Lady's Man

In An Interrupted Li/e by Etty Hillesum, she is speaking about a man she adrnires and says
I think most of us get the wrong idea when we hear the phrase lady's man - we immediately think of sex. He is a lady's man, true enough, but only in the sense that like Rilke, there is something about him to which women immediately respond and open up. And that is because he has so strong a feminine streak that he can understand how women feel - women whose souls find no home since men will not join them to theirs. But in him the "soul" of a woman is given welcome and shelter. In that sense he is a lady's man, yes!

What most moves me in this passage are the words "women whose souls find no home..." I would like to have the wisdom and knowledge to give the soul of a woman shelter, welcome and rest.

Lazarus

I am like Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead (John 11:38-44); except I have got only half as far as he did. Lazarus was four days dead when Jesus, hating death, bid that the stone be removed from the tomb.
Then he cried in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out." The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound in the burial wrappings. "Unbind him," Jesus said, "and let him go free." Jesus would do all the same for me, except I, when he bids me come out of the tomb, answer fearfully, "I can't. I'm dead."

Legacy of the Enlightenment

I wonder how much my sense of the absence of God is due to my being a child of these times and how much is just in the nature of things across many epochs. From our times: God banished from culture and public life, believers made to seem naive and weak, science presenting us with too vast an expanse of the universe. The legacy of the Enlightenment, and all that. From the nature of things: because God could not be just another of the things on earth to be related to as one among others. Re must be another dimension, and his absence points to this difference. It is absence only from some perspectives. From these his presence looks like absence. I try to think this through. These are interesting thoughts, and I think they are correct. But they do not always give me consolation.

Limits

An unbelievably beautiful spring day, coming out from under two months of clouds and rain. The green, of course, is intense: fields of grass or spring wheat and the softer-toward-yellow green of the just budding trees. The view is longer than summer can grant when growth will be thick. I like especially the soft, long curve - all green - of the short hill in the near distance. The thicket of trees along its ridge is a dense wood, nothing budding there yet, looking nearly black in this day's light. This side of that hill the trees are opening, and so the mound I spy is through the still nearly bare branches. It will not be long - this is clear - until from here one will see only the thick leaves and nothing of the gracious curve of the hill behind.
What lies behind each thing that I see now? Life is springing up and will veil some things even as others come to the fore. In another season, life's leaves wilI fall and show again the once veiled scape. It is an amazing rhythm. This is life. It is always moving, never still, always on the way, diminishing, coming back. And so I can think again clearly today about where and when and who I am. It is useful to take account of the fact that I am not everywhere, nor in some other place but only here. This is my limit. But I am at least here, and I am grateful.
Not only am I here, but I am here now. That seems obvious enough, but accepting the fact with gratitude is not so obvious or automatic. That it is only now is another limit. It is only today, there will not be another. Stretch this fact out for a while and you have a lifetime. The now in which I am here is only a limited span. I am not in another century, another epoch. I have only this day. It is given me. I may be given another or even many more, but one thing is certain: a day is not for ever and no amount of days ever could be. Praised be the One who from his for ever gives me one day in the shape of whose limits I see, conversely, One to whom I cry out, "O Illimitable You!"

Benedictine monastic values are perhaps best summed up in the injunction with which the Holy Rule of St. Benedict opens: "Listen." Monastic life is a way of life devoted to the practiced art of listening. St. Benedict says, "Listen carefully, my son, to the master's instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart." In the immediate context in which he is speaking, St. Benedict is referring to listening to the words of the Lord as expressed here in the words of the Holy Rule. But monks through the centuries have learned from that listening that the range of that to which they listen will grow ever wider.
Among other things, monks listen to their place; and everything they do there, everything they build and plan, wants to promote this listening. This listening becomes an exchange between the place and those who live in the place. So, for example, at my monastery one listens to, and with the ears of the heart, attends to a hill, to many trees, to wonderful views, to the light of the passing hours of day and night, to the seasons and their weathers. And why? Because monks are meant to listen for God everywhere. Above all they will hear him in his holy word, the Scriptures, which aH the monastic practices are meant to promote and put into action. But this very word teaches monks that creation itself is already God's message. It teaches also that living in time - call it a little piece of history - Christians are meant to live their redemption by building and planting, working and praying, creating a culture that speaks their Good News into any number of forms that will celebrate it and share it.

Little Things

"Tante piccole cose, tante piccole cose..." This was Valeria's refrain at the age of 95 during our long conversation today. "Many little things, many little things ..." She was remembering large parts of her century in Italy, smiling with gratitude, and explaining wistfully that the whole culture had been based on "many little things" that could give us joy. Examples from her conversation: slow train rides so you could enjoy the countryside; stopping at out-of-the-way stations, when there was a chicken coop and a garden attached; the sound of the station manager's whistle as he signaled the engineer to move out; the sunrise on the Adriatic, near Ancona, the sea so still; the family meals together and the special, practical yet elegant vessels that her mother had for these; the way her father tapped her on the cheek before she went out at night with her friends; linen on the table and knives that cut; cats instead of dolls because cats are alive.
Valeria is splendid, and I am fortunate to sit beside her in her reminiscing. That great culture of which she speaks is fading fast and all but lost, though perhaps parts of it could be regained by practicing. I need to practice letting little things please me. Otherwise I will finish among those whom Valeria sadly denounced: "No one is pleased with little things anymore." And this is very sad: she said she couldn't be as happy anymore because no one around her is.

Loss

I'm thinking all the time about people, their differences, their greatness, their squalor; I'm thinking about cities and about wars. I'm thinking of problems, and I also think of things like wine or mountain lakes, lovely things. I feel like I'm moving forward with a new understanding of something. But of what? Of life, perhaps?
It has become very hard for me to "work," but I can't tell if this is progress or a problem. Work here means writing an article, preparing a class, reading students' papers and helping them. I can hardly do it, or I only do exactly as much as I must. But this is perhaps to the good, for I am thinking all the time, even if I am not making any direct progress in theology in the sense of reading and learning things I don't know about. I have many poems rising up within, but to write and refine them is also the work I seem unable to do. I just quietly hold the thought of the poem and then move on. Eventually, of course, that poem is lost, but then another rises up and another, and this for the moment seems better than writing. True, if I were to write the poem, it would not be lost. But that all things are passing and are lost is my fundamental thought and insight now. So writing too is loss. If it is done at all, perhaps what should characterize it is some reverent sense of inhabiting this loss, this world where alI things are lost.

Love of Art

When people decide to stay in a place for their whole lives and dedicate themselves to building up that place into a monastery that gives glory and honor to God, and when those people know that after them others will carry on what they have done, there arises rather naturally as a dimension of the whole project a desire to do things beautifully: to create a place of beauty, to create beauty that will last. This has happened in thousands of monasteries through the centuries; it is why monasteries have contributed so much to culture. In addition to the beauty sought in the buildings and the landscape, the arts contribute greatly to the creation of a beautiful place. Music, for example, renders worship beautiful but also extends from there into many other dimensions of life. The plastic arts are important also in the church, but likewise they appropriately adorn every other place of living and activity at the monastery. Even furnishings and vessels are desirably beautiful and made to last. Beautiful language - poetry - is happily an inevitable dimension of the monastic way. Beauty in a place creates a momentum to refine things even more, just as lack of it can impede the momentum. Thus, in all that is undertaken and planned at any monastery, the conditions for creating beautiful things must be considered a necessary ingredient of the project.

Lucky

I lead an unusual life, and I am lucky. I live away from "the action," and often enough don't even know what the action is. Yet I hear its voice in the near distance. I know that on this account, in my case, I can be closer to what is real - not because I hear the noise but because I am not doing so much of what so many others do. But the noise reminds me that I am near them. I recognize the density of reality in something like my six weeks in Paris: living in the center of the city with a wise man, inhabiting his ideas, praying with him. Or, in another city, just two hours of talking with Milosz, but all the reading that prepared for it and now follows - this is living as concretely and as fully as I can imagine. Or, my friendship with M., where none of what we do is exciting or fun in the way that society conceives of these, and yet he is a real companion in soul and mind. We are constant1y interchanging things. And now I am thinking of all this in a quiet house in the country, where with several other friends, we try to be faithful to offering up our simple prayers, to choosing our reading well, and to spending some time together in the evening that will be enriching for each. I cannot ask for much more.