Into Great Silence

On this feast of St. Bruno, an offering written some years ago as a review, of sorts, of Philip Groning’s now famous film, Into Great Silence. 

 

The affable and jocular tone of this writing was not this blogger’s choice but an editorial suggestion to “lighten up” the piece.  The editor knew the readership for which it was intended and also the inclination of this blogger toward a stodgy, ponderous gravitas (well…not really “stodgy” – I just like the way that sounds in front of “ponderous”).  This blogger, of her own counsel, would not have bothered with all the pinching and tweaking.  She would simply have expected those who found it deadly boring to yawn, take another sip of coffee and click off to some other place.

 

NB:  I have had the pleasure of writing an alternative ending to this review, appended here below for our more “discerning” readers (pun entirely intended).

 

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“Promoters and defenders of traditional Christian monastic life in the West seem to be thin on the ground these days.  The life is either completely unknown or, if known, is made the object of criticism and suspicion if not outright rejection, sometimes even by its own members.  As a person formed by Christian monastic life, who gained a foundation for living and found her Joy (which, by the way, is not something but Someone) from within the monastic tradition, I am disinclined to denigrate the life.  Although it has not been the panacea for my ills nor kept me perpetually in the state of the angels (but whose fault is that?) it certainly has been and continues to be for me the conduit of salvation.  Therefore I can only revere it and the thousands of fellow strugglers who similarly cleave to it as the bark of their deliverance, bearing them across the turbulent seas of the spiritual life toward final safe harbor.

“To be a detractor of the monastic life is easy.  One can effortlessly chart a long list of weaknesses and defects from the top down, beginning with the life in general, moving on to one’s particular Order and then on again to one’s own community (or, if one is a hermit, to one’s cooking pot).  The list could trail out the door of the Chapter Room, through the cloister, out past the porter’s lodge and into the road, depending on how bent one is on this project.  I exaggerate…but only to make a point: the monastic life is not exempt from sin and failure.  How is this possible, we might ask, of a life known in the ancient Church, and still today among the Orthodox, as ‘angelic’?  Because it is a life lived not by angels but by men.

“I was reminded of this the night I saw Into Great Silence at the Film Forum in…Manhattan.  The audience was treated to a post-show Q&A with an exclaustrated Carthusian who has been outside the Charterhouse for more than a decade.  …  To this life, he explained, there is an ‘underbelly.’  Egads!  Should there have been a symphonic trumpet blast, a crash of symbols and the thunder of kettle drums at this utterance?  Is this a revelation by which we are all to be astonished? We are not astonished.  Instead we are already informed by common sense that, even though monasteries may be, more than any place on the planet, the ante-chamber to paradise and even though they are places where men, if they live the life right, end up suspended between heaven and earth, it is men who are thus suspended, not angels.

“Groning was clearly aware of this while making Into Great Silence.  He found and filmed a monastery of men of all sorts, lovable, unlovable, stable, unstable, strong, weak, spiritually minded, carnal minded, each man perhaps being each of these things at one time or another in his life.  I would like to say Groning eyed them with his camera the way the Lord God eyes them, with compassionate love, but his filmmaker’s gaze was, perhaps appropriately, a tad cooler and more dispassionate.

“Were the Lord himself our camera, were we seeing with the divine eye, we would easily penetrate the veil separating seen from unseen.  We would easily be able to hold in reverence the mystery of the human person in each of these men even if we were to know (or think we know) them intimately in all their weakness.  We would leave their culpability to the mercy of God and look at them, as Jesus does, with love.

“As visitors to this place via Groning’s camera we see, in part, the physical life and being of these men as it has been captured on film.  To their interior life, however, we are not privy beyond whatever speculations we are willing to make.  A general estimation of their spiritual itinerary, as practitioners of a recognizable pattern of life, might be as follows:

“The neophyte arrives at the monastery with limited self-knowledge and therefore little or no awareness that he brings with him myriad layers of stuff that are not even actually him; he stays and learns to live the life; gradually a distillation begins and the layers of ego, of the ‘false self’ start to peel away like the layers of an onion; with more and more of this (years and years and years of it) the kernel of the person, the true person eventually emerges and begins to flourish; this flowering and flourishing may continue for decades or it may last only briefly, being a signal for departure: the veil has become so thin that it tears and the monk falls through it to the other side….

“The monastic itinerary, in precis, is ‘divinization.’  The life, if well lived, divinizes the one living it, transforming him or her into ‘Other Christs’, cleaning out the blockages so that the ‘inner man’—the mind, the heart, the will—becomes a clear pipe through which the Holy Spirit sings and murmurs unhindered.  This slow transformation can be invisible to the casual observer despite or perhaps even because of its great profundity and, again, it happens only if the life is lived well.  What, you may ask, is the life ‘lived well’?  Groning seems to have an insight into this: it’s all about the ear.

“Into Great Silence begins and ends with the same dramatic image, a side view of the right ear of a monk kneeling at prayer.  The profile of the face and a hand to the chin are visible but they seem to be only a setting for the ear.  In between these shots, the camera’s predilection for the ear presents us with eight or ten more shots, usually from behind and slightly above but with the monk’s ear central or dominant in the frame as he studies or reads, as he eats at his window or stands with the bell rope waiting to ring, as he carefully cuts fabric for a habit, as he sits silently in prayer, as he bends over the rocks of a small dam he’s fortifying in a stream in the woods, as he sits by the door of his cell garden taking his soup.

“When I saw this opening image of the ear and the shots that followed I thought [whether aware of it or not, the director has intuited what is at the core of] the Rule of Benedict.  In the Prologue to the Rule there is the famous (at least to the monastically inclined) reference to the aurem cordis, the ear of the heart.  This ‘heart-ear’ is the monastic organ par excellence.  Groning may not know this particular phrase or image but it is clear he understands the critical need in the monk’s life for deep—even existentially deep—listening.  He also understands the ineluctable bond between this listening and silence.

“In the Charterhouse or in any monastic dwelling where silence is understood it is cherished, guarded and nourished.  For ordinary life in the world, having no access to media might seem retrograde and strange but within a monastic context it’s entirely logical.  The material simplicity and silence within the confines of the monastic cloister are precisely meant to and do make it easier for the monk to intensify this listening.

“Groning strikes the minds and hearts of his audience multiple times with the message of this need for silence by repeatedly citing a passage from the Book of Kings in which the Prophet Elijah awaits the Lord.  Strong winds rend the mountains, there is an earthquake and then a fire but it is only after this, in a ‘still small voice,’ that Elijah detects the presence of the Lord.

“In silence we become aware of the workings of our mind and heart.  Our radar for truth and integrity gradually become tuned so that, more and more easily, we begin to detect false notes in ourselves.  We are able, gently, to reject what is of the ego (fear, jealousy, despair, false hope, feelings of inadequacy or superiority, etc.), allowing the true notes to play, the music of the Holy Spirit which is a joy and peace of heart that nothing outside ourselves can disturb.  It is then that the real ‘doxology’ begins.  The dropping to the floor or bowing while praising the Persons in the Holy Trinity becomes only an intermittent physical expression of what is now a constant condition, a way of being in which one has become praise and gratitude to God for all things.

“Understanding, then, that to ‘live the life well’ is to listen deeply and long with the ear of your heart and so gradually to be transformed by what you hear, you might finally say ‘Yeah, and… so what?’  If this is your response, then I think I can safely tell you that you have no need to worry—you don’t have a monastic vocation.

“If you are relieved to know this but at the same time feel strangely disquieted, again I say, worry not.  In the words of Roumanian priest-poet, Virgil Georghiu, in his Memoires, ‘…what is important is less the environment in which one lives than the manner in which one lives there.  Adam was lost in Paradise and Lot saved in Sodom.’  So, if you are not monastery-bound, stay where you are, take a look at the life in which God has placed you and perhaps begin to tweak it here and there, making the odd choice now and again in favor of strengthening your friendship with God.  His presence is not limited to the monastery.  Now, where you are, if you seek him, you will find him.”

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I was not at ease encouraging movie goers and readers of the website on which this review appeared to return home, make a few positive adjustments here and there and get on with their lives.  Instead, this is what I would like to have said: 

If you feel strangely disquieted or, conversely, if you feel a certain warmth in the area of your heart for which you cannot account, pay attention – either condition may mean a message is trying to get through to you.  Quite possibly the Lord is indeed calling YOU to the monastic life – yes, YOU with the fresh college degree or the new car, the lovely girlfriend or the challenging job with all it possibilities for moving on and up, etc.  No one will tell you this but the vocation to cloistered monastic life is nowhere near as rare as most people think.  In fact, God calls and calls and calls, long and insistently, to very many people but, with the ears of the heart stopped up with all the goods of this passing world, few people are listening, few people hear. 

What should you do now?  What you should not do is return home to live pretty much as you did before you saw this film.  Instead, you should plan vacation time not to go to the Bahamas or to Prague but to a monastery where, in silence, prayer, reading and the absence of all that distracts and deflects you from God, you can begin to open up the ear of your heart, to hear and understand the words of transfiguration and promise and hope that are spoken there.

Yes, it is quite possible God is calling YOU to live with and for Him alone in the setting of the monastery, inviting you to a peace not of this world, to a joy found only in Him.  Do yourself a favor (and a favor to the rest of us who are in terrible need of your surrender to the One Who calls you) – check it out!

 

Holy Poverty and the Heart’s Desire

Monk, nuns and hermits generally live in “Holy Poverty” which is a poverty embraced as a spiritual practice in a life dedicated to God.  They live without property of their own and typically in material simplicty and austerity, doing without many things that might have been a normal part of the life they left behind.  This chosen poverty is sometimes viewed as a way of living in solidarity with the poor of the world but I am not certain this is true. 

The poor of the world have not chosen to be poor.  This is the first and fundamental difference between the two kinds of poverty.  In monasteries and convents and hermitages one may find people who have come from well-to-do families or at least materially stable families and who have had education and other opportunities in their lives.  The life they are living now may, in fact, be a further opportunity for personal and spiritual formation and enrichment.  Most of the poor of this world have never had such resources. 

A person who has had much and lost it (whether by choice as a spiritual practice or by misfortune, against his will) can never be as poor as the person who has had little or nothing to begin with.  There is also the sober reality that the poor of the world have not enough to eat whereas monks and nuns and hermits generally do.  The latter choose to eat less as part of their spiritual practice but the food is there and food will be there the next day and the day after.  These sorts of observations are deeply humbling to a person living in religious poverty.  He recognizes that Holy Poverty, despite a longing that it be so, is not truly a means of “living poor with the poor.”  He knows and accepts that his own religious poverty is a choice, a willed response to the inner promptings of the Spirit and embraces it as such, grateful for the purpose and effect it has in his life with God.

Holy Poverty, allied with its sister vows (in the West, at least) of Chastity and Obedience, is, most meaningfully, a spiritual practice intended to purify and divinise the person living it.  It is intended to “impoverish” a person, stripping away non-essentials and even, to some extent, essentials to the point that the person’s only remaining wealth is in God (or, when God Himself seems to have stepped aside and left the person in darkness, then in the doing of His Will).

In Carmel, Holy Poverty is taken quite seriously.  There is little if any extraneity in the monastery and material objects are used to bits and then, only if they cannot be taken apart and made into something else, are they disposed of.  Even when finally designated as no longer of use, depending of what they are made, they are not thrown out with the rubbish but kept for the winter fire to heat the community room. 

There are some items, mostly in the kitchen, that, in this postulant’s estimation, should have gone onto the fire many moons ago.  A few are actually precious pieces “from the foundation” which means, literally now, from a hundred years ago.  Perhaps these, instead of to the fire, should be removed to a nice glass museum case in the public foyer at the entrance to the Enclosure.  Hmmm…once I’m solemnly professed I’ll have to think about suggesting that.  In the meantime, since they are not completely broken or entirely disintegrated, they continue to be used. 

I jest but there are many such elements that make up the fabric of Holy Poverty in Carmel, aspects of the life which a person simply would not have abided or have had to abide in a life of their own – the poorest person in her own country, after all, would have had better!  In this, Holy Poverty has a salutary dampening effect on a person’s inclination and desire to influence her surroundings, to keep some control over certain aspects of her life.  Why is it important to overcome such inclinations and desires?  Because the path to inner freedom is paved with overcomings of this kind and inner freedom is the springboard for a soul’s ascent to God. 

A person comes to Carmel to cleave to God alone – this is her deepest heart’s desire.  In facing and embracing the detachment demanded by Holy Poverty she becomes available in the deepest parts of herself to God.  In her freedom from solicitude for material things, the supramaterial God of her desire can descend into her heart, a heart she has laboured to make spacious for Him, and lift her to Himself.

St. Teresa Margaret and the Virtue of Poverty:   http://www.stteresamargaret.org/poverty.htm

Suffer With a Love That Saves

In this post, “believer” means one who believes in the divinity of Christ and”non-believer” one who does not.

As a young person, before my conversion at age 26, my agnosticism revolved entirely around the question of whether God was “good” or not.  The agonising, distressing question that kept me, at best, in a state of disapproval of God and, at worst, in horror was:  how could a good God allow all the atrocious, abysmal, unspeakable suffering there is in the world?  In my young unbelief I had little tolerance for ambiguity (which, for the believer, becomes “mystery”), for all the gray areas along the long spectrum between black and white, right and wrong, good and evil.  Neither did I have the capacity to accept that all the dichotomies I experienced in my own person and in the world might not actually exist in God.

Simply by virtue of being human, all people are acquainted with suffering.  The believer, however, is further acquainted with a concept which his faith calls the “mystery of suffering.”  Because of this, the believer is no longer impelled, as he might once have been, to call God on to the carpet for all the miseries of the world.  He weeps in the face of horror and (if he is not deeply formed in the theology behind the mystery of suffering, or perhaps even if he is) spontaneously cries out “Why, Lord!  Why!” but he does not set about to prosecute God, trying Him for “crimes against humanity.” 

He does not because he is not himself God and is greatly aware of this fact.  He is fully aware that reality itself has him permanently in a position of humble contingency.  As a non-believer he had had a certain ignorance of the fact that he himself was not God, unwittingly putting himself in the place of or on a par with God.  He could not have known the absurdity and irrationality of his positioning himself this way as he was unaware of even doing so.

Having myself come to belief, I ceased to suffer the disapproval and horror intrinsic in my former perception of a “monstrous god.”  Even so, I still have not found, strictly speaking, (in a manner that would answer the logic of the non-believer’s argument) an answer to the question of suffering.  Neither have I come upon anything that might prevent my spontaneous flow of tears at the sight of it.  Instead, I have come to pose the question a different way.  Now I ask: Why does suffering remain central in God’s plan, central in the unfolding of Salvation History, central in the journey to God of each of His creatures?  What is this great and terrible mystery of suffering, not only at the heart of the world but at the very heart of the Incarnation of God?

For a non-believer, perhaps the question to ask is not “Is God a moral monster?” but:  how do I move from a position of disapproval, hubris, accusation, anguish, fear, or horror (or whatever else it is that keeps my gaze averted from the true God) to one of a life-giving humility and awe in the face of a great and terrible mystery hidden in the most unfathomable Mystery of all – God Himself, He Who Is and upon whom the mystery of my own being is wholly contingent?

To this question there is an answer, which is as follows:  I move from my current position into this new way of being not through apprehension of a concept using my keen, even Mensa-level intellect but through contact with a Person.  I move not by understanding something but in experiential knowledge of Someone.  This unique Someone is fully a brother to me in my humanity and, at the same time, He is an instrinsic part of the Godhead, fully divine.  It is contact with and knowledge of this Person (which are a divine gift, a grace) that causes the non-believer to believe.

The believer has an understanding (an integrated, whole-person understanding, not merely rationally, in the intellect) of how the very Person of Jesus Christ can be “the answer,” at once comprehensive and insuperable.  Belief allows a person to see Christ as the prism through which all of human history, in all its misery and glory, is refracted.  Until we see through Him we cannot even begin to understand what it is we are looking at.  Until we meet Him in the ground of our being we cannot have a hope of an “answer” to the question of our suffering.

With regard to the suffering in our own lives, we have two choices.  We can either suffer or we can love and suffer. We cannot not suffer.  Therefore, the question to ask ourselves is not “Why is there suffering?”  (which actually is not much, if at all, our business) but “How shall I suffer?”   

Shall I crumple inward to the destruction of my own person and to the harm of others?  Or shall I proceed in love, accepting the hiddeness of the meaning of my suffering, believing in faith that it is unto good (even unto glory) although faith itself, by its own nature, hides this good from me?

The supreme embodiment of a person both loving and suffering is the god-man Jesus.  He is the reason we as His disciples choose (by His grace and not by the powers of our intellect) not to deny or avoid suffering but to suffer in the manner of the Incarnate God – with a love that saves.

Your Ineffable Face, O Lord

Ta Face est ma seule Patrie
Elle est mon Royaume d’amour
Elle est ma riante Prairie
Mon doux Soleil de chaque jour
Elle est le Lys de la vallée
Dont le parfum mystérieux
Console mon âme exilée
Lui fait goûter la paix des Cieux.

From a poem by St. Therese

   

 

Everywhere today, Petite Therese, loving souls seek the beauty and mystery of your face, so familiar yet so secret.  In your gaze we take refreshment and find comfort.  You encourage us on our journey home, you, an alter Christi, bearing in your face the image of Our Ineffable God.  

Spiritual Bees and the Honey of Hesychia

Living the “angelic life” on Άγιον Όρος . . .

It is within these small caves that the spiritual bees live, making the sweetest honey of hesychia.  The hymn which St. Nicodemos composed for the Athonite Fathers came to mind, and I started chanting it. …

‘O honeycomb assembled by God, who has hidden in the hollow places and caves of the Holy Mountain, as if in spiritual cells, the very sweet honey of hesychia.’

~ from A Night in the Desert of the Holy Mountain 

 

 

This Present Glory

The monastery in which I lived some years ago (long before entering Carmel) had about a hundred acres of forested land abutting on a preserve with about a thousand acres more. There were narrow, simple paths through our property and then, once in the preserve, well worn dirt tracks used by the foresters in their vehicles. In the summer, during the meridian, which was about an hour and half long, I often walked out the back and into these woods, idling quietly along the foresters’ tracks or skipping along the stones in the bed of a stream farther in.  I wandered generally and without aim, enjoying the deep sweetness of being alone with the Lord in nature.

A local saying about the weather in this area was “If you don’t like it, wait five minutes.” When I had left the house one afternoon for my usual walk, the sky was clear. As I ambled I was aware of a change, of newly forming cloud cover, of a hint in the air of rain. I had wandered, as was my custom, just about far enough into the preserve to be able to turn around and make it back in time for Rosary and None. Then, quite suddenly, as I was standing beside a particularly beautiful tree, admiring it, the heavens opened, releasing an avalanche of rain.  It was a rain reminiscent of the tropics where, in the rainy season, the rains beat down endlessly with a whoosh and a roar on every created thing. Instinctively, I grabbed hold of the lowest branch of the tree, swung myself up and clambered up into the leafy cover of its upper reaches. 

If the eye of a camera were fixed on this scene it would see:  a novice, high up in the arms of a tree in the middle of the woods in the middle of a storm, tucked up in the crook of its branches, unseen by any but the Lord God Most High (by the eye of  the divine camera), enjoying enormously the sumptuousness and splendor of His ways, so sumptuous that, despite the leafy cover, habit and veil have become drenched and so splendid that, despite the constraints of time, all thought is suspended for anything beyond this present glory!

It did occur to me soon enough, however, that, having become wet through, I really had no excuse to linger. Wistfully, I abandoned my perch, climbed down and trotted back toward the house through the pelting rain. Entering at the end door that let into the baking room, I wrung myself out a bit at the sink there.

Then, turning toward the back stairs to go up to my cell, I glanced at the clock on the wall above the ovens. For an instant there was that familiar sinking feeling we have when we know some unpleasant presentiment is about to be made true. This was followed by a moment of surprise, which was in itself surprising since the hands of the clock had only confirmed what, in my heart of hearts, I already knew:  the meridian was long past.  The chapel was silent.  The Sisters’ rosary beads were back in their pouches and their books put away until the Little Hours of the next day.  The Sisters themselves had disbursed and were now in their places about the monastery beginning their “obedience,” their afternoon round of work in which the glory and the splendor of the Father lay, perhaps, a bit more concealed.

God Who Calls You Will Be Your Strength

L’entree au desert est toujours un instant solonnel.  Vous quittez le monde normale des relations sociales pour l’inconnue de la solitude.  Il faut commencer par des arrachements, des brisements, peut-etre des reniements.  On n’accomplit pas sans larmes cette universelle et definitive rupture avec ce qui nous etait le plus cher.  …

Dieu qui vous appelle a ces renoncements sera votre force.

                                        l’Hermitage par Un Moine

Entry into the desert is always a solemn moment.  You leave the normal world of social relationships for the unknown of solitude.  One must begin with pulling away, breaking apart, perhaps renunciations.  One does not accomplish without tears this universal and definitive rupture with that which was most dear to us.  … 

God who calls you to these renunciations will be your strength. 

The Hermitage by a Monk

                                       

Carmelite Egg on Face

In Carmel, the oblong linen refectory napkin stretches out across the table in front of you and has all your tableware – a plate, a “godet” for water, a mug for tea, and utensils – laid out on top of it.  One end of the napkin is folded over a bit at the outer edge of the table.  The other end is in a deeper fold, covering your utensils and your day’s portion of bread.  Once seated for dinner or collation, you unfold the end of the napkin nearest you and tuck it in at the top of your scapular.  If you’re a postulant, as I was, you pin it to the front of your cape.  

Your food is then brought to you in a bowl which the Sister server places before you on your refectory napkin.  You may request a large portion or a small portion.  Other than this, the food is the same among all the Sisters.  All except, that is, for yours truly:  for a month or so, as part of the Sisters’ efforts to fatten me up, a nice fried egg with a runny yoke was regularly added to my collation.

Autumn was advancing and the days were getting shorter.  Now it was dark outside by the time we arrived in the refectory for collation.  Collation was in progress one evening when a Sister asked Our Mother’s permission to close the shutters over the windows.  My place at table was just in front of a window at one end of the refectory near the kitchen turn.  When I heard the shutters on the other windows being closed I leaned toward our Novice Mistress and asked should I close those behind me.  She nodded yes.

In one deft movement I rose from my seat and swung around to the left, reaching both arms upward toward the shutters, neatly yanking the refectory napkin after me and flinging my bowl of food onto the floor!  Sitting back down abruptly, I glanced toward Sister Mistress.  Our Mistress is always the foil in any skit performed in the community, with her keen sense of humor barely concealed behind her “straight man’s” mask.  Now, as I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, I could see it – I could see the undeniable traces of a smile, ever so slightly curling up the edges of her mouth.

I leaned over and peered under the table.  I saw, to my disappointment, that the dear fried egg seemed to have survived the fall undamaged, its runny yolk miraculously intact.  According to our customs, I would still have to eat it.  I did, remembering gratefully that quiver of a smile on Our Mistress’ lips.  This mere hint of levity lightened the obedience (and also made it much easier to wipe the egg off my face!)

   

The Life of Man on Earth Is a Warfare

                              Militia est vita hominis super terram.  

“Jesus permits the spiritual combat as a purification, not as a punishment. The trial is not unto death but unto salvation.”                                               ~ St. Pio of Pietrelcina

Our first cell in the monastery (under the Rule of St. Benedict) ~ drawn by this blogger.

A True Carmelite, Without Habit or Vows

     For three days after the ceremony of reception, the novice has permission to receive visits from her family and friends. … On the afternoon of the third day, I was called to the speak room to see a young woman whose name was unfamiliar.  A sweet, youthful face smiled at me when I drew back the screen.  A conspicuous deformity in her spine forced her to stand and sit in a pitiable posture, leaning toward her right side.  Her disfigurement helped to explain her sad, suffering eyes.

     She had heard there had been a clothing ceremony at Carmel, and she came hoping to be allowed to see the “new bride.”  She told me that when she was a small girl she had dreamed that one day she might be a cloistered nun, but now that vocation obviously was closed to her.  Having lost her parents five years before, she had been forced to seek employment as a scrub girl in a downtown New York office.

     As she talked to me, it was obvious that with all her infirmity and despite her sad eyes, she had a burning love of Our Lord.  She spent several hours each day, she said, in prayer in the Franciscan Church on 31st Street.  Our Lord’s invitation, “Come to Me all you who are weary and heavily burdened and I will refresh you,” had been accepted, and her Master always gave her the strength of body and peace of soul she so ardently prayed for.
     This crippled, humble scrub-girl contemplative, whose cloister was the canyons of Wall Street and whose choir was the nearest parish church and whose cell was a cheap rented room in the slums—this Carmelite without vow or habit—taught me many things about suffering and about prayer.

                                                                      From  My Beloved: the Story of a Carmelite Nun