One worry remains – numbness in the right leg. Is there another problem? Will it someday mean another operation? I have got to be faithful, detached, obedient, concerned not only for my own life as I want to live it, but for God’s will that remains to be realized in and through me. That is all.
Dom James has, I think, been badly treated, tricked and dealt with rather shamefully and stupidly by the people making the “experimental” foundations in Denmark. Of course I have not heard both sides and Dom J.’s position sounds a little rigid to me, but still, they have not dealt with him freely or even maturely. It puts the avant-garde of the order in a rather different light. I have had reservations about this experiment since it began, and I still have them. I wonder if these people are simply monastic agitators. They do not strike me as having much to offer. But again, I do not know the whole story. For my part I don’t want to get involved in debates about it – one of this set, in Kenya, wrote me recently trying to engage me in a silly “action vs. contemplation” argument – obviously using me to draw attention to himself and his friends. It is a bit silly and I told him I would have no part of it. Anyway, the Gethsemani foundation in Norway seems to be definitely off. They will go to Chile instead – or rather take over Spencer’s Chilean foundation, which is certainly an economy!!
April 16, 1966. Saturday in Albis
Dom Columban is here for the visitation and surprised me by a visit to my infirmary room, where I was resting after dinner. Last evening a group of the “infirm” sat around the loudspeaker in the common room to listen to his halting English speech for the opening of the Visitation. Fr. John Baptist, Bro. Jerome, and the novice Bro. Columban, whom I will talk to this evening. Has had flu for two weeks!
Dom C. told me that the Viet Cong had blown up a huge supply of gasoline and a lot of planes at an American base, as this fantastic, tragic, absurd war goes on. More and more I am convinced that the real problem is the delusory character of American thinking about life, reality, what the world is all about. Men with incredible technical skill and no sense of human realities in Asia – lost in abstractions, sentimentalities, myths, delusions, Narcissism and the Great Mania fixation of America! This can lead to nothing but disaster on an enormous scale if the more realistic minds cannot get something across! The Viet Nam venture is a pure absurdity.
April 19, 1966
Warm wind swaying the very leafed out branches of the rose hedge. The grass was cut yesterday for the first time (and smelled sweetly). The dogwood blossoms are just beginning to open. Bro. Benedict finished planting those pecan trees yesterday.
And a letter came from M. I was glad to hear from her. Have to think – my way around the problem of this tenderness – but anyway, I will do the only thing possible, and risk loving with Christ’s love when there is so obvious a need for it. And not fear!
Harper’s (Catherine Meyer) wrote they would take “Apologies to an Unbeliever” if I would cut it and “jimmy it down.” Which I did today.
The question of love: I have to face the fact that I have simply sidestepped it. Now it must be faced squarely. I cannot live without giving love back to a world that has given me so much. And of course it has to be the love of a man dedicated to God – and selfless, detached, free, completely open love. And I have not attained to such a level, hence the risk. But facing the risk – not after all great since I am out here in the woods!! – I will learn. And God deliver me from selfishness.
April 20, 1966
I can hear the demolishers shouting from the top of the steeple. They are now stripping it. A momentous change: the steeple has been so much a sign of the place – the thing one looks for when one is getting close – the expression of the abbey’s identity – the sign that it is there! I was disquieted by the steeple’s going. The Church is raided and ruined inside (Sunday I concelebrated on the third floor and it was already hot, but I like the simplicity of the long room and the beams). Fr. Idesbald has been turned out of his nook4 (“Abbates in Pace” [“Abbots in Peace”]). Warm afternoon. Dom Columban came up to the hermitage on his tour.
April 21, 1966
Dark day, colder. Andy Boone’s buzz saw is going and it sounds like winter again. But the grass is very green, the redbuds show well against the green pines and the brush bursting into leaf, small wildflowers everywhere and the May apples opening their shiny new umbrellas. St. Anselm’s day. It has been a day of struggle and prayer for me – the need for inner freedom, the urgency of constant work, and the difficulty of getting back into solitude after the hospital. In fact there is now a real doubt in my mind about the value of the whole hermit experiment as it is here. Certainly it means more to me than the artificialities of the community, but this is artificial and arbitrary in its own way. I would organize it otherwise if I could – more open, less rigid. But I have no way of doing so, and really perhaps it is best to have to take it, as I do, on someone else’s terms, especially if that other is an Abbot with whose views I in no way agree. But there is the question of charity, of being open to others. Of course I am really bothered and worried. M. wants to see me and I – want to see her. I tell myself it is because I want to help her. And so on. Yet the bother is that one has to calculate how it might possibly be done. And then the letters … will they be stopped, or interfered with etc. Things should not have to be this way. In the hospital, where I could confront everything directly and frankly, there were no such Byzantine problems of tactics and justifications.
However, I must admit that I can do her little or no good as long as I am emotionally attached to her. I must try to be more free and more sure of what I mean by love in Christ – and not kid myself.
April 22, 1966
More shouting on the steeple. Slowly the plates of lead come off and the old brown lumber appears. Warm afternoon. For a while I sat in the sun surrounded by lovemaking bumblebees. The other day I saw the feathers of a cardinal which a hawk had killed, and was sad, thinking a pair had been broken up. Today I saw this male sitting beautifully on a fencepost singing joyfully – but at first no female. Then I saw her flying in and out of a big rose bush in the hedge, where the new nest is, and was happy.
Cannot eat much, do not feel like work (writing). Am delaying work on the bits for Ned O’Gorman’s book5 (plenty of time anyway I found out). Nothing terribly pressing to be done, and I don’t yet feel much like typing. But walking around, my neck feels fine (today is exactly 4 weeks since the operation). The left leg is still a bit numb, and the incision still bleeds. Otherwise everything is fine.
April 24, 1966. II Sun[day] after Easter
One warm grey day after another, continued struggle in my own heart. I am losing weight (five more pounds in the last week). Repugnance for food. Perhaps this is something to do with the antibiotic that made me sick in the hospital. It will be better for me when I can work again. Yesterday, the whole day revolved around a long (illegal) phone conversation with M. I got in the cellarer’s office when everyone was at dinner (with his approval – he went off and left me locked in), reached her in the hospital cafeteria (cry of joy when she found out who it was!). We had a good long talk, and it was in many respects necessary, cleared up a lot of confusion in my own mind (from sheer lack of information and communication). Yet on the other hand one thing led to another and this is another link in an uncomfortable kind of karmic chain. In my heart I know it would really have been better if I had followed my original intuition and been content with a couple of letters and nothing more. But we want to see each other etc. etc. Still we both know there is no future to it and there is no sense making much of it. Sooner or later it will all end, anyway, and it would be better to end it before it gets more complicated than it is. And now I fear that a chain of events has started that cannot be stopped – only slowed down, directed, guided (I hope!).
Today – back to meditation on the Dhammapada – something sound to support me when everything else is quicksand.
April 25, 1966. F[east] of St. Mark
&nb
sp; Yesterday I went down to begin my conferences again, having thought of reading my hospital poem – yet doubting and hesitating. I read it, and at the end, though I am sure that most of them did not understand much of it, they all seemed very attentive and moved – some (whom I would not have expected to be so,) quite visibly. I think to begin with that they were first of all happy that I should share a poem with them (of my own – which I never do. Perhaps read one twelve years ago in the scholasticate). Also, they were obviously glad to have the conferences start again. In a word, in spite of all my anxieties and doubts about myself and my hesitations about the community, I am someone they (at least those who come to the conferences, and others too) appreciate, to whom they look for something that seems to them alive and valuable. Usually it disturbs me to admit this, since it starts a conflict between narcissism on one hand and self-doubt on the other. And my usual reaction is flight.
Now I see more and more that there is only one realistic answer: Love. I have got to dare to love, and to bear the anxiety of self-questioning that love arouses in me, until “perfect love casts out fear.”
Same with M. (but with no nonsense!). The basic fact is that she does love me – she does need from me a certain kind of love that will support her and help her believe in herself and get free from some destructive patterns and attachments that are likely to wreck her. Her love arouses in me at once an overwhelming gratitude and the impulse to fling my whole self into her arms, and also panic, doubt, fear of being deceived and hurt (as I lay awake half the night tormented by the thought of the guy she is probably sleeping with!).
After several days of this conflict and anxiety, last night I took a sleeping pill and Bro. Camillus, the infirmarian, gave me some old bourbon that had been tucked away in a closet since Dom Edmund’s days (marvelous too!). I slept nearly 9 hours (sweated up and changed 3 times) and awoke with the deep realization that my response of love to M. was right. It might have nothing to do with the rule books or with any other system, it might be open to all kinds of delusions and error, but in fact so far by and large I have been acting right. I have been in the Truth, not through any virtue of my own, nor through any superior intuition, but because I have let love take hold of me in spite of all my fear and I have obeyed love, and have honestly tried to see her truly as she is and love her exactly as she is, to value her uniquely and share with her this deep faith in her. And I know that the result has been a deep, clear, strong, indubitable resonance between us. Our hearts really are in tune. Our depths really communicate. And this is all. It is the real root and ground of everything and of this sexual love can only at best be a sign. Certainly it would be marvelous if we could communicate the whole thing in this sign, but I see no way of doing this without falling away completely from truth. Hence I will never touch her, and will make sure that this is perfectly clear – without being sanctimonious about it, and she is very aware of the problem too!
Then too of course, I have to continue my work of eliminating all craving, all passionate attachment, all self-seeking from this. And it is work. Evasion is no answer, and I am not sure I have a real answer or know just what to do. I have only in the end to trust God in this as in all my other perplexities and He will bring me through it all right.
April 27, 1966
There is no question that I am in deep. Tuesday (yesterday) M. met me at the doctor’s. Appeared in the hall, small, shy, almost defiant, with her long black hair, her grey eyes, her white trench coat. (She kept saying she was scared.) [Dr. James] Wygal6 (on whom I depended for transportation and lunch) was along, and kept peppering everything with a kind of earthy crudeness that annoyed me, but it was a good thing I guess. His house just burned down and he was upset, drank too much, left me and M. alone for a half hour in our booth at Cunningham’s. It was a wonderful lunch, so good to be with her, and more than ever I saw how much and how instantly and how delicately we respond to each other on every level. Also I can see why she is scared. I am too. There is a sense of awful, awesome rather, sexual affinity – and of course there can be no hesitations about my position here. I have vows and I must be faithful to them. And I told myself that I can and will be, but I have moments of being scared too. Apart from that, though, we had a very good talk and once again it was clearer than ever that we are terribly in love, and it is the kind of love that can virtually tear you apart. She would literally tremble with it. But also it exists on other levels, and really so, and I tried to make this clear, and the meaning of it, trying desperately. I do so much want to love her as we began, spiritually – I do believe such spiritual love is not only possible but does exist between us, deeply, purely, strongly, and the rest can be controlled. Yet she is right to be scared. We can simply wreck each other. I am determined not to give in to this, not to yield to fear and despair, to keep it on the level where it belongs, but I can see I really don’t know how to handle this if it ever breaks loose. I have been imprudent. Wygal added to it afterward with his warnings, prophecies of doom and gloomy insinuations. The man has an appalling death wish, and sado-masochism gets more and more into his friendship, and that is really depressing. Yet there were some peaceful moments sitting at the airport in the rain, drinking brandy and soda and watching the planes. Yet it was unreal. I do hope that my fondness for M. will not turn into an ugly, bloody conflagration. It would be so good to be able to help her, to have real sweet, tender, good friendship. I am going to fight for it, against all odds because I do believe in this kind of love (look at Jacques and Raïssa Maritain) and in fact I do have plenty of friends on this basis (Mother Angela for instance). It is just that M. is terribly inflammable, and beautiful, and is no nun, and so tragically full of passion and so wide open. My response has been too total and too forthright, we have admitted too much, communicated all the fire to each other and now we are caught. I am not as smart or as stable as I imagined.
But such good things – her response to the poems, her words about her love, her fears, her hopes …
April 28, 1966
Last evening I called M. again from the Cellarer’s Office. Another imprudence. Several people saw me hanging around waiting to get her on the phone (she was at supper) and I had to spend ¾ hour there reading Dag Hammarskjøld and waiting. Then I talked for about ½ hour and seven or eight people were in and out. This can’t go on forever, it is not safe.
However, it was once again a wonderful call. She was perfectly happy and at peace, with a blissful, childlike kind of happiness about our meeting Tuesday: a total certitude about our love, all fear gone, a perfect confidence in our affection and in the greater worth of a love in which we are determined in advance to stay pure, according to our obligations. I respond so much to her now, to the inflections of her voice, her laughter, everything, that I was flooded with peace and happiness and wanted just to talk to her forever. There is in her a wonderful sweet little-girl quality of simplicity and openness and I suppose this is closest to being her true self. It is with this self that she told me “I will love you always.” She was up until 1 o’clock writing me a letter after our meeting Tuesday (an “epic”). She laughed about her striding into the Medical Arts Building fighting her fears (“Joan of Arc with her banner”). All I know is that I love her so much I can hardly think of anything but her. Also I know that in itself this love is a thing of enormous value (never has anyone given herself to me so completely, so openly, so frankly, and never have I responded so completely!). Yet it is in absolute conflict with every social canon, feeling, predetermination etc. And everyone, the pious and the feisty, will use it for one thing only – to crush and discredit us.
I suppose that is the next thing to face. If I believe in love and in M., am I willing to face all the consequences frankly and despise the ridicule, the criticism and the injury without in any way cheaply giving in? The worst is that inevitably we will be cut off from each other with brutality and self-righteous refinements of official cruelty. In the solitude of my heart I will have to struggle to be ready for thi
s, for here again we are both vulnerable and can so easily be destroyed. I keep thinking if only we could really go through it all together, supporting one another by our love and closeness, it would be bearable. I see how badly I need her love to complete me with its warmth and understanding and how utterly alone I am without her now. Some talk for a hermit! But it is true and I may as well admit it.
Then the other temptation – when I see how rough this can all become, I instinctively go back to the old routine of drawing into my shell and putting up the defenses – not letting it go any further, anticipating the break to make it easier for myself, etc. etc. That would be a betrayal. I want to share as much as I can of my heart and life with her in the next couple of months so that we are as much as possible “transformed” in each other and that no matter what happens we will always love each other and be filled with each other no matter what people do to us. It seems like a contradiction of all I have been striving for and writing about … and living for. Somehow I know it isn’t. Yet I have no way of rationalizing that one! I will just have to leave it as it is – vulnerable and ridiculous.
Of course too I have kissed her and in the chastity and tenderness of it (as I knew it would be) felt this deep, total, vibrant resonance and response of a whole warm little being, totally surrendered. This much, surely, has to be said with the senses! I know she also received me as totally, blindly, rashly but deliberately given.
Groping for support and strength – where else but in God’s word?
“Dear children you belong to God and you have conquered (all who are opposed to love and to Christ) for He who is within you is greater than be who is in the world …”
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love belongs to God and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God: he who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
“God is love and he who remains in love remains in God and God remains in him. Love is complete within us when we have absolute confidence about the day of judgment, since in this world we are living as He lives. Love has no dread in it; no, love in its fullness drives all death away …” 1 Fn. 4.
Learning To Love Page 7