I Am Through You So I Read online

  I became an altar boy and had to memorize prayers of the Mass in Latin. To get to the Rorate Masses in Advent, I had to trudge through the deep snow before break of dawn. Altar boys in the parish church of Prein were even allowed to tread the bellows for the organ, but the little convent chapel of the Sisters of Mercy, on the edge of the workers’ settlement in Edlach, had only the harmonium on which Sister Viola would accompany the singing on Sundays. Back at home after the Sunday Mass, we would often play “mass” again. Our friend Karli Geyer was always the priest and seemed, in our eyes, to be able to repeat the sermon word-for-word. Our young chaplain, Father Franz Rudolf Kopf—fresh out of the seminary—preached well. He had a Puch motorcycle and would sometimes let me ride on the back seat up to a nearby mountain pass to watch the night sky and learn the names of the constellations. He supported my mother—who did not remarry—and remained a fatherly friend to my brothers and me throughout our later life.

  Soon, my two brothers and I were allowed to participate in the star singing on Epiphany. Each of us wanted to be the Black King, so the honor was determined by chance: our mother had baked her ring—showing St. George as dragon-slayer riding his horse—into a special Epiphany cake, and the brother whose piece contained the ring would blacken his face with soot and don the most beautiful of our paper crowns. Then, draped in linen sheets and bearing our homemade star, we set out to our neighbors’ houses.

  It was also a tradition for us boys to bring the newly blessed Easter fire home with us from church on Holy Saturday, so that the kitchen stove could be freshly lit with its flames. We had long before made containers from empty tin cans which we would swing on strings to fan the embers of the bracket fungus we collected and used as coal. It was important to know where exactly we had to make holes in the old tin cans. Our older playmates dutifully taught us these arts, just as the games and counting-out rhymes of the schoolyard were passed on, step-by-step and word-for-word, from the older to the younger children. It was not so easy to whittle a hazel twig into a whistle that actually did whistle loudly; or, when tending the goats, to stoke the fire in such a way as to achieve the perfect temperature for roasting jacket potatoes; or—particularly tricky—to fashion a forked twig into a reliable slingshot. Zens Ferdl was especially skilled in this regard. I can still see him shooting a swallow off the telegraph wires before my very eyes. It was dead, but still warm. I felt complicit and would have cried from guilt, but boys don’t cry!

  Swallows’ nests were too high up in the cowshed, and the nests of the redstarts high on the gables of our roof were unreachable. But in the birchwood forest behind our house, there was a bird’s nest one could peer into. Only after I had given my solemn promise never to go there alone, Sommer Hansl showed me the secret place. How artfully the nest had been woven! A single egg lay in it. Despite my promise, I snuck back on my own, but not just to look; I had to touch this egg. And suddenly, the yoke was all over my fingers. To my broken promise, I added the lie that it hadn’t been me. What pangs of shame and remorse! Paradise was lost to me not just through my parents’ divorce—a disgrace in those days, and something that I could not speak of to anyone even late into my adult life—but through my own guilt as well.

  However, near the end of the first decade of my life, I was given the gift of the experience that would give me inner strength after my loss of paradise. The childlike dreamer had become a little rascal. I was rarely ill, thank God. And if we children ever did fall ill, our beloved Herr Doktor Bittner called at our house at any hour of the day or night. He would diagnose us as soon as he walked in, simply by the smell of the sickroom, and make us healthy again. That’s how easy it seemed.

  I was sitting in Dr. Bittner’s waiting room with my mother—I’ve long forgotten my ailment at the time—and was starting to get impatient. I had already thoroughly observed the leeches in their glass, and—as inconspicuously as possible—had studied the huge goiter of the woman sitting across from us. Now I began to get really impatient. Once more I was demonstrating what I had so often been reproved for: having “mercury in the butt.” But this time my mother did not say that. Instead, she laid her hand on the part in my hair and said, very quietly because of the other waiting patients, “Try to do what people in Russia do: they can sit completely still for hours, just breathing in and out and holding Jesus’ name in their hearts with each breath.” (That was my first encounter with the Jesus Prayer. Why my mother ascribed it to the Russians, specifically, I do not know to this day; perhaps she had read the Russian classic The Way of a Pilgrim. At any rate, her gift for me that day was the Prayer of the Heart.) I tried out her suggestion: I closed my eyes, breathed calmly, and thought on Jesus. Everything else happened by itself: I discovered my heart as a silent inner space where I am at home with Jesus. I began to realize that I can come home to this center whenever I want. From then on, this insight gave my life an anchor I cannot lose. It is this homecoming that gives the image of melting into one with Christ—the relatively static image I know from my dream—its dynamism.

  Dialogue

  JK: Brother David, your earliest biographical recollections reveal that, even as a child, you were filled with an unquenchable curiosity, a joy in discovery. Your world was a place where you experienced deep connections, and this feeling of connectedness seems to come from your wonder in the miraculous. On the one hand, it is wonder at nature, and on the other hand, your prayers with your grandmother probably gave you an early inkling of something intangible, something larger, greater than what is immediately around us—the gold thread, for example, which you described finding just before Christmas. In retrospect, you interpret such moments as initial meetings with a Mystery beyond understanding. Additionally, all of that was embedded in a still unbroken relationship with the Christian faith. What sort of a spiritual world was it that you were born into?

  DSR: In retrospect, such wonder is truly important, central even. One could say that wonder is oriented in two directions: one is amazement at and appreciation for the beautiful; the other is reflection on it. Reflecting is more than just thinking. It means opening oneself to the things that are worth wondering over. This is the sense in which for Plato philosophy begins with wonder.8 Both orientations have been important to me throughout my life: on the one hand, admiring and praising the beautiful, and on the other hand, wondering about something mysterious that extends beyond it.

  JK: That requires some sort of resonating chamber, in your family, for instance. That’s why I ask, What kind of a world was it that you were born into, for it to be possible for you to interpret those moments in such a way? That isn’t an inevitable attitude.

  DSR: What enabled me to take that position was a feeling of being protected. It is quite astounding that my parents and my grandmother made it possible for me to feel so protected. I was born only eight years after the end of the First World War. This was not a time of security, but of total societal collapse. And yet I grew up in this little “pre-war” world—and I mean pre-World War I! The only picture in our living room showed the Emperor Francis Joseph. I belonged to that anachronistic bubble and felt protected within it. Outside the long garden wall of our park, parades and rallies passed by with screaming and commotion. I can remember that vividly.

  JK: Were these parades and rallies already connected with the rise of the National Socialists?

  DSR: Possibly so. I know that the Nazi movement was already starting back then. The early 1930s were almost a time of civil war. I remember how once as a child I walked out through the large gate of the park. There were flags and screaming and I scrambled back and forth, lost between all those legs. But then I was found and brought back. So, that feeling of protection is probably the most important and fundamental feeling that made it possible for me to grow up in a sense of wonder.

  JK: You were four or five years old when you had this remarkable dream where you encounter Jesus on the staircase, and as you pass one another, the two of you melt into one. This amalgamation with the Ho
ly was foundational to you and has influenced your sense of life in the following years. Even early on, Jesus seems to have been a fascinating figure for you. Looking back, how do you make sense of that?

  DSR: In fact, I find that inexplicable. But I believe that all humans are oriented toward the Great Mystery. We are conscious of the fact that we stand before what we cannot grasp. For me, this expressed itself in my dream image of Jesus. Jesus and God—for me there was no real difference at the time. I believe that as a child, Jesus was my image for the entire Divine Mystery.

  JK: But in your dream, you melt into one with the Divine Mystery, so with its real image, the real presence.

  DSR: And that, I believe, is a lesson that this Mystery itself gave me from the beginning. I cannot imagine it to be something that a child would think up. Thinking was not even a part of it. It was a gift of life, and it has always stayed with me.

  JK: How do you feel and think about this, today?

  DSR: At the very end of my biographical reflections, I write of the double realm. This double realm is something I grew into very early, and it has stayed with me throughout my entire life. Furthermore, it is becoming more and more tangible. The danger was never great that a gap would open between my thinking and my feeling. On reflection, that too was a great gift. As far as I can remember, what I felt and what I thought never came into conflict.

  JK: Meaning that one stimulated the other. Or to put it differently: one could hardly think without being in some way emotionally directed, but one is often just unaware of the fact. When you feel, that influences your thinking.

  DSR: And if you continue this line of thought, that means that the beautiful and the good were inseparable to me. As Theodor Haecker said, “The beautiful feels itself in feeling, and the good wills itself in willing.”9 In other words, the beautiful, the good, and the true are one. The true recognizes itself in recognizing, the good wills itself in willing, and the beautiful feels itself in feeling. For me, that has always been a single thing from the beginning. I had to gradually separate it, analyze it to distinguish its parts. But sometimes it seems to me that, in many people’s minds, the beautiful and the good are not one. To them, they must be brought together gradually. My development happened somewhat differently.

  JK: You seem to have had parents and grandparents who encouraged your joy in discovering the world and laid the cornerstone of a confident, creative personality in you. I know several people in whom this joy for life was halted or disappointed early, or gradually poisoned. Reflecting on your early childhood, what are you most grateful to the people around you for?

  DSR: For me, the most important thing seems to be a trust in life. I received this gift of trust in two ways: First, the people close to me proved themselves to be trustworthy. They were simply there for me, the small child, when I needed them—without question. My mother was not always physically present, even if I would have liked that. I remember it very well: When she put me to bed, I would say, “Stay here, stay here! Why do you have to go?” She would always answer, “I need to earn pennies.” She had to work in the coffeehouse in the evenings—but she was trustworthy. And second, I was trusted, which was just as important, though different. I was sometimes astounded at what I could do without being supervised or checked on.

  JK: What sorts of things?

  DSR: For example, at play. Even as small children, my brothers and I were allowed to go into the woods alone for hours, walk up the creek, and explore. I think that my mother knew where we were and that we were in no danger. We felt protected because we somehow knew that she was not far away. But she gave us that trust; so we were free. Later, we would go exploring for weeks at a time, and she did not know where we were, because at the time, there was no way to call and let her know. She gave us this gift of trust anyway, confident that we would take care of each other, that we would give each other trust and prove trustworthy. Those two aspects are what I am most grateful for.

  JK: As children, we feel protected and free until we have an experience of fear—fear that we may lose something familiar, fear for our own existence. I imagine that, for you, the early divorce of your parents must have been one of those breaks. In that way, the economic and political depression of the 1930s had its parallel in private unhappiness. How did you personally experience your father’s departure?

  DSR: My mother and younger brother were suddenly gone. I was the only one who was already in school and thus stayed in Vienna with my father, who was very kind to me and tried hard to care for me. But taking care of a child and running the business at the same time was simply too much for him. So, he sent me to the boarding school of the Christian Brothers, where I was already enrolled as a day pupil. Of course, for such a young child, as I was, a boarding school was dreadful, but I was only there for a brief time. Then my mother came one night and simply took me with her. The separation from my father did not really feel painful, but I think I may simply have suppressed that pain. I fervently prayed that my parents would get back together. I remember that very well, but I did not consciously experience any pain of separation from my father, so I probably suppressed it.

  JK: In the later years of your youth, were there any situations where you wished for a father?

  DSR: No, not really. In retrospect, I feel that my mother, as far as possible, also filled the father role well. I cannot remember yearning, wishing, or searching for a father. In my early youth, just after the war—I would have been around eighteen or nineteen years old—we rediscovered our father with our mother’s encouragement, and from then on, had a very good relationship with him all his life. The relationship with a father that is formed throughout the years of childhood is missing in my life.

  JK: But not painfully, as you say?

  DSR: It was not painful at all. In contrast, when I was separated from my mother for even three days, I missed her a great deal. But I cannot remember ever missing my father as a small child. Not in the least. But, as I said, I may have unconsciously denied and repressed my feelings.

  JK: Was he less present than your mother in the family system even before the divorce?

  DSR: He was very present, but he was also very strict. He was a very loving father, but when I was a small child, he was very strict about things such as eating everything on your plate. His absence, therefore, may have been freeing, in a way.

  JK: Your childhood during your time in the country between Schneeberg and Rax is couched in the rhythm of the seasons, the rhythm of the holidays, and traditions of the region. As an altar boy, you were connected to the local version of the Christian tradition. But then there is also that scene, reminiscent of Mark Twain, in which you refer to yourself as a rascal, with “mercury for a behind,” who not only breaks a promise but then lies about it. I’m referring to the story of the bird’s nest. Psychologically, that is quite easy to understand, because one wants to preserve the integrity one is projecting outward. But you felt guilty and interpreted the story as akin to the fall from grace. Seen from the outside, that feeling is no more than a peccadillo; seen from the inside, however, it is more. How did you experience guilt at the time? And were there forms of reparation?

  DSR: Guilt was connected closely to the Ten Commandments: it was very clear what one was or was not allowed to do. If I did something one was not allowed to do, I felt guilty. I did not question that. The reparation was to go to confession. I felt that as unpleasant, but then again also as very freeing. I have always found it difficult to ask for forgiveness.

  JK: How did you experience your guilt? What were you afraid of if you had to live with that guilt?

  DSR: I had no fear of hellfire or anything similar.

  JK: Psychologically speaking, could you have lived with that guilt at the time? It may have been little guilt, but you were also very conscientious.

  DSR: I was always conscientious, but that was not due to ideas such as eternal damnation. From the beginning, I trusted that God is gracious; that seemed the most important fact and
the reason why everything would be alright somehow. I still remember that my mother must have felt that I did not rise on my hind legs and defend myself enough. A boy who was a bit older than I was, Löschl Loisl, was a bit of a bully, and at one point, my mother saw that and said, “Go on and defend yourself!” So, I jumped at him and hit him, and he immediately had a nosebleed. That was horrible for me. I felt so sorry for him. This was an important experience for me.

  JK: That you felt sorry for him or that you could defend yourself?

  DSR: No, that I felt sorry for him. I did not really doubt that I could defend myself if I wanted, but I really did not want to, because I did not want to harm others. That became very clear when I actually did harm him.

  JK: There is this scene in which you are becoming impatient during a doctor’s visit with your mother. It resolves very unexpectedly. In this situation, you, as a fidgeter, are introduced to the Prayer of the Heart by your mother, without knowing that it has a long tradition in Eastern Christianity. In retrospect, you describe this as one of the first turning points in which your experience of melting into Christ now calls up a complementary, dynamic experience. How do you understand this dynamic experience? What was new in this religious dimension?