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

My heart is breaking that all things are passing away. This brutal fact punctures my whole inner being, and my life leaks out in the form of tears. All that I love - beautiful earth, lovely people - all fade away and are gone. And our fading is accompanied by absurd sins expressing our desperation. For these too, especially for mine, I have tears. Yet in this anguish a hope is hidden. I find it in the Book of Revelation, in the words, "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there by mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away." (Rev. 21:4) The "former" things are still too much present in me, and their passing away is what is breaking my heart. But I am writing toward my future and placing these words on the page as my own hope, as that in which I trust: every tear wiped away and death no more.

"Zia" is the Italian word for "aunt." If I were Italian and had an aunt named Helen, she would be my Zia Elena. Instead the Zia Elena in my life is not a relation but a bar with this name in the part of Rome known as Testaccio, a unique and lively neighborhood. (In Italy the word "bar" is used to designate those places that can be found about every twenty paces, where in the morning you can have a coffee and a quick bite to eat, in the afternoon an ice cream or a beer.) During a number of years Zia Elena was my foot in the door of Testaccio, for it is only about 40 paces away from the back door of my Roman monastery. I often stopped in there for a cappuccino during morning study breaks as I took a brisk walk through the neighborhood. I soon became known to the owners and to the regular customers, and they were only too happy to have a monk and a priest with whom they could exchange their observations about God and the Church and the meaning of life and the different ways coffee should be prepared and why it's not fair the way they are ticketing parked cars nowadays. Sometimes I would talk with my theology students about these conversations in the bar, telling them that the insights which emerge from the refined language and paradigms of academic disquisition must still be connected with the more simply expressed concerns of the people I met at Zia Elena. I called this "Theology in Testaccio," and that became a shorthand expression in my lectures to signal that we were going to move from the level of lofty thoughts to an exposure of their existential relevance.
One scene can serve as an example of how intense theology in Testaccio could actually become. I was standing on a particular morning in a very crowded Zia Elena and was working my way over to the cash register to pay. One of my closest friends in the bar was Stefania, who collected the money, counted change back, and carried on several other conversations all at once. When she saw me that day, even while returning money to someone else, she said excitedly, "O Je! [short and friendly Roman version of my name, Jeremy] I wanted to ask you something. Yesterday I was praying the Our Father," she explained, "and I suddenly realized that I wasn't able to say the words 'forgive us as we forgive' because there's lots of people that I don't forgive and don't want to. What should I do?" she bluntly asked. The next thing I heard was someone else say, "Two coffees and two sandwiches," wanting to know how much they owed. Stefania answered, and while she took their money, I said, "Listen. This is important." I discovered in Testaccio that unless you begin your sentence in a vivid or dramatic way, you can fade out in the crush of traffic, or Stefania might easily forget what she had asked. I continued, "When Jesus was dying on the cross, he prayed for those who were putting him to death saying, 'Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.' That was perfect forgiveness," I explained. Then, not wanting to lose this first strand of my answer, I hurried ahead saying, "Jesus is praying in you when you pray the Our Father. So let his perfect forgiveness be in you. Say the prayer with him praying in you and you will learn to forgive. If you wait until you've already forgiven enough, you'll never pray it. But if you let Jesus pray it in you, you will learn from him to forgive."
There was a pause - unusual for her. She dropped her various strands of conversation and stopped her shifting of the money. She shouted out over people's heads to her son at the bar who was making cappuccinos and said with wonder, "Armando, Jeremy just explained the Our Father to me and I understood it!" The crowd went silent, and I could see that everyone was wondering what had been said. In the little interval Armando announced generously, "Of course you understood once Je explained it." Then after that, the noise picked up again. People were still wondering what exactly I had said and so I repeated my short lesson, now to this group, now to that. That's generally how theology in Testaccio comes about. Lessons short but intense, and life going on all around us.

I have this image while I pray: what God has done in Jesus hanging as a thin thread from top to bottom of the whole universe. It appears frail and dimensionless, without color, and virtually invisible. Still, it is there, even if surrounded all around by the vast space of earth, by the endless space of the regions beyond. I reach out and touch this thread. That's all there is to do with it. It's not a rope you can grab on to and climb upward with. You can only touch it, feel it against your hand. But surprisingly, something comes from this. I touch it, move it a little, and some new something comes into me, some new life, a new seeing. I don't climb up on it. I don't follow it down. I don't go anywhere. But when I touch it, I feel a great connection.
I am touching it now. I am feeling against my hand something which by comparison with the substantial things all around me hardly exists. And yet a power comes out from this touch. It is as if - virtually unnoticed, no more than the slight movement of a thread - the door to an entirely new dimension cracks open and I find myself standing within it. I don't know how. I am in the same place. I see all the same things around me. I am still me and I must face the day. But a bit of understanding begins to emerge and some sense to it all. As improbable as it seems, I dare to think I may now be connected with God, even in a kind of intimacy. How exactly, I can't say. I can only bear witness to this marvelous surprise. When I touch this thread, I feel a great connection. Then the connection fades. So I reach out and touch it again. Again I am connected.

More than once I've noted Czeslaw Milosz citing Edgar Allan Poe as saying that the melancholy of transience is the most poetic of tonalities. Yes, of course. But the dreadful pain of this thought must be faced and grappled with. And I am wondering if it is possible to conceive of salvation as grappling with precisely that? And if it doesn't, then what salvation is it? Great or small, we all pass away and are no more, and all things pass away. What real difference does it make if some are remembered with love for a while and others are discussed for a period for the merit of their thoughts or deeds? Undoubtedly it is right to remember and discuss. Indeed, it would be absurd for us, the living, not to do so since any given moment of being alive is stitched together from a combination of people and events unfolding and people and events remembered. My point is simply the absolute poignancy of it all eventually passing away. And though much of what passes is shallow and of little significance, there is also a huge amount of untold greatness and stunning, unique beauty.
So if we are saved in Christ, we must be saved somehow from this apparent passing, this apparent vanishing into nothingness. But how? Where? Naturally, I cannot offer any clear answer. Yet I sense the possibility of such a saving being contacted and "fore-tasted" in the act of prayer as invocation. I call out various versions of "O God, Lord of the Universe," and I am met, it seems, by a force, a power, that is going to save me, that is going to save us all. Even so, in whatever way such saving might come about, one thing is clear: the passing away is utterly real and it sweeps away sooner or later absolutely everyone and every thing. This must be faced and grappled with. But I find it virtually unbearable.