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Meditation
On the Monk Who Dwells

in Daily Life

Tliomas Moor
Author of Care of the Soul and Soul Mates

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Meditations
1

Sffso by 'Thomas Moore

.

Soul Mates

Care of the Soul

Rituals of the Imagination

The Planets Within

Dark Eros

A Blue Fire: The Essential Writings of James Hillman

(Editor)
M E Dl
r r (
l'fZctlOJiS
On tfieMonkWHo "Dwells in 'Daily Oft

Thomas Moore

HarperCoWmsPublishers
Qrateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint
excerpts from the following:

OPUS POSTHUMOUS by Wallace Stevens, edit., Samuel

© 1957 by Elsie Stevens and Holly
French Morse. Copyright
Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

"Qod Is Bom" from THE COMPLETE POEMS OF D. H.

LAWRENCE by D. H. Lawrence, edit., Vivian de Sola Pinto
and Warren Roberts. Copyright © Angelo Ravagli and C. M.
Weekley, Executors of The Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli,
1964, 1971. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a divi-
sion of Penguin Books USA Inc.
MEDITATIONS. Copyright © 1994 by Thomas Moore. All rights

reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this

book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever with-

out written permission except in the case of brief quotations em-

bodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York,
NY 10022.
HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business,

or sales promotional use. For information please write: Special

Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 10 East

53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
FIRST EDITION

Text design and production by David Bullen

Cover design by David Bullen and Michael Katz

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moore, Thomas, 1 940-

Meditations : on the monk who dwells in daily life /
by Thomas Moore,
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-01 7223-1
1 . Spiritual life. 2. Monastic and religious life. 3. Moore,
Thomas, 1940- . I. Title.

BL624.M664 1994
291.6'57— dc20 94-33743

94 95 96 97 98 RRD 10 987654321
 For Mary and Ben,

who perceived the mystery

and let it be
w
a seminary designed

Catholic priesthood.

driving desire to
hen I was

aim
thirteen years old

to prepare

I was filled
young men

as high as possible in
I left

with idealism and had a

my
home
for the

life,
to enter

Roman

follow-

ing the example of boys a year or two ahead of me in school

whom I greatly admired. That spirit was so strong in me

that it overcame the deep attachment I had felt keenly all

my life my family,
to to both my parents and brother at

home, and my larger family of grandparents, uncles and

aunts, and a host of cousins. The homesickness I felt year

after year tore at my heart, and yet I stayed with the monas-

tic regimen for twelve years. Only a few months before

ordination to the priesthood I was stirred enough by the

longing for a bigger world in which to live and think that I

left the security of that life and began my wanderings.

The Servite Order that was family all those years had

been founded in Florence, Italy, in the year 1 233. It was an

ancient order dedicated to the image of the sorrowful

mother of Jesus. A Jungian psychologist might say that

those intense years of religion had a marked anima focus,

not simply on a mother figure, but specifically on a mother

who suffers as a witness to her son's driven, idealistic life

and torturous, disillusioned end. The community was not

strictly speaking monastic, but partly contemplative and

partly active — my colleagues taught in colleges and high

schools and served in parishes. But even in these active set-
tings the style of life was characterized by intense commu-
nity and dedication to contemplation.

The only bad memories have I of this experience of reli-

gious life, in addition to the separation from my family, was

the tendency in it toward authoritarianism. It wasn't

always the case, but frequently enough I had to live under

the control of "superiors" who felt it their duty to maintain

strict observance of rules and customs. I've always been a

sensitive person who only needs a hint of direction and a

suggestion of correction. For the most part I do my rebelling

in imagination, and so I didn't fare well in authoritarian

atmospheres.

Otherwise, the religious life was filled with pleasures. I

could live out the solitude that is part of my nature, and yet
I would never be isolated — the community was always
there for support and companionship. I was surrounded by
men of character and good will, as well as idealism and

humor. I was fortunate to be in a Catholic community that

loved the world, deeply appreciated culture, and never

despised earthly pleasures. Without sex, without money,

and without much exercise of free will, I lived a satisfying

life.

When I finally left the order, I left most of religion

behind. I lived as an agnostic of sorts for a while. In my

monastery days I had studied music seriously and had writ-

ten and directed a considerable amount of music, and so,

once out of the order, I planned on the life of an academic

musician. Unexpectedly, my love of theology and religion
stayed with me. I received degrees in each field and then
took up a career as a college professor, followed by many
years as a psychotherapist.

With the publication of my two books, Care of the Soul

and Soul Mates, in another unexpected development I

received many invitations to speak in churches. I found

myself in grand, lofty pulpits and on stage and in crowded

bookstores talking about the soul. One time a Catholic

priest on Cape Cod invited me to speak. The church was

filled with people, and he insisted I speak from the pulpit.

As I stood there looking at the people, the church, the pas-

tor, and my position in the pulpit, I asked myself: "How did

I get here! Here I'm doing what I hoped to do when was I

thirteen. It has all come full circle. But none of it is literally

as I expected it to be. This priesthood and spirituality I had

sought so ardently takes form now that I have become a
family man, a husband, and a writer."

Over many decades my raw thoughts and emotions

about priesthood changed tone and color through an alche-

my almost entirely unconscious to me, and they gathered a

weight and form that I could never have predicted. In my
life now both the priesthood and the monastic life are made
of subtle stuff — not literal ways of life, but possibilities

powdered so finely that they have become values, nuances,

styles, and elements of character giving my life a certain

tone and color.

This book of meditations attempts to capture that alche-

my for the reader. I believe we all, men and women, have

XI
much to gain by reflecting on religious community life as a

spirit that can be fostered within our ordinary, secular lives.

It is a spirit that can deepen our values and experiences,

nourish our souls, and reveal sacredness where one pre-

viously suspected only secularity. The meditation form is

suited to this process because it is a collection of seeds, not a

fully articulated conclusion, that germinate like perennial

flowers in the midst of a worldly life.

These meditations come from my youthful experience of

religious community and the subsequent interiorization of

that experience. While our society may not seem terribly

interested these days in monastic life, it is clearly hungry for

a kind of spirituality that is neither divorced from ordinary

life nor escapist in tone. We may not need new leaders and
new philosophies as much as the recollection of old images

from the past. Monasticism may appear to be dying, but

that fading of a way of life offers us an unusual opportunity

to regard it with increased imagination, drawing its lessons

and attractions into our own lives, no matter what exter-

nal shape our work and home life may take. The ghosts of

the monks still speak. We have only to listen to them with

subtle attentiveness.
The doings of the gods are filled with Providence.

Chance events are not unrelated to nature

or the weaving and winding of the allotments

of Providence.

Everything flows from Providence,

and alongside it is Necessity,

and whatever contributes

to the entire universe

of which you are a part.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

 J ;arly christian monks went out
to live in the desert in order to find emptiness. Modem life

is becoming so full that we need our own ways of going to

the desert to be relieved of our plenty. Our heads are

crammed with information, our lives busy with activities,

our cities stuffed with automobiles, our imaginations bloat-

ed on pictures and images, our relationships heavy with

advice, our jobs burdened with endless new skills, our

homes cluttered with gadgets and conveniences. We honor

productivity to such an extent that the unproductive person

or day seems a failure.

Monks are experts at doing nothing and tending the cul-

ture of that emptiness.

 ONASTIC BWILDINQS SHOW US
how an intense interior life may generate an outward form

of art, craft, and the care of things. Out of a simple life has

come an extraordinary heritage of books, illuminated pages,

sculpture, architecture, and music. The cultivation of the

inner life overflows in outward displays of beauty and rich-

ness.

Maybe it's a mistake to think of the monastic life as a

withdrawal from the active world,- we might see it more as

an alternative to the hyperactivity that is characteristic of

modem life. Traditionally the monk is extremely active,

and on many fronts: actively engaged in nurturing the inner

life, actively committed to a communal style of living, and

actively producing words, images, and sounds of extraordi-

nary meaningfulness and beauty.

I N AN AQE OF PROFOUND CULTURAL
transition, religion itself appears to be going through its

own rite of passage. For some it is in a time of crisis, for oth-

ers a period of vibrant change. I see religion moving toward

a diminishing of dogma, authority, membership, and belief

and an increase in everyday ritual, poetic theology, social

engagement, guidance in contemplation, and care of the

soul.

In this new setting monasticism, too, can become more

a spirit than an institution, one element among several in

establishing a soul-centered life, and a style that invites

beauty and culture into a life of pragmatism and efficiency.

iu
something
ITHDRAWAL FROM THE WORLD
we can, and perhaps should, do every day.
IS

It

completes the movement of which entering fully into life is

only one part. Just as a loaf of bread needs air in order to rise,

everything we do needs an empty place in its interior. I

especially enjoy such ordinary retreats from the active life as

shaving, showering, reading, doing nothing, walking, lis-

tening to the radio, driving in a car. All of these activities

can turn one's attention inward toward contemplation.

Mundane withdrawal from the busyness of an active

life can create a spirituality-without-walls, a spiritual prac-

tice that is not explicitly connected to a church or a tradition.

I have never forgotten Joseph Campbell's response when he

was asked about his yoga practice: laps in a pool and a drink
once a day. Anything is material for retreat — cleaning out
a closet, giving away some books, taking a walk around the
block, clearing your desk, turning off the television set, say-

ing no to an invitation to do anything.

At the sight of nothing, the soul rejoices.

w
treat
HEN

and one week each year

leave the monastery, but
I

from the world wasn't

LIVED IN

we
A MONASTERY,
sufficient.

"went" on

we went away
One day a month
retreat.

from
We
it.
RE-

didn't

Qoing
away — literally, figuratively — is the essence of retreat.

I remember a considerable amount of walking during

retreat. There is still beauty in the image my memory con-

jures up of brothers taking solitary walks slowly through the

lush gardens or lazily down the dusty roads. This was walk-
ing for the soul — no calculating of heartbeats, no effort to

get anywhere, no concern for speed, no worry about going

around in circles.

Simply getting away from linear life, going away in

mood or reflection, walking away from the action, or shut-

ting down business as usual: This is all the start of retreat

and the core of the monastic spirit — only a walk away.

I
rify
N THEIR POVERTY
pennilessness and want
MONKS DO NOT
but tone down
QLO-
their acquisi-

tiveness and desire for possessions. We could incorporate

the monastic experience of common ownership into capital-

ism. I own the bridge and the waterway, the woods and
city hall, the park and the main artery out of town. On the
other hand, I don't truly own the land I live on or the car I

drive or even the shirt I'm wearing.

Woody Allen tells the story of his uncle who on his

deathbed sold his nephew a watch. People who can give

gracefully appreciate the mystery that monks have been

preaching for centuries: great riches are to be had by those

who surrender their possessiveness.

Wealth needs poverty of a kind in order to be complete

and fulfilling.
m
bacy, a

don't,"

said:
I
HEN WAS LIVINQ THE VOW OE CELI-
man
said.

Ah! Masturbation
I

asked

He
me how
gave me
I got along without sex.

a look I've never forgotten that

or a lover in town or 'Penthouse

"I

under the mattress. I was thinking: the pleasure of living

this communal, natural, interior life is sexual. I don't feel

anything missing.

We can all take the vow of chastity in the midst of a

vibrant sex life. The beauty of being with one person sexu-
ally is fed by saying no to others, by not giving too much
attention to sexual longing, by sublimating in imagination

without repression, by finding that the world itself is a sex

partner.

Celibacy is a rounding out of sex, just as sex is a natu-

ral outcome of chastity. In Botticelli's 'Trimavera Chastity

dances with Beauty and Pleasure, not with Sobriety and

Severity.
I
by a
N MONASTIC
clock. The day may be
LIFE TIME
set
IS NOT MEASURED
out according to the parts of

Divine Office, a set of psalms and songs chosen according

to the remembrance of the day — a saint, a liturgical season,

a holy event. Lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, and

compline are the "hours" of a sacred day.

Qualities of time are also evoked by chants. Tuer CNatus

for Christmas, Victimae Taschali for Easter, Tties Irae for

death. I can't listen to the chant of '7e Tteum without feel-

ing the emotional release of ending a long retreat. We all

have music that is tied to special times, and is therefore a

means for celebrating the seasons of the soul. We could all

leam from monks to disregard our watches and find other

more imaginative, sacred ways to mark time.

 HERE WAS A
JLhei MAN IN OUR COMMU-
nity who was always prompt studious, generally serious,

and obviously destined for a role among the hierarchy. He

was a perfect target for monastic humor.

One night he arrived at his room to find life-sized statues

of a male and female saint lying next to each other in his

bed. On another occasion, just to add a spice of humility to

his habit of promptness, some of his more thoughtful con-

freres unscrewed the handles on his door, so that when the

bell for vespers rang, no matter how much he tried, he

couldn't get the door open.

What is the humor within the joke here? Don't saints

sleep together? Don't we know from Pygmalion that statues

have their own private lives? Aren't we always being

locked in when we have important things to do elsewhere?
a.
road
PILQRIM
when one day he
WAS WALKINQ A LONQ
passed what seemed to be a monk
sitting in a field. Nearby men were working on a stone

building.

"You look like a monk," the pilgrim said.

"I am that/' said the monk.

"Who is that working on the abbey?"
"My monks," said the man. "I'm the abbot."

"It's good to see a monastery going up/' said the pilgrim.

"They're tearing it down/' said the abbot.

"Whatever for?" asked the pilgrim.

"So we can see the sun rise at dawn/' said the abbot.
I
visit
:m sure the day my doctor decided to
the monastery he hadn't the slightest thought that the

prior would throw him into the swimming pool. He stood

with his nobility firmly in place at the beginning of the

party, but when his wife was nudged into the water by a
clumsy brother passing by, he may have begun to change
his mind about what a monastery was.

Superficial solemnity, thankfully, was never part of my

experience of the life. I have always favored the kind of spir-
itual involvement that begets rather than kills earthy humor
and even ribaldry. The perspective of divinity can be de-

fined as all that is contrary to human intention and digni-

fied expectation. We know we are moving more deeply

into the spirit when we notice the presence in us of holy

foolishness. And who is to say that this was not a case of

baptismal renewal?
TU
dience,
E

even as
COULD ALL TAKE THE VOW OF OBE-
we pursue freedom and individuality.

Obedience means to listen closely to others for words of

direction. Only in an ego-mad world do we think that des-

tiny is revealed in our own will and thought.
You know something that I don't know about where I

want to be. If I just listen to myself, I will be trapped in a cir-

cle. If you don't speak to me about what you see and sus-

pect, then I won't know the direction in which want to go. I

And if I don't listen to my friends and neighbors, I'll be

stuck in the labyrinth of what I think I want. Obedience is

a way of being communal, but if I'm not in community,

obedience will become slavery. The monk sees the will of

Qod in his superior. I can see the deep will that guides me
in the thoughts and reflections of my neighbor.

12
J WAS
tual
NINETEEN WHEN SOUQHT
guidance from the novice master whose brother
I SPIRI-

was a

professional contemplative, though he himself had an

attractive mix of earth and sky. He was an amiable, highly

cultured man, who as a leader could be warm without

being ingratiating. As was the custom, I prostrated myself

on the floor in front of him and kissed my scapular when he

gave the sign to rise.

"I've been reading a book on meditation," I said, "that

claims the best way is to have a conversation with Christ.

I'm trying, but it seems that I'm doing all the talking."

"Just keep listening until you hear something," he said.

That was all.

Thirty-four years later, not having seen this novice mas-

ter all that time, out of the blue I received a letter from him
and then visited him at his monastery. I found in him the

same dry humor, even more culture, and a new degree of

gentleness. Maybe because the trappings of authority and

student were now absent, I felt a strong love for him and
appreciation for what he had given me in my youth.
Now, having read Jung, Ficino, Yeats, Rilke, and Dick-
inson, I've discovered how to listen meditatively. It has

taken me thirty years to learn how to stop talking, to wait

and really listen.

The truly extraordinary discovery is knowing that I still

have a novice master.

L
nity of
N TWELVE YEARS OF LIVINQ IN A COMMU-
men I discovered that monks could be heterosexual

and still be attracted to each other. I never witnessed any

acting out of those attractions, but I could sense the passions

and the longings.

A student of theology once told me that whenever she
took a class in her major, she developed an extreme longing

for sex. Could it be that wherever sex is absent — wher-

ever — it shows its displeasure in obsession? Would a sexier
theology course have had a different effect? What if school

were fundamentally sexy? What if we allowed all of life to

be suffused with desire, sensuality, and pleasure?

I imagine the result to be fewer concerns about people's

sexual choices, more interesting sex in the movies, less

moralism and education in matters of sex, and deeper plea-

sures in ordinary life. We still haven't learned what the

monks knew well: that sex has little to do with biology.

'4
TU HEN WAS TWENTY AND LIVINQ
a priory in Ireland, a perceptive
I

and generous old man took

IN

me under his tutelage and told me countless stories of great

writers and painters he had known. At the time he was a

close friend of Samuel Beckett, a writer for whom even then
I felt a certain kinship. He and Beckett were planning a
vacation in Venice and invited me to accompany them. I

rushed to the prior, the head of the monastery, and asked

permission to spend two weeks in Italy. He looked at me as
though I had asked him to buy me a Jaguar convertible.

"Absolutely out of the question," he said with considerable

finality.

At the time my imagination allowed me only regret.

Rules were rules and priors were priors. Now I think rather

differently. I know about Qiordano Bruno, for instance, a

monk who traveled from one country to the next, teaching

outrageous ideas in a place until he was run out. Now I

realize I had other options. I could have gone to Venice and

then begged for reinstatement, or I could have joined the

Jesuits, or I could have embarked on my own European edu-

cation. This last option gives me pleasure just in the fantasy

of it.

In spiritual lifestyles one often loses touch with one's

own freedom and imagination.

r5
TJlURINQ MY LAST YEARS IN A RELIQ-
ious community had I a friend who was too worldly for the

authorities. He was an extraordinarily intelligent and tal-

ented man, a true friend, and, though living a thoroughly

secular life, a lover of the monastic traditions. I was told he

couldn't come to see me, and I wasn't to spend time with
him away from the monastery.

The prior was probably afraid I might be led so much

into the delights of a more worldly life that I'd leave my
vows. The prior was right. I did leave my vows, and my
friend was certainly an influence in that direction. Each per-

son played his role: the tempting friend, the protective

authority, and the wide-eyed pilgrim — me.

Nevertheless, destiny and fate have strong hands, and

necessity waits upon no good reason or loyalty. Happy are

we who find authorities inside us and outside, who can do

their job of protection and guidance, while at the same time

lighting a votive at the altar of necessity.

IO
33 EfS^S K£$*£l R£ra Vg&Sl E£^S£^5£5^E£^E£3^^
2a a&s^a i^i^i £&3^d £&£2a iito^i^^^ii»$^^^^^^^^^

a: HE QREATEST BLESSINQ TO ME OF
ing for twelve years in a religious community was
Liv-

the op-

portunity to meet many extraordinary individuals. From the

outside, people look at monks and see habits and cowls.
From the inside you see souls.

The composer Monteverdi said there are three passions:

love, hate, and prayer. All three were in play in the reli-

gious community. More interesting is how prayer fosters

both solitude and love. Men who pray together several

hours each day, and then work, play, and think hard, enjoy

a special kind of communal connection.

There is little room for sentimentality, but if the idealism

of the praying seeps down into emotions of genuine inti-

macy, a rare strain of conviviality comes into being, and

there is nothing more fulfilling.

Today prayer seems to be largely out of vogue, and so,

coincidentally, is conviviality.

j
r
Q
astic

that night
life,
NICE, IN

and needed a
THE EARLY YEARS OF MY MON-
young man was visiting

haircut.
who said he had a date
He noticed our barbershop,
which looked quite professional, but what he didn't know
is that in religious community it's the custom for each monk
to take a new job every six months. The "barber" had just

begun his stint, and the young man went away that day
with a hat pulled down over his inexpertly thatched head.

I developed appendicitis on a soccer field in Ireland and

went to the "infirmarian" to get some advice. We all tended
to believe that in our various offices we knew what we
were doing. He recommended hot compresses. When the

doctor arrived to take me to the hospital for surgery, he rec-

ommended cold compresses. Definitely nothing warm, he

said.

All of this suggests that we can survive without experts,

and maybe even discover community in the common dis-

pensing of offices.

iS
*sL*BILLBOARD NEAR AN OLD HOUSE OF
mine displayed in six-foot type: PRAY. IT WORKS. I al-

ways thought this was the ultimate in American pragma-

tism. If it doesn't work, do you stop praying? What does it

mean to say that prayer works? You get what you want?
Life gets better?

My billboard would say: PRAY. IT MAY NOT WORK.

Prayer is an alternative to working hard to get what you
want. One discovers eventually that what you want is

almost always what you don't need.

Pray — period! Don't expect anything. Or better, expect

nothing. Prayer cleanses us of expectations and allows holy

will, providence, and life itself an entry. What could be

more worth the effort — or the noneffort?

*3
IM
wear a
THE MONASTERY OUR CUSTOM WAS TO
habit, or you could say, our habit was to wear a cos-

tume. I wore black for twelve years: a long tunic, thick belt,

narrow band down front and back (scapular), and cowl.

Attached to the belt was a rosary — beads, seven times

seven, counting the sorrows that Mary endured as mother

of Jesus.

Marsilio Ficino, my Italian Renaissance guide in matters

of magic, taught that one should wear colors for their spiri-

tual effect rather than randomly or according to momentary

taste. Certain colors attract a certain kind of spirit.

What did my black habit attract all those years? Cer-

tainly a degree of sobriety. An Englishman once noticed a

group of us dressed in black and asked: "What are you? You
look rather grim."

But black also evokes eternity, as in black holes, and

withdrawal, as in black moods. Whatever the mood, mak-

ing a habit out of a costume serves retreat from the world.

n: HE MAJOR PART OF
given to a strange "work" — liturgy.
A MONK'S
The word means
LIFE IS

"pub-

lic work or performance." We laypersons think of work as

something we do to make a living and stay alive, care for

our families, find meaning, and achieve a modicum of suc-

cess. We may justify our lives by it.

The monk gives up this source of meaning and transfers

it to "soul work." The work of the monk is liturgy.

We could discover from the example of the monk that

there is a place for an odd kind of work that feeds the soul

but not necessarily the body. A few moments with a paint-

ing, a sunset, a sonata, nothing — might give the soul its

sustenance, its meaning, and its reason for existence.

21
w.
erism? It's
HAT IS THE PROBLEM WITH CONSUM-
not in shopping, buying, having, owning, sell-

ing, enjoying. All these are ways of being attached to the

world of objects — not a bad thing in itself. The problem is

that in shopping, buying, and possessing we are never sat-

isfied, and that the feeling of emptiness after such an effort

to possess indicates that for all our buying we never fully

possess or fully own.

I suspect that the soul needs to have and to own, and
these needs are perhaps the shadow of spiritual self-denial.

The monk's vow of poverty may have nothing to do with

this moralistic denial of pleasure.

What does it take to really own and possess? It means

loving a thing so much that one can't be parted from it,

can't stand to see it neglected and misused, can't trust that

someone else will care for it sufficiently.

Our materialism is a sign that we don't love the world

nearly enough.

22
re _JLoR REASONS I HAVE NEVER UNDER-
stood, our community once moved from a much loved,

beautiful, warmly furnished monastery to the cold wing of

a nearby diocesan seminary. We looked at the colorless ter-

razzo floors and pale, plain walls of our new abode and
made it our first order of business to bring in lamps, paint-

ings, paint, soft couches, and comfortable chairs. Within a

few months we began getting requests from local seminari-

ans to join our community.

Oddly it was the worldliness and body sense of us

monks that seemed to attract the so-called secular priests-to-

be. When spirituality and worldliness are so infused with

each other that it is difficult to distinguish one from the

other, they are both brimming with soul and become

objects of desire.

-3
I T IS SAID THAT PRIESTS AND MONKS ONCE
practiced the rule of jus primae noctis, the right of the first

night. The clergyman would celebrate the wedding of a

couple and then spend the first night with the bride. A four-
teenth-century priest had a long affair with a woman whose
wedding he had performed. Her husband said, "With the
priest it's all right, but stay away from other men."

The monk lives according to the advice of Marsilio

Ficino — partly in time, partly in eternity. Whatever is done

is never fully of this world, and yet it's always in this world.

We could all live partly out of this world, and perhaps dis-
cover the limits of worldly law and convention.

14
Qod himself is bom!
And so we see, Qod is not

until he is bom.

And also we see

there is no end to the birth of Qod.

D. H. Lawrence
•sitsN INTELLIQENT, KIND MAN LIVED IN
our community for many years, and admired him
I greatly.

The prior, however, was constantly annoyed by this man's

independent thinking and gave him grief on every occa-
sion. I'm not one to stand up quickly or forcefully, but this

time I couldn't watch the injustice quietly. I told the prior

that I was quite disturbed at the way he was treating this

valuable member of the community.

The next week my friend was asked unceremoniously
and authoritatively to leave the community that loved him
and of which he had been part for at least six years. He was
told that his manner was a serious disturbance to the others.

Several months later a small revolution took place in the

politics of the order, and the prior lost his position.

I have no doubt about the necessity and fatefulness of my

friend's leave-taking, but I learned through strong emotions

that spiritual authority can easily lose one of the soul's great-

est gifts — conscience. Righteousness can be a form of in-

sanity in which conscience, protector of community, is

swamped and undone by entitlement.

26
M
filled

lore
-Y
with comedy

and legends of grand

MEMORY OF MONASTIC
— practical jokes, elaborate stories,

probable personalities, the great stand-up comic monks, the

foolishness.
LIFE

On solemn occasions
IS

im-

the humor seemed to be especially intense — a cracked

voice during a solemn chant, miscues in ritual, food spilling

during silent meals, vestments accidentally put on back-

ward.

Then there is the spirit that seems deprived of the capac-

ity for laughter. It can be so severe, sincere, and focused that

humor appears alien and almost criminal.

Humor lubricates and softens the spiritual life, and

makes it bearable.

^7
a
was
YOUNQ WOMAN WHOSE FAMILY
living in poverty tried hard to enter a

world by getting her high school diploma, but the

more promising
state had
decided that all students should pass difficult math tests,

which she had failed. "We must raise our standards," said

the superintendent of schools. "We must be able to compete

in the next century. The Chinese and Japanese know their

math," he said, "and so should we all."

When educators lose their compassion to principle, to

ambition, and to competition, soul has once more been pul-

verized by a misplaced desire for success. When the indi-

viduality of the person is subjugated to general principles of

the whole, the soul begins to fade. Principle, futurity, and

totalitarianism take over.

The most difficult lesson to learn about caring for the

soul is that our best and most cherished ambitions are its

worst enemy.

iS
I N THE
of beauty and
BEST OF MONASTERIES THE PURSUIT
spiritual practice go hand in hand. Music,

architecture, decoration, language, gardens, and libraries

flourish. Community life is the object of central concern.

Learning, study, reading, and the preservation of books are

all integral to spiritual practice.

We get into trouble in the spirit when we give up any of

these: when beauty turns into sentimentality or propagan-

da, when architecture and the other arts are unconscious or

considered secondary, when we forget the importance of

ongoing, lifelong learning in all areas as support for the spir-

itual life, and especially when we make spiritual practice

the project of creating a certain kind of self.

25
L _'VE

Jesus or the
NEVER HAD THE IMPRESSION THAT
Buddha were proselytizers. It simply wasn't

their style to run membership campaigns or even to "net-

work." They seem to have been less ambitious than that.

Believers and followers and converts — words we use of

those who have become convinced of some spiritual

value — run the risk of trying to make everyone else as per-

fect as they are. You must read this book, listen to this

speaker, go to this place, become a whatever. What is it

when the spirit gets such a hold on a person that they have

to convert everyone else to their enthusiasm?

Soul puts reins on this tendency to clone one's own

tongues of fire. Soul respects another's failure to find per-

fection, resistance to enlightenment, sheer ignorance of

absolute truth, misguided attachments, and unrelenting

meandering.

30
 Old pond,
frog jumps
Plop.

<TLHE SOUND OF WATER IN BASHO'S POEM

about the frog has been translated in a variety of ways
splash, shhh, plop. Qood sounds can't easily be put into

ordinary words.

One day I'd like to open my own musical instrument

store in which I would sell fountains of running water

tuned in fourths and fifths, and trees with leaves voiced for

sleep that could be placed near a bedroom window, and

long metal tubes of such low resonance they could be felt

but not heard, and beehives in which the pedal point of the

bees could be amplified with a sounding box, and treble

frogs and bass frogs, and stones that could be dropped on

each other for percussion, and drinking glasses that could be

either struck lightly or rubbed, and a bird feeder that would

attract a variety of singers, and fish that would make
sonorous bubbles in a pond.

My store would be called Bashd's Pond.

S1
1U HY IS IT SO DIFFICULT FOR A RICH PER-
son to find heaven that it would be easier for a camel to pass

through the eye of a needle? Qranted the needle's eye may

be a metaphor, the image is nevertheless striking. Which
end of the camel would go first, if he gave it a try at all?

Is it that the pursuit of money for power, prestige, and

comfort is so far removed from the concerns of the spirit? I

don't think it's how much money you have, but rather how
much of yourself you give to it. A person with money may
not be rich in the biblical sense, and a person with modest

quantities may be distracted by its weight.

According to an old Irish story, a monk had a prized pos-

session, a fly that walked along each line of his breviary as

he read the psalms. One day the fly died, and the monk
lamented the loss to his spiritual director. His friend's ad-

monishing reply: "Misfortune always waits upon wealth."

3*
s. THOMAS MORE WROTE
T. IN tfTCKP/tf:
What you cannot turn to good you must make as little bad
as you can.
He lived a vibrant family life, enjoyed political power,

and always sought the monastic spirit. A man for all sea-

sons, his life was a zodiac of attachments and devotedness.

In particular he followed an ancient humanist insight: the

life of the spirit flourishes in combination with a subtle,

reserved, carefully focused life of pleasure.

If you aim at a life of spiritual purity, then you, more than

most, must cultivate honest worldly pleasures.

33
I S

Dickinson asks,
IT OBLIVION OR ABSORPTION, EMILY
when we forget?

When some new thought feeling, or notion presents

itself, we can't forget it or overlook it. When we have invit-

ed it in or agreed to live in its company, maybe then it won't
be such a preoccupation. It will be forgotten —not exiled

into oblivion, but absorbed into being.

34

>
I T IS SAID THAT MICHEL^NQELO
the sculpture in a raw piece of marble. Could
COULD SEE
it also be a tal-

ent to see the marble out of which our things are bom!
We tend to look at all the things of life, from objects to

people, as fixed, separate, one-dimensional givens. Could

we also perceive the stories in which they live, the spirit

that gives them context, the music made by their move-

ments, the aromas emanating from their presence, the void

displaced by their forms, the secrets hidden by their revela-

tion? What kind of senses would be required for such per-

ception!

35
 ARSYAS, A FIQWRE IN MYTHOLOQY
who played the flute or oboe, challenged Apollo to a con-

test. The muses judged the competition, and Marsyas lost,

his punishment the flaying of his skin.

The torture of the mortal by the god who inspires him

was a central theme in the revival of ancient mysteries, says

art historian Edgar Wind of Renaissance sacred art. The

mythological flaying of Marsyas was a prime image of this
mystery that may be implicated in all serious experiments in
the spiritual life. Our small, protective intentions in spiri-

tuality, sustained sometimes by sentimentalities, may be

chewed to pieces, their skin ripped off, and their insides

turned out, as we discover the awesome nature of what we

innocently name divine and angelic.

36
Q
underworld
any sky,
RPHEUS AND EURYDICE. ORPHIC DARK
spirituality is

mountain, light-centered quest

as sacred and close to divinity as

for spirit. But the

mystery of Orpheus confounds with its antipathetic logic. If

you want to retrieve from the depths your treasure, that

which you love, indeed your own soul, in that eternal

moment between life and deathly oblivion you must not

look at it. The very goal of spiritual quest disappears instant-

ly when it is perceived.

So, generation after generation the Orphic poets speak of

that which they have never seen and will never see as long

as they are in its presence.

37
VL
are
S MONKS SINQ THEIR CHANTS THEY
making music that mirrors and models the life they are

living. Chant is modal. It doesn't have the drive toward

ending or the insistent relationships between notes and

chords that modern music has. Endings and climaxes

appear melodically, for the most part, with a felt lift in song

and a sure entropy in musical energy.

A modal life reflecting the chant would be created more

by art than by plain emotion. It would be individual

(melodic) rather than collective (harmonic). In a modal life,

endings are soft, peaks are rounded, and energy is reserved.

Modal life, like modal music, has the special beauty that

comes with the absence of drivenness.

I've never seen monks waltz, and I'm not sure that their

lives rock and roll.

<R
tially a
ECAWSE THE LIFE

withdrawal from the world,

OF A MONK
it's
IS ESSEN-
necessary for the

monk almost every day to say no to some invitation from

modern life. Monasteries are often difficult to approach

physically. They may have long entrance drives, stout gates

and fences, heavy doors, loud bells, a labyrinth of corridors,

and notices in Latin. These are ritual forms hinting at a cru-

cial spirit that resists modern culture.

If we want to don the metaphoric costume of the monk

in our quest for spirituality, we might leam this art of indi-

rection and concealment, ultimately a means for preserving

one's own spiritual integrity. The world should have a dif-

ficult time gaining entrance.

33
I.N A JAPANESE STORY A RENOWNED
teacher of archery goes to a mountaintop to find the greatest

archer in the world. He's astonished to discover that this

accomplished master doesn't use a bow and arrow. Yet,

when the master aims his empty arms, formed as though to

shoot, into the sky, and then releases the invisible arrow, a

bird falls to the earth.

What I envision is a rebuilding of monasticism without

the need for monasteries, a recovery of sacred language

without a church in which to use it, an education in the soul

that takes place outside of school, the creation of an artful

world accomplished by persons who are not artists, the

emergence of a psychological sensibility once the discipline

of psychology has been forgotten, a life of intense commu-

nity with no organization to belong to, and achieving a life

of soul without having made any progress toward it.

40
s OME
r

worked hard
RENAISSANCE
at reconciling
THEOLOQIANS
paganism with Judaism and
Christianity. We have yet to achieve this detente that is es-

sential to the life of soul. Fragments of our hearts and minds

are located in the garden of Qethsemane and in the garden

of Epicurus, on the zodiac of the Apostles and on the zodi-

ac of the animals, in the wine of Dionysus and in the wine

of the Eucharist, in the psalms of David and in the hymns of

Homer.
It is not a matter of belonging to a religion or professing

one's faith, it is a matter of orientation in life and participa-

tion in its mysteries. We can all be pagan in our affirmation

of all of life, Christian in our affirmation of communal love,

Jewish in our affirmation of the sacredness of family,

Buddhist in our affirmation of emptiness, and Taoist in our

affirmation of paradox.

The new monk wears invisible robes. Thomas Merton

travels across the globe, and in the home of Eastern monks,
dies. Isn't this a myth for our time about the resurrection of

the monastic spirit?

41
&
monks
T. COMPASSUS AND HIS BAND OF EIQHT
lived for years in a land-locked region of forests and
valleys. One day the saint rose in the morning with the
thought that he and his men were destined to find a new
land across the sea. He had the advantage of both book
learning and a certain intuitive, divinitory form of knowl-
edge, and so every day for five years he read about the sea
and about unknown lands. At the same time he consulted
the flight of migrating birds and the shape of clouds and the
peal of thunder.

When all was set, the small band climbed into the

homemade craft they had brought to the ocean's shore, and

amid jeers from their countrymen who believed the land-

lubber crew would perish in the unfamiliar sea, they set off

from the rocky edge of land. St. Compassus knew exactly

where the craft should head, but a current turned them

around in the first minute of their voyage, and they sailed

away, first in circles, then in a serpentine squiggle, and

finally straight ahead in the wrong direction. They were
never heard from again.

41
Q NE DAY,
sorbed into the

restored and
life
WHEN THE MONK
of culture, theology will also have been

revisioned. It
IS

will be a rich study of religions

AB-

and nonreligions, philosophies and poetries, fictions and

musics, beliefs and unbeliefs.

In my daydreams this new theology takes her place

alongside the arts and sciences, and her objects of study

include culture's daily diet of ritual, prayer, icon, ceremony,

architecture, holy reckoning of time, illness, death, birth,

marriage, yearning, melancholy, meaning, lack of mean-

ing, history, ancestors, values, morality, atonement, and

initiation.

One day, instead of going to a therapist, troubled or

searching people will pay a call on their theologian to con-

sider the mysteries that have befallen them.

43
& r
OMETIMES
will land
IN THEIR
upon a note and sing
CHANTINQ MONKS
it in florid fashion, one syl-

lable of text for fifty notes of chant. Melisma, they call it.

Living a melismatic life in imitation of plainchant, we

may stop on an experience, a place, a person, or a memory
and rhapsodize in imagination. Some like to meditate or

contemplate melismatically, while others prefer to draw,

build, paint, or dance whatever their eye has fallen upon.

Living one point after another is one form of experience,

and it can be emphatically productive. But stopping for

melisma gives the soul its reason for being.

44
 ATINS. THE MORNINQ PRAYER OF
the monastery, named after Matuta, Qoddess of Dawn,

according to Lucretius. For years I rose at 5:15 a.m. to a

knock at my door and a Latin greeting from a confrere. "CAve

Maria," Hail Mary, he would say in a muffled voice on the

other side of the door, breaking into my dreams, "gratia

Tlena," Full of Qrace, was my reply, although it was often

said with more growl than grace.

It is of the essence of the monk's life to rise early.

Whenever we get up in the small hours of morning we par-

ticipate in the monk's praise and enjoyment of dawn. In this

liminal place, on the threshold between dream and life,

sleep and waking, and darkness and sunshine, we find a

special doorway to the spiritual and the eternal.

The monk seeks out periods of spiritual ripeness and

simply opens his heart to their effluence.

45
<£ HE MONK'S LIFE OF CHASTITY IS LIVED
to a full degree as a life station, but chastity is available to us

all, single or married, as one positive element among many.

Being chaste, we need not give all our thoughts and time to
the pursuit of sex, which is not fulfilled in such singlemind-

ed devotion anyway. In chastity we reserve a good part of

ourselves for relation to others — to people, places, and

things, and we have the conviction to be individual, soli-

tary, and self-contained.

The soul enjoys sensations of purity, as long as they are

not bought at the price of impurity's delights.

The monk has to find his lay soul, just as the layperson

searches for the monk soul.

Purity, sometimes achieved by the ritual washing of
hands, has long been celebrated as a needed preparation for

the incursion of spirit. Such chastity may last no longer than

a fleeting moment and yet satisfy the requirements for a

spiritual grace.

&
a
fected.

ate,
S MONKS, WE DIDN'T
We never used that word, but the room in which we
the long hall with tables set on the outer
DINE, WE

sides only,
RE-

we
called the refectory. The word refers to being remade or

refreshed at a meal. Nonmonks use a similar word, restau-

rant, which means to be restored.

Still, the refectory had its own style of dining and its

own method of restoration. Most days we ate in silence. I

wonder if the silence that sometimes descends upon people

at a restaurant is due to a passing monkish spirit and not to

a failure of communication.

Often a brother would read a thoughtful book aloud

while the rest of us ate — being restored in mind as well as

body. Certain restaurants — delis, coffee shops, bakeries

seem suited for reading while eating, thus keeping refection

alive. Thought for food.

47
 HREE MONKS KNELT IN THE CHAPEL IN
^LHRI
the dark morning hours before dawn.
The first thought he saw the figure of Jesus come down
from the cross and rest before him in midair. Finally, he said
to himself, I know what contemplation is.

The second felt himself rise out of his place in the choir.

He soared over his brother monks and surveyed the timber-

vaulted ceiling of the church, and then landed back in his

place in the choir. I've been blessed, he thought, with a

minor miracle, but in humility I must keep it to myself.

The third felt his knees growing sore and his legs tired.

His mind wandered until it came to a stop on the image of

a luscious hamburger laden with onions and pickles.

"No matter how hard I try," said the devil's helper to his

master, "I can't seem to tempt this third monk."

 ^Lhe
HE ARTS QIVE THE SPIRITUAL LIFE IMAQ-
nation, softening its tendency toward rules and dogma and

deepening its intuitions. Monastic architecture, so unique

and so deeply moving, is of the essence of that spiritual life,

in no way secondary.
Every home is a monastery. There, it is to be hoped, we
can find solitude, community, beauty, nature, oratory, and

food. There the spirit can be nourished, and the body

pleased with arts and pleasures.

When planning a home, a remodeling, or a new

arrangement of furniture, we could do worse than study the

plans and pictures of a great monastery of the past.

45
<£ HE MONK'S LIFE MAY APPEAR TO BE
extraordinary, but in truth it is exceptional for being so

utterly ordinary.

For years I conducted my fellow brothers in Qregorian

chant. The chant may sound simple, but it required daily

evening rehearsals. We didn't have an expert choir chosen

by audition, we had a choir of men who happened to live in
a particular monastery. A few were downright tone-deaf.
Some were basses whose pitch hovered above and below

the appointed note. Others were tenors whose voices tended

to crack and gargle at a certain high range. Each had a dif-

ferent idea about how long it should take to reach the end of
the piece.

But we sang beautiful chant, and therein is a lesson

about making something extraordinary out of less than ordi-

nary talents.

50
n:
ing. For
HE MONK
him, a book
PRACTICES SPIRITUAL READ-
is not a source of information, but a

way to pray. What if we always read as prayer, every book

a scripture, whether science, fiction, or theology? Our

minds might release some of their authority and influence,

allowing our hearts, or some other place of reflection, to be

nourished.

Monks also spoke of the world as a book, liber mundi

How do you study the world without trying to be in-

formed? The answer to that question defines the difference

between the religious and the secular life.

51
iu HAT
the image of the
I

monk
PARTICULARLY
is that he is
LIKE
always out of
ABOUT
place. A
picture stays in my mind of a priest in our community who
was extraordinarily bright and also very funny. He had a
bad back and often had to use a heating pad. One day as we
were chanting vespers I looked over to the opposite choir

stall and saw him standing there with a cord trailing from

somewhere in his habit to an outlet in the wall. The electric

monk.
The incongruousness of a plugged-in monk or a nun at a
bank ATM machine says something about the religious life.

It is always an anachronism, because eternal time is always

somewhat out of synch with ordinary calendar time. This

also suggests that whenever we feel that we belong in

another century or we can't seem to keep up with the pace

of modern life, the monk may be paying a visit, and his

spirit could be cultivated rather than cured.

5-
I N HIS RECOLLECTIONS
ton, before talking about their
OF
common
THOMAS
approach to
MER-
world
peace, the Dalai Lama noted that he learned from Merton

to wear a thick belt instead of a thin cord around his waist.

Imagine the Dalai Lama and Merton in deep conversation

comparing Buddhist notions of compassion with Christian

ideas of charity, the great religious leader all the time eyeing

the monk's belt with some envy, and then later copying the

monk's ways.
Here we have an extraordinary example of religious

learning — imitating the holy figure we admire — as well as

living in the stereoscopic world in which one eye is on the

cosmos and the other on a belt, a perfect reconciliation of

time and eternity.

53
 UKNS FOR MONASTERIES ALWAYS CALL
for a chapel. In the life of the monk, spiritual practice is cen-

tral — liturgy, meditation, divine office, prayer — and so the

room dedicated to this work is an important part of the

architecture.

Any of our buildings — houses, civic centers, office

plazas, shopping malls, places of industry — could also rec-

ognize that spirituality is a central element of life. Each

could have a chapel, if only a simple room, dedicated exclu-

sively to the needs of the soul.

What shift in attitude would be required should our

architects consider a chapel as an absolute necessity in any

building project?

54
I N THE TWELFTH CENTURY JOACHIM OF
Fiore created a sensation with his theology or philosophy of

time. There is an age of the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit he said, of law, grace, and spirit. As I read Joachim, I

imagine three phases in each person's life and in the history

of a culture. There is a time to focus on law, learning, and

guidance. Later, one discovers structures that serve one's

needs — church, a school of thought, marriage. Finally, one

finds all of these things sublimated — less literal, concrete

but not obvious.

I prefer the intention to be in community over inten-

tional communities. We nonmonks may think of commu-

nity involvement as something added on to our private

lives. The monk knows that the individual fulfillment he

craves can only be found in perpetual attention to commu-
nity.

55
<B ROTHER
in the kitchen, as
PHILIP WAS BAKINQ BREAD
he had done most of his life as a brother

and a baker. The day before, his spiritual director had

advised him, when discussing Brother Philip's inclination

toward anger, especially at his fellow monks, to think dark

thoughts as he kneaded the bread and then bake them in the

holy fires of the furnace oven.

So Brother Philip happily conjured all the bile his mem-

ory preserved and fingered it forcefully into the tawny
dough. He kneaded, fingered, remembered, and kneaded
again. He set the dough aside to rise in a warm place, and
then returned later to punch it down with unusual force.

Finally, he placed the much worked dough into the oven

and slept the first restful nap he had taken in years.

In the great oven the loaf began to rise. It rose and rose.

A passerby wondered why the monastery windows

appeared to be covered with oat-colored curtains. By day's

end the monastery was engulfed by the bread. As time

passed the dough hardened to petrification, and much later

another generation of monks stood at the base of the moun-

tain chanting: "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will

build my church."

56
3 Efrai 1*55^ PKW5S Vgsst J^^i^ra^resE^raROT^ ^ 1

afc&S^^*3^tf*£^£^£^fc^

rr J_ORTHE MONK WORK IS PRAYER, READ-

ing is contemplation, following orders is listening to the

word of Qod, community is a foretaste of heaven, time is at

least 50 percent determined by ritual, and celibacy is a pos-

itive prerequisite for service in the world. Ordinary details

of life are always imagined through a filter of sacredness.

The secularization of modern sensibility is so uncon-

scious that it may seem odd to consider a similar sacriliza-

tion for us all. Yet, without imagination for the sacred in

everyday experience, we are destined for a life without soul.

The two — soul and the sacred — go together. We don't

have to become monks, but we can learn from their exam-

ple how to bring the monastic spirit, as a color and a flavor,

into modern life.

57
<£ HE LIFE OF THE MONK SEEN THROUQH
sentimental eyes can be easily misunderstood. It's a tough

life, in which sensitivity to interior thoughts and feelings

are intense, and a similar attention to the presence of others

in the community makes relationship particularly challeng-

ing. In modern life it may appear that real work is located in

the heroics of surviving and succeeding in the world. For

the monk the challenge is in nonheroic intimacy with one-

self, others, and the world.

The monk's occupation is soul work. In religious com-
munity was always
I told that the mere presence of a priory

in a neighborhood was a contribution to the area. If we do

not have monks in our midst, we might not know of this

soul-centered approach to life that the monks model, teach,

and demonstrate. Our task is to discover in the monks how

to bring soul closer to the center of a generally secular life

and make the switch from heroics to intimacy.

5&
S3 EfTS^B F£5^l U£5^3l KZ&SS J£^E£^E£TOE£5^J£§^3^
22 £&3j2a ra£2a Kt^i v&S&t i^^^^^ik^s^^k^^j^^^^s^^fe^Sj^i^

w^lLN IMPORTANT PART OF THE LIFE OF

many monks is study. In a stereotypical image, the monk is

reading in silence in a library. Historians associate monas-

ticism with reading, writing, and publishing. Like every-

thing else in modern life, learning is generally considered a

secular pursuit, but the monks show us that study can be a

spiritual practice.

We study to get diplomas and degrees and certifications,

but imagine a life devoted to study for no other purpose than
to be educated. Being educated is not the same as being

informed or trained. Education is an "eduction," a drawing

out of ones own genius, nature, and heart. The manifesta-

tion of one's essence, the unfolding of ones capacities, the

revelation of one's heretofore hidden possibilities — these

are the goals of study from the point of view of the person.

From another side, study amplifies the speech and song of

the world so that it's more palpably present.

Education in soul leads to the enchantment of the world

and the attunement of self.

53
Q NE OF

at a service of the
MY MOST
monastery monastic experiences was walking
Cathedral of
CHERISHED POST-

St.
in procession

John the Divine with

Dean Morton at my side, on my way to give a Sunday ser-

mon. I was reminded then of many processions during my

years in a priory.

Procession is a form of walking, ritual walking. We

would process formally into the chapel for special ritual

occasions, or into the refectory for special dining occasions,

and once a year, during Rogation Days, through fields and

gardens, chanting litanies, to bless all the growing things.

Procession is an identifying act of the monk, but it, too,

has its counterparts outside the monastery. A family may

process into the dining room on a holiday or special occa-

sion. In good restaurants you will be led to your table by a

guardian who leads the procession to the table. A proces-

sion invites the spirits of the occasion to be present, and it

renders the place of gathering the hopeful goal of laby-

rinthine mystery.

60
 ONKS SPEND A QOOD MEASURE OF
their time in meditation. Meditation offers innumerable

ways to leave the here and now for the forever. This kind of
meditating may last only seconds — as you glimpse a wood-
pecker climbing up a tree outside your window.
The perceptive religion scholar, Karl Kerenyi, describes

religious festival as an "arresting." Whatever arrests us in-

vites us to meditation. I am arrested as I play a Bach partita

on the piano, or when I come across a Lucas Cranach paint-

ing of Venus, or when I stand on a wet beach with a cam-

era in hand, or when I'm inviting the muse to give me a line

to write.

I wonder if being arrested by the police has a relation to

this religious meditation, and if the monk and the trespasser

have something in common.

6
1U
brother I
HENEVER
knew in his
I SEE AN AQED PRIEST
youth or midlife, I'm struck by the
OR

sense that this person, though now old, is living the same
life he lived thirty years ago. Outside the monastery people

go through significant external changes. They succeed or

they fail. They do things that give them a clear history,

while the monk appears to live in an eternal present.

It's as though the timeless soul experience of the monk

pours out onto his life and person, while most of us show
only the metamorphoses of time.
 J^RA
RAYER IS A SCANNINQ OF THE HEAV-
ens for the chink through which angels travel and divinity

looks on, like the opening in the dome of the Pantheon in

Rome, or on the head of the Hopi in prayer, or the clear

sight of the sky in a grove of tall trees, or the fontanelle of a

baby.

Or, in the other direction, it's Dante finding an entrance

in the woods to the inferno, or the tomb of Jesus, or the

place of Orpheus's musical descent, or the Frogs of Aris-

tophanes chanting their Underworld mantra.

Sometimes it's a foxhole, in actual war or in the more

ordinary life battles. It might be rimmed with hopelessness
or marked out with fear or set with ignorance and chance.
Cancer opens the way to prayer, a black hole through

which divinity peers and the human discovers infinity.

*
of our
HE ROMAN ARCH, SO
image of the monk, preserves
ordinary folk daily walk through portals that are
MUCH A
eternity. Without
flat
PART
it

on top
we

and bottom. The monk, in contrast, is ever passing through

the earth and sky, the latter the ever-present dome under
which we all live. The monastery is microcosm, the arch a

two-dimensional dome, the dome a constant signal of the

heavens.

Modern life has lost its sense of the dome, thinking

instead, very unmonklike, that the sky reaches out into deep

space. To counter that void of empty space, which has a cor-

responding effect of hollowing the things of earth, we

would have to reconstruct the dome in imagination. We
would have to restore the monk's vision and corresponding
architecture.

64
<£ HE MONK'S RELATIONSHIP WITH NA-
ture is essential to the life, but this relationship is not senti-

mental. It is not basically aesthetic, not environmental, not

naturalist, not agricultural. The monk knows that without a

constant and intimate relationship with nature, divinity is

not fully revealed.

The monastery at the edge of the sea or at the top of

a mountain or on an expanse of farmland is proximate to

nature as revelation. Without knowing nature we cannot

know who we are or what we are to do. Nature shapes us
as much as we shape nature, and in that mutual engage-

ment is the fulfillment of both.

As each year of technological change comes and goes, it

seems that nature loses its influence over the shaping of

human life. It still manifests its power for beauty and for

devastation, but the human response seems to be an in-

creasingly defensive and offensive struggle.

The monk struggles, too, yet has a means of rapproche-

ment in a theology of creation, in prayer, and in worship, all

worked out in day-by-day toil in the earth.

65
I
the
N A MONASTERY LIBRARY ONCE FOUND
volume Opera Tlatonis in the music
I

section. The librar-

ian was either unschooled in Latin or perhaps familiar with

Plato's 'Timaeus and the music of the spheres.

Many medieval philosophers taught that life is essen-

tially musical, and that it takes a true musical sensibility to

reflect philosophically on the nature of things. To the musi-

cal philosopher beauty is more convincing than truth,

movement more central to life structures than static forms,

song more expressive than syllogism, and being moved by

a thing's presence more significant than understanding it.

Angels are the only musicians who can play this music,

and monks are the only ones who can hear it.

66
iu
day, I
HENEVER
don't think of a Catholic
I THINK OF A
monk or a Christian
MONK TO-
monk
or a Buddhist monk or a Zen monk, and I don't think of

male or female monks. I imagine the monk as a spirit that

engendered monasticism and moves a certain few individ-

uals to live that spirit as a way of life. For me, the more

interesting monk is a figure of the deep, creative imagina-

tion, who can inspire anyone toward an experience of

virtues and styles epitomized by monks of all traditions.

Our task is to notice the monk when his spirit makes an

appearance, and then find an individual way to embody it.

67
s. ILENCE IS NOT THE ABSENCE OF SOUND.
That would be to imagine it negatively. Silence is a toning

down of inner and outer static, noise that occupies not only

the ears but also the attention. Silence allows many sounds
to reach awareness that otherwise would go unheard — the
sounds of birds, water, wind, trees, frogs, insects, and chip-

munks, as well as conscience, daydreams, intuitions, inhi-

bitions, and wishes.

One cultivates silence not by forcing the ears not to hear,
but by turning up the volume on the music of the world and

the soul.

6S
ct LL THE CLASSICAL THINQS THAT
have been said about prayer are true — petition, praise, ado-

ration, communion, conversation. But one's notion of Qod

and divinity has to be sufficiently empty, its mystery suffi-

ciently accounted for, or else prayer becomes exploitation of

the divine.

Prayer only makes sense in the paradoxical presence of

both human pain and desire on one hand, and divine infini-

tude on the other.

a
dral of St.

certain
-S

day would
EVERYONE KNOWS, THE CATHE-
Regianus had a magical rose

cast a beam of light

window
down upon
that on a
a stone

in the pavement of the cathedral's nave, a beam so bright,

warm, and powerful that it was believed to cure illnesses

caused by any dark factors whether inner or outer — a black

mood, a dark enemy, a shadowy infestation, or a cloudy

disposition.

One weekday afternoon, when no one was in the

church, the sacristan brought his cleaning bucket to the re-

flecting stone, applied a detergent of extraordinary strength,

then an oil used only for the most sacred objects, and finally

a choice piece of chamois for polishing. As the stone lost its

residue of dust and grime, and then when it found its shine

from the soft chamois, the sacristan felt a tingle in his arm.

He looked down and watched his forearm glow with an

otherworldly sheen, and then his forearm withered.

The bishop called for an audience with the sacristan.

'Tell me," said the bishop authoritatively, "is this a miracle?"

"The stone is supposed to heal, not harm," said the sac-

ristan meekly. "I wouldn't call this a miracle."

After this event the authorities allowed the stone to

gather grime and the window to lose its translucence, wor-

ried about the easy transition in such arcane matters from

miracle to maim.

70
M Y MONASTERY HAD A PRACTICE
called "culpa," fault. The friars

the prior sitting in front of the assembly,

ones from the priests, brothers,

would gather
and
in the chapel,

certain select

and students would ap-

proach, prostrate flat on the ground, kiss the scapular, and
rise to tell of a fault, some action that might have offended

the community.
This impulse toward confession is an essential part of

the spiritual life, which, I believe, mitigates rather than

feeds the tendency toward masochistic self-reproach and

sensations of victimization. Confession is an evocation of
remorse, a feeling placed in the heart much deeper than
regret, that keeps the soul intact, neither unconcerned about
its destructive inclinations nor subdued by self-judgment.

71
I S THERE A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE
priest who drinks wine in ritual and the person who can't

stop drinking in the bar? Both are fascinated by alcohol, and

both are drawn into its mystery. The holiness of ritual wine
doesn't keep priests from alcoholism, and heavy drinking
doesn't lead the alcoholic to sacred mystery.

Still, it is a question whether one needs the other the

priest in need of the alcohol of life, what the Qreeks called

Dionysus, and the alcoholic in need of the profound fulfill-

ment of his thirst.

7*
n:
habit
HE
was
COWL I WORE AS PART OF MY
not intended to keep my ears warm, nor was it

merely a vestige of clothing commonly worn at the time of

monasticism's flourishing. Rather, it was a ritual covering

of my head, a small form of retreat.

Athletes, who are monks in their own way, wear cowls,

and cowls are also fashionably attached to capes and sweat-
ers of both men and women. Monasticism still flourishes in

sports and in clothing.

The cowl lying ready at the base of our necks prepares us

to respond at that moment when the spirit of the monk

descends unexpectedly, and asks us to cover our heads in

contemplation.

73
«ytpPARTICULARLY HYPNOTIC FORM OF
religious chanted poetry is the litany, often sung by monks
on special occasions. 'Te rogamus audi nos, the monks
chant, as long lists of saints are sung. Hear us, we beg you.
I think of the many men and women who have touched
me during my years and who form a litany of names cher-

ished and feared and fondly remembered. 'Te rogamus audi

nos. Hear me, my grandparents, who gave me so much of

their hearts. Hear me, friends, who stayed with me in my

most unconscious and unripe years. Hear me, my ancestors,
whose written words and objects of art have educated me.
Hear me, former loves, who feel my rejection and coldness.
Only a finite number of names can be in our litany, and

so we sing to them as precious saints who have graced our

lives.

74
rr JLrom THE OUTSIDE, THE MONASTERY
garden can be seen as a romantic, sentimental place of

sweet spirituality. From the inside, that garden may be an

enclosure of interior torments for the monks who struggle

with their desires and passions and self-examinations.

At our homes we can evoke the sweet and the torment-

ed monk in our enclosed gardens, with their trellises and

gates, their walking paths and their shade. The soul seems
to benefit from having an external manifestation of its inter-

nal states. The dialogue between the inner and the outer in

this way is the very essence of ritual.

Qardening is a monk's way of caring for the soul.

75
 ONKS ARE CALLED TO THE "CON-
templative" life. The word means to cut out a space for div-

ination. The monk creates an inner temple, a space in mind,

imagination, and heart where he can observe the signs of

divine providence.

The work of the spiritual life includes the building of

these inner temples and the creation of temenos — space set

apart for sacred use. As this work progresses, everything

acquires its temenos. As Emerson said, everything becomes

a sign.

Contemplation, the primary work of the monk, achieves

the necessary emptiness in every thing, every moment, and

every event. These empty spaces, simply marked out as

sacred, invite the soul to participate and provide places for

its dwelling.

76
What birds fly through is not intimate space

in which a form arises.

In the open air you would be dispossessed of yourself

forever.

Space extends out from us and connects to a thing.

To effect the presence of a tree

put innerspace around it

from the pure space that is in you.

Surround it with restraint.

It has no limits.

Only in the containment of your renouncing

will it truly be a tree.

Rainer Maria Rilke

::
 G
1^ ^/
#OD
life,
IS BEYOND
says Bonhoeffer.
IN THE MIDST OF OUR
The monk manages to live this

beyond-amid with special gracefulness and beauty. Beauty

emerges only when life has achieved radical beyondness

while fully amid, or intense amidness by means of beyond.

Oddly, the monk withdraws into the heart of culture

and life, into the fullness of community. He withdraws in

order to be more involved.

We average persons may need daily withdrawal in

order to be more fully participants in community, family,

and society. Pull up the cowl, eat in silence, read to be

absorbed, pray without intent, chant.

78
\M
mendicant order
is shameful
Y COMMUNITY WAS CALLED A

to the
— begging,
middle
living off alms.

class, a scandal to those

Today begging
who think
everyone can and should work for a living. The homeless
person on the street is surrounded by the emotional shad-

ows of reprobation.

Yet, the most spiritual activities are funded by begging:

public radio and television, charities, programs for the dis-

advantaged, medicine, education. Even today many who

enter the most meaningful professions become mendicants.
If we are not beggars, we might ask ourselves if we have
any spirituality in our lives.

79
Ill HAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AN
illuminated manuscript created by a monk and a page

freshly spewed out of a modem word processor!

The computer page is eminently legible, quickly pro-

duced, perhaps beautiful and created by the collaboration

of human and machine. The illuminated page is beautiful,

slowly produced, not terribly legible, and printed in soli-

tude. The monk works with his hand, close to his ink, ready

for a slip of the pen, meditating as he works.

Is there a way to bring the spirit of the monk to the com-

puter, and by extension to all our machine work, without

making either an anachronism?

So
a: HE LIBRARY IS OFTEN THE PLACE WHERE
you can find the spirit of the monk: in silence, the lustre of

old woodwork, the smell of ageing paper, reading, retreat

from the world, rules and authorities, tradition, volumes of

wisdom, catalogues for contemplation.

In an age of information technology, monks of the li-

brary are being put out on the streets, no longer finding a

home there. Where will they go?

A home library, if only five volumes on a piece of special

wood, might give the monk a place of refuge and serve the
souls of all who live there.

81
a SAINT IS A HOLY PERSON WHOSE LIFE
demonstrates how to live fully dedicated to the soul. Some

saints are outrageous, some fictitious. Most live so close to

the eternal that they are known for performing miracles

actions that are not bound by the limitations of a temporal

merely natural outlook on life.

I've known a few saints in my day, and still enjoy the

acquaintance of some. These are not perfect saints, but they

have special power due to their intimacy with an angelic

dimension. Knowing them is a grace in itself.

Saints are to be sought after, believed in even when they

are most incredible, and cherished in memory, story, and
devotion.

Si
I
Outside,
N A MONASTERY TIME
we don't think much
IS

of letting
CAREFULLY SPENT.
one activity lead to

another, each taking as much time as needed. But in a

monastery there are fifteen minutes for reading, two hours

for study, allotted periods for prayer and meditation, usual-

ly less than an hour here and there for recreation.

It does no good to think moralistically about how much

time we waste. Wasted time is usually good soul time. But

there is something especially fruitful in a regulated life, a

fantasy of time in which regularity — monasticism is some-

times called the regular life — is not a prison but freedom.

The ritual quality of appointed times releases us from the

burdens of free will.

*3
^E£5^fc£5^R£5^E£5^K£^^
^££&^tra£^£S&^£^^£«&^

<*.
HE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A TRADI-
tional practice of spirituality and a made-up, "new age" ver-

sion is immense. Traditional rituals and images rise out of

an historical fog in which founders and authorities are more

mythological than personal, and in which so many different
layers of meaning lie packed together that the sacred litera-

ture becomes genuine poetry. This inexhaustible richness is

entirely different from one person's intentional program of

spiritual progress.

Tradition is often confused with institution, yet we could

be guided by countless generations of ancestors without

becoming oppressed by the words and structures they have

left behind. We could be members of an institution without
sacrificing our intelligence or our capacity to think and
choose.

Tradition is a pool of imagination, and not a basis for

authority.

84
 S PBfrai &£*** IKf*^ EfS^J V&mVgSmVg^Vg^KZ^ft

fcff«&^tf^^tf*3^K&£^

«yL RELIQIOUS OR SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY

stands in a dangerous position, full of traps. It is in the

nature of the spiritual life to think in hierarchies of authori-

ty, to imagine meaning in terms of truth, and to invest one

person or group of persons with extraordinary influence.

Religious leaders require unusual wisdom not to become

intoxicated with power and lord it over their followers.

Religious authorities need our own self-governance in

spiritual matters. If we "subjects" are making intelligent

decisions and educating ourselves, then the leader can offer

focus, direction, and structure. But the moment we give too

much power to our leaders, we become the victims and they

the tormentors. The religious spirit, which needs vibrant
external structures, succumbs to empty institutional forms,

and rules replace wisdom.

$5

J
The final belief is to believe in a fiction,

which you know to be a fiction, there

being nothing else. The exquisite truth

is to know that it is a fiction and that

you believe in it willingly.

Wallace Stevens

86
s. PIRITUAL COMMUNITIES TAKE SPECIAL
note of a person's hair. Some rule against cutting any hair,

others make a haircut part of the initiation rite, as in ton-

sure — the ritual cutting of a monk's hair. Some specify how

to curl the hair or to cover it with a turban or kerchief. Some
find great spiritual pleasure in shaving the head, others are

specific about veils and hats. Television evangelists are

sometimes known for their coiffures.

Religion teaches us something extraordinary in this

that hair and its condition is a holy mystery. If hair is sacred,

what could possibly not be?

87
I,N SPITE OF INTENSE COMMUNITY LIFE, POV-
erty, and withdrawal from the world, it is not unusual for

monks to travel widely. Thomas Merton, perhaps the most

famous monk of our time, who spent many years of his life

in a strictly contained monastery, died in Bangkok, halfway

across the world from his home monastery.

Monks who travel, like so many spiritual people, have

homes in many places. They can stay cheaply in other

monasteries or in the homes of people dedicated to the same

life. Travel and the hosting of travelers is part of the life, and
it shows a typical monastic sublimation of the very idea of

home.
Do innkeepers, B & B owners, and hotel managers know
of the traditional spiritual nature of their work! Could we
all see the monk in people temporarily in search of a place to

spend the night? Could we open our hearts as well as our

doors to each other as fellow travelers?

88
t
to
HE MONK'S CELIBACY
the absence of sex

anything but the

and marriage. The monk
infinite, and
IS NOT SIMPLY

that relationship
is not

is
wedded
extraor-

dinarily elusive. If you're married to All and Nothing, to

the Minimum and the Maximum (in Nicholas of Cusa's

wording), you're a celibate in the world.

The monk's life is dedicated to the principle of detach-

ment, but that dedication doesn't mean that he doesn't

enjoy and suffer many attachments. A spirit of detachment,

celibacy, unweddedness, even amid a plethora of attach-

ments, is exactly that — a spirit, a spirit that doesn't have to

dominate in order to influence.

Maybe we ought to be celibate in all that we're wedded

to.

83
L
er.
IKE

Early monasteries
MOST MODERN
have experimented with ways
were designed
to
PEOPLE, MONKS
be both alone and togeth-

so that a monk would

live in his own cell and eat from his own garden, and yet

participate in a common life with his brothers.

Sometimes people become anxious as they try to live as

an individual while in a marriage or other close relation-

ship. Others, who live alone, can be quite anxious about

finding a mate or a community.

Monasticism doesn't seem to have been caught up in

these anxieties, but rather enjoyed the experiment of living

both lives in one place. Maybe our anxiety comes from our

attempts to resolve the issue mentally and abstractly. The

monk's way is to shape life concretely so that it speaks to

both necessities.

o,0
HI*55^fc55^l*?5^IE£5^l*^^

^ li&X^ tt«£^ £&£^£«2^ tt*^

a,
life —
CLOISTER MAY BE PART OF A MONK'S
a place set apart for utter privacy. The word means
partition, and is related to cloisonne, the method in jewelry

making of separating sections of stone or enamel with nar-

row strips of metal. It's striking that a cloister, intended as a

way of keeping monks out of the world, is known for its

beauty, whether in jewelry or in monasteries.

Cloister is still possible today in the way we build our

homes and live our lives. We live in an age of social

involvement, when turning in on oneself may appear

suspicious. But the monk, dedicated wholeheartedly to

community life and to the needs of the world, could be

nourished in his soul as he enjoyed the solitude of his com-

forting cloister.

91
i3 PIRIT IS THE MOST CREATIVE, INSPIRINQ,
and meaning-giving element in all of life, and yet it is also

the most dangerous. When spirit visits us, it moves us

toward action, commitment, ambition, goals, ideals, vision,

and altruism. All of these feed the soul, but they also

wound it. To the soul their opposites are equally impor-

tant — waiting, doubting, retreating, not going anywhere,

not knowing, not seeing, and being absorbed in oneself.

When spirit is not grounded and checked by soul, it

quickly moves into literal forms — converting others and

becoming blindly and callously ambitious. Its powerful

force may turn without conscience into violence, its altru-

ism blackened as intrusion into the freedoms of others. Its

creativity becomes unbounded productivity, and its quest

for ultimacy transforms into jealous possession of truth.

92
m
in Ireland

bed
I

in a hospital

active place, that

HEN WAS A PHILOSOPHY STUDENT
I

had an emergency appendectomy

ward with twenty other men.
ward —
that put

patients raided the kitchen in the

It
me in
was an

middle of the night, distributing forbidden food to those of

us who couldn't get out of bed, and many daytime episodes

were so funny I thought my stitches would burst in my
laughter.

On my first day back at the monastery my Qreek profes-

sor, a man of intelligence and good humor, accosted me. I

suppose you must be far ahead of your classmates in Qreek

now, he said seriously. In fact, I was at least ten days

behind. I had taken the time to live the hospital routine, get

to know people, and, of all things, rest. Yet, I felt somewhat

guilty, wondering why I couldn't be as disciplined as this

revered teacher.

My Qreek professor is now dead, but I wonder what he

thought late in his life about his drive and discipline.

Would he have said, from a lifetime given to spiritual

ideals, that he had gone too far, that he might have gained
something had he made fewer demands on himself and
others? Or was his disciplined life his joy?

93
1)
ice in the order, a
WRINQ THE YEAR LIVED AS
spanking new
I A NOV-
trainee in religious com-
munity life, my brothers and I were not allowed to listen to

the radio, leave the grounds, or read newspapers. For a year

we were uninformed about world events.

In our time it seems necessary and responsible to know
what is happening everywhere in the world. A modem
anxiety, perhaps a neurosis, is the need to be informed min-

ute by minute of late-breaking news.

Is the ideal to be found in a balance of these two
approaches? Or can we entertain both passions — the adult

need to be informed and the childlike need to be uncon-

cerned and irresponsible?

94
n:
who
HE DAY ST. CHRISTOPHER, THE SAINT
ferried Jesus across the river on his shoulders, lost his

canonization because his historical facticity was seriously

questioned, was a bitter day for sacred imagination. The

very point of religion is to give utter devotion to images that

render life utterly vibrant and meaningful.

Apparently historians and scientists still think that their

notions about experience are more fact than fiction, and yet

it is abundantly clear, as revision after revision revolution-

izes these fields, that at the most fundamental levels and in

all fields we live in a grand web of imagination.

The monk has the courage and the folly to shape a life

around imagined inspirations.

95
ss EEwa eerra zgs&t xz&tx sewa vgs^v&mfzzo^vg&siK
?4£&&^ti&S^K&3^£*^^

a T CHRISTMAS WE

divinity of childhood, or the appearance of light

CELEBRATE THE
birth of the divine child, or the childhood of divinity, or the

and life out

of darkness and the fallowness of winter, a child in a

manger. It is a mystery that we honor, a mystery that can-

not be explained or contained.

This celebration, like all holy rituals, rises out of a partic-

ular religious tradition, and yet it is the honoring of a mys-

tery in which all beings, human and otherwise, participate.

The particularity of the monk's life gives it its existence,

and yet its unlimited relevance makes it eternally meaning-

ful. The monk's purpose is to shape a life that embraces this

paradox of individuality and eternity in every moment and

in every act.

S6
M
recent years
-OST OF THE MONKS HAVE MET IN
have either been world
to Poland, Russia, Israel, or Paris, or

takers of vast, beautiful expanses of land

I

travelers on their

they have been care-

and buildings
way

that

they call home.

Apparently, the spirit of poverty is good soil for the

planting of a business and for a life in the global village.

Virtues of humility and modesty not only provide purity of

heart, they also sharpen a person's commercial talents.

Business leaders might be well advised to spend some time

in retreat with monks, and learn how to live successfully in

this world.

97
K
ally

ciated
r
AILY LIFE IN

punctuated by the ringing of

A MONASTERY
bells.

with churches and monasteries? Perhaps because

IS

Why are bells asso-

USU-

their overtones are so strong — the high-pitched ringing

sounds that decay slowly after the initial clang. In the sev-

enteenth century Robert Fludd depicted angels as the over-

tones of human life. Joan of Arc loved bells, and said that

she heard voices especially when bells were rung for matins

and compline, the morning and evening hours of the

church day.

Overtones, sometimes called partials by music theorists,

are those elements in every experience that last long after

the literal act — memories, shock, emotional residues, reac-

tionary behavior. They are also the meanings and implica-

tions of deeds, their nuances and reverberation.

Monks are more interested in these partials of experi-

ence than in the literal facts. They are professionals in spiri-

tual resonance. When the bell rings, they stop and listen.

?8
•n
astic life I
WRINQ ONE BUSY YEAR OF MY MON-
had a double major in music and theology. I was
taking a difficult course in orchestration when one day my
professor assigned me a Beethoven sonata to be arranged for

full symphonic orchestra. During that week, after a busy

day of monastic routine and classes, I dashed to the piano

that was in a large recreation room, tried to remember the

ranges of the various instruments, their clefs and qualities,

and then began to make nineteenth-century musical sense

of the score.

As I was working away, deep in the intricate task of

becoming an orchestrator, a monk passed through the room

and saw me. He was one of several authorities in the place.
"Why don't you get to work like the rest of us," he said
gruffly, "instead of playing around at the piano."

In my home now I have a page from an illuminated

manuscript, framed, hanging on a wall. I look at that page,

at the green plant painted in the hollow of the large "P" in

the words 'Tarce mifii, Ttomine — Spare me, O Lord — and

I realize that monks sometimes forget that their proper work
is art and play, and I still pray that I will be spared the criti-

cism of the moralist who disapproves of my wanton ways.

93
w
come monks
father

to
had
HEN
I

tried to

complete the job,

I

be a
THINK OF

much
WHY
can think of no good reasons.

monk and failed,

to the son's
and so
PEOPLE

sorrow and
One man's
BE-

his son tried

frustra-

tion. Another was gay and hoped to find companionship in

the male environment of the monastery. I, myself, was led

to monastic life when, at a vulnerable age, I idolized the

boys who were my seniors and who had left home for the

monk's life.

Could it be that, at least sometimes, good things come

from wrong reasons?

IOO
•yiLhNCIENT TEXTS THAT OFFER QUID-
ance to monks often advise ways to resist the temptations of

sex. What is it about sex that is inimical to the monks life?

The obvious answer is the monks need for solitude,- yet one
gets the impression from the early texts that the issue lies

deeper.

Sex tugs at the monk and invites him down into related-

ness, pleasure, and the complications of romantic involve-

ment. His aim is toward a loftier life of considerable sub-

tlety and simplicity.

The intensification of sex as a quintessential temptation,

complete with preoccupying thoughts and fantasies, is yet

another paradox in monastic life. It places the monk in

extraordinary dialogue with his sexual nature, and in that

sense he is more involved in sex than he would be without

his vow.
Right usually intensifies the very thing one flees, and
establishes a special intimacy with it.
 EDIEVAL STORIES ABOUT MONKS
frequently tell of brothers breaking the rules in order to

acquire money. Why would a person be a monk, and at the

same time break the very rules that establish the life he has

freely chosen?

Rules only make sense if they are both kept and broken.

Breaking the rule is one way of observing it.

The monk abandons the values of the greater society, as

does the criminal, yet, in breaking the rules, one becomes a

saint and the other a sinner.
1U
tery where
HEN WAS A NOVICE, THE MONAS-
I lived
I

had an orchard filled with a wide variety

of apples. On weekends we brothers would load a wagon

full of cider and apples, and take it to the road to sell to

passersby. I always enjoyed driving the tractor and hearing

the corks pop off the bottles that were filled with the more

aged cider.

We had apples for every occasion. One variety, the

Wolf River, was unusually large, brilliantly red, and sym-

metrically shaped. Customers couldn't stop themselves
from buying these apples, even though I would explain to

them that this fruit had very dry meat and was the worst
kind we had for eating.
There is something odd about a monk trying to convince

innocent people not to eat the bright red apple.

103
w
heavy, thick,

lived the

made
HAT
wooden
monks
of metal or painted
IS A MONASTERY WITHOUT A
door? In every monastery

generally used back doors

wood. It always
and
felt
where
side doors

strange to
I

enter by the main door, as though it were too serious for

daily use. Doors always invite a rite of passage, but espe-

cially doors of considerable weight and woodenness.

One of the most mysterious things a person can do is to

knock on a monastery door and enter through that portal.

It's like walking through a looking glass or finding the en-

trance to a cave that opens into a hidden world.

Life is filled with such doors, some real and some

metaphorical. Some are likely thresholds of the soul, while

others are astonishingly improbable.

104
I
the
T IS SAID THAT
Renaissance philosopher
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA,
who in his mid-twenties

called the world to Rome to debate his ideas, planned to

write a book on poetic theology. This book has yet to be

written and its idea still to be fully realized.

The artist who works in dialogue with the muse is per-

haps the best theologian, and the theologian who thinks,

speaks, and writes poetically the most reliable source of reli-

gious knowledge. History gives us many attempts to link

art and religion, yet it is always our task, in the most ordi-

nary and individual ways, to find one in the other.

The truly artful life, not the merely aesthetic one, is reli-

gious, and vice versa.

io 5
: I litany oj thanks to tfiese scribes and others who brought this book

quickly into print:

To Michael Katz, who knows monks and books

To Hugh Van Dusen, who knows the world and retreat

from the world

To Father Patrick McNamara, man of wit and spirit and

master of all of us novices

To Pat Toomay, a brother of a different order

To David Bullen, who plies the ancient trade of making

precious books

To Joan Hanley, who loves things into beautiful existence

To Abraham and Siobhan, who are still close to the angels

107
 SPIRITUALITY
&SV8I

Thomas Moore, bestselling author of Care oj the

Soul and Soul .Males, draws on the twelve years

he lived as a monk in this insightful book of a

hundred one-page meditations. Interspersed

with glimpses of the beauty and humor of the

monk's life, each page suggests a way of finding
ms
spirituality and nurturing the soul that can be
fe^l
applied in any walk of life.

[Moore] is

ticipant observer,
a literate, informed,

practical insights for

and
life. . . . The
and careful par-

his meditations are full of

collection is as
H
much about the poetry and music of our lives

together as about overtly religious discipline."

$3l
^Booklist

Thomas Moore is a writer and lecturer, living in

New England with his wife and two children. |Es55*|

He lived as a monk in a Catholic religious order

for twelve years and has degrees in theology,

musicology, and philosophy. A former professor m,

of religion and psychology, he is the author of

Care of the Soul and Soul .Mates.

m
HarperPerennial

1995 by David Bull,

ISBN 0-0b-0^E700-3
Co n: Christus, Portrai
90000
of a Young Man. Courtesy Nation;
/^CVsJ Gallery, London.

^g USA $10.00
CANADA $14.00

9 780060"927004
a i&s2ajra£2i £