[Monastery]
Dear Fr Donagh,
…. I wrote to you last month about a spiritual crisis I was in, and your reply was very helpful to me. As you suggested, it put the struggle ‘outside’ me – not too much but enough to let me have some perspective on it….
I find I'm able to think about monastic life much more calmly now, and to see it as one particular (if unusual) life-path. It connects me to other people’s struggles in the world. Parents struggling to raise their children, people facing serious sickness, people trying to make ends meet…. But my question now is whether I'm justified in living a life that has none of these problems. Should I be with people, trying to help them, instead of isolating myself from them? I'm not really planning on leaving, but I'd like to come to a clearer understanding of what I've taken on. Can you help again, please…? Sr C.
Dear Sr C.,
I remember a monastery at the other side of the world, where I gave a retreat many years ago. It has stayed with me as a symbol of contemplation – and monastic life in particular. It was in Trinidad, West Indies. In fact, there are two monasteries on that location: an old disused monastery and a new one. The old monastery was made of clay and timber. It was a modest structure, with many small windows, doorways, corners, passages, steps up and down…. It scarcely looked like a planned building at all, it was more like a thing of nature that happened to sprout on that spot. The most whimsical thing about it was a passage that ran right through the centre of the building, lengthways, at ground level, without doors or gates. They told me the reason for this. When monks first came there, long ago, the terrain was extremely rough, and there was only one place where a monastery could be built: right on the path that led up the mountain. They built it right there, but they had to allow the path to remain open. To determine the width of the passage, they loaded a donkey with two bales of hay and measured from side to side.
Though probably not intended, this has great symbolic value. The world was able to pass through the monastery. The little monastery was not a fortress, but a place of passage. Today there is a new monastery near the top of the mountain, and again the world passes through it, though not in the literal way of the old monastery. People come for spiritual guidance: not only Catholics, but Christians of every denomination —Lutherans, Baptists, Pentecostals—and even Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims…. The world must be able to pass through your monastery, through your contemplative centre, your heart, your heart of prayer; otherwise your monastery is only a fortress for your ego. The German word for a fortress or castle is Schloss. The word is related to schliessen, ‘to close or lock’. And incidentally the Irish word is Dún, as in Dún Aenghusa or Dún Dealgan, and the corresponding verb means ‘to close’. Fortresses are closed and defended places, but a monastery has to be open in a deep sense.
A monastery with a thoroughfare, a heart pierced by the world…. Contemplation has to be open for the world to pass through it. You are not insulated in the hard shell of your ego; you are accessible, you are vulnerable, you are pierced. At the heart of contemplation you don’t meet a tiny localised god who protects you; you meet the infinite God who lays you open. And you are not settling, in contemplation, for a tiny patch of world; your heart is expanding to embrace it in its entirety, more perhaps than if you were superficially bound into its affairs.
The life of a monastic seems quite exceptional, different in every way from that of an ordinary Christian. Yet it is right to remember that monks, typically, are laymen; and nuns are laywomen. Anthony of the Desert, the founder of monasticism, was and always remained a layman. When more and more monks became priests, their abbots began to resemble bishops, with mitre and crozier; but monasticism, at heart, is a lay movement. What monastics do, then, has something to say to every Christian. They make visible the contemplative side of all Christian life. They live in this world, not in the skies. Therefore we cannot put them in a separate category or make them our substitutes; they are there to recall us to the contemplative side of our Faith. If some of us need to pass sometimes through their monasteries, it is in order to pass through our own heart, our contemplative centre.
The spiritual health of a monastery, in my opinion, is measured by how well they do this for people around them. If, instead, a monastery turns in on itself, relying on outsiders for every kind of support and service but not actively teaching contemplation to a world that needs it so badly, it is not in service to the Gospel and is no place for a Christian to live. In your first letter (last month) you were wondering whether you were in a rut. In your letter this month it seems to me that your question is whether your monastery is in a rut. Only you can answer these questions with full and detailed awareness. I pray that you will discern wisely and find your way to the heart of the matter.
Donagh