I Am Through You So I Page 6

  One of my older cousins was a psychiatrist in New Jersey, and he let me work for him on some cases of mentally ill children. A former colleague from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts already had a prominent position at the Philadelphia College of Art, and I received work from him as well. But my heart was not in it, nor did I know where it belonged or where it could find rest.

  My culture shock in the “New World” soon led to days of depression. I had come here to escape, but now I began to ask myself whether the right monastery might not be waiting for me somewhere after all, even in the United States. “If I had lived in the Middle Ages,” I said to a friend, “I might have become a Benedictine monk, but today, too much tradition is weighing down the monasteries in Europe. What I’m looking for”—yes, I heard myself saying that I was actually looking for something!—“is a monastery that follows the original Rule.” “That’s strange!” my friend replied. “I hear that kind of reformed monastery has just been founded near Elmira in New York State.” That same day, I called the Greyhound Bus Company, found a night bus to Elmira, arrived there the next morning, and after some searching, discovered the farm on which three monks had founded the monastic community of Mount Saviour.5 That afternoon, I worked with one of them, Father Placid. While we were planting squash, he answered my questions and his answers reassured me. The next morning, I hitched a ride with two other guests back to New York. That was in mid-May of 1953. Suddenly, the decision had become easy. I applied at Mount Saviour, was accepted as a candidate, and on August 20, I arrived to stay.

  In my first years at the monastery—as postulant, as novice, and then as a young monk—I felt quite like I had felt as a shepherd on that mountain pasture in Austria. The third decade of my life ended in the rolling hills of the Iroquois much as it had begun high in the Alps. What I had been doing there all day long, I did now: listen deeply into silent space.

  Dialogue

  JK: The art of living well is also the art of dying well—ars vivendi est ars moriendi. You had already read the Rule of St. Benedict during the war, and in the face of the daily possibility of death, you got to know central spiritual principles. When people speak of religion today, many think of ways of life that are controlled from outside, marked by rules and commandments. For those people, religion is problematic, irrational, a potential source of conflict. Only few associate spirituality with being alive, wakeful, and living fully. But this aliveness and all its possibilities were available to you, Brother David, in a freed Austria after the end of the war. You not only had death constantly before your eyes, but a whole bouquet of options. Which were the ones that attracted you most, initially?

  DSR: At first, I wanted to continue what I had already begun before I was drafted: my studies at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. But Professor Karl Sterrer, whom I loved and admired greatly, had been caught in the political wheels. Even though he had been known to be opposed to Nazi ideology at the time I studied with him, he now was made a scapegoat. He was no longer allowed to teach at the Academy. I never found another painting teacher who fit me well, so I switched from painting to studying art restoring with Professor Eigenberger. That was fascinating. After the war, as restorers we received a great many damaged art objects.

  JK: In what sorts of places did you do your restoring work?

  DSR: With a few exceptions, we worked in the Academy’s studio, for example, on a painting by Lucas Cranach, the paint of which had bubbled during a fire—I think it was the fire in St. Stephen’s Cathedral. We had to use a great deal of care and effort in repairing that painting. There was also a work by Albrecht Dürer: a Madonna belonging to the Austrian state, which was then traded in, so that Austria acquired the Stifter Museum from the Czech city of Oberplan. Another thing that was very exciting for us students was that every day from noon to 1:00 p.m., the professor would offer free expertise to people who wanted a valuation of their real or supposed art treasures. We students could sit in on this every day. Most of the time the things weren’t very valuable; paintings often turned out to be mere copies of masterworks. But once, someone brought in a briefcase a folded canvas, and our professor immediately said, “That could be something interesting. We need to take a closer look at it.” It was impossible to see the picture clearly, since it had darkened and was extremely dirty. After weeks of work, it turned out to be a previously unknown Van Dyck. We were the first to discover it. There really were some very exciting moments at the Academy. But what excited me much more during this time was a lecture by Professor Koppers on the origins of the idea of God.6

  JK: He was a theologian?

  DSR: No, he was an anthropologist, but he was a priest of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD). At the time, they provided several professors of the anthropology department. Yes, I was very moved by this lecture. I went to the Austrian National Library afterward and borrowed the various volumes of Wilhelm Schmidt’s The Origins of the Idea of God.7 I sat in the Café Bastei on the Schottenring, and wept as I read. Following that, I studied anthropology.

  JK: Can you remember what it was about the book that moved you to tears? Was there a special idea or realization that stirred you?

  DSR: Wilhelm Schmidt’s Kulturkreis theory is largely obsolete today. But what remains and what really touched me at the time was that the God Idea is a shared primeval human experience. That is what Father Wilhelm Schmidt’s volumes illuminated for me.

  JK: That there has always been a kind of primeval religiousness or faith with all peoples—is that what you mean?

  DSR: He articulated it quite differently then, but that thought continued in my mind. Today, I can see that what makes us human is that we grapple with this Great Mystery that we can cautiously call God. This idea shone on me like a light in that moment, and that moved me so greatly.

  JK: So, you studied anthropology. You describe the summer of 1946 as free and magical. If I interpret it correctly, you as a then twenty-year-old were in love with a girl named Elisabeth. You wrote that she was an excellent dancer and that you not only visited the Salzburg Festival with her but also did quite a bit of dancing yourself. If you were in love, then were you considering marrying and founding a family?

  DSR: No, I did not consider it, so much as plan it. I pictured it in detail: I wanted to have twelve children. But soon, I began considering the problem of overpopulation, and eventually that consideration did decisively contribute to my decision to live a celibate life.

  JK: You thought that you didn’t want to bring more children into the world because there were already too many? But that was back in 1945, when the world population was only two billion people.

  DSR: Since then, humanity has tripled in size. That is completely unimaginable.

  JK: When you’re in love, you don’t necessarily think of overpopulation.

  DSR: Today, young people do not even necessarily think of a family and children. But at the time, we did think of that. It was part of our frame of reference.

  JK: For both of you?

  DSR: In our entire generation’s frame of reference, love, marriage, and family still belonged together, that is what I mean.

  JK: So, you pictured it for yourself. And on Elisabeth’s side?

  DSR: I do not know. But I believe that picturing was rather one-sided.

  JK: Your love as well?

  DSR: Largely.

  JK: At any rate, nothing more came of that on the relationship level. But at the time, you didn’t yet know that you wanted to live alone, did you?

  DSR: Since my experience at St. Peter’s Archabbey in Salzburg, I did know, somewhere deep inside, that this was my path: becoming a monk.

  JK: You are referring to the scene where, as part of a service in St. Peter’s, you hear the Bible text on the judgment of Solomon—a child is to be split with swords, and the true mother saves the child by giving it up. You relate this text to your own life: you did not want to live feeling torn in two. But why did you relate it to yourself at all? In what ways did this wholeness take
shape for you?

  DSR: At that time, I had this “either/or” in my head constantly and felt the dangers of inner division. I became aware that we had always been whole, undivided. That is why we were so happy even during the war. We had to live in the moment because death was always before our eyes. I then connected the experience of “keeping death before your eyes at all times” with being a monk, because I had read the sentence in the Rule of St. Benedict. I realized that, as a monk, my life would become whole; I would live in the moment and be happy. So, I wanted to become a monk, but at the same time, I didn’t want to.

  JK: So, at the same time, twelve children would have been an attractive option as well, were it not for overpopulation?

  DSR: Very attractive, and many other things were as well. At the time, I pictured being a monk as something quite grim. I was still undecided in this “either/or.”

  JK: Had you read Søren Kierkegaard at the time, his book Either/Or?

  DSR: We did read Kierkegaard during the war, but I do not think that had any influence on my decision. It is told that, at a reception, a society lady enthusiastically thanked Kierkegaard for his book Either AND Or. I was the same way. I wanted both: either and or. But the judgment of Solomon made me reflect.

  JK: So, you are saying that at age twenty, you realized that you wanted to live in wholeness. And yet for several more years you continued living that “either and or.”

  DSR: Precisely. Often in life, an insight appears long before it is finally put into practice or even before there is any will to put it into practice. I lived this “either and or” and was unwilling to decide, despite being simultaneously able to see that I did not want to live a divided life. I could see this particularly clearly after the Bible reading of the judgment of Solomon.

  JK: Can you remember why it was particularly this passage that spoke to you and gave you such clarity?

  DSR: The imagery is very clear: to me, the two women were, on the one hand, the Church, the true mother; and on the other, the world, both claiming “this child is mine!” The true mother lets go of her child to keep it alive—but in the end, the judgment of Solomon restores it to her. That image did not let go of me, even though I was constantly pushing it away from my conscious mind.

  JK: …and went on to completely different studies. The broader the base, the higher the pyramid—as you described your motivation for such varied coursework at the University of Vienna. After anthropology, there were art, restoration, and even psychology. This last course you studied with Hubert Rohracher, who was born in East Tirol but taught in Vienna.8 From today’s point of view, you see these studies also as an attempt to escape your final decision to become a monk. I remember that you once told me how heavy another reason weighed: at the time, you felt yourself to be anticlerical, in the sense of seeing the Church as still having many very bourgeois aspects. That was the sense in which the Neuland movement was anticlerical; not antireligious and certainly pious, but anticlerical in its rejection of the old, ivory tower Catholic system.

  DSR: For me, the monasteries, at least those that I knew, were largely part of that outdated system. The only monastery I felt at home in was Heiligenkreuz Abbey, where Father Walter Schücker was my spiritual counselor.9 But because my enthusiasm had been awakened by the Rule of St. Benedict, I always longed for a monastery that followed the original Rule. That was, admittedly, what kids today would call “a head trip.”

  JK: What did you hope for from this “back-to-the-roots” approach?

  DSR: I do not believe I pictured anything precise. I knew more what I did not want than what I wanted. But I did not want what I had seen.

  JK: Such as? What did you not want?

  DSR: An abbey with so many parishes that you really become more of a parish priest than a monk by joining it. My ideal was to go back to the original monastic practice without all this historical baggage. That was what I told my friend, Father Phillip Walsh, an Oratorian in the United States. In response, he told me of a newly founded monastery that had made it their goal to live strictly by the Rule of St. Benedict. That was the first time I heard of Mount Saviour.

  JK: We’ll get back to that. I want to take a closer look at the time of your early twenties. You spent a relatively lengthy period in East Tirol, on the Kerschbaumer Alm, an Alpine farm, surrounded by the silence of the mountains. On reflection, you could see that time as an incubation period for your later life as a monk. On the Alm, the dividedness may have lifted. Life there is simple and clear; things like daily rhythms, the weather, the animals, the water, milk, cheese, meat, and bread. It is easier to retreat there, there is little distraction. But when you come back down into the valley with its varied ways of living, all the temptations return. And one can’t live up on the mountain indefinitely. To a certain degree, that was a symbol of your dividedness or ambivalence back then, which lasted quite a while into your subsequent years.

  DSR: The thing about the Alm that was so beautiful to me was the opportunity for deepening. And what was so beautiful about the valley was the possibility for broadening. Now that the war was over, we could, for the first time, travel abroad. I went to Switzerland. That was a broadening experience for me, if there ever was one. Here, everything was a discovery for me—a land of peace and plenty. Together with two friends to whom I still have a close connection—Werner Scholz, the former choirboy, and Heinz Thonhauser from Lienz—I went on a bicycle tour. We rode through East Tirol into Switzerland and to the lakes in northern Italy. It was a time full of broadening experiences. Today, it is hard to imagine what it meant to us after the war to see the world and be free and mobile enough to simply ride a bike to wherever one wanted to go. Those were significant experiences of breadth. So, that was my conflict: whether to go deep or broad.

  JK: Back to the Alm: it was a “natural monastery,” where you were able to experience contemplative life. Nature itself was the monastery; you even had a sort of hermit’s setting in that solitude.

  DSR: I would call it the experience of a reflective life. On the Alm, I experienced a time of joyous meditation—all day long. I was either filled with joy in nature or with joy in reading the small Bible that I carried with me.

  JK: So, you read the book of nature and the Books of the Bible?

  DSR: I did not think of it in those terms at the time, but St. Bernard of Clairvaux did say that there are these two books in which we can find God. The Book of the Holy Scriptures and the book of nature.

  JK: And what you perused, so to speak, in East Tirol was the book of nature?

  DSR: Yes. What could be more beautiful than a mountain pasture, completely cut off from the rest of the world? There was not a single person there aside from us all summer. Only once or twice did pilgrims come by; the border between Austria and Italy—right above the Alm—was closed at the time. All around our meadows, like a fence, stood the delicately carved peaks of the Dolomite Mountains, white against blue sky…unbelievably beautiful.

  JK: Here it is again, that encounter with the wonderful as you knew it from your early childhood, when, with your father’s help, you look into a tulip and are transfixed by what you find.

  DSR: The entire Alm was like the chalice of a flower, with the surrounding mountain peaks as its petals, and us sitting in the center.

  JK: After your second journey to the United States, you followed your family to America in 1951. Your relatives had already immigrated there and were living in Manhattan, New York. But the question of finally deciding whether to become a monk would not let you go. It is an irony of history that, in the land of possibility, you finally found your possibility, a monastery of your choice in Elmira, where the Benedictine monastery community of Mount Saviour had been founded three years earlier. What drew you to Mount Saviour and finally strengthened you in your decision that becoming a monk really was your path?

  DSR: The only important question for me was whether the Rule of St. Benedict was truly lived there. That was all. Nothing else was of importance to m
e. I was completely caught up in this idea. That’s why I needed to stay at Mount Saviour for only one afternoon before I decided and left again. The next time, I came to stay for good. That first time, I arrived around midday, and in the afternoon, they sent me already to plant squash with Father Placid. That gave me the chance to ask him, “Do you really want to return to the original Rule of St. Benedict here, without later additions?” His answer was yes. My second question was, “Do you have lay brothers who are separated from priest monks, or are all monks considered equal?” (In the middle ages, monasteries introduced the institution of lay Brothers, which resulted in two sociological levels in one monastery. To my mind, that ran counter to original Benedictine life. That’s why for me it was a touchstone of dedication to the Rule.) And again, Father Placid’s answer to my question satisfied me: “We are all one here and see ourselves as a lay community of choir monks. We have only as many priests as the monastic community needs.” That was enough for me. My motivations were very cerebral, but they set me on the right path. I could make the decisive step, and it is a step I have never regretted. Even errors can bring us to the place where we want to be and should be. In fact, the decision had already been made seven years earlier with the image of the judgment of Solomon.

  JK: I want to go back for a moment to ask a hypothetical question. In the Solomonic parable, that wholeness, undividedness that showed you a path could also have gone another way. Imagine you had fallen head over heels in love with a fascinating woman, and she with you. And imagine that you had not cared about overpopulation and you had said, “We want a family with twelve children.” Might that not conceivably have been a way of living in wholeness?