Sister Wendy, Contemplative

 

Sister Wendy Becket, Icon by William Hart McNichols

I knew her as the art nun, but I also knew that she lived alone as a hermit. When I caught wind that a book was coming out about her (“Dearest Sister Wendy”, Robert Ellsberg) I was intrigued. 

The book was not what I expected. I was expecting to enhance my appreciation of art, at least a little. Wasn't art the love of her life? But there is very little art commentary in this book, or spiritual insight into the art world. 

Instead, there is personal honesty: a deep look at the inner world of an odd and holy woman who is called to a solitary life of prayer. And her miraculous opening out and sharing of herself in an almost daily correspondence with Robert Ellsberg during the last 2 years of her life. 

It turns out that God is the love of Sister Wendy's life. 

Sister Wendy is delightfully funny. And odd. And very smart. And humble. I'd almost say that she had no ego. Those 7 hours of daily praying must have been at a high order of meditation. And yet, in so many words, without words, she lets you know about this simple prayer of hers.

I’ve been intrigued with solitary monastic life for awhile, most of my life. When I was a child it was the Carmelite monastery in Louisville that most caught my attention. What did the nuns do in that walled and silent place? I’m odd, too - introverted - so I sort of can identify with and understand Sister Wendy.

Sister Wendy knew her way early in life. She joined an order of teaching nuns when she was just 16 years old. She never doubted this move or looked back. She followed the rules; she obeyed. Her life was totally in the hands of God and she trusted that the circumstances of life would guide her to where God wanted her to be. And they did. 

After about 20 years in a teaching role Sister Wendy had a physical breakdown of sorts. Seizures that were diagnosed as epilepsy. She was given permission to live as a consecrated virgin and hermit. Secluded in a trailer on the grounds of a Carmelite monastery in Quidenham, England, Sister Wendy lived her life alone and in prayer. She went to the monastery for Mass every day, but otherwise she was in her little trailer, praying for at least 7 hours a day. She read - about art, about religion, about Thomas Merton, Pope Francis, and others. 

Sister Wendy took the rules of monasticism seriously, which is probably one of the reasons she had such a hard time with Merton. Merton talked a lot about the monastic life, but he broke most of the rules. His engagement with “the world” was relentless. She wondered why his writing did not convey much joy in his life. 

Reading Sister Wendy’s takes on Merton is revealing. Even at 88 years old and in failing health, her mind is still sharp and penetrating. Her insights in to what is happening in the world are compassionate and wise. Most of her life has been spent in silent prayer, away from the world. Not talking to people. When her correspondence with Mr. Ellsberg begins, Sister Wendy is hesitant. How does one speak of a life of silent prayer? There are no words. Nothing, as she would say. 

And yet, over the course of 2 years and possibly for the first time in her life, Sister Wendy relates from a deep and authentic place in herself who she is and who God is for her.

Obituary for Sister Wendy in the New York Times, December 26. 2018

I am the utter poverty of God

This came to me via the Facebook International Merton Society site, who got it from the "Spiritual ... But Not Religious" blog site.  

...The most influential contact Thomas Merton made was with the Buddhist teacher, Chatral Rinpoche, a monk who had spent more than thirty years in the solitary contemplation that was Merton's only real home in this world.

It was Chatral Rinpoche who identified Merton as a pratyekabhudda, and with whom Merton would take a variant of the Boddhisatva's vows, in which he dedicated himself to do all he could to reach enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, in this lifetime or the next.

Merton was already far along that path, as the following entry written in his journal several months before he set out to Asia demonstrates:

"I am the utter poverty of God," he wrote.

"I am His emptiness, littleness, nothingness, lostness.

"When this is understood, my life in His freedom,
the self-emptying God of me, is the fullness of grace.
Love for all, hatred of none, is the fruit and manifestation
of love of God, peace and satisfaction."

Chatral Rinpoche identified Merton as an independently enlightened being. In doing so, they highlight the Buddhist acceptance of ultimate teachings, irrespective of what religious or spiritual tradition in which they arise.

The Buddha consistently said that his path was not the only path to enlightenment, and that every being must find his own path. His teachings, he noted, were meant only to be guides, and he encouraged all to investigate for him or herself the truth of what he said, rather than merely taking his word for it."

The Mark of the True Revolutionary - The Young Gandhi

 

One of my Facebook friends posted this photo and story about the young Gandhi. Look at the clarity of his eyes, and his keen insight into the nature of human delusion and roots of racism. He had already found the path and courage of Nonviolence.

When Mahatma Gandhi was studying law in London, a professor named Peters had a bad attitude … but student Gandhi never lowered his head and they met very often.

One day Peters was having lunch at the university canteen, Gandhi came with his tray and sat down next to him.

The very arrogant professor said to him, “Student Gandhi, you don’t understand!” “Pig” and “bird” don’t sit down to eat together. “

Gandhi replies, “Be calm, Professor, I will fly!”

And the situation has changed. Professor Peters, filled with rage, because he understood that the student had called him “Pig”, decided to take revenge on the next exam …

But the student answers all the questions brilliantly.

Then the teacher asks him the following question: “Gandhi, if you walk down the street and find two bags, one with wisdom and the other with money, which of the two will you take?”

Gandhi replied without hesitation, “Probably the money, Professor.” ‘’

The smiling teacher tells him, “I would grab wisdom in your place, don’t you think?”

Gandhi replies, “Everyone takes what they don’t have, Professor.”

The already hysterical professor writes “IDIOT” on the exam sheet and returns it to the young man. Gandhi takes the sheet and sits down … after a few minutes he turns to the teacher and says, “Professor Peters, you signed the sheet, but you didn’t write my grade …”

~ If you let something hurt you … It will hurt you. But if you do not allow it, the thing will return to where it came from. ~

___ 

The following is from an essay by Lawrence S. Cunningham, a professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame and a frequent writer about Merton. The entire essay, "Alone Among Many", is HERE.

"Nearly a half century ago, Thomas Merton wrote "Notes on a Philosophy of Solitude," an extended essay in which he pointed out that a person who enjoys solitude, by which he meant the quiet possession of the self, is the one less likely to be beguiled by mass movements, collective passions, the false siren of advertising and the lust for the ephemerally fashionable. True solitude (as opposed to individualism or "going it alone") is the cultivation of the sense of the self that permits us to adjudicate the cry of the mob and resist the lure of the moment.

 

Such self-possession is both a gift and a risk. It is most often a risk when acting against the consensus; such acts can earn scorn or, at worst, actual physical harm. Decades ago Ignazio Silone, the Italian political novelist, said that the first lethal blow against fascism came when the first brave person in a village chalked a large NO on the wall of the town square. Interior solitude has always been the mark of the true revolutionary. It was the inner force of Gandhi's resistance; it was the inner strength of a Solzhenitsyn whose inner life could not be broken by the horrors of the Gulag.

At a deeper spiritual level the cultivation of solitude is a necessary matrix out of which comes authentic prayer. By that is not meant that one must seek a solitary place (even though that may be a good thing to do on occasion) or go to a monastery for a retreat (also a good thing) or give up one's ordinary pattern of living. What it does mean is that if we are to pray, as opposed to saying prayers, we need the capacity to slow down, get in focus and become re-collected, albeit for a short period of time. The Bible describes that capacity as watchfulness, the alertness that brings our interior attention toward a single One. God says, through the psalmist, that we are "to be still and know that I am God" (Psalms 46:11). That stillness is the defining element of solitude."

#MastersofSocialIsolation

This is so good.

https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/soul-seeing/seeking-wisdom-masters-social-isolation?fbclid=IwAR16Ywqcz_GozOwXBHfHiNwO3qljPqKSSD_S57KfrC1aqP2ViAcdSyH3Si8

#MastersofSocialIsolation #12. In 1941 #ThomasMerton entered the strict cloister of the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani. In the Trappists his heart was captured by the image of men “on this miserably noisy, cruel earth, who tasted the marvelous joy of silence and solitude." pic.twitter.com/vQrHj8WFir

— @RobertEllsberg (@RobertEllsberg) March 28, 2020

An excerpt:

I thought of Thomas Merton, who originally conceived of his flight to the Trappist monastery as a way of "drowning" to the world and all its compulsive and self-destructive habits. And yet his attitude shifted. He saw his vocation to solitude as a form of witness, a point of solidarity with humanity, a call to others to reclaim their true humanity and freedom and shake off the noise of ideologies and mass culture. And he remained vitally engaged with a wide circle of fellow pilgrims through his correspondence and writings.

___

...  a call to others to reclaim their true humanity and freedom and shake off the noise of ideologies and mass culture ...

I, Solitude

Titan moon haze

NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

If you seek a heavenly light
I, Solitude, am your professor!
I go before you into emptiness,
Raise strange suns for your new mornings,
Opening the windows
Of your innermost apartment.
WHen I, loneliness, give my special signal
Follow my silence, follow where I beckon!
Fear not, little beast, little spirit
(Thou word and animal)
I, Solitude, am angel
And have prayed in your name.

Look at the empty, wealthy night
The pilgrim moon!
I am the appointed hour, 
The "now" that cuts
Time like a blade.
I am the unexpected flash
Beyond "yes," beyond "no,"
The forerunner of the Word of God.

Follow my ways and I will lead you
To golden-haired suns,
Logos and music, blameless joys,
Innocent of questions
And beyond answers:

For I, Solitude, am thine own self:
I, Nothingness, am thy All,
I, Silence, am thy Amen!

-Thomas Merton, The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, pp. 340-341 

“Vocation to Solitude — To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over that land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit still again in meditation in the evening when night falls up on that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars… to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into the bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of life into a living and vigilant silence.” 

—Thomas Merton from "Thoughts In Solitude" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1956). 

active solitude

photo by Thomas Merton

He loved the loneliness of the night. It taught him to view solitude as act, and to conclude that the reason no one really understood solitude was because men viewed it as a condition, something one elected to undergo -- like standing under a shower. Actually, solitude was for him a realization; even a kind of creation as well as a liberation of active forces within him. As a mere condition, solitude could be passive, inert and basically unreal: a kind of coma. To avoid this condition, he had to work actively at solitude.

Thus, a need for discipline, for techniques of integration that keep body and soul together, harmonizing their powers to bring into one deep resonance, oriented to the root of being.

Freedom began for Fr. Louis with the willingness to realize and experience his life as totally absurd in relation to the apparent meaning which had been thrown over life by society and by illusions. But that could be only a starting point leading to a deeper realization of that root reality in himself and in all life "which I do not know and cannot know ... This implies the capacity to see that realizing and knowing are not the same ... solitude itself is the fullness of realization. In solitude I become fully able to realize what I cannot know". 

-- John Howard Griffin, writing about Merton in "Follow the Ecstacy"

trust your aloneness

Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it. 

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

HT: John Predmore SJ, Ignatian Spirituality

The Useless Life

Brother Paul Quenon outside the hermitage;

Several people have referred me to this article published in Parabola Magazine. It is a chapter from Paul Quenon's book, In Praise of the Useless Life: A Monk’s Memoir by Br. Paul Quenon, O.C.S.O. The chapter is reprinted with permission of Ave Maria Press.

I love the title of the book and have particular fondness for Gethsemane and her monks.

"This retreat, no rain came all week long until the last day, late afternoon, and then the downpour was gratifying and robust. Eventually clouds broke and sun came through while rain continued, showering sunlight and rain together. I cartwheeled, became a child again, back in my home yard, knowing only this yard as the whole world, suddenly changed into something wondrous. Rain glistened, backlit by the sun, showing every falling drop for all its worth. Rain appeared to be falling from the sun itself. This rain was meant for this space, felt like something made for only here and now. The narrow yonder of the field where trees attend Our Lady’s statue took on a magical, silver sheen where air misted—a lost wilderness, reverting to some ancient, mythical epoch."

Read the whole chapter HERE.

the silent call of the earth

 Shoes by Vincent Van Gogh

The philosopher Martin Heidegger saw the painting on exhibition in Amsterdam in 1930 and later wrote about it:

"From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrate the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field." - Martin Heidegger

"Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it. I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream." - Vincent Van Gogh

Vocation to Solitude

Pictured: Odilon Redon, Silence, 1900, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, NY, US

“Vocation to Solitude — To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over that land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit still again in meditation in the evening when night falls up on that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars… to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into the bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of life into a living and vigilant silence.”

—Thomas Merton from Thoughts In Solitude (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1956).
Pictured: Odilon Redon, Silence, 1900, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, NY, US

 

parabola-magazine 

http://faithfuldissident.tumblr.com/post/172788710405/parabola-magazine-vocation-to-solitude-to

Before you can be with others, first learn to be alone

Hannah Arendt, "On The Life and Death Importance of Thinking"
Photo of Hannah Arendt: Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Private Archive.

In the 20th century, the idea of solitude formed the centre of Hannah Arendt’s thought. A German-Jewish émigré who fled Nazism and found refuge in the United States, Arendt spent much of her life studying the relationship between the individual and the polis. For her, freedom was tethered to both the private sphere – the vita contemplativa – and the public, political sphere – the vita activa. She understood that freedom entailed more than the human capacity to act spontaneously and creatively in public. It also entailed the capacity to think and to judge in private, where solitude empowers the individual to contemplate her actions and develop her conscience, to escape the cacophony of the crowd – to finally hear herself think.

Read the rest at AEON. Click HERE.

the vanity of anti-silence (Considerations for the time of Christmas)

Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis)

From a cycle of six largely unknown meditations Jesuit Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio gave in a week-long retreat to Jesuits in the early 1980s, entitled simply ‘Considerations for the time of Christmas.’

With the ferocity of a desert father, his reflection on silence invited the Jesuits to consider how mass media created a seductive deluge of sweet-sounding or furious words “that seek noisily to take up space in our hearts and contribute nothing to truth.”

He contrasted the Word of God that created the universe and the words by which we are surrounded, which have been “disempowered of their creative force.”

“If there is no solitude, there is no silence,” he added sternly, “and without either there is no truth,” only “the vanity of anti-silence.” Although Jesuits were obliged to speak as part of their “apostolic mission” - they are not monks - if in their speaking they lacked “the core of silence that makes us pilgrims” they would end up, he warned, “corrupted by the spirit of the world.”

Silence was the prerequisite for the eruption of the Word in history, he said, before inviting the Jesuits to contemplate how the Word “becomes tenderness in the womb of a Mother who ‘pondered all these things in her heart’.”

https://cruxnow.com/commentary/2017/12/27/expecting-bubbly-pope-francis-christmas-meet-jesuit-past/

going nowhere

 

Leonard Cohen

“Going nowhere … isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.” Leonard Cohen

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/11/10/pico-iyer-the-art-of-stillness/

the hours of silence when nothing happens

Photo by Beth Cioffoletti

Why do I live alone? I don’t know.... In some mysterious way I am condemned to it.... I cannot have enough of the hours of silence when nothing happens. When the clouds go by. When the trees say nothing. When the birds sing. I am completely addicted to the realization that just being there is enough, and to add something else is to mess it all up. It would be so much more wonderful to be all tied up in someone ... and I know inexorably that this is not for me. It is a kind of life from which I am absolutely excluded. I can’t desire it. I can only desire this absurd business of trees that say nothing, of birds that sing, of a field in which nothing ever happens (except perhaps that a fox comes and plays, or a deer passes by). This is crazy. It is lamentable. I am flawed, I am nuts. I can’t help it. Here I am, now, ... happy as a coot. The whole business of saying I am flawed is a lie. I am happy. I cannot explain it.... Freedom, darling. This is what the woods mean to me. I am free, free, a wild being, and that is all that I ever can really be. I am dedicated to it, addicted to it, sworn to it, and sold to it. It is the freedom in me that loves you.... Darling, I am telling you: this life in the woods is IT. It is the only way. It is the way everybody has lost. ... It is life, this thing in the woods. I do not claim it is real. All I say is that it is the life that has chosen itself for me. A Midsummer Diary for M. June 23, 1966

Merton, Thomas (2003-02-01). When the Trees Say Nothing: Writings on Nature (pp. 135-136). Ave Maria Press - A. Kindle Edition.

meeting yourself in the desert

No Better Place to Meet Yourself

       English Hindi Spanish        

--by Moussa Ag Assarid

- See more at: http://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2133#sthash.TRMTPvuT.dpuf

Moussa Ag Assarid (MAA): I don’t know my age. I was born in the Sahara desert, with no papers. I was born in a nomadic camp of Touaregs, between Timbuktu and Gao, in the north of Mali. [...]

J: What do they do for a living?

MAA: We shepherd camels, goats, sheep, cows and donkeys in a kingdom of infinite and of silence…

J: Is the desert really so silent?

(MAA): If you are on your own in that silence you hear your heart beat. There is no better place to meet yourself.

J: What memories do you have of your childhood in the desert?

MAA: I wake up with the Sun. The goats of my father are there. They give us milk and meat, and we take them were there is water and grass. My great-grandfather did it, and my grandfather, and my father, and me. There was nothing else in the world than that, and I was very happy!

J: Really? It doesn’t sound very exciting.

MAA: It is. At the age of seven you can go alone away from the camp, and for this you are taught the important things—to smell the air, to listen, to see carefully, to orient with the Sun and the stars…and to be guided by the camel if you get lost. He will take you where there is water.

J: To know that is valuable, no doubt.

MAA: Everything is simple and profound there. There are very few things, and each one has enormous value.

J: So that world and this one are very different.

MAA: There, every little thing gives happiness. Every touch is valuable. We feel great joy just by touching each other, being together. There, nobody dreams of becoming, because everybody already is.

J: What shocked you most on your first trip to Europe?

MAA: I saw people running in the airport. In the desert you only run if a sandstorm is approaching! It scared me, of course.

J: They were going after their baggage, ha ha.

MAA: Yes, that was it. [...]

J: What do you dislike the most here?

MAA: Many people here have everything, and it is still not enough for them. They complain. In [the modern world] many people complain all the time! They chain themselves to a bank; many people are anxious to have things, to have possessions. People are in a rush. In the desert there are no traffic jams, and do you know why? Because there nobody is interested in getting ahead of other people!

J: Tell me about a moment of deep happiness for you in the desert.

MAA: It happens every day, two hours before sunset. The heat decreases, there is still no cold air, and men and animals slowly return to the camp, and their profiles are painted against a sky that is pink, blue, red, yellow, green.

J: That sounds fascinating.

MAA: It’s a magical moment… We all get into the tents and we boil tea. Sitting in silence we listen to the sound of the boiling water… We all are immersed in calmness: with the heartbeats tuned to the rhythm of the boiling water, potta potta potta…

J: How peaceful.

MAA: Yes…here you have watches; there, we have time.

Moussa Ag Assarid is the oldest of thirteen children in a nomadic Touareg family. Born in northern Mali in 1975, he moved to France in 1999 to study Management at the University of Montpellier. The above is excerpted from an interview with Víctor Amela.

- See more at: http://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2133#sthash.TRMTPvuT.dpuf

Wonder: The Lives of Anna and Harlan Hubbard

A film by Morgan Atkinson.

the fear of emptiness and uselessness

"The person who dares to be alone can come to see that the 'emptiness' and 'uselessness' which the collective mind fears and condemns are necessary conditions for the encounter with truth. It is in the desert of loneliness and emptiness that the fear of death and the need for self-affirmation are seen to be illusory." - Thomas Merton, "Raids on the Unspeakable"

the Real Thing and to be real alongside it

Dag Hammarskjold trekking in the Swedish far north.

(Photo: Gosta Lundquist, in the collection of Nordiska Museet)

"The mountains became his retreat, sometimes with friends, sometimes on his own - retreat from pressures of work, society, and family, retreat into a world that cleansed and clarified.  An entry in Markings for 1951, two years before he became secretary general, relflects some part of what he found above the Arctic Circle:

Lean fare, austere forms,
Brief delight, few words,
Low down in cool space
One star -
The morning star.
In the pale light of sparseness
Lives the Real Thing.
And we are real.

"The poem suggests the extent to which Hammarskjold acquired a sense of the sacred not only from religious literature and from those around him for whom Christianity was alive, but also from experience in Nature.  The perception of the real, faithfully recorded here, cuts through theory and ideals to make itself known as the first fact. ... In summer he wrote of "the sacrament of the arctic summer night", in autumn of "the opening bars in the great hymn of extinction".

... "The mountains provide a new solitude", he wrote " ... It wasn't solitude for its own sake or in fearful withdrawal; it was solitude for the sake of more acutely perceiving "the Real Thing" and to be real alongside it."

- from "Hammarskjold - A Life" by Roger Lipsey, c. 2013, University of Michigan Press, p. 34

the reality and unreality of our being

Photograph by Thomas Merton

"... it is in solitude that the monk most completely comes to discover the true inner dimensions of his own being, at once "real" and "unreal".  The conviction of ones' "self" as a static, absolute and invariable reality undergoes a profound transformation and dissolves in the burning light of an altogether new and unsuspected awareness.  In this awareness we see that our "reality" is not a firmly established ego-self already attained that merely has to be perfected, but rather that we are a "nothing", a "possibility" in which the gift of creative freedom can realize itself by its response to the free gift of love and grace.  This response means accepting our loneliness and our "potentiality" as a gift and a commission, as a trust to be used - as a "talent," in the language of the parables.  Our existence is then at once terrible and precious because radically it belongs not to us but to God.  Yet it will not be fully "His" unless we freely make it "ours" and then offer it to Him in praise.  This is what Christian tradition means by "obedience to the Word of God."  The monk must learn this for himself."

-Thomas Merton, "The Spiritual Father in the Desert Tradition", Merton and Hesychasm, p. 298