I Am Through You So I Read online

  DSR: Maybe for someone else, but not for me. When I think back, I cannot feel my way into that scenario. From the first experience in Salzburg onward, I was already inclined in the direction of monastic life. Not that I was constantly thinking of it, not at all. I did truly remain open to other things. But my heart was leaning heavily in that direction.

  JK: If I remember correctly, in a former encounter, you said, “After the war, I had two paths; either the right woman comes along or the right monastery. And the right monastery just happened to come along first.”

  DSR: That was more of a joke that I frequently made. But in my heart, I did know: if the right monastery comes along, everything will fit. My question was more along these lines: Does such a monastery even exist?

  JK: Reflecting critically at your early days, would you consider yourself slightly fundamentalist?

  DSR: Rather legalist, and that later gave me the greatest difficulties in my life as a young monk—of course, for me, Mount Saviour never seemed sufficiently strict or observant of the Holy Rule. I would have become a great legalist if fate had not dashed that in the form of disillusionment. But each disillusionment frees us from an illusion. There simply is no monastery that lives as close to the Rule as I wished, and perhaps still wish, deep down. For example, as a young monk, I spent days, weeks, and months calculating and writing down what a continuously changing daily schedule might look like, because the angle of the sun changes constantly, and Benedictine monks originally had sundials. That, of course, would not have fit with the guests who wanted to visit us or come to Mass at a specific time. But I engaged such questions a great deal. I could still dream of living a stricter observance of the Rule of St. Benedict than is the case today.

  JK: That speaks to the fact that rules, specifically the Rule of St. Benedict, gave you stability in those early days as a monk. You seem to have needed something you could hold on to, to structure your own personality, your own life.

  DSR: Fixed structures have always been important to me.

  JK: Why?

  DSR: I think it is a predisposition, even a bodily predisposition.

  JK: Because in other things you are also an artistically and poetically talented person, open for art, for the unregulated, so to speak. That is the other side.

  DSR: I can see both sides. As early as the war, we were reading Paul Claudel, The Satin Slipper.10 It contains the sentence, “Order is the pleasure of the reason; but disorder is the delight of the imagination.” That was an important sentence for me. I had to learn to live with this tension and am still learning to do so. I was being stretched by this tension.

  JK: You could embrace both?

  DSR: I was not able to, but I learned and am learning that both are equally important: order and chaos, reason and imagination.

  Kerschbaumer Alm

  4

  Becoming a Monk

  1956–1966

  I once summarized what becoming a monk means to me in one of those answers that one sometimes gives without even having to think. Two or three years have passed since I have entered the monastery, and a friend asks me, “So, what do you actually do all day at a monastery?” Without hesitation, I hear myself giving this answer: “We stand around the altar and sing thanks and praise. From there, when necessary, we go outside to do our tasks. But we always return to communal prayer as the center of our life.”

  At Mount Saviour, we pray the canonical hours seven times a day and once at night, as prescribed in the Rule of St. Benedict. We pray the so-called Minor Hours—Prime, Terce, Sext, and None—at their proper times throughout the day, separately and not joined together, as is the custom in some other monasteries. The bell calls us together for prayer seven times a day, even for those brief prayer periods. At each of those hours, the changing light lends a distinct color not only to the landscape, but to the flavor of our prayer as well. From around the altar, our praise of God in community radiates into whatever work we may do in between prayer times. Praying to God, however, is in and of itself “work”—opus Dei, God’s work—a lifelong process of ever-deepening insight and grateful praising. Through this process of growth, the entire life of a monk consists in becoming a monk.

  “Praising, that’s it!” writes Rainer Maria Rilke.1 With this call, he is drawing attention to three things: the calling of the poet, the central task of every human being, and the innermost nature of Word arising out of Silence for the sake of praising—and for the sake of nothing else. Growing into this tripartite truth of poetry, humanity, and Mystery as Word (Logos) seems to me of crucial importance in becoming a monk. Yes, a relationship with poetry is part of it. It is no coincidence that Cardinal Newman saw the poetic view of the world as the Benedictine Order’s characteristic contribution to Christianity’s intellectual history.2 The monk is by his very humanity a poet—just like Adam giving every animal its name3—simply by being a person whose innermost self is the praising Logos. The life of a monk allows us to make praising itself the center, and to let its energy radiate out from this center as joy.

  Admittedly, it is then reasonable to ask, “And how do you spend the rest of your time, in which you are not chanting in choir?” The short answer is that the life of a monk is astonishingly varied. Our two principal areas of work are study and handiwork—that is to say, working with both heart and hand. Our Prior, Father Damasus Winzen, emphasizes the importance of daily manual labor. In our daily studies, we are to use our rational minds fully, but at the same time, open our hearts wide. To contemplative reading, or lectio divina, are added classes in scholastic philosophy and theology (with rigorous exams). Some of our Brothers, who have themselves only recently finished their studies at the Benedictine college of Sant’Anselmo in Rome, are now our professors. Each week, a different Brother reads aloud at meals. This way we become familiar with standard works in the fields of theology, science, and the humanities and with important contributions to current periodicals. In our up-to-date library, I can find the latest books and journals in English and German; Father Damasus personally sees to that. He also regularly gives us spiritual teachings, since he sees the role of an abbot not as that of an administrator, but as that of a teacher—and I eagerly take notes, to penetrate as deeply as possible into the doctrina abbatis.

  It is true that monastic life is not without its hardships, and for me that includes having to get up early (at that time, just past 4:00 a.m.—in sixty years of monastic life, I have never been able to get used to the time of rising.) Father Damasus enjoys telling the story of an extremely well-read young man who—having already written a book about monastic life—became a novice at Father Damasus’s former abbey of Maria Laach. He too found the rough reality difficult to adjust to: when the monk in charge of waking up the others—elegantly called the excitator in Latin—knocked on his door in the morning with the words “Benedicamus domino!” (Let us praise the Lord!), the novice answered not with the prescribed response of “Deo gratias!” (Thanks be to God!), but grunted, half asleep, “This is a dog’s life!” (He apparently did not last long.)

  Since Mount Saviour does not yet have its own novitiate, we novices are sent to Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, a Canadian abbey. The Brothers there speak French, which leads to several small confusions. The young monk who was assigned to me as “Guardian Angel” and French teacher had a stutter. Only years later did I discover that in French, the linden tree is called tilleul, and not “ti-tilleul.” In the Chapter Room on Friday mornings, we have public confession of minor infringements. I want to accuse myself of having shattered a light bulb, but I am unsure of my vocabulary and instead admit to having broken a matchstick. The abbot considers the ringing laughter that greets my pronouncement sufficient penance for my transgression. (Yes, in those days, we still did have this so-called Chapter of Faults, and we even whipped ourselves in our cells, reciting Psalm 51, while the bells rang on Friday evenings.) The abbot, Dom Odule Sylvain, is a man whom I esteem and admire. On high Holy Days, he embodies the role of tres révé
rend pere, who is solemnly robed, piece by piece, in his vestments, before we lead him in procession from his rooms to the chapel. On weekdays, however, he stands high up on the ladder as we harvest apples, or lies on the floor of the bathroom mending a pipe—for he is also a plumber.

  Saint-Benoît-du-Lac is famous for its tradition of Latin plainchant, and we novices are trained in the spirit of Solesmes, the leading center of the practice.4 For my entire life, this chanting has remained one of the greatest treasures. In this abbey church, a long nave is leading up to the altar, while in the octagonal chapel at Mount Saviour, the altar stands in the middle, but in both places, it is clearly the central fount of life for the monastic community. In French Canada, I learn to live and love the Benedictine tradition in its richest form. We novices are grateful for that experience, but we are also happy when we can return to our humble monastery.

  Back home, our daily work is varied. We do not hire help, but do all the chores of the house and garden, the kitchen, the fields, and the stable ourselves. Since Brother Laurence is the only one apart from me who knows how to milk a cow, I am frequently in the stables and greatly enjoy my time there. I am also responsible for our “depot,” the pantry from which the Brothers can request what they need—notebooks, sandal straps, toothpaste, and so on. Brother John from Weston Priory in Vermont spends a year with us, becomes my faithful helper, and eventually a lifelong friend.

  All of us take turns cooking. Cooks and kitchen helpers receive a special blessing when they finish their turns on Sunday. In a stroke of luck for my fellow brethren, I am never made “first cook” but only a kitchen helper. (At home in Austria, my brothers and I learned a great many household skills. Mother even taught us knitting and crocheting, but food was so precious that she could not risk potentially spoiling it by letting us attempt to cook.)

  The need for constructing new buildings offers many opportunities for my creative interests and for hands-on experience. For the first few years, we sleep in the hayloft; only when winter gets too cold, do we escape into the old farmhouse; but there it does become quite cramped for us all. So, we must build. Fortunately, we do have generous helpers. Some of our volunteers are even professionals, such as our friend Rocko, a skilled carpenter from town. Alone we would not be able to manage. The Boy Scouts help as well, and over the years, we plant fifty-thousand trees together.

  Each morning, during Prime, we receive our work tasks for the day. There are sometimes surprising jobs: one time, I am sent all the way to Connecticut with Brother Ildefonse to pick up huge quantities of canned food, still usable but condemned by the authorities after a flood in the warehouse. But my favorite task is housecleaning. There is always enough of this work, and it is less popular with the others. It gives me the opportunity for undisturbed silence and wonder. Just the way the dust dances when winter sunlight pours into the dark hallway I’m sweeping is a thrill:

  My broom the mallet

  My dustpan the gong. Dust motes

  dancing in sunbeams!

  At the time, dustpans were still made of metal, and the handles of the small brooms were still wood—today, the sound of plastic on plastic would hardly cause mystical enchantment. But that homely gong tone opened for me a mysterious realm; Rilke calls it “an inner world-space.” He writes, “One single space pervades all beings here: / an inner world-space.”5 The outer reaches of space, which we somehow sense, gazing at a winter night sky, evoke in me an inkling of those inner reaches. This experience is behind another three-liner from my time as a young monk, possibly the oldest that I have kept:

  While the brothers sleep

  Orion stands guard above

  In a frosty sky.

  Every year, my family visits the monastery for Easter to join our festive liturgy. There is complete silence during Holy Week; we greet one another only briefly. But on Easter Sunday, we sure do celebrate. My grandmother is still with us in the early years—later, my little nephews and nieces carry the light from the Easter candle in a lantern to the cemetery on the hill above the monastery. There we hold a festive Easter picnic on her grass-covered grave.

  Our community has many friends. Most of them come from nearby, but no small number also visit from further away. They bring us home-baked food and many other useful things; they also bring their sorrow and their pain. In most households, hardship and distress come only occasionally, but in the monastery, people bring them to us daily that we may hold them up in prayer. We must learn to include these dark sides of life in our praising. Rilke writes, “Only he whose bright lyre / has sounded in shadows / may, looking onward, restore / his infinite praise.”6 “Infinite praise”—that is a good description of the prayers we chant. Infinite, not only because they take part in the praise that the Logos sings beyond time, but also because praise must stop at nothing, exclude nothing, not even the things that grieve us. That is how I want to learn to sing. I believe that we have passed the hardest test of becoming monks only when we can say, “Between the hammers our heart / endures, just as the tongue does / between the teeth and, despite that, / still is able to praise.”7

  The canonical Hours have not been so obviously the center of communal life in every monastery in which I have spent time, but in all of them, the altar was the source of life for the community. I consider it a great gift that, unlike many others, I did not have to search from monastery to monastery but instead had such clear “love at first sight” for Mount Saviour. Later, however, I came to know many other monasteries. And as a student, I had known Heiligenkreuz Abbey, near Vienna. It was my spiritual home because, there, Father Walter Schücker, the Prior, was my spiritual guide. At that time, under Abbot Karl, Heiligenkreuz was open to experiments and earnestly considered opening a Cistercian monastery in Tibet. In 1951, however, with the Chinese annexation of Tibet, the negotiations ended abruptly.

  I did have the opportunity of witnessing an unusual attempt to found a monastery. Around 1980, I got to know three young men who had grown up amidst the turmoil of Californian counterculture. They had been questioning so seriously all prevailing majority norms and values that they came to a striking conclusion: only as monks would they be able to authentically realize their positions. And so, they simply set out to found a monastery on their own. They then sought an ecclesiastical connection, and first knocked on the doors of the Anglican Church. There, no one had any idea of what to do with “wannabe monks.” The Roman Catholic bishop was also slightly embarrassed, but exhibited a rather benign attitude—after all, the three had lived a relatively strict life following the Rule of St. Benedict for years now. They had found an abandoned monastery building and lived there in exchange for custodial duties in the building and grounds. They now asked me whether Mount Saviour could help them in any way. At the time, our Prior was Father Martin Boler. He went to California for several days, found the young monks trustworthy, and suggested that after a year as novices of Mount Saviour, they could become an independent priory. I was to live with them in California and oversee their novitiate. Unfortunately, I still had a few other obligations to complete, and by the time I was ready, the three had been offered positions in prison pastoral care. They achieved remarkable things there, but it was the end of their plans to found a monastery.

  For me, however, the experience led to a fateful turn: these three young men now no longer needed me. Instead, their spiritual companion for years, Father Bruno Barnhart, Prior of the New Camaldoli Hermitage, said, “We need you with us in Big Sur,” and so began my stay in New Camaldoli, which was to last fourteen years. This “hermitage” was different from the other monasteries I knew. Communal living was reduced to a minimum; we monks lived each in separate little cottages and tended our own gardens. In the one entrusted to me, I planted two fig trees, black bamboo, and nine various kinds of lavender. Before my window—and a thousand feet below—lay the Pacific Ocean. Its silent blue enormity seemed to rise steeply into the sky. Nowhere have I ever found it easier to dive into “the world’s inner space”
than in the outdoors of Big Sur. But here, too, the monastic community gathered around the altar as its center and source of strength for daily celebrations of the Eucharist.

  Once more, in my old days, I was to live in a monastery in which the altar represents the center of life: in the European monastery of Gut Aich. Here, the form of monastic life recalls the image of concentric circles: healing power radiates outward from the altar to the inner ring of the monastic community. Around that inner ring, the village community of Winkl forms another one, as the monastery is in the center of the village. A further ring consists of oblates, men and women who are closely connected to the monastery in the Benedictine spirit but often live far away. The furthest circle is made up of those seeking inner and outer health here. A monastery is meant to be for the Church what the Church is meant to be for the world: a place of healing. There are rooms here to unburden the sufferings of one’s soul, but also a health center consecrated to Hildegard of Bingen, herb gardens, a small factory for herbal remedies, and a center for monastic medicine. As early as the third and fourth centuries AD, Christian monks were referred to as therapeutes—healers. Health means wholeness. Health means being one with oneself and with the universe. The word monk contains the root monos, meaning “one” and “alone,” but also one with the community and one with all things. We find this oneness when we find the eternal center.

  Dialogue

  JK: Brother David, your birth name is Franz Kuno Steindl-Rast. How did you come by the name David?

  DSR: David is my name as a monk. We were given new names at the beginning of our novitiate. In truth, I had always wished for the name David, because I had read Kings and Samuel on the Kerschbaumer Alm and delighted in the stories about King David. So, for me, David became a heroic figure, which is why I wanted that name. But at Mount Saviour Monastery, we already had a Brother David when I arrived, and so I had given up hoping. But shortly before I became a novice, the other Brother David left the community, and it was not uncommon for the next novice to receive the name of a Brother who had just left. It was my good fortune that this also happened with me. At the time, we could not choose our names, and so I had not told anyone that David was my wish. It was a great surprise and joy to me to know that I would be called David.