Jeremy Driscoll OSB A Monk's Alphabet

Jeremy Driscoll OSB
A Monk’s Alphabet
Moments of Stillness in a Turning World

DARTON - LONGMAN + TODD, 2006

For Paul Murray, OP who helped so much with this alphabet and who helps so much in general

Pacific Ocean
Pain
Paradise
Paris
Peninsula

Photo
Pimple
Poet
Poland
Prayer

Priest
Principle
Processions
Prose
Psalms

Pacific Ocean

At the ocean the scene is lonely because the expanse is vast, nothing is named, and very little human history has happened here. Things are just fine here without any of us human beings around.
The ocean is not only beautiful, vast, mesmerizing. I find it also terrifying. Not in the sense that it might overrun its limits, climb up the bank and sweep me away. No, terrifying in the sense that it is just always there and rolling in and out in its huge way as it has done just like this for tens of thousands of years. I do not know the long-term geological history of these parts, but there is a definite sense of it all being and looking like this, apart from the comparatively few puny houses, for thousands and thousands of years. Every day only this - the tides in and out, storm and sun and shore and sand, the gulls feeding and flying so, the sea lions unchanged in their habits during millennia. It is terrifying. Things are just fine here without any of us human beings around.

Pain

How am I to account in my heart for the fact that pain far worse than mine is oppressing people by the hundreds of millions? That a comparable pain may touch my life one day or may not? Is there some hidden law at work which explains these differences?

Paradise

The question, or at least the tone with which we tend to ask it nowadays "Why am I here? What is the purpose of my life? What is the meaning of history, of this whole created order?" - is a question that arises with a sting as a result of sin and the distortions in our perception that sin introduces. When life in this world, with its difficulty in following moral principles, seems to me like a lot of bother on God's part just to unite us to himself, then I know that I have lost the original wonder and insight of Paradise. For if I could somehow wa1k again in the first Paradise, I would experience the magnificent abundance of the created order and the thrilling promise of a history wholly guided by God. I would experience this as explainable only by Love. Only Love, only divine Love, with its limitless delicacy, could and would create a world like this and place in it his own image and likeness. Image and likeness of God - that is what I am and that is what we are.
So there is a sense in which our salvation from sin will show itself as a restoration of the wonder of Paradise, where life is no longer experienced as something of a bother and where doing the will of God is no longer a burden and a chore. No, just as in Adam I sinned, so in Christ, the new Adam, I am come to a new life: a being in the body and on the earth in such a way that the only explanation is Love, living a new history which derives entirely from him and whose characteristic mark is entirely doing the will of the Father in joy and trust.

Paris

When I am in a city and sit quietly and alone in my room in an effort to pray, I somehow begin to feel all around me the thousands of people, and it just seems odd that I should sit quietly in the midst of them. From my window in an inner court I see at least a hundred windows of other apartments, and I can't help thinking something like, "Well, here we are on top of one another." There is nothing wrong with it; there is even something touching about it. In any case, it is hard to ignore; and it takes over my prayer; and I'm not praying; I'm thinking about all this. Maybe I go off in this direction because I was raised in a small town and in another country, and it is so different from where I find myself now. Where am I when I am not in Paris?

Peninsula

Italy as a peninsula - you feel it when you're there, even if few of us feel much of anything like that any more, in our culture dominated by technology. But with a little attention, the effects of the peninsula can be noticed all around. One sea is never far away and the other never much further, land thus taken less for granted than in the great, vast expanses of Europe and Asia. You can feel Italy by contrasting it with what it feels like when you're way up inside part of Europe - for example, in Poland, around Krakow. Then there is the Oregon coast and the huge Pacific. You are not really seeing or feeling that sea if you do not also somehow feel a huge and gorgeous continent at your back. This is very different from looking at one or the other sea in Italy - which, as I say, is a peninsula.

Photo

I am gazing now at a photo of Natalie and Nathan, my niece and nephew, aged eleven and eight. Will those beautiful children live to be old before they die? Yes, of course, I hope so, with all my heart. And so then, how many further ways of looking will come across their faces? What of what I see will fade? What of what I don't see now will come into their glance? Can people who look like this grow old? Of course, we know they can and will, but, hard though I try, I can't see how when I can stare like this at the fresh faces of the young. And did people, old now, once look this fresh and beautiful? They did, of course, we know that, but how hard it is to see. And all the while ... within ... invisible ..., it is always the same me, the same she, the same he. Our looks go on changing around a solid, invisible core.
It is a comparatively recent development for the human race, this possibility we have to stare at a face in a photo, inc1uding our own. It is far different from a mirror, where what we see is always present, always right here. A photo is the past and elsewhere. We can ask, "Did I once look like that? Is that what my sister looked like that day? Row pretty she is! Is that what we looked like together?"
Then there are the photos of the dead, our beloved and well-known dead or the countless unknown. For me it is a deeply unsettling experience - also mysteriously beautiful - to stare into the photographed face of someone who has since grown old through many other stages of life and then died. The faces of the young survivors of the great world wars. The beautiful young women ready to dance in the cabarets. Children playing in a park in the 1930s.

Pimple

When I was in my late teens, I found myself in the lucky situation of being able to stay for three weeks in my brother's apartment in San Francisco. I had determined that I would learn about the world while there, and so I set off each morning systematically walking the streets, planning in this way to see a good deal of the city and to drink in its spirit. I did so, but I am not writing about that here. I am only remembering a funny line that an old philosopher-bum said to me in a short conversation we had on the upper end of Grant Street. Re had managed to condense into one short phrase what apparently was his basic insight about the mystery of life. It was enough for him to repeat this phrase, interspersed with sighs, not especially dramatic. Re kept on saying, "I'm just one pimple on the ocean, one pimple on the ocean."
I knew his meaning, of course, but what caught my attention was this use of the word pimple. (From the dictionary: "A small hard inflamed spot on the skin, or anything resembling a pimple, esp. in relative size.") It seemed such a striking way to make the point that each of us is so small when set up against the vast world, the universe, in which we find ourselves. At the time I was not especially moved by the content of his thought. In the late teens one feels big, not small. But I did appreciate his manner of expression, and I have quoted him often since. Gradually, because of the memorable form of expression, its content entered my consciousness as well.
Now I pronounce it as an insight, as a means of taking my bearings: I am but one pimple on the ocean. Behind me stretch the billions of years in the place where I now am. Before me stretch the planet and the universe - lasting, lasting, lasting long after humans are gone. If I try to bring things down to a human scale, I am still only a pimple, a particle, a blip. One civilization succeeds another. Billions of people like me alive before and alive now ... for a while.
Is the God of Jesus possible in all this? Is Jesus as God possible? Has God in Jesus really come among us as another pimple on the ocean? This is what we believe. But put this way, the content of Christian faith appears even more amazing than anyone could ever have imagined. In one pimple on the ocean the infinite being of God is revealed!

Poet

The poet is one made to see, really to see, and then to say, really to say. But what if nobody listens? It has probably always been that way. So this too will be a part of what is seen and said. Yet the poem uttered has its force in the world, like the word the Hebrew prophets once proclaimed. Israel believed that the prophetic word pronounced, which carne from God, was a three-dimensional event, and not merely indifferent sounds issuing from the throat. Such an event set other events in motion, moving in a way they would not have moved without that word. Reason to fear the prophetic word or to hope for a good one! What really has force in the world is right living, the living that is event. This sounds as if I may be speaking of morality. Of course that is a part of it, but I mean something much more pervasive - the whole of every day and every hour gracefully seen and then lived and perhaps occasionally also said.

Poland

Wherever you go there are surprising personal connections, and all things eventually touch. Only a little attention is required, and you can begin to trace the trails.
It was late in August when Maciej and Daria and I left Bydgoszcz and drove to Gniezno, the old capital of Poland when it was first being formed of Slavic tribes in that region. It was there in 966 that Duke Mieszko I accepted Christian baptism, which effectively introduced Poland into Christian Europe. In the little city there is a large and beautiful Gothic cathedral where St. Adalbert is buried. Re was around in Mieszko's time as bishop of Prague, where he was not wanted. Re left and went to Rome where, though a bishop, he wanted to live like a monk, which he did at Sant'Alessio on the Aventine, just down the street from where I live during the five months I pass in Rome each year. He eventually died a martyr on a mission in Prussia, but not before he was sent by the Pope from Sant' Alessio to Hungary to found the great monastery of Pannonhalma, where I am scheduled to preach at a retreat in the coming year.
Recently thieves or a peculiar type of religious zealot sawed off the silver head of St. Adalbert represented on his tomb over the high altar, but it has been replaced with another one, and you wouldn't know the difference. Sawing the head off a saint's tomb seems a bit sacrilegious, though not as bad as Czechs and Poles having wars with each other through the centuries over who should have the body of St. Adalbert. The Czechs soon forgot that they hadn't wanted him in his lifetime, stole the body from Gniezno and brought it back to Prague. After more war it was returned to Gniezno. The things that people fight about! The things they steal!
In any case, I knelt down and prayed at the tomb of this bishop, monk, and martyr. I prayed for all the people I know named Adalbert. That's two. (In Polish Adalbert comes out as Wojciech. He is patron of Poland, and the name is common there, and so Daria and Maciej could think of more people to pray for.) Then I prayed for all the Poles and Czechs and that the Christian faith would remain strong in these lands. I prayed for my friends and neighbors on the Aventine and also for my old students who used to live at Sant' Alessio, especially Luca, who died when he was thirty, and Remo, an Italian who now lives in New Hampshire and works with orphaned boys.
From Gniezno we carried on to Biskupin, which is the site of the discovery of one of the oldest civilizations on the European continent, extending back some 13,000 years. There are more substantial remains from the Bronze Age, some 6,000 years ago: a city of long log houses on an island in a lake. The place itself is by no means stunning: rather flat land, well cultivated now, a small lake and not in any way dramatic. But nonetheless, there is something moving in thinking that people lived in this place some 13,000 years ago. The day we were there, Mars passed its closest to earth in 60,000 years. So, something was happening there in the air that had never happened there before for any of those people.
A fierce cold wind was blowing on this August afternoon, and summer was already over in these parts. I know it's not connected, but I somehow felt that the wind was blowing so hard all day because Mars was so near. Naturally the sky was cloudy that night, so there was nothing to see. But I consoled myself by thinking: "Row far away again can Mars get before I get my next look at the sky?"
At the end of our outing we carne back to Daria's apartment in Bydgoszcz, drank tea there, and ate the sweets we had bought the day before in Torun, the town where Copernicus was born. The best sweets were the ones from the shop that hundreds of bees had been swarming around all day. I noted from Daria's window that her house was similarly positioned in relation to the Bydgoszcz prison as you are in walking along the Roman Janiculum in relation to the Regina Coeli prison. I told her of the Roman custom of the women singing to the prisoners at night from the hill for their comfort and suggested she might do the same. What a comfort her singing would be for those prisoners, whoever they are.

Prayer

I speak in my prayers to Mary and say: "You, the mother of Jesus, are the mother of God who became flesh for us. Beg him not to abandon the work he set out to do, beg him not to give up on the race of which he became a part. Remind him of his Huge Deed and tell him that for some reason we need more help so that its force can be extended to us. Tell him of me who, though a sinner, recognizes the beauty and generosity of his plan to create the earth and the life of human beings upon it. Tell him that there are many sinners like me who nonetheless still see and believe in his plan and who beg him for strength to be lifted up from their sins. Ask him, Holy Mother, if maybe the repentance of a few might not be counted as the repentance of us all. Wasn't that in fact what he himself already did when as the sinless one he became sin and begged mercy from his Father in the name of us all? So then, tell him, Holy Mary, that never has his race needed his attention as it needs it now. Implore him to forget not the work of his hands."

Priest

One evening Nicolas (age nine) interrupted a dinner conversation that was going in quite another direction and announced, "I have a question." Then he turned to me and said, "What's it like as a priest to say the words of Jesus at Mass, 'This is my body'?" I knew that he needed as clear and complete an answer as possible and that he expected it to be brief. So I told him that you could feel in that moment Christ completely taking possession of you and that you experience his total love for the people, his desire to give every bit of himself for their well-being. You feel it especially for the people that are there in the church but you know also that this love is for the whole world, for everybody and for everything in the world. In another direction you also feel in yourself Christ's love for his Father, burning like a roaring furnace. You understand that the reason he is offering his body and blood is because in this way he wants to honor his Father; he knows that the Father wants him to offer himself for the world in this way; and he gladly does it, so full of love is he.
I could see that Nicolas was made happy by this answer. The smile that spread quietly across his face when I had finished betrayed a wonderful understanding, a kind of knowing satisfaction, almost a "yes, I thought so." He had told me the week before, with tears in his eyes, that he wants to be a priest when he grows up.

Principle

What is so frightening about the present course of human history is that there is no principle of unity any longer operative. Countless thoughts a good many of them noble and true and sincere - lie scattered over the face of the earth but with no force that can any longer pull them together and purify them. Only in Christ can this be found. Good apologetics would demonstrate this and (re)awaken the hunger for it in the human heart.

Processions

Christians believe that what God once accomplished long ago for his people is always available to each subsequent generation of believers. That availability is made active principally through a liturgical reenactment of the saving deeds of God. One way of understanding what God has done for his people - and thus what is still available today - is considering the divine action as a series of processions in which God himself leads his people to salvation. Thus, there was the procession out of Egypt through the Red Sea at the Exodus, the procession of the 40 years in the desert and the giving of the Law on Mt. Sinai, the procession across the River Jordan and into the promised land. AlI these processions shift key in Christ, who leads his faithful followers in procession along the path that he himself trod: in the exodus from death into the promised land of eternal life, an exodus from this world to heaven.
Monks are always having processions. As a community, whenever we go from one place to another, we don't just do it helter-skelter; we go in procession. We process into church; we process out. We process to a meal. We process to our cells. We process to the cemetery. We process around our property. I am glad for all this marching about. Of course, it could become too formal; we could make it over-serious; and then it would just be weird. But I experience it as an extra in my life, something in my day that I would not have were I not a monk. And so I am reminded again and again that I am not just vaguely moving through life. In my life I am inserted into the definitive procession of Christ. I am part of a huge story, a huge movement, a definitive exodus. I am going somewhere.

Prose

On the level of linguistic metaphysics, prose is always within poetry and springs from it. Poetic talk is the more radical, the more original. Prose is commentary and interpretation of the more dense poetic word. But we forget this poetic frame, and we take up poetry to interpret it as if it were prose.

Psalms

For decades now and for every day within them I have been singing the psalms - scores and scores of them, hours of each day. I sing them all every one - and then start them all over again. I have become a long line of words, an arc of sound, a tone that tries to span the dividing spaces that keep the world from what can save us.
I do not get across. I call from the far side. I stretch all my being into the narrow lines that say those right and only words, words that every day trace our fall and point the path of return. I crawl over every word.
I grope my way over and around every syllable, each phrase.