughts, and words above the fact or outside the fact, this fear is important in Orthodoxy, is the basis of the freedom of the Orthodox.
Aversion to propaganda, to indoctrination and to undue restraints: Orthodoxy, says Yelchaninov, means “putting our whole faith in the actual presence of religious life and all the rest will come of itself.”
Three dreams of Descartes are central in his philosophy. They have a religious importance. The God of Descartes is absolute reality, timeless, simple, instantaneous action, breaking through into the conscious like a thunder clap.3
Port Royal.
Return to sources.
Vernacular use of Bible and the Fathers. Emphasis on redemption and grace. Emphasis on liberty or a more flexible idea of authority. They were ruined by the authoritarians.
The Jansenism of the end of the 17th century was something different. It was merely anti-Jesuit. Yes, they were pessimistic. Yes, they were combative. This is an example of a debate which made everybody wrong.
The priest, Monsieur de Sainte Martre, he went sneaking out from Paris by night, along the wall of Port Royal to a tree which he climbed and from which he gave conference to the nuns inside. Of this Sainte-Beuve says: “Voilà presque du scabreux, ce me semble; voilà les balcons nocturnes de Port Royal!” [“There, nearly scabrous, it seems to me; there the nocturnal balconies of Port Royal”].4
The serenades!
The nocturnal balconies of California.
Brother rather than father. Partnership in seeking to understand our monastic vocation.
A happening.
Presence and witness but also speaking of the unfamiliar…speaking of something new to which you might not yet have access.
An experiment in openness.
Problems.
Too much conformity to roles. Is it just a matter of brushing up the roles and adjusting the roles? A role is not necessarily a vocation. One can be alienated by role filling.
Background.
Nazareth, Beguines, mystics of the Rhineland, beginning of the modern consciousness.
Problems.
Contemplative mystique. Feminine mystique. Theology of vows. Monastic life as an eschatalogical sign. Risk and hope. The promise of God to the poor or the promises of the beast to the rich. Judgment of power. Ecclesiastical power. Power prevents renewal. Power prevents real change. Garments of skins in the Greek Fathers. Hindu Kosas, then modern consciousness. Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Sufis, and Zen.
Astavakra Gita.
Christ consciousness in the New Testament.
Pascal said, “It is the joy of having found God which is the source of the sorrow of having offended Him.”
Pascal said, “He is not found except by the ways taught by the Gospel. He is not preserved except by the ways taught in the Gospel.”
“Thou wouldst not seek Me if thou hadst not already found Me.” (cf. St. Bernard, Pascal)
Of Pascal, Poulet says, “Lived time is for Pascal as it had been for St. Augustine. The present of an immediate consciousness in which appear and combine themselves with it retrospective and prospective movements which give to that present an amplitude and a boundless temporal density.”5
Words of Martin Luther King, recently shot, copied on the plane.
He said: “So I say to you, seek God and discover Him and make Him a power in your life. Without Him all our efforts turn to ashes and our sunrises to darkest nights.”
May 6, 1968
O’Hare, big fish with tail fins elevated in light smog.
One leaves earth.
“Not seeing, he appears to see.”
(Astavakra Gita)
Snow-covered mountains. Thirty-nine thousand feet over Idaho. Frozen lakes. Not a house, not a road. Gulfs. No announcement. Hidden again.
We are all secrets. But now, where there are suggested gaps, one can divine rocks and snow. “Be a mountain diviner!”
Whorled dark profile of a river in snow. A cliff in the fog. And now a dark road straight through a long fresh snow field. Snaggy reaches of snow pattern. Claws of mountain and valley. Light shadow or breaking cloud on snow. Swing and reach of long, gaunt, black, white forks.
The new consciousness.
Reading the calligraphy of
snow and rock from the air.
A sign of snow on a mountainside as if my own ancestors were hailing me.
We bump. We burst into secrets.
Blue-shadowed mountains and woods under the cloud, then tiny shinings, tin-roofed houses at a crossroad. An olive-green valley floor. A low ridge thinly picked out at the very top in blown snow. The rest, deep green. One of the most lovely calligraphies I have ever seen. Distant inscaped mountains and near flat lowland. A scrawl of long fire. Smoke a mile or two long. Then a brown rich-veined river. A four-lane super highway with nothing on it.
Utah? It’s dry.
The Other Side of the Mountain Page 12