Something is up. Monasteries, of all places, have become a hot vacation ticket in the '90s. If you want to spend time with the Trappists at Gethsemani in Kentucky - and a lot of people apparently do - you'll need to make your guest house reservation at least a year in advance.
Meanwhile, a chronicle of a yearlong retreat at a Benedictine monastery, The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris, became a surprise national best seller last year. The book rode the crest of a phenomenal 40 percent surge in religious book sales, with contemplative spirituality and mysticism titles among the fastest movers.
Then there's Thomas Merton. Nearly 30 years since the American monk and mystic's accidental death in Bangkok, interest in his work is at an all-time high. Nearly all of his more than 40 books are still in print, and Merton discussion groups are popping up everywhere. A recent organizational meeting of a local chapter of the Thomas Merton Society in South Bend drew more than 100 participants.
Yet another sign of something brewing is the centering prayer phenomenon. Contemplative Outreach, an organization established to foster the Christian meditation technique, estimates "many, many thousands" of people have been taught the method of "wordless prayer" popularized by Trappists Basil Pennington and Thomas Keating. During the Reagan years it may have been "hip to be square," but in the '90s it's hip to be spiritual.
So what is going on? Why are so many people becoming so reflective? And why now? It's easy to see the fingerprints of the Baby Boomers all over the trend. With the leading edge of the generation entering their 50s, death is no longer the shocking exception, the result of random violence or a freak accident. When it comes now, it's in the discomforting name of "natural causes." What was a distant rumor has been rudely confirmed as fact. Death happens. Not only that, it is something to be expected, a commonplace. To the survivors though, it's a wake-up call to figure this thing out before it's too late.
But there's more to the phenomenon than 70 million Americans discovering their mortality. Part of it also seems to be a backlash to our flattened-out nothing-is-sacred age. There's a real hunger for things spiritual.
For better and worse, ours is a secular society. No group can force its version of religious truth on another. The price we pay, though, is that spiritual matters are largely confined to one hour on Sunday mornings. The sacred has no part in real life.
Science has explained away the little mysteries and so nothing fills us with awe. Nothing is holy. Down deep, however, we know that this is the insight of a fool, and so we look to monks and mystics, those who still possess the sacred.
Notre Dame theologian Father John Dunne, CSC, identifies four cycles of sacred storytelling in the human race. In the first, all things are one. Then the human race emerges and is separated from all else. The third phase is marked with alienation and anomie as the individual emerges and separates from humanity. Finally, in the fourth phase, "one day we will all be one again with each other and God."
We are living in the third, teetering on the brink of the fourth, Dunne says. But for that movement to occur, a heightened awareness of God in our living lives is essential. Perhaps that is what is happening. Perhaps the hunger signals a sea change.
From the four corners they come every day of the year. An intermittent caravan of pilgrims wends its way along Monks Road through Kentucky meadows that heave and roll like the ocean swells around the high, rounded hills called the Knobs.
The road swivels and dips, then you see it: the fortress known as Our Lady of Gethsemani Monastery. Its tall, narrow brick church gleams white in the sun, forming part of the masonry wall that encloses the cloister and shuts out the world.
I like to think I am unique, but, in truth, I am just another face in the crowd of seekers. We are irresistibly drawn to such places because we know that here you can still find the real thing: an understanding of life in all its shades of black, white and gray. Monasteries safeguard the truth today, just as they did in the original Dark Ages. What is sacred may be an afterthought in the outside world, but here it is the only thought.
Monos, Greek for "one," is the root of both monastery and monk, and Gethsemani is indeed a single-minded place. Everything, from time to the physical surroundings, is structured to turn attention back to the Eternal and foster a sense of reverence.
The monks' day is a balance of work, prayer and reflection. It begins early: They rise for vigils at 3:15 a.m., the first of seven daily visits to the chapel to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, a series of prayer services centered on chanting, selections from the Psalms, prayers of praise and petition.
After Mass, two more chapel visits and breakfast, work begins at 7:30. The work period ends at noon with another church service followed by lunch. Most of the monks are involved in making cheese, fruitcake and in farming to support the community. At 2:15 they return for another church service, followed by chores and free time to read and pray. Vespers is at 5:30, followed by compline at 7:30. Then - if the monk is wise - bed, because the cycle starts all over in less than eight hours.
To the visitor what is most striking is the quiet. The Trappists were once so strict about silence that they developed their own sign language. Following the reforms of Vatican II, the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance relaxed its ways, but a spirit of silence still rules. "We are into a cult of quiet here, the love of silence, the absence of communication," says Father Matthew Kelty, a white-haired Gethsemani monk who once lived as a hermit in the jungles of New Guinea. Such an environment makes contemplation possible. By paring down the distractions, one can more easily see God in creation and hear his voice. Monks know that God speaks to the heart in whispers.
The Carmelite William McNamara says, "the art of contemplation is to look long and steadily, leisurely and lovingly at anything - a tree, a child, a pear, a kitten, a hippopotamus, and really 'see' the whole of it; not to steal an idea of it, but to know it by experience, a pure intuition born of love." Contemplation leads to mysticism, which McNamara defines as "awe and wonder and the sacredness of life and of being and of the invisible, transcendent and infinite abundant source of being."
Theologian William Ralph Inge once defined mysticism as "the attempt to realize the presence of the living of God in the soul and in nature." Long confined to the shadowy X-files of religious experience, mysticism has been discourages and misunderstood by Western Christianity. It was effectively suppressed in the 17th and 18th centuries; in the 19th century Protestant theologians led the charge against the approach.
The 20th century, however, has seen a renaissance, spurred especially since the '60s by the popularity of Eastern practices. Within the last 20 years, more Christians have rediscovered their own rich mystical tradition and have dusted off the writings of such Christian mystics as Saint John of the Cross; Teresa of Avila; Meister Eckhart; Julian of Norwich; Brother Lawrence; the anonymous 14th century Benedictine who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing; the modern Anglican mystic Evelyn Underhill; and, of course, Thomas Merton.
Most of us do religion by the numbers, but the mystics, it seems to me, are the ones who truly "get it." We lip-sync our half-hearted beliefs, but they see God alive in the here and now. They are the pioneers, the first into the new territory that is our detination. We should listen closely to them, because they have been there and they know the way.
Few of us see ourselves as mystics, but most have caught a glimpse of what it is like: that exhilarating experience on a cloudless day when everything is right and you feel "at one with the universe." As the 14th century Dominican Meister Eckhart says, it is the understanding that, "Everything that is, is in God."
At day's end, I sit in the gallery of the church staring down at the black-and-white robed monks assembled in the nave in four rows, two one each side of the central aisle. Standing in their blond oak choir stalls, they sing the prayers of compline. In the name of us all, they thank God for the day just past and ask his protection through the night to come. Their chant echoes off the church's austere whitewashed brick walls.
My mind drifts with the voices, back to a conversation help months before with Father Thomas Berry. The 83-year-old priest, perhaps the foremost Catholic author writing on spirituality and the environment, had been invited by several Notre Dame student groups to speak on campus. The day after his lecture we had breakfast at the Morris Inn dining room.
"Dante touches on this [mystical sense] in the closing stanzas of the Divine Comedy," Berry said. "He describes his being seized by the power that moves the heavens and all the other stars. He identifies the power as love, the ultimate resonance of the small self with the Great Self.
"In some of the early writings of Christianity, we find it said that God is in the world the way the soul is in the body," Berry added. :It's an analogy that holds significant knowledge. But people don't understand analogy. It's difficult to accept." For Berry, God reveals himself most forcefully through the scripture of the natural world.
Before I went to compline I sat on a hill with the lush valley spread out before me; it was easy to be awestruck. The encounter with God in nature on a gorgeous day is like loving an infant. It's beautiful and it doesn't talk back. The encounter with God in the "real world" of work and family is something else. It's a stretch to see God in the lane-changing idiot who has just cut you off.
But McNamara reminds, "If we are going to find God, it will not be in the pie-in-the-sky abstractions, but in the 'mud luscious' and 'puddle wonderful' road under our feet and in all the lovely and homely things along the way - the magnificent mountains and monotonous neighbors."
The monks end compline. "Praise the Father, and Son and Holy Spirit, both now and forever. The God who is, who was and is to come at the end of the ages," they chant.
A month later I'm still pondering this mysticism stuff as I board Bus #4186, now leaving for Boston and points east. The thing that distinguishes Christian mysticism from non-Christian brands, I think, is its emphasis on love and the relationship between divinity and humanity.
Wrapped in a blue-black diesel haze, the bus eases out of the Buffalo, New York, terminal and bullies its way into stop-and-go traffic. In his best airline captain baritone, the driver welcomes us aboard, recites the eight or so stops between here and Boston and points out our Scenicruiser's comfort and convenience features: overhead reading lights (not all of which function) and a lavatory in the rear.
Experienced riders of the 'hound know that the only way to achieve anything that approximates sleep on an overnight ride is to stake out two seats. This allows you to lie half your body down. Competition for turf is fierce.
The last passenger to board plunges down the aisle and stops when he gets to me. He asks, "Is this seat taken?" I move my gear in reply and he sits down. His question reveals an accent of untraceable origin. Jamaica? England? Africa? His four words are not enough to pinpoint it. We do not converse. All I know is I will not be sleeping tonight.
Neither of us acknowledges the other. He stokes my resentment by, it seems to me, crowding me into the wall of the bus. For all I know he is just as irritated as me for taking up his sleep space.
I settle back into my book, The Liberated Heart, by theologian Rosemary Haughton. I hope to finish it before meeting her tomorrow so I have something intelligent to say and ask. The New York Thruway hurtles past without any acknowledgement from either of us.
At 6 p.m. the buss pulls into a rest area and the driver announces a 20-minute dinner break, cautioning us to be prompt. They call it "fast food" but the line's snail's pace belies the claim. I am aware that my traveling companion stand behind me, but we still do not speak.
When I turn, he has vanished, apparently in search of faster food. Chicken Caesar salad in hand, I stake out a picnic table within sight of the bus. Before I've taken five bites however, the driver climbs on board and I scramble in behind him, the last to be seated.
The driver strides down the aisle, counting heads. Satisfied with his tally as he walks back, I feel obliged to correct, "Somebody's missing. A guy was sitting next to me." The driver shrugs, "Life's hard. I told him we had just 20 minutes." He shoves the bus in gear and we resume without remorse.
My annoyance now reaches a new level of irritation. Don't tell me I'm my brother's keeper. Still, I fret, if I had talked to him, this might not have happened. If he is a foreigner, he may not have understood the driver. If we had connected, I would have made sure he made it back to the bus on time. If, if, if.
His green carry-on looms accusingly in the rack above me. I decide the least I can do is make sure the authorities in Boston know this luggage belongs to a stranded passenger who, with any luck, will eventually claim it.
As if I need more guilt, in a magazine interview I am reading, the author Katherine Patterson discusses her own hard-hearted reaction to an incident. "I was treating human beings as disposable," she says. "The more I thought about it, the more I thought: 'That's how crimes are committed, that's how wars are fought. One human being thinks another human being is disposable."
Two hours down the road we pull into the Albany terminal for a rest stop. After a 10-minute break, I retake my seat only to see an apparition. Just as in Buffalo, the missing man plunges down the aisle and stops before me.
I feel like Thomas viewing Jesus. The first words that impolitely tumble from my mouth are, "What are you doing here? I thought we left you back at the rest stop." Suspecting my worry has been pointlessly squandered, I feel slightly foolish. "I told the bus driver you were stranded. Were you sitting in the back in another seat?"
No, no, I was truly left behind," he says in a Kenyan lilt. "It is a miracle that I am here." Ben Ateku explains that 20 minutes after we left the rest area a charter bus group took pity on him and agreed to take him to the Albany depot where he caught up with us.
With the barrier broken, we share our stories. He is a playwright who has come to study at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. We talk about good and evil, divisiveness, our hopes for the future, our families. We differ in so many ways, and yet the more we talk, the more we find we share.
The conversation speeds time, and Boston arrives without effort. I have not slept but don't care. I have met someone so alien, and yet I realize at some level I could be he. We exchange addresses and part company.
I take a cab over to Boston's North Station only to discover that I have missed the last train to Gloucester. It is a little past midnight and the next train doesn't leave until 7 a.m. The commuter station echoes with four footfalls - mine and the lone security guard shadowing me. It's apparent I can't stay here, so I have two options: A) find a hotel; or B) hunker down in the all-night coffee shop across the street. "A" is tempting, but expensive. I choose plan B.
I walk into a scene that could be a model for Edward Hopper's painting The Night Hawks and purchase two double-chocolate donuts and a large coffee. The place smells of cinammon and cigarettes. I sit down with my purchase and a copy of Disputed Questions, a collection of essays by Thomas Merton.
Merton says some pretty heavy stuff at 1 a.m. Humanity's power to love "stamps us in the image and likeness of God," he writes. Our vocation to be sons and daughters of God "means that we must learn to love as God Himself loves."
Now what could that mean? At 1 a.m., the best I can figure is this: I think about those I care for deeply, those I truly love with all my heart: my family, my relatives, my close friends. I want them to be part of my life and I want to be part of theirs. I want to be united at the deepest possible level. I call them each to mind and embrace them. If I had to, I think I would step in front of a speeding car to save these people. I identify so intensely in some sense I become them.
Then I imagine feeling that way about everyone who is alive now and has ever lived. Not only every person, but every creature. That, I think, is how God loves. And that is the love mystics know and understand. What kind of world would we create if we all prayed in this imaginative fashion, I wonder? What if David Duke and Louis Farrakhan prayed this way? Benjamin Netanyahu and Yasser Arafat?
Merton says this love is more than a warm fuzzy feeling. "It has dynamic spiritual meaning, for by [it] we are called to redeem and transform the world in that same power which raised up Christ from the dead. That power is the infinite love of the Father for His Son."
To some extent it is up to us to answer the prayers people address to God. That's what we're here for. The Jesuit Jose Aleman says, "If you want to change your society, the only way to do so is to forget yourself a little and to work for others. . .that is the old Christian formula, is it not? To set out to help others, and then find that you have been changed, you have been converted."
As Meister Eckhart says, "Love is of such a nature that it changes us into the things we love."
The group had been meeting for some time for prayer and reflection but felt increasingly called to some form of action. "We decided that the one thing we all knew something about was hospitality," Haughton, Wellspring's associate director, recalls.
With a leap of faith, the friends pooled their resources - one couple even sold their house to provide investment capital - and with the assembled funds plus a mortgage they purchase a six-bedroom farmhouse built in 1647. The building had once served as an inn and in the late 19th century had been owned by a family of former slaves; it seemed like the ideal place to offer shelter to Cape Anne's homeless people.
The small idea has grown into two nonprofit organizations with an annual budget over $600,000. Wellspring House and its sister corporation, the Wellspring Community Land Trust of Cape Anne, provide shelter, life skills and career development education, and affordable housing. Recognizing that homelessness is merely a symptom of poverty, Wellspring has begun developing local economic opportunities. Its first program, "Fish to People," markets less-popular fish species from Gloucester boats at a fair price.
Wellspring, I think, shows how much can be accomplished when a few inspired (inspirited?) people "forget themselves a little" and work for others. That's how prayers are answered, and the Kingdom is built.
My thoughts skip back 24 hours to the coffee shop and the people - many of them Wellspring candidates - I met there. As I sip my coffee, I am conscious of a rhythm to the night. From midnight until 2 a.m. it's a parade of hardhats, cabbies, cops and ladies of the evening, all taking a break from their jobs.
A young woman with blond hair, a low-cut tank top and short leather skirt saunters in. Obviously a regular, she banters with the clerk. "Dave!" she shrieks. "How the hell are ya?" She pays for her large coffee and doughnut-to-go and says, "Listen, if you don't see me on Monday, it's cuz I'm dead."
"Now, hey now, don't you talk like that. You be careful," Dave says. She swirls out as his admonition strikes the shutting door.
Around 3 the bars close and the party-hardy crowd wobbles in. They are joined by other exotic creatures, the nighttime crazies, walking wounded and wounders. Everyone needs a break.
One young woman who calls herself Aravella gets a cup of coffee and two dollars in change. For the better part of an hour she feed coins into the pay phone calling all-night disc jockeys requesting the same song, dedicating it to her boss, Nick, "cause I just love him."
Around 4 the shop quiets down. The night people have finally gone to bed and the day people have not yet arrived. Around 4:30, like the first robin of spring, a neatly dressed middle-aged woman wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase walks in for a quick breakfast. By 5 the city shakes itself awake in earnest and the respectable people begin to stream in. First the janitors and maintenance men, then the secretaries and clerks, finally the "suits," studying their Wall Street Journals, gulping down black coffee, figuring out their next hustle.
I star at them and think, "Can I be connected to all of these?" Is that what it's about?
