DARTON - LONGMAN + TODD, 2006

Effort

Only by suffering and working does someone realize the promise ofhis life and achieve results never entirely merited.

Egg

We hardly think of it when we do it, but to pick up an egg without breaking it an acquired knowledge is required. Too much force and it would break, all gooey in my hand. Too little, and I would drop it. But surely many other things are like this, and the egg is an image. The egg as image of moderation! I need to learn this. Moderation is an acquired knowledge of not too much and not too little, and its application changes according to circumstances. Not to break the egg and not to let it drop the goal of my life.

Elijah

Elijah retraces the steps of Moses but in reverse. Elijah leaves the promised land and returns to the desert, and now God appears, not as he did to Moses in fire, storm, and earthquake, but instead in the tiny whispering sound of a gentle wind, the Spirit.

Ending

The day is ending in great beauty, and I see again the magnificence of God's plan. A strong wind blew the whole day, very cold again. The air is pure and clean as God intended for our breathing. My vision can reach long while the sun sets. The moon, nearly full, is already high and poised to take over the night. The Alban Hills line up like a dance, and again I admire their broad rhythms. I can see the statues atop the church of the Lateran. Christ and his apostles, their backs to me, turn pink in the last light; and I take it as a greeting from them, even if I do not discern a specific message. Clouds that have never been, being only today's clouds, raced through the sky alI day. With what grace they still fly by in day's last light!

Engelberg

We three monks had slept welI on the night train between Rome and Luzern and did not awaken until it had grown solidly light and we were well into Switzerland. We pulled the shades of the window open and were presented with a wondrous winter morning: snow falling lightly on several feet already accumulated, but visibility good enough to see halfway across the frozen lake which the train was rounding. The train would stop in Luzern before we were really fully awake.
In Luzern we boarded a little train specially equipped for the steep climb to the village and monastery of Engelberg, some 30 miles distant, some 2,000 feet higher. (Engelberg had founded my monastery in America, called Mount Angel, in 1881. 'Mount Angel' is the English equivalent of the German 'Engelberg'.) The day was clearing as we climbed, but the already-fallen snow was growing deeper and deeper. The mountains all round grew steeper and more numerous. The train penetrated a deep forest of fir; all the branches hung downward, heavy laden with snow. I knew the trip was to take about an hour. After about 45 minutes the train stopped for a moment in the thick forest and somehow kicked into another gear. My anticipation mounted as we did. The climb grew sharper than I thought trains could climb. We were moving very slowly. Everyone on the train grew silent, it seemed, from joy and wonder. At the top we carne level into a wide valley laid out at the base of many mountains roughly circling it. These were powerful mountains, many peaks rising some 6,000-7,000 feet above the valley floor. The sky was now clear and blue but laced with light clouds that looked like snow blowing from the tops of the distant summits. We entered the village, but I could not see the monastery. I was looking all around for clues, expectant and gladly impatient. We were directed down a street, then another, winding among shops of various kinds. At last we swung round and saw the huge monastery at the end of the town, its onion-domed tower, its church, the cloister - all of it framed by the mountain whose shape the façade of the church clearly echoed.
This was my mother cloister. These were my roots. This was the monastery that founded mine. What would I find here? The large oak door swung open to receive us. The guest master, who knew monks from the daughter house were arriving, was waiting for us with a warm embrace and summoned us to hot coffee with whipped cream. We passed a corridor with windows onto an interior court with many views toward the mountains. I saw a date etched into the stone floor of the corridor: 1740. We entered a sweetly heated room, paneled with wood, with a wooden floor, and portraits of 57 abbots, dating from 1120, hanging all around. A place visually so different from Mount Angel but a place where I immediately felt all that I feel at Mount Angel: the spirit of a place, the spirit of the Benedictine way, the spirit of Mount Angel 's and Engelberg's way, a way refined and nuanced by 57 abbots since 1120. In that moment, there in Switzerland, I became more Mount Angel. I was very glad and profoundly grateful. The privilege of my vocation!

A couple of years ago on the autumn equinox, I took careful note of the precise time when the sun broke over the mountains which stand on the eastern edge of my valley. It occurred to me that, subtracting an hour for daylight saving time, the time would tell me the relation to "true time" in this place. That is, it can't literally be the same time across the hundreds of miles in a time zone. That's only a convention and an arrangement to lend some unity to a region. Since my place is more or less along the forty-fifth parallel, 1 reasoned equinox should mean sunrise at six and sunset at six. Well, the sun carne up at just seven minutes after the hour, seven minutes after seven, which really was seven minutes after six. That's wonderful. We are only seven minutes off true time here. It was a different true time in north Idaho, where I grew up, more than 300 miles to the east and yet in the same time zone. "Seven Minutes Off" - perhaps a good title for a poem.

The redemption, our being "saved," is eschatological. That is to say, it is more there than here, more in the future than in the present. Christ is risen and has ascended into the future he has prepared for us. He is coming again from there, but he is not yet returned. Still, there are signs in the present that come from this future. I mistake them if I expect from them any more than some indication. For example, the liturgy - whether in its beauty and splendor or in its humble and meager shape - is a sign, but only a sign. I taste my future and celebrate it but return to my present. People I love and lovely people are likewise a sign. But we also disappoint one another and hope wrongly for too much from one another. Still, real love lasts and carries us through to the future, even beyond death.

Sometimes and often - like today again, for example - I experience my inner life as being so filled with riches, with beautiful gifts from beyond me, that I think it cannot possibly be given for me alone but must somehow belong to everybody. The problem is that I receive it as so particularly mine that I have no sense of how possibly to transfer it from myself to others. And is it not perhaps simply some version of vanity or self-centeredness to imagine that what is particularly mine has a relevance for everybody?
What is the richness and beauty I am speaking or? Mostly about prayer or things heard in prayer which also turn into wisdoms useful in daily living. But I should not make a problem of this. I do not know how to make the transfer anyway, so for the moment at least there is nothing to do. And I am not sure anyway that it all does belong to others and should be expressed.
I ask God to make a way clear should he want me to share it and to make my heart calm should he not. I thank him for his goodness to me. Meanwhile, I am silent before his great mystery. "My life is hidden now with Christ in God." (Col. 3:3) Perhaps it shall always be. This has been known before to be a Christian's vocation and particularly a monastic vocation: a life of secret riches passing unknown to all but Christ and me in the monastery.

Excellence

"I kiss my hand to the stars." This line from Gerard Manley Hopkins expresses how I feel about this day. I kiss the day, and I praise the excellence of God. Everything today was a treasure. Released a little somehow from precise religion, I saw all things in a fresh and godly light. Life going on. The inexorable press toward the glory of being, despite all that is squalid about us. A going on in life that has its press and force even in those who have little wisdom and so whose living is shallow. People: the centuries and the present moment combined in their faces. The way they walk, the way they stand, their speaking, a wondrous light in their eyes. And Rome supporting it all. Rome being here, with its colors, its rambling streets, the opening into the squares, flowers in a window, and traffic. Why all this? Whatever is it for?
I sang Vespers tonight, half outside of it because I wasn't especially focused. But the force of its images and music carried me along. How our male voices swelled! What great strength there was in the air that swung the notes upward toward the wooden boat-like beams of the roofs that were the skies. It was a divine something, and I could stand inside of it and out, an uncomprehending man. Whoever God is, God was there and so was I. The smell of incense ran right up my nostrils and quickened my invisible soul. I was weak and strong in that hour: the immensity of God and his excellence blending with my smallness and holding it aloft, holding it somehow to the task, letting me succeed, however improbably, in being there, in being where Life is, where Life manifests itself as unaccountable and quite beautifully there, unpredictable in its myriad nuances, new in every hour and in every minute of the hour.
How shall I stand before all this? How shall I worship? How shall I live? "I kiss my hand to the stars." I kiss the day. I praise the excellence of God.
Rain that threatened all day is finally falling in this night. "Greetings, rain," I want to say. "So you have come at last." And I want to say this same "you" to everything. You, O night! You, O quietly moving clouds! You, screaming and love-making cats! You, O wall beside the road beneath the window behind which I live! You, O prepositions of my language and all you other parts of speech! I know you well and love you. I have passed the day with you. And: I praise you in your excellence, O God, you who are everywhere.

What I am about to say has been thought through often enough; I am not expressing an original insight. But I would like to live with a little more attention to it, for it is something at which to marvel. When I experience an event, and still more when I recount it, I am massively shaped in the way I experience it by thousands of my memories of previous events.
Further, I have developed habits of recounting - first to myself and then to others - that hugely inform the present recounting. So, any present is my past! But there is more: any present is also my future since the future experience will be filtered through the now present event, destined to be past to the coming future. In that sense my future is already here; I am already in part living it.

We think that when we see one another, we are seeing primarily the body. But really, it is more the soul than the body that we are seeing. We know how to read especially the face, but indeed the whole body, in its expression; and we read it immediately, instinctively. In fact, the very word expression implies this: what is in itself invisible achieves visibility in the bodily expression of another. Actually, I see the other's soul before I see the body qua body. When another comes toward me, what I first see, what I first detect, is that one's feeling, the inner life, his sense of this encounter with me. Only in seeing this do I see the rest, the details of the corporeal features of face and body.