I Am Through You So I Read online

  JK: You discovered some of the silence of the Kerschbaumer Alm at Mount Saviour, which lies in a secluded area once inhabited by the Iroquois. You led a purely contemplative life there, a life that I suspect makes it possible to experience a different, completely new way of being in time. All our lives, being and time are given to us as an inescapable set of occurrences. But once we discover it, it is like the experience of a wellspring revealing something primeval and incomprehensible. How were you able to experience the phenomenon of time more deeply?

  DSR: Guests who visit a monastery often comment that time stands still there—one of the aspects of the stillness, or silence, one finds and cultivates in monasteries. This means avoiding haste and rush, so that ideally one lives in the moment. This, in fact, is the goal of stillness: to help us live in the Now. The ringing of bells has the same goal.

  In monasteries, bells are important; they call to prayer. Their very sound is something beautiful and uplifting. As novices, we were trained to stop whatever we were doing at the first stroke of the bell. If you are writing, do not dot the i’s and cross the t’s, even if you have just put the vertical stroke to paper. Stop, stop immediately if it is time! All activities in the monastery are done when it is time. We gather for prayer when it is time, not when we feel like it. Ordering one’s day according to the bells, and thus finding harmony with the cosmic rhythm of the hours, enables one to experience one’s relationship with time quite differently.

  JK: On the one hand, time in monasteries is externally organized and structured. But on the other hand, within that structure, it is also possible to experience that different quality of time of which we have already spoken.

  DSR: I think that it is precisely through that structured framework that one can transcend time and be in the moment. When we are in the moment, in the Now, we are simultaneously in time and beyond time.

  JK: Why is that?

  DSR: We tend to picture the Now, incorrectly, as a brief stretch of time. If that were correct, then it would, in theory, be possible to cut this stretch of time in half. In that case, one half is not, because it is no longer, the other half is not, because it is not yet. If we conceive of the Now as a stretch of time, no matter how short, it remains possible to cut it in half. But then where is the Now? We see that it cannot be found in time at all. Yet, we do experience the Now. Understood correctly, the Now is not in time. Rather, time is within the Now. Because when we remember the past, it is now; when the future comes, we will feel it not as the future but also as the Now. So “all is always now,” as T. S. Eliot writes.8

  JK: If my life is existence, then it is spread out into the past, which is in some ways always present. My education, my relationship with my parents, my life experience—everything that has happened in my life is present in some way. I can even repeat and revise it in my memory. But my existence also inevitably reaches into what is coming. That is a significant insight: I can give future to past things. I give future to some things, but to many other things, I don’t.

  DSR: One might say that our experience enriches the Now: my personal Now is enriched by everything I have experienced in the past.

  JK: Enriched, yes, but by being open for what is past, I am also in the Now. I open myself to some things and thus give these past experiences a future and new significance.

  DSR: …the possibility of a future.

  JK: Conversely, one might also say that the future, meaning what I act on, also intentionally determines my presence, my being, and my becoming. When you decided to become a monk, you were intentionally giving a future to things that had been. That decision then determined all your future becoming.

  DSR: Raimon Panikkar said, “The future does not come later.”9 When it comes, it is now. Remember: “All is always now.”

  JK: If one wants to say something reliable about the Divine, one cannot do so without having had an experience of being and time. Without temporal experience and experience of creation, all faith is baseless and hollow. Therefore, one needs to understand what creation is, what time is—not just philosophically or intellectually, intuitively as well. In your personal experience, what is the foundation of a good faith?

  DSR: I would phrase my answer like this: faith is radical trust—trust in life and trust in God. We are here speaking of faith in the fullest sense, not merely “believing in something,” considering something to be true, which is something quite different from faith. We sometimes imagine that faith stands ready, like a train we just need to board, and then it will bring us to our destination. But it is not that simple. Going forward in faith is not a train ride; it’s more like walking on water. The life of faith is a continual test of trust.

  JK: One could say our entire life is continually being put to the test?

  DSR: Yes, it is put to the test, and articles of faith—as in a creed—can be hints, possible sources of support and help, but sometimes also challenges to this life of radical trust.

  JK: You described your life at the Mount Saviour Monastery community as a strictly regulated daily schedule of prayer, praising God, handiwork, and study. Can you remember any texts that you studied at the time and whether there were any that had special influence on your development as a monk?

  DSR: Yes. We studied strictly according to scholastic philosophy and theology. Our textbook was Joseph Gredt’s Elements of Aristotelian-Thomist Philosophy.10 Often, we would memorize entire passages and definitions from the Latin, for which I am still grateful today. It gave us a clear framework for philosophical thinking. Even when one understands that any frame is limiting and one must continually go beyond it, it is still an immense help to have an intellectual framework that clearly confronts fundamental questions and sets one on a path toward answering them. It is good to have such a fundamental structure, and for me, that was indeed helpful. After all, the point in studying philosophy is not to read one philosopher after another, but to find one’s bearings in the world, to gain an orientation for one’s own thinking. That was very important for me.

  JK: And that was possible?

  DSR: Yes, the structure we were given was the traditional framework of scholastic and neo-Scholastic thought. But even then, openness was a constant subject: one can go beyond the frame. What we can express in words is not the final reality. Reality always goes beyond the expressible.

  JK: What spiritual texts influenced you at the time?

  DSR: We read primarily the Church Fathers.

  JK: Evagrius Ponticus?11

  DSR: Especially Evagrius, but also the sayings of the Fathers, the Apophthegmata.12

  JK: Was that helpful for you at the time? I ask because these texts originated in the completely different time, culture, and reality of late antiquity.

  DSR: That was very close to life. We lived in that spirituality. But we also read many Jewish texts, such as writings by Samson Raphael Hirsch, a great German rabbi from the nineteenth century.13 Father Damasus, our abbot at the time, cited him constantly. Sometimes, he even misspoke and said, “The Saint Samson says….”

  JK: You developed a special love of Gregorian chant during your time at the Canadian monastery of Saint-Benoît-du-Lac. This formal way of singing is nearly two thousand years old, and it is thought to go back to the singing in Jewish synagogues. In one of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s poems, there is a description of how the world calls for the air to be steeped in delighted songs for God.14 Gregorian chant comes out of silence and is the Word, sung. What exactly fascinates you about it?

  DSR: Gregorian chant has a special beauty due to its position within the realm of music history. It was composed in the church modes; major and minor did not exist yet. As young monks, we studied this rather difficult way of singing intensively. These chants have an unbelievable beauty, and their beauty is what draws me to them most. It is a beauty that straddles the border between the sensual and the transcendental. When I think of the most beautiful polyphony of later ages, such as Palestrina, Orlando di Lasso, or Jacobus Gallus, that is
what comes closest. After Gregorian chant, polyphony is my favorite music. That is the secret of plainchant: it is both sensual and transcendental.

  JK: Is that due to its simplicity of structure, which leaves space for other things?

  DSR: That is certainly part of it. Singing in unison has a special power, but I also love the music of the Eastern Orthodox churches with its rich harmony. In Mount Saviour, we also learned and celebrated the Orthodox liturgy. We had a friend, Father Pilipets, a priest of the Eastern tradition, and we often celebrated those long liturgies together with him. That is also incredibly beautiful, very uplifting, bordering on the transcendental. The beauty of singing, especially, is one of the things that often moves people to visit a monastery.

  JK: You spoke of the monastery having many friends that support it. Is that equally true of what we might call the “seat of your old age,” the Gut Aich monastery in Austria? People come not so much out of curiosity as bringing their life, their sorrows, their suffering. They find support in the monastery, including through intercessory prayer. This is where I would like to pause for a moment, because prayer and action are often contrasted with one another: Here is prayer, there is real life. This is where we pray, that is where we act. Or along the lines of “All we can do now is pray.” What does prayer mean to you personally? Where do you see the help and power of prayer, and how can we pray appropriately without childishly projecting onto God what we ourselves need to be doing and changing?

  DSR: Prayer in all its forms does not primarily mean asking God for something. That is how it’s often misunderstood. Instead, praying means opening our heart to the Great Mystery—to life, to God. This open confrontation changes us personally and thereby changes the conditions of everything else, as well. The smallest change we make in the great network of the world influences the whole. When we open ourselves to the Divine Mystery in prayer, then we are aligning ourselves with the direction of life. Yes, that is the surprising thing: life does have a direction. Life wants certain things and does not want others. Life wants aliveness, creativity, change, variety, cooperation; all those things are part of the direction of life; anything that resists those things goes against the grain of life. Life is an expression of the Great Mystery. To live is to be immersed in Mystery; and to live mindfully is to pray. By adopting the correct attitude toward life, we are changing the world for the better. In the Lord’s Prayer, the first petition is “Thy will be done;” only after that do we pray for our daily bread and all the rest. Therefore, in prayer we should first align ourselves with the flow of life, which shows us God’s will, and then have the courage to articulate clearly how we imagine the realization of God’s will. But most often, we pray the other way around: “Please, make this or that happen, and if all things fail, well, then your will be done.” That’s how we too often pray.

  JK: You have often said in encounters that—and this was what suggested the question to me—after your parents’ divorce, you had prayed a great deal for your parents to be reunited. Now, I can imagine children who pray as you did; who are, in their experience, not heard by God; and then despair completely over God and want nothing more to do with God. In their eyes, one might say God has become powerless. They feel that they have not done anything wrong. How was that for you? Why didn’t you lose your faith when your prayers could not achieve what you wished for so strongly in secret?

  DSR: I consider it a great gift that I was taught to trust in God from the very beginning. We have talked about that already. This trust became so fundamental to me that it was not shaken even when God appeared not to hear my prayer. Perhaps I would have said what I later heard from a different child: “God did hear my prayer, but unfortunately he said no.” If upbringing has not rooted one in trusting God, then one is likely to say, “If there is a kind God at all, then he is obligated to fulfill my request.” This was not the case for me. Children, who ask their parents for something that the parents then deny them, maybe even a hundred times, do not lose their faith in their parents. Regarding God, it was quite similar with me: I trusted God, my Father, even when he said no.

  JK: To return to the fundamental question: What does the power of prayer consist of, to you, if we are not convincing, persuading, and in some way manipulating God? What is it that makes it good, indeed a central Christian virtue, to pray every day and to live in prayer?

  DSR: I can speak only based on my experience; intellectually, I might not yet have completely caught up with experience. Energy—life energy—flows through this web of life into which we are woven; through prayer, we can channel this energy in a specific direction, focus it on a goal; the energy will reach this goal and become effective. Only personal experience can prove that. My own experience does so. I can also feel it when people pray for me, and I am deeply grateful for it. I know how much of what I succeed in doing, much of my good health, and much of all other good things I owe only to that God-given life energy that is bestowed on me through so many loving hearts. This conviction goes beyond what I can prove rationally. But are we not considering a topic that goes beyond cold reason? Life is larger than logic.

  JK: Nevertheless, in prayer one runs the risk of becoming childish, imagining it very childishly. I don’t mean as a child, but as an adult, not seeing how one must change, what one can do to alter one’s own life. There is also the danger of spiritualizing problems that are solvable only on other levels. But as a spiritual adviser, you know firsthand that one needs to distinguish very clearly between those. My point is that one should avoid escaping into prayer when what one really needs to do is confront major changes in one’s own life. That would be a kind of “misuse” of prayer.

  DSR: Yes, that can happen. Rightly understood, praying means facing the Mystery, facing life again and again. If we do that, life will tell us what we need to do. Rilke shows us an example for life’s surprise challenges. In his famous poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” a marble torso confronts us with such immediacy that we are “all eyes,” as it were, looking at this sculpture. Suddenly, one and a half lines before the end of the poem, the thing looks back at us: “For here there is no place / that does not see you.” And the resulting challenge: “You must change your life.”15 If we really face up to life—be it in art, in nature, or in everyday experience—life will inevitably challenge us to change. Openness for this challenge to change is what matters in prayer.

  JK: Human cohabitation always means being confronted with problems and, one hopes, growing through them. Franz Kafka once illustrated it using the example of love: “Love is as unproblematic as a vehicle. All that is problematic are the drivers, the passengers, and the road.” So once a problem has been solved, a new one appears immediately. Some people think of faith as a kind of transcendental insurance policy against inherent problems—religion as solving all problems. How do you see it?

  DSR: Faith is trust in life, lived new again and again—new in each moment because life is also changing every moment. Faith is the opposite of insurance. It constantly makes us unsure, but in trust, I know myself assured despite feeling unsure. The more I feel unsure, the more trust I need to feel assured.

  JK: The Christian religion does not understand itself as a spiritual system of order and insurance, the way some people imagine it—that one can flee from life’s uncertainties into religion.

  DSR: Religion gives us security by showing us a path to keep trusting in life. There is also so much more to religion than doctrine. That’s just a tiny part of it.

  JK: More than ethics, as well.

  DSR: Community is a part of it. The community supports you and helps you to realize this trust in life. That is always the decisive element: trust in life.

  JK: In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche had a different image of religion. He was heavily polemic against a Christianity that was nihilistically conceived in the sense of a faith that mistakes itself for being convinced, for holding certain positions, for a dogmatic belief. Nietzsche sees this Christianity as a worl
dview, religious ideology. To him, Christianity has become a worldview: “Christianity is Platonism for the ‘people.’”16 Even before university, he encounters Anselm of Canterbury’s proof of God, according to which God is the most perfect conceivable being. Anselm concludes that anyone who thinks that God does not exist is not thinking of the most perfect conceivable being, since an existing being is more perfect than a nonexistent being. Therefore, God must exist. While this sounds logical, Nietzsche saw through the apparent logic, identifying it as a mere word game and empty idea of God. He responded to this idea by saying, “God is dead!…We have killed him.”17 This thought-up, imagined stopgap deity is misused for political and moral power—that God no longer exists after Nietzsche. Nietzsche chose the atheist path, presumably because the Christian God he knew from his time seemed ungodly to him. I can imagine that in your years of becoming a monk, you, Brother David, thought a great deal about this atheism—which you were familiar with—and about authentic faith in God—a faith based in experience. What do you see as the foundations of such a faith that does not turn in the direction of atheism but is truly based on experience and is not merely a fantasy that I can choose to have or not?

  DSR: We must remember both. On the one hand, experience is the ultimate bedrock of faith, and on the other, anything one can say about the Great Mystery, even if it is completely right, is still more wrong than right. That is the thesis of negative theology, which goes deeper than its positive counterpart.18 In the end, the Mystery is the Unknowable. And if something is unknowable, then it cannot be put into words. We may experience it by letting it take hold of us, but we cannot ourselves take hold of it. When I was studying theology, however, I was thrilled with the profound creativity of statements on the Trinity. I admired these speculations as a huge cathedral of thought. But the triune God does not live in buildings, not even in thought-cathedrals. They may be beautiful and express deep insights, but reality goes infinitely beyond them. How astonishing, that we humans have access to this reality at all! Yet, as we approach it, we become aware of the limits and insufficiency of conceptual thought. When our thinking touches that which extends beyond thought, we experience that not so much as touching but as our being touched. Bernard of Clairvaux said, “Knowledge comes from grasping something, wisdom from being gripped by something.” The deepest prayer is being gripped, touched in such a way.