I Am Through You So I Page 13
DSR: I’ve never looked at it from that point of view. I would put it like this: The highest goal of a hermit is to live in the present moment. The desert fathers noticed early on that there are only three fundamental ways of missing that goal.
The first is to hold on to what is past—especially memories. That is always a danger, especially for hermits; one who does not have much else to cling to, clings to memories. That clinging has been called greed and lust, but by whatever name, it makes one miss the present: by clinging to the past, one belongs to the past.
The second reason for missing the present moment is anger—or rather the impatience of anger. Anger in and of itself is simply a strong burst of energy that can be necessary and helpful; impatience is the destructive aspect of anger: one wants to force a certain kind of future and—occupied with the future—fails to live in the present. One would think that preoccupation with past or future has exhausted the options, but we are quite creative when it comes to missing the mark—in this case, the Now.
The third possibility is that one is neither holding on to the past nor impatiently reaching for the future, and yet misses the present moment by not being awake. The drowsiness that makes us miss the Now is what the desert fathers called the “Noonday Demon.” In the midday heat of the desert, one tends to doze off in body and in spirit. Spiritual dozing is a great danger especially for hermits, since there is no one around to wake them up. These three “addictions” can make us fail to be truly awake to the moment.
JK: What you have just described, the “Noonday Demon,” was what Evagrius Ponticus described as acedia, “spiritual listlessness.” Evagrius considered this to be the monk’s greatest danger, becoming spiritually discouraged, listless, bored. Despondent, one would say. One has no taste for life anymore and does not know what to do with oneself and the world. That may also be a subtle form of depression.
DSR: Of depression or of midlife crisis or of that typical crisis where in the middle of anything one tackles, one then runs out of steam. Acedia is the listlessness in all those situations.
JK: How do I fight that, or rather, how do I prevent spiritual listlessness from taking hold of me? What are the countermeasures to become awake again, or even stay awake?
DSR: Not subjecting oneself to a fixed schedule in the hermitage can be of help here. When I realize that I am starting to doze in this sense, it is time to do something that gives me joy, whether or not I had planned it for that day. It sounds funny, but we must keep on the lookout for things that give us joy. If we fit enjoyable activities into our day, that joy will carry over to all the rest of our activities.
JK: Can you give an example of something that has given you joy?
DSR: Chopping wood is one example. If I have planned to read for an hour but begin to doze after twenty minutes, I can go outside and chop firewood. That gives me joy and wakes me up. Or I may take a brief walk (taking walks is part of my life in the hermitage). When I feel lazy, it helps me to do something that is long overdue because I kept delaying it. My inclination to postpone is due to laziness in the first place. Acedia is laziness. Its first symptom should alert me to counteract my laziness.
JK: Your time on the small islands must have been especially challenging. Sand Island, for instance, is a pile of rocks, and on them, an abandoned lighthouse. You and your Franciscan Brother had to have yourselves brought there by boat. How can one do that, two people being alone in the same place?
DSR: On Sand Island, there was enough space to spend the entire day alone on two different sides of the balcony without seeing one another. Then we would celebrate the Eucharist together. But we would eat alone again. The Eucharist was our time of community.
JK: Though there are few classical hermits today, that way of life does seem to be very attractive: retreating to an isolated hut in the mountains, living in the wilderness in a tent or under a tarp, exposed to the elements—plenty of individuals keep looking for that. There are also new offers that take up old spiritual traditions such as the vision quest, initiation rites, and so on. What, in your opinion, are these people looking for or finding?
DSR: I believe that they are looking for and—when successful—finding exactly what other hermits search for and find. Today, there are few who live their entire lives as hermits, and maybe there never were very many. But temporary hermitage has almost become a necessity for many people in our society. Some go hiking on their own, others have a hut or a dwelling where they stay all alone, and there are also monasteries that make hermitages available for a time. Conscious solitude probably always has spiritual overtones, whether it occurs in a monastic environment or during a hike through the mountains. For human beings, solitude is always an opportunity for encountering the Great Mystery. Sustaining that aloneness for an entire life is indeed something quite unusual. It might be one’s special vocation. For me, in any case, it was not.
JK: You needed the rhythm, the dynamics of aloneness, community, and being able to work with people?
DSR: Yes. Many people today—and not just monks—find that they can serve their community best if they intermittently retreat, collect themselves, and find themselves. They have more to give that way.
JK: From the vantage point of the hermitage, one can, it seems, develop an unbiased view of the society in which one is living. Like Henry David Thoreau, who developed his criticism of American society in the nineteenth century when he was living as a hermit.9 That was powerful, and it became one of the foundational texts of the hippie movement in the late 1960s.
DSR: I’ve gone on pilgrimage to Walden Pond, where Thoreau lived as a hermit for a time. Unfortunately, his hut is no longer standing.
JK: And how was that?
DSR: I found it a moving experience. Thoreau’s spirit is still present there in the woods by the pond. My first visit to Walden Pond happened to coincide—if there are such things as coincidences—with the first Earth Day. That was in 1970.
JK: He was, in the best sense, an incredibly anarchistic thinker.
DSR: In fact, he was imprisoned for it briefly. He took a good look at the society of mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts and was disgusted by its fake and sham. Later, he wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” I take this to mean, “I wanted to become real.” And becoming real is the challenging task of any hermit. In the children’s classic The Velveteen Rabbit, the toys on the nursery shelf have one great desire: they all want to become real. We humans, too, have a deep longing to become real. The toys asked one of them, the wise old rocking horse, “Does it hurt to become real?” A hermit will understand the answer: “The more real you become, the less you mind that it hurts.”
7
Encounters in Travel
1986–1996
Though my longest lecture tours fall only in the seventh decade of my life, I’ve enjoyed traveling all my life. In my youth, our greatest excitement was backpacking—tramping for days, even weeks, with our heavy backpacks. Since my birthday was during the summer holidays, I was always away from home on this day. My mother’s comment was merely, “Well, you are my little gypsy.”
Leaving and breaking off all ties with the home was a way of articulating our independence, and independence was important to us. I still marvel at how generously my mother allowed me that independence and even encouraged it. How difficult it must have been for her! On a backpacking trip, my brothers and I were no less cut off and unreachable than Scott or Amundsen had been at the South Pole. In an emergency, we would probably have been able to telephone, even half a century before cell phones. Fortunately, nothing ever happened to us that we considered an emergency; and so, from a departing hug to the joyful greeting weeks later, my mother knew nothing of us or our whereabouts.
A typical backpacking trip in my early teens—we are traveling to the Bohemian Forest—starts by train. The train ride itself is an adventure, particularly on the little local train we change to at Regensburg. Sharp tongues claim that the tracks
of this line do not run exactly parallel, and so the wheels are not fully screwed on, in order that the train can adjust to the changing gauges. Certainly, that is what it feels like when the train rattles and sways into motion—though not very fast. In fact, a sign was supposedly posted somewhere: “Picking wildflowers is not permitted while the train is in motion.” And there are plenty of wildflowers around the little village where we get off and start our hiking; it is called Zwiesel, if I remember correctly. Backpacking is illegal—except with the Hitler Youth—but no one but us is hiking here, and we feel safe in this remote area. In any case, we keep secret anything having to do with our hikes. Most of the time, we come here with sworn friends from the Neulandschule, but this time it is just my two brothers and I. Max is thirteen, Hans is fourteen, and I am sixteen. It is not long until we are deep in the silence and fragrance of the forest. For days, we wander through seemingly unending stretches of blueberry bushes. We carry hardly any food in our packs—there is no food one can buy—and the berries are our main source of nourishment. Only once or twice a day do we pass a human habitation, a forester’s or charcoal burner’s hut maybe. Then we send in Maxi, our hungry-looking youngest brother, to ask for directions. Admittedly, we do have a map, but we also have ulterior motives: “If they give you something to drink,” we tell Max, “you can drink it, but if they give you bread, you must put it in your pocket and share with us.” Our method proved highly successful.
Deep in the forest, we reach the barren loneliness of the high moors and then the mountains. One of them is called the Arber. Just below its peak—as with other mountains close by—there is a small mountain lake. Bathing in that icy water is a test of our courage. At night, we sleep in tents. When our group is larger, four of us carry one side each of the Kohte, which when assembled in the evening can sleep up to a dozen of us.1 Inside, we can build a fire and cook in a large pot. Then, by the light of the fire, we sit around the pot and eat directly out of it. For this reason, we carry long spoons that we call “Puszta spoons.”2 The smoke escapes through an opening in the tent, though it also rains in through the same opening if we are not quick enough to extinguish the fire and close the smoke hatch. This time, however, it is only three of us, so a small tent is enough; we are used to sleeping in cramped quarters. On another trip to the Bohemian Forest, six of us once had to sleep in a forest chapel that was so small that if one of us turned over in his sleep, all the others had to turn as well. If the weather is good, we three brothers simply sleep under the stars. When we pass villages, farmers will often let us sleep in the hayloft. We even carry an impressive letter of recommendation from our local cardinal and archbishop—which becomes important during one of our rides. I am sick with a fever, and the concerned local pastor diagnoses, “His pulse is racing!” He allows me to sleep in a real bed in the parish house until I am better, even with a real quilt. Then we walk on. Mother does not need to know.
A highpoint of our time in the Bohemian Forest is a visit to the home of our friend, my classmate at Neulandschule, Rupert Steinbrenner, at Winterberg. Though we arrive unannounced, Rupert’s mother takes us in like family, and we feel completely at home—for once, at home with sisters. This is new to us, and we are thrilled. After the privations in the forest, we are being spoiled, experiencing home away from home. Might we have had something like homesickness? We would never admit it, but there are a few tears when we depart. Until then, everything is one long celebration here, a celebration of our young life, with flirtation, laughter, and music. We were even greeted with music fluttering out of an open window when we first arrived: a melody from Bach’s Notebook for Anna Magdalena, which the youngest girl was practicing on the piano. For my brothers and me, this piece remains to this day the quintessence of our visit to Winterberg and those days of unforgettable joie de vivre.
We also pass through other towns: Krumau, Prachatitz, Rosenberg—these are the names I remember. When we arrive at a town, we go into the church, pray, and look at the statues of the saints. We have a powerful sense of belonging to this great family, the Communion of Saints. We feel at home in the churches and curiously eye each little detail. On a hand-carved wooden pew—in Prachatitz, I think—we read, “Beware of cattes not so kinde, who woo in fronte and scratch behinde!” We love such discoveries and continue to laugh about the archaic spelling for a long time. Aside from church visits and overnight stays, we never stop where there are people. Even in the big cities of Regensburg and Passau we only stop to look at churches—the famous ones of which we have seen pictures. Then we wander downstream along the Danube, always as close as possible to the river, along the ancient towpath, where men and mules used to pull barges upstream using ropes. For us, those are marvelously unobstructed walking paths.
Suddenly, we see a steamboat not far ahead of us about to cast off. As quickly as our heavy boots and backpacks allow, we run toward the boat. The men aboard laugh understandingly and wave. Maxi is the last one to reach the gangway just as it is being hauled in; luckily, he does not fall into the Danube but onto the boat. We are not taken far, but we are let off the boat near where raftsmen are at work. Laughing, they accept our offer to “assist” them and as a reward we are allowed to ride along on the raft the next morning. In Krems, the raft is taken apart, but we have the opportunity of buying the lifeboat. We are astonished by how little the raftsmen ask for it, but as soon as we get in, we realize that with three of us in it, the boat takes in so much water that two of us are completely occupied just bailing it out. The third steers, as well as can be managed. We are cornered worryingly by an oncoming steamboat on one side and the shore on the other. After the danger has passed, we see a small chapel on the banks and, knees still weak, we stop there to say prayers of thanks.
After spending one more night—not very dryly—on a little island overgrown by reeds, we arrive at Nussdorf, tow our skiff to land, and sit on the riverbank. From our boat waves a sign: “Firewood, for sale.” In these early war years, wood is rare, so we are able to sell our boat quickly and without a loss. Back then we experienced everything that I would later see as significant aspects of travel; independence ranked high, but was never again as important as in those years in which we were first allowed to taste it.
The richest gifts on my travels remained the encounters—just as meeting people on our youthful adventure trips had enriched our lives forever. Each future journey would also bring again hospitality, fun, surprises, wonder, and the unavoidable tears of homesickness and farewell. Each of these key words brings to my mind experiences from my later travels. Let me offer just a few of them, like snapshots.
Many of my most important encounters started during a course called “Spirituality for Our Times,” which in the 1980s, I presented annually at the Jesuit university of St. Louis, Missouri. The overall program was called “Focus on Leadership,” and many of the participants had been heads of religious orders who were now able to devote a year to furthering their spiritual education after their terms had expired. They came from Asia, Africa, Australia, and other parts of the world and often wished that the other members of their order could hear the program. Consequently, I was invited to all parts of the globe; soon receiving more invitations than I could accept.
For example, the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart wanted me to meet all of the over one thousand Sisters of their Australian order. On the vast continent of Australia, this involved a journey of over six thousand miles, since often only two or three of the “Brown Joeys” (their nickname was based on the Australian term for baby kangaroos) were serving God’s people, hundreds of miles from their nearest Sisters. In Australia’s Northern Territory, I was flown by a bush pilot into Turkey Creek—a village consisting of only one building, namely the schoolhouse, and five huge fires around which the Aborigines lived out in the open air. As soon as I landed, the two Sisters on mission here took me from fire to fire and introduced me to the chiefs. The government had erected the school, where the Sisters were expected to cover the
same lesson plan as in the city schools of Sydney. Instead, they dealt more creatively with the situation: they taught the children—or actually the mothers and their children—to avoid generational conflict, not in the schoolhouse but outside in an airy bough shed, and adapted the lesson plan to the circumstances as much as possible. I will never forget the encounters with the children, who gave me drawings they had made, or with their mothers, or especially with the wise elders of the tribe. Nor will I forget the many brave Sisters of the order on their lonely outposts.
I have experienced such frequent and such openhearted hospitality on my travels that it is difficult to select individual examples, but Polynesia is famous for its almost reckless overwhelmingly heartfelt hospitality. I experienced this in Apia, the capital of Samoa, where Cardinal Pio Taofinu’u had invited me to hold a retreat for all the priests of his diocese.3 The Cardinal sat in their midst, wearing nothing but a cardinal-red loin cloth, and for an entire weekend, proved to me that Samoan hospitality deserves its fame. The people of Tonga, however, are no less hospitable. Once, Irish monks who had founded a monastery in New Zealand and had a host of novices from Tonga invited me to help them deal with an unusual challenge: When guests from their homeland visited the monastery, the Tongan Brothers knew no higher rule than hospitality. The singing and dancing continued half the night, and the next day all the monastery’s refrigerators were empty. The novices had used up anything that was edible or drinkable. In their defense, they cited the Rule of St. Benedict: “Guests should be received as Christ himself.” “Well, this is how we would receive Christ in Tonga,” they would say, and I did not know which to admire more: the hospitality of my Tongan Brothers or the patience of the Irish ones.