posted April 01, 2008 12:33 PM         

Other people found Dom Aelred a cold fish, but he filled a cere­bral need I was feeling. His large and unforgiving intellect could grapple with formal questions of philosophy or theology which Fa­ther Joe tended to deflect. As I got to know him better, I found that he also had an intense mystical core, in sharp contrast to Father Joe’s down-to-earth saintliness.

He came from a distinguished German family with origins in Hamburg and had entered the Benedictine order at the Abbey of Downside. Dom Aelred and several other monks, including the celebrated historian Dom David Knowles, grew unhappy with the worldliness of Downside (whose rich and prestigious public school had many secular liaisons) and began agitating for a new founda­tion which would live by a contemplative and far stricter interpre­tation of the Rule. They failed in this goal, and Dom Aelred came to Quarr.

He was a severe and ascetic man who believed in the virtues of order and discipline and could hardly have been more different from Father Joe. As the most prominent younger men in the com­munity, its future leaders, they nonetheless complemented each other beautifully. Dom Aelred and Father Joe were the head and the heart of Quarr, a monastic Odd Couple, one living by logic and precedent, the other by emotion and intuition. The two were a real-life version of Ben and Lily’s Franco-Prussian fantasy: a man with actual Teutonic roots and one who, if not French, had spent almost two thirds of his life speaking, thinking, and breathing French.

They represented the extremes of the Benedictine spectrum: at one end the ultraviolet of awe and order, at the other the infra­red of love and community Dom Aelred held that the fear of God led to the love of God. Father Joe never tired of telling me “we have to take the fear out of religion, dear.” I never spent an hour with Dom Aelred that didn’t leave me feeling I’d been through an intellectual car wash; it was with Father Joe that I felt safe. It was natural as air to call Dom Joseph Warrilow “Father Joe”; it would have been unthinkable to call Dom Aelred Sillem “Father Ael.”

Dom Aelred sent me home that summer with a reading list for Mysticism 101 -- among others, Thomas a Kempis, Dame Julian of Norwich, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, St. Teresa of Avila and her Franciscan mentor Bernardino de Laredo, who wrote a how-to of mystical advancement called The Ascent of Mount Sion which St. Teresa swore by. He also suggested that when I had time I should dip into the Desert Fathers, the dour, unyeilding pillars of the early Church.

I found Thomas a Kempis pedestrian but Dame Julian beguiling. I was surprised by the Spaniards, who I expected to be intense and passionate like St. john of the Cross; instead I found them ferocious and absolute, their paths to salvation painstakingly laid out in dozens of steps and stages, with spiritual exercises to get you from one to the next and crammed with gloomy imagery minutely worked out (the great door of Grace might be opened with the doorknob of Constant Prayer on the hinges of Relentless Self-Denial). Or they would casually throw daunting tidbits of information: The Ascent of Mount Sion estimated that the path to perfection -- from standing start to union with the Godhead -- takes thirty years. If you make it -- no guarantee that, at the end of Year Twenty-nine, within sight of the summit, you won't choke and slide back down to base camp.

In my sixteen-year-old hunger for learning and experience, I lapped it all up. In the back of my mind, though, was the hope that somewhere in all this strenuous and often inspiring piety would be one story or account or prayer or insight that would somehow spark a fiery and emotional renewal of my lost Eden, wipe out the ravages of my night in Hell.

Sensing there was probably something aberrant about this, I mentioned it to Father Joe.

"Well, dear, the whole point of the mystical path to God is that it's arduous. That's why it's often called the Way of the Cross. It takes years of dedication, hard work, and discipline, with few rewards. There are no shortcuts. Certainly not the coup de foudre you're looking for. We leave that to the holy rollers. The trouble with being a holy roller is, it's wonderful at the time, but what do you do the next day -- and the day after that?"

Father Joe's favorite writers were those who inspired rather than systematized. Dame Julian he loved, and The Cloud of Unknowing. As for Thomas a Kempis, whose Imitation of Christ, written in the late 1400s, is one of the best known devotional texts of the Church:

"It's very sound. Solid stuff. But don't you think, dear, that Brother Thomas must have been a most uninteresting person to be with?"

This had been exactly my reaction, but I would never have dared express it to Dom Aelred.

"He'd have bored me silly."

"Of course, he did spend most of his life in Holland. That might have something to do with it."

Of the Spanish mystical contortionists:

"Dear me, no! I could never remember all those steps and exercises. Like learning to be a chartered accountant."

And of the august and adamantine Desert Fathers:

"Stay away from them! Silly old devils!"

Father Joe responded to the person, to the simplicity and limpidity of the writing, rather than to the degree of order which could be imposed on the volcanic and mysterious process of salvation. This may have been why he suggested the pithy, punchy, brilliant preacher considered by Protestant scholars to be an early precursor of the Reformation. Dom Aelred had specifically forbidden me to read him until much later, because he was "difficult".

I loved Meister Eckhart.

When God laughs at the soul and the soul laughs back at God,
the persons of the Trinity are begotten.
When the Father laughs at the Son and the Son laughs back at the Father,
that laughter gives pleasure, that pleasure gives joy,
that joy gives love, and that love is the Holy Spirit.

This was a Trinity I could live with.

One recommendation on which, surprisingly, both my mentors agreed was the Discalced Carmelite nun St. Teresa (Therese) of Lisieux, also called "the Little Flower". The Carmelites were the extremely strict order of enclosed nuns founded in 1562 by St. Teresa of Avila -- whom Father Joe therefore called "the Big Flower".

St. Therese of Lisieux died in 1897 when she was only twenty-four after a harrowing round of physical and spiritual travails. Respectful though Catholic kids were taught to be about the saints—especially modern ones, with their relevant messages for our sinful young lives—the Little Flower was a figure of fun, because her following while enormous, tended to be female, long in the tooth, and gag-me sentimental. Her statue was always the soppiest in the church, goody-goody eyes rolled up to Heaven, chipped plaster roses held to chaste bosom. I’d always dismissed her and her wildly popular autobiography, Histoire d’une ame (The Story of a Soul) as the worst kind of Victorian nun-slush.

There was a lot of three-hanky Victorian piety in The Story of a Soul, but to my surprise I also found a very tough-spirited young woman. I found her single-mindedness about entering Carmel inspiringly familiar. Even more familiar: the "curtain of darkness" she endured and the manifold doubts which constantly plagued her.

posted April 01, 2008 08:06 PM         

Excellent!!! Thanks!!!!

quote:
When God laughs at the soul and the soul laughs back at God,
the persons of the Trinity are begotten.
When the Father laughs at the Son and the Son laughs back at the Father,
that laughter gives pleasure, that pleasure gives joy,
that joy gives love, and that love is the Holy Spirit.

Ah, yes *grinning from ear to ear*

This is the only type of spirituality for me. There is a purpose to the dogma and the formalities of the Rites of Mass and the Rites in general. They serve a useful purpose, there is spiritual meaning behind all of them. However, God - the Father, Son and Holy Spirit - is a personal, inward relationship that produces that spirituality of the heart and soul that is like any love relationship but waaaaaaay beyond any human relationship. It's the sprirtuality of imperfection and the spirituality of being human that I relate to...the spirituality of being human and very much in love with the living God. It is my form of spirituality. No one explains this spirituality of imperfection better than the Franciscan Father Richard Rohr. When I get time I will send you excepts of his talks that I transcribed.

I have met many priests in my life and the ones who I found most comfortable to be around were the ones described in this article, the ones who were human first and didn't themselves and all of it too seriously. My son mentioned this to me once. He said " Ma, what I like about Catholic priests is that they are always joking around and laughing." True. Many of them are. That's because they are comfortable with God, comfortable being who and what they are while striving for the ideal. They never forget to be human. A priest friend of mine once told me, " Don't ever forget to be human first because people who are too holy tend to scare people." LOL

I love the picture of the laughing Jesus. I relate to that heavily because I know he laughs at my foibles a lot. And he helps me to laugh at them too. :-) Once a pastor of mine was being chastised by one of the parishioners for something he did or said. She told him, " Jesus wouldn't do that." He just smiled and asked her, " Do I look like Jesus to you?" I burst out laughing. Then he told her that Jesus wouldn't say and do half of the stuff that any of us do.

Have a good day and again, thanks for sharing this with me.