Note – the letter of Eshleman chiding me for identifying with the Latin Americans and too lightly dismissing U.S. poets, while right in its context (my loose statement in Harper’s), does not alter the fact that I am identified with the Latin Americans more than with the U.S. poets. Certainly I am not clear enough about the motives myself.
Distraction – from the illusory expectation of some fulfillment, which in the end is only a human loneliness.
Warst du nicht immer
noch von Erwartung zerstreut, als kündigte alles
[eine] Geliebte dir an?
[Were you not forever
distracted by expectation, as if everything were announcing
to you some (coming) beloved?]
Distracted that is from the solemn Auftrag – [a commission entrusted to one by another] the [indecipherable] suddenly “giving itself” etc.
Rilke (1st [Duino] Elegy)
Merely living alone, but continuing to engage in a lot of projects, is not yet an authentic hermit life. The projects must go. – Solitude demands an emptiness, an aimlessness, a going nowhere, a certain “having nothing to do,” especially nothing that involves the growth and assertion of one’s “image” and one’s “career.”
This writer really must die down a bit. I am aghast at the things I have left to do. Must take care not to get more commitments – except the really unavoidable ones! This has to be a real retirement, everything depends on it. The spontaneous writing that arises out of such freedom is eminently desirable. Not “slower” projects – the bricks without straw kind – (except really essential services).
February 3
A basic conviction grows more and more clear to me. That I am called into solitude by God’s will in order to be healed and purified. That there are deep wounds in me which would cause me despair if I saw them all at once – but I see them gradually and retrospectively. (I see a danger when I have somehow been taken past it by the mercy of God, and what a danger it was!) Hence I cannot play with this vocation. I must gradually learn to hear and obey Him directly in everything.
There is an immense amount of nonsense in me, but He is wise and tolerates it for the time being. I must trust Him, and trust more perfectly, more completely, more wholly as I go on. The useless and the false preoccupations will gradually be liquidated by His action in my life.
February 4
To be healed of mendacious activity – the lying acts by which, in homage to an imaginary self (self-idol) man manipulates and falsifies reality. Depth and significance of this activity characteristically human, and fallen, “creative” yes and in some ways also demonic (dai-monic), Faustian. Ambivalence of this activity. The sickness of it in fact. Analyzing, “knowing,” retreating further and further into the abstract – and the conviction, arrogant, brutal conviction that this has to be the “real” – resulting in conflict, barbarity, the awesome fact of this struggle. It comes clear to me in this silence, at dawn. The substitution of mechanical images for the creative silence of God, of the Logos … The hard impulsion to “do this” (in order to set up the idol over and over again).
Let the idol fall on its face in the presence of the hidden Child. (Yeah, but beware!!)
Acceptance of the “Auftrag” in sense of R[ilke]’s 1st Elegy – the central thing.
And of course, critically important, is the question of the purity of my own faith – my willingness to risk compromises perhaps with other doctrines? This must be faced. But I can say here I have no hesitation in firmly desiring and intending to be a Catholic and to hold with all my heart to the true faith of the living God manifested in Christ and in his Church. And no monkeying! Amen. Whatever I seek in other traditions is only the truth of Christ expressed in other terms, rejecting all that is really contrary to His Truth. (Not what is irresponsibly and hastily said to be contrary to it.)
Today I realized very clearly what I am doing with Rilke and why, though I see so many flaws in him – and such greatness too – I must go on with this study. It is my own case that is under judgment. Specifically, the possibility of the same flaw in my own solitude. I can confidently face it, I think, because I see solitude is for me, anyways, flaw or no flaw. And indeed it is given me precisely to see this flaw and take care of it as a Christian and as a monk – not with a beautiful and clever aesthetic confabulation. (Yet is R.’s answer a confabulation? Is it not much more authentic, though flawed with error?) Anyway, it is a central problem for me and for this age and I might as well cope with it as best I can, without illusions and without pretense – in other words humbly, doggedly, patiently, faithfully. This too is Auftrag.
Septuagesima Sunday
February 6
Have been living completely in the hermitage about 6 months – this corresponds to the slight crisis that I noticed many novices would get after about that length of time. A corner is to be turned and my vocation must develop. That is – proper of conversatio – penance – true conversion of my entire life. Not easy!! Plenty of opportunities to make mistakes and misjudgments.
Whole purpose of the solitary life is really “Nepsis” [sobriety], alertness, awakeness, attention. All the ascesis of the life centers on this – or is a waste of time. What do I know of it? Real “awakenness” is rare, yet thank God there are in each day three or four fairly long moments of it, sometimes extending over an hour. In the community I was lucky to have a minute of such “attention” here and there. Exercises simply moved it under.
February 12
Tired as a result of the long cold spell, rather intense study and writing under pressure to finish the article for Katallagete – very aware of my incompetence to say what needs to be said, not knowing where to begin. I ended with an ambiguous sort of letter that took great labor and much rewriting and I am still not at all satisfied, but there is no point in fooling with it any more.
It has brought me close to a nervous crisis – tension yesterday, and last night, interrupted sleep, nightmares, etc. All to the good. I have to sweat it all out and try to find my way forward. Perhaps I can keep Lent free of writing and see how that works (except purely monastic notes, under no pressure, for E.C. [Ernesto Cardenal].
Real need for the quies [contemplationis] [quietude or inner repose] of the solitary life. By my anxiety to keep going, I am perpetuating useless movement, action and tension. I can see there is a real fear in me of stopping altogether – fear of vanishing, of really facing my own nothingness! To be realistic, I know that writing has been a help to do this, up to a point. Sooner or later I must do without it – but I can see I cannot get to that all at once. It has to be gradual.
Qui autem cellulam perpetuus incolit, ad stabilitatis praeconium de toto corpore linguam facit. [Whoever dwells in his cell for life makes of his whole body one tongue to proclaim the praise of stability.]
St. P.[eter] Damian. Opusc[ulum] XV. c 28.
In my own case this is complicated by the fact that I have caused literally thousands of people to have, for me, the illusory expectations I have of myself: expectation of something to be manifested in and through me – a deep new truth of some sort, a fundamental hope, a solution. Even though I know enough to tell myself that I will never find “a Solution,” yet secretly my nature insists on this project!
Mary ever Virgin, Mother of God our Savior, I entrust myself entirely to your loving intercession and care because you are my Mother and I am your dear child, full of trouble, conflict, error, confusion and prone to sin. Because my whole life must change and because I can do nothing to change it by my own power, I entrust it with all my needs and cares to you. Present me with pure hands to your Divine Son, pray that I may gladly accept all that is needed to strip me of myself and become His true disciple, forgetting myself and loving His Kingdom, His truth and all He came to save by His Holy Cross, Amen.
(Intention of my Mass today, February 12. Saturday)
February 15
Solitary life and struggle with illusion: not with objectified exterio
r devils but with the devils which are illusions about self.
Pattern of thought – the expectation of something happening: basically, an habitual attitude of mind is an orientation toward “something good happening to me, in me, as a result of my disposing my life in view of such a happening.” In monastic life – “attaining” to an experience of fulfillment, union, etc. By ascetic and other preparations. To illumination. To possession of the truth. To be fixated in this pattern means that when it is not simply and rapidly brought into effect, one becomes anxious and the “pattern” works itself out in illusory and unpleasant ways.
These are a good. They show how, and to what extent, the pattern itself is illusory, arbitrary, even self-willed.
True theological hope must be substituted for this arbitrary pattern of achievement and expectation. But this hope is a deep mystery – and it goes with self-forgetfulness and love of others (not wanting a special fulfillment for oneself and giving to others what one can here and now, without demanding that it be a “rewarding experience”).
Si vous avez le sentiment de l’espérance à vous reservée, vous serez délivrés de toutes les passions dommageables et vous mettrez dans vos âmes l’image de l’amour des hommes. [If you have a sense of the hope in store for you, you will be delivered from all hurtful passions and you will put in your souls the image of (God’s) love for man.]
Jean le Solitaire (5–6 cent[ury]), Dialogue on Love and Passions
Ash Wednesday. February 23.
From the Paradise of the Fathers –
Fasting is the subjugation of the body
Prayer is converse with God
Vigil is a war against Satan
abstinence is the being weaned from meats
humility is the state of the first man
kneeling is the inclining of the body before the Judge
tears are the remembrance of sins
nakedness is our captivity which is caused by the transgression of the command
and service is constant supplication to and praise of God II. 548. p. 263.
Il y a dans la lectio divina une grâce quasi-sacramentelle. Comme l’Eucharistie, comme la prière, comme la solitude et le silence, comme les divers renoncements inscrits dans la tradition apostolique; elle transforme insensiblement l’étre tout entier et le divinise progressivement, amenant peu à peu l’ermite à l’état parfait de fils de Dieu, faissnt passer et grandir en lui la vie de l’Esprit. [Lectio divina possesses a kind of sacramental grace. Like the Eucharist, like prayer, like solitude and silence, like the various renunciations prescribed by apostolic tradition, lectio imperceptibly transforms one’s whole being and divinizes it progressively, little by little bringing the hermit to the perfect state of being a son of God, making the life of the Spirit enter into him and grow within him.] Dom F[acques] Winandy
It is not for me to be disturbed particularly by some of the developments in the community. I know by now that, for various reasons, there is nothing I can do directly to affect anything that happens there. Yet how strange that I am still required to give a weekly conference (in which as much as possible I avoid anything directly concerned with new policies etc.). My aim in these conferences is simply to try, with those who come (attendance is entirely spontaneous) to “seek wisdom” in various ways not usually explored.
My part in the renewal of religious life is simply to be in my cell or in my woods, seeking in silence to follow where the Spirit leads, into depth, purification, humility, hope. And to have less and less to say about it.
The writing of letters is simply a torment. All I can do about that is to make sure that those I write are required by the needs of the situation or the person. And not fear to let the others go. It is the division and uncertainty that increases the anxiety connected with them.
Dom J.’s letters from Rome (February 66), no matter what anyone says, there is certainly a trend to centralization – the “unity of the community” is being used by him consciously or otherwise as simply a means to get everybody in choir under strict obligation – under the abbot’s eye. He admits theoretically the principle of “diversity in unity” but one can see his mind. The (former) brothers who stay out of choir are, in his eyes and those of the other American abbots, to be regarded and treated as an extinct species, and the old ones will be tolerated while they are dying out. No sense of the real meaning of the relative freedom of the brothers’ vocation – quasi-eremitical in its original spirit.
Yet nevertheless – a different matter – importance of a true sensus ecclesiae [sense of the Church]. Respect for preoccupations and for the needs they express – without taking them obsessively. Still less imagining that they are in some sense “saving events,” matters of life and death. They are simply occasions for decision: many decisions remain possible including the decision to be wide open – rather than the decision to be “in fashion.”
“La verité de la foi n’est pas solidaire des contextes idéologiques qui la présentent et peut-être la favorisent sur le moment.” [“The truth of faith is not a part and parcel of the ideological contexts that convey it and perhaps even foster it for the moment.”] [M. D.] Chenu
The “spiritual preoccupations” of this time – post-conciliar years. (An imaginary era we have thought up for ourselves – divertissement [diversion]!) I need perhaps to be less preoccupied with them, to show that one can be free of them and go one’s own way in peace. But there is inculcated such a fear of being out of everything, out of touch, left behind … This fear is a form of tyranny, a law – and one is faced with a choice between this law and true grace, hidden, paradoxical, but free.
An unformulated “preoccupation” of our time – the conviction that it is precisely in these (collective) preoccupations that the Holy Spirit is at work. To be “preoccupied with the current preoccupations” is then the best – if not the only – way to be open to the Spirit.
Hence one must know what everybody is saying, read what everybody is reading, keep up with everything or be left behind by the Holy Spirit. Is this a perversion of the idea of the Church – a distortion of perspective due to the Church’s situation in the world of mass-communications? I wonder if this anxiety to keep up is not in fact an obstacle to the H[oly] Spirit!
February 24
Excipientes verbum in tribulatione multa cum gaudio Spiritus Sancti … [Welcoming the word among many trials with the joy of the Holy Spirit … ] I Thess. 1:6
At the same time I have realized in a moment of bitter conflict that the whole thing is not simple, as I owe it to God to preserve a certain personal integrity and inner freedom which precludes masochistic submission. And there are human motives in his [Dom James’s] actions which are to be taken into account, though they are not decisive. Hence, genuine obedience and not subservience to false ideas and principles especially in regard to writing.
Historical point – ordination of monks to priesthood became very common in 11th–12th centuries precisely in view of hermit life. Priest-hermit considered his Mass primarily as the perfect means of uniting his sacrifice – passion with the Passion of Christ.
February 26
Evening. February 24. Thurs[day] after Ash Wed[nesday]
Si consurrexistis cum X to … [If you have risen with Christ … ]
Before one can rise with Christ, one must die with Him. My central problem comes back to this: my passionate resistance against being “put to death” in a way I do not like and do not understand – a way that seems to me brutal and irrational.
No question that certain policies of my Abbot in my regard amount to an execution and a putting to death of myself as a public figure and as any kind of influence in the Order by personal presence and contact. (i.e. I am sure there will never be any question of my being one of the periti [experts] to be summoned to help G[eneral] Chapters or Abbots’ Committee meetings in Europe or even America. I know I am wanted by some others and Dom J. will never permit it.) This is precisely what I must accept. Not that I really wa
nt to go, and if it were up to me, I would probably refuse anyway. If I thought I could. But this business of simply having no choice … not even being spoken to (as he did not even discuss the question of the meeting of the editorial board of the Collectanea). The question of being put to death morally is real. I see aspects of his motives which he probably does not see. I do not agree with a sado-masochistic spirituality. I think he is simply wrong and even in some sense perverse. Yet I have to accept all this without evasion and without retaliation. Only the Grace of Christ can help me!
They are to me a source of strength by their goodness and simplicity, also I am sure by their prayers.
The community
There is little use in my thinking of my own conflicts and burdens and trying to reason them out. I do not consciously try to analyze and understand everything that goes on in myself, but try to accept the conflict and bear with it intelligently, ready to give up anything I am in myself that is an obstacle to humility and truth. However, more and more I think of the burdens and conflicts of monks down in the community – young monks I know well because I had them as novices or students.
I can see that there is a fruitful and happy obligation on my part to love them here [in the hermitage] and pray for them, and to share their burdens in solitude (alter alterius [onera portate. Bear one another’s burdens] … the capitulum of Sext.), to believe that I can be for them a source of healing and strength by prayer. Not to waste time with my own conflicts but to bring others help in theirs. Also to pray for any I may have offended or scandalized, and not merely worry about whether or not they were hurt by something I said or did.
Learning To Love Page 46