by Nicolas Diat
Where is God in the life of monks suffering from a psychological illness? Dom David believes that it is difficult for a sick person to recover the quality of his former spiritual life. The psychological troubles that affect the brothers become a kind of barrier, a sign on which would be written in capital letters “PLEASE DO NOT ENTER”: “I do not want to remain silent about this reality that affects all monasteries”, Dom David told me, “this refusal to speak, this distaste for divine realities.” In the dark forests of apathy, monastic life is reduced to its most simple material aspect. The Liturgy of the Hours is a shadow, a path of brambles, a long suffocation. No one even knows if the sick monks still hear the beautiful ringing of the bells.
The great trial of En-Calcat was the suicide of a forty-eight-year-old monk. In April 2012, on Easter Tuesday, Brother Irénée took his life by taking sleeping pills. He was a brother infirmarian. It took the monks a while to find his body. They spent an entire day, without rest, looking for him. On the little table in his cell, a word jotted on a piece of paper left no doubt for the reason of his absence.
Brother Irénée had entered the monastery at thirty. The young religious had a suicidal past known to some of his old friends. A few months before the tragedy, he had written to one of them. Brother Irénée said that he had all the necessary medications in his infirmary to commit the irreparable. Every week, the monk went to Toulouse for psychotherapy. On that sad spring night, he never returned.
Wednesday morning, around six o’clock, the brother who worked with him realized he had not returned. Alerted, Dom David went to his cell. He found a small card. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, I am suffering too much, I am going. . .” Brother Irénée was addressing his family and community for the last time. He did not blame anyone, but he wanted to die. In the pocket of his habit, the monks found a little note. He had composed a prayer to God before giving up his life to despair. “Lord, Lord, you will forgive me, I cannot go on. I cannot stay. I know that I am going to you.”
Brother Irénée had gone up to the chapel of Saint-Ferreol. The little building overlooks the monastery at the summit of Black Mountain. For a long time, it has been a pilgrimage site. The novices come to walk and pray on these heights after Sunday lunch.
Near the lifeless body, the monks found a bag of medications. Tuesday evening, Brother Irénée had remained alone. Night fell, and the walkers deserted the place. From the heights, he saw his monastery. He could imagine what the monks were doing at that exact hour.
Dom David modestly and realistically described those somber days to me. His courage, his sensitivity, his humanity had to be admired. Listening to him, I could not help but think of Baudelaire’s sad verses in “Spleen LXXVIII”. The words came back to me like pounding in my head:
When the low, heavy sky weighs like a lid
Upon the spirit moaning in ennui,
And when, spanning the circle of the world,
It pours a black day sadder than our nights.1
Five years after the death of Brother Irénée, the sadness, the suffering, and the doubts were still intense. Dom David, in a voice weak as a spring that dries up in the aridity of summer, was kind enough to revisit those dark hours: “Brother Irénée committed suicide on the summit of the mountain. He went to sleep, curled up at the foot of the chapel. There was a macabre staging to his death. Wednesday morning, we had followed his trail to Toulouse. He had left an address on his table. But there was no one at the indicated place. Then we decided to inform the police. The officers advised me to ask to locate him through his cell phone. Shortly after, someone on retreat, out walking, discovered his body.”
Dom David was struggling to catch his breath. His words faltered, they stayed stuck in his throat: “I wrote the death announcement without hiding the truth. I was surprised by the messages sent to me by abbots who had lived through the same experience.” Dom David paused for a long time, his gaze lost in the distance, then he continued: “The community was struck in the heart by the violence of this departure. But we were carried by the power of Holy Week, which we had just celebrated. The monks had an extraordinary awakening of faith. We wanted to stay united. They prayed a lot for me. The brothers saw the abyss into which I had fallen. I became the abbot of a religious who had chosen to kill himself. My suffering was deep, difficult, long. When we found his body, the police took the corpse for a few hours for forensic identification. I did not have the strength to go identify him.”
Brother Irénée was buried shortly after Easter, Saturday in albis. The celebrants wore white liturgical vestments, according to the customs of this season and the wishes of the deceased. Those who attended were numerous and reverent. The monk had just given up a professorship at the Catholic Institute of Toulouse, where he taught Hebrew. His friends and students came to bid him farewell.
Brother Irénée left carrying the key to his mystery, his impulses, his pain. He was buried in the cemetery of the monks. On a small stone placed on the earth, the inscription is solemn: “F. Irénée—April 11, 2012.”
The abbey had to rebuild its faith. The monks had no choice but to accept the humiliation of a scathing denial; only prayer remained for moving forward. Exhausted, Dom David had to find the strength to support a monk close to Brother Irénée. He left the monastery six months after the suicide. He was then in the clutches of a violent depression. The abbey had initiated a process of secularization. The religious who returned to the world had been the only one to receive a letter of farewell from Brother Irénée. He could not leave without giving him the reasons for his action. From then on, the former monk returned to the abbey for funerals or monastic professions.
Still today, Dom David is trying to understand Brother Irénée’s action: “The dramatic aspect of our brother’s suicide shows the presence of the Evil One. In deciding to leave on the day after Easter, Brother Irénée knew he was choosing an important date. He was adding additional violence to his death. We were annihilated. Did he want to make us suffer? He had cried out, but we could no longer respond. Where is the monastery where a monk does not encounter psychological problems? Men enter at twenty, and they are supposed to pass sixty years of an intense and demanding monastic life. The monks change, their world views become more complex. With time, the ardors of those first years fade. Some sufferings become unbearable.”
Dom David has never forgotten Father Damien. The monk died three years after his arrival. He always knew him to be affected by a mental illness. In the halls or the cloister, he fought against an imaginary demon, his body twisted by large striking gestures. Young, he was full of hope. Good and pious, he possessed all the monastic qualities. The photos from that time show a religious with a smiling face. He had the confidence of children who know they are safe. One day, bent under accumulated fatigue, Father Damien suffered a psychological crash. The obsessions, the paranoia, the delirium, his troubles, little by little, became a permanent state. For a long time, he was interned in a psychiatric home. After many infernal nights, many empty days, many tears, the doctors thought that he should return to the monastery. The Father Abbot studied his history; he knew that Father Damien had a true vocation. But the machine had stopped; it was impossible to go back.
Dom David d’Hamonville believes that monasteries have always welcomed men who have a hard time living. The thirst for God is sometimes overwhelmed by existential evils. The origin of a vocation could be an immature disinterest in the things of the world or emotional and social wounds. But, without the desire to seek God, a man is incapable of walking for long on the path of religious life. “The monks who do well are those who know that we are all a little damaged. In a monastery, we often have a little account to settle with normality”, the Father Abbot confided in me.
There is another evil of the mind, difficult and terrible, of which we spoke with sadness. Two Benedictines at En-Calcat were stricken with Alzheimer’s at the same time. Father Efflam and Brother Joseph showed different symptoms. Their memories burned progressively,
but the flames were not the same.
Brother Joseph became incapable of holding a conversation. He no longer knew his own name or those of others. For his part, Father Efflam no longer had control of the threads of his own life, but he had not forgotten anything about those of others. He remained capable of having endless discussions about the history of France and the geography of some distant country.
The two men spent their days together. Alone, they were lost, disoriented, unhappy. But when the brother infirmarian placed the hand of one in that of the other, they would go for a walk together on the little paths that surrounded the monastery. In church, Father Efflam and Brother Joseph were recollected, focused. They resembled children learning to pray. In the afternoon, they sat beside each other, always in the same place, and they talked for hours, about everything and nothing.
One winter morning, Father Efflam was found dead in his bed. For Brother Joseph, it was a terrible blow. His companion in illness had caught a mild cold. He departed in his sleep, like a feather falling to the ground without making a sound.
In the last photos, Father Efflam had the look of a happy and distracted child. The monks of En-Calcat liked to say that his old age was a return to the maternal breast. The torments of the disease did not get the better of his purity, his candor, his fragility, his smile. Certainly, he was no longer in control of his life. The infirmarians and the community decided everything for him. But he remained full of wonder.
Father Efflam lived the monastic way perfectly. The monks who knew him do not know if they could be so obedient to the will of God. Dom David had no doubt: “If Father Efflam lived with Alzheimer’s disease in joy, it was because of the simplicity of his life of prayer.”
The death of the fourth Father Abbot of En-Calcat, December 13, 2010, left a mark on the memories of the monks. Father Dominique Hermand was also suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. From 1965 to 1978, his years as abbot were difficult. In those stormy years when the winds of protest were blowing, he accompanied seventeen brothers to the door of the monastery. The monks left without returning. He narrowly avoided a split within the community. How could a man complete, with perfect joy, such a heavy existence, a life of trials that was not without sorrows?
In the final months, he marveled at everything. The wind that pushed the clouds, the avenue of plane trees, the sunlight in the refectory, the peace of the infirmary, the trees in the cloister, everything took on an extraordinary appearance. Father Dominique had a deep affection for the community when he could have pulled away from it.
Dom David was present on the day of his death. He has not forgotten that extraordinary moment. His features were tense, painful, contracted by the final efforts of his facial muscles. Breathing became difficult, gasping, suffocating. His heart was beating less and less strongly. His face changed from one moment to the next. He died smiling. Dom David’s emotion remains intact: “I felt the presence of God when looking at the smile of Father Dominique as he died.”
The brother infirmarians made the funerary preparations, and the body was placed in the oratory of the dead. The hours passed, he became more and more beautiful. Father Abbot asked for a brother to take a photo. His predecessor had the radiance, the smile, the perfect joy of monks. In the church, during the funeral, the religious, the priests, and the faithful could see the radiant face of the deceased. He kept that expression up to the moment when the brothers placed the pall over the body. Then they lowered his remains, without a coffin, into the open ground.
Several monks told me that death masks were changeable. There were brothers who lived like saints whose faces in death were not beautiful; others had more uneven lives, and their final expression was radiant.
The growing difficulties with hospital services do worry the monks. En-Calcat is primarily concerned about the problem of the scarcity of care in rural areas. Dom David sees the medical desert surrounding the monastery with apprehension. “In the rural world, the system of young replacement doctors has become a weak point. These new physicians do not know us. I was reassured by our old doctors who treated us for many years. Sometimes, when one of them leaves, we lose forty years’ worth of familial support. They knew about the psychologies, the fears, the weaknesses. The old system was human.”
I was appalled by the violent and distressing description that Dom David gave me of his dealings with the French healthcare system. The example of Father Patrice, who died in December 2016, at ninety-nine and eleven months of age, is terrible. He had been the creator of the abbey’s famous zither workshop—in forty years, En-Calcat made thousands of instruments, dispersed to the four corners of the world. At the end of his life, the strength of his voice could still surpass the whole abbey choir. Father Patrice did not want to die before celebrating his hundredth birthday. The monks had planned some beautiful festivities. A month before the celebrations, they had to cancel everything. Father Patrice was hospitalized for two months in Castres for a pulmonary infection. When he at last came back among his brothers, the professor announced that he was cured. Father Patrice died two days later. . . The doctors had defeated the famous bacteria they had relentlessly pursued in his lungs. But the poor man had become a weak and emaciated little fledgling. He was so thin that his pacemaker was visible beneath his pale skin. The brothers wondered if the doctors had tried new medications without informing them. This fierceness in eliminating a bacterium seemed suspicious. Had Father Patrice’s flesh been used experimentally? How does one resist the authority of a medical decision that drops like an axe? Is it even possible? The elderly are without defenses. It is necessary to fight to get access to the information in medical records. The hospitals have profitability requirements that make one shudder, and the patients are downgraded.
Dom David has spent a long time considering these questions: “Our connection with medicine has greatly evolved. There is now preventative work that did not exist before. When I entered the abbey, the monks rarely went to the infirmary. Regular checkups can save a life. In cardiology, these visits are essential. In 2010, during a simple consultation, they discovered I had coronary stenosis; the treatment saved me from a lot of problems. Though, in heaven, I would be happier. By relentlessly repairing the living, like robots, we will end up in tatters. When we put a pacemaker in a brother with Alzheimer’s disease, we are caring for the heart in order to prolong the disease of the brain. Often, we have to choose between cancer, a stroke, or a heart attack. I very much enjoyed reading the philosopher Gunther Anders’ book L’Obsolescence de I’homme (The Obsolescence of man).2 He talks about the promethean shift that marks the postmodern world. Man has created a technological world that humiliates him and makes him feel ashamed. Machines are more perfect than the human being. In this system, the error is necessarily man. Technology cannot be at fault. In contrast, in classical anthropology, man was the summit of the animal kingdom. Over the past fifty years, he has become the low point in a world dominated by technological idols. We are reduced to the role of the weak link in a system we have freely created. In a hospital, healing follows the same logic. The patient is a machine. Surgeons repair a liver, a kidney, a heart, a stomach, until the machine is so worn-out that it has to be thrown in the trash. This phenomenon affects Western societies, and the monks are no exception. In opposition to this vision, I believe very much in the biblical approach of the dynamism of the soul. We have to stay in touch with God, from whom we get our breath. This link cannot be broken. The doctor provides care, but it is the patient who heals. The restoration of the body is always connected with the One who gives life.”
Since the election of Dom David in 2009, twenty-two brothers have died. For the Benedictines of En-Calcat, it is important not to forget the dead. The Father Abbot gives the greatest care to the writing of the biographical notes of the deceased brothers. The living try to summarize the essence of the lives of the departed. In Chapter, each monk shares his memories. The work of memory is essential. Why speak of the dead? To make them known. Every
ten years, in the refectory, the brothers reread the monastery’s death records. The abbey has had 170 monks die since its founding. It is necessary to fight against forgetfulness, against closing cases without further action. The modern world consumes the living and throws them away. The youngest ones told me they were very moved by hearing the obituaries.
In the Middle Ages, the abbeys possessed the famous scroll of the dead. The parchment, on which were written the names of the dead, was carried from one monastery to another. A monk from Cluny traveled all over announcing the dead and calling for prayer. He added to the scroll the names of the latest departed. Benedictine abbeys have always cultivated the memory of the deceased. A monk is always the inheritor of a great tradition. Saint Benedict himself is a successor of Cassian, Basil, and Augustine.
These practices are devoid of morbid impulses. In Chapter, Dom David refrains from giving overly regular news of the state of health of the elderly. Monks are in the monastery to live. The conditions of great old age must be accepted. Brother Olivier may disappear from one day to the next, but he has his rightful place in the refectory. The novices share in serving the elderly. The young monks have a special place next to those who will soon depart. In the beginning, they are tongue-tied. They are always afraid of meeting the lifeless look of a bedridden brother.